All could read the order of battle at last as squadron lay against squadron. On the west, under Xerxes’s own eye, the Athenians must charge the serried Phœnicians, at the centre the Æginetans must face the Cilicians, on the east Adeimantus and his fellows from Peloponnese must make good against the vassal Ionians. But would the signal to row and strike never come? Had some god numbed Eurybiades’s will? Was treachery doing its darkest work? With men so highly wrought moments were precious. The bow strung too long will lose power. And wherefore did Eurybiades tarry?
Every soul in the Nausicaä kept his curses soft, and waited—waited till that trailing monster, the Persian fleet, had crept halfway from Psyttaleia toward them, then up the shrouds of the Spartan admiral leaped a flag. Eager hands drew it, yet it seemed mounting as a snail, till at the masthead the clear wind blew it wide,—a plain red banner, but as it spread hundreds of axes were hewing the cables that bound the triremes to the shore, every Greek oar was biting the sea, the ships were leaping away from Salamis. From the strand a shout went up, a prayer more than a cheer, mothers, wives, little ones, calling it together:—
“Zeus prosper you!”
A roar from the fleet, the tearing of countless blades on the thole-pins answered them. Eurybiades had spoken. There was no treason. All now was in the hand of the god.
* * * * * * *
Across the strait they went, and the Barbarians seemed springing to meet them. From the mainland a tumult of voices was rising, the myriads around Xerxes encouraging [pg 317]their comrades by sea to play the man. No indecisive, half-hearted battle should this be, as at Artemisium. Persian and Hellene knew that. The keen Phœnicians, who had chafed at being kept from action so long, sent their line of ships sweeping over the waves with furious strokes. The grudges, the commercial rivalries between Greek and Sidonian, were old. No Persian was hotter for Xerxes’s cause than his Phœnician vassals that day.
And as they charged, the foemen’s lines seemed so dense, their ships so tall, their power so vast, that involuntarily hesitancy came over the Greeks. Their strokes slowed. The whole line lagged. Here an Æginetan galley dropped behind, yonder a Corinthian navarch suffered his men to back water. Even the keleustes of the Nausicaä slackened his beating on the sounding-board. Eurybiades’s ship had drifted behind to the line of her sisters, as in defiance a towering Sidonian sprang ahead of the Barbarian line of battle, twenty trumpets from her poop and foreship asking, “Dare you meet me?” The Greek line became almost stationary. Some ships were backing water. It was a moment which, suffered to slip unchecked, leads to irreparable disaster. Then like a god sprang Themistocles upon the capstan on his poop. He had torn off his helmet. The crews of scores of triremes saw him. His voice was like Stentor’s, the herald whose call was strong as fifty common men.
In a lull amidst the howls of the Barbarians his call rang up and down the flagging ships:—
“O Sons of Hellas! save your land,
Your children save, your altars and your wives!