Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power by Victor Davis Hanson Read Free Book Online Page A

bodies.
    Originally either a Phoenician or an Egyptian invention, an ancient trireme in battle was a rowing, not a sailing, ship. Usually, 170 sailors powered the vessel. An additional crew of thirty or so marines, archers, and helmsmen crowded above on the decks. Unlike the oarsmen in later European galleys, rowers sat in groups of three, one on top of another, each one pulling a single oar of a standard length. The great strength of the trireme’s design was its extraordinary ratio between weight, speed, and propulsion. The sleekness of the ship and the intricate arrangement of the oarsmen made it possible for two hundred men in a few seconds to reach speeds of nearly nine knots. That quickness and agility ensured that its chief weapon—a two-pronged bronze ram fitted at the waterline of the prow—could smash right through any ship on the seas. So complex was the ancient design of vessel, oar, and sail that in the sixteenth century when Venetian shipwrights attempted to duplicate the Athenian method of oarage, the result was mostly unseaworthy galleys. Modern engineers have still not mastered the ancient design, despite the use of advanced computer technology and some 2,500 years of nautical expertise.
    The trireme was also a fragile and vulnerable heavily laden craft that put two hundred men out in the open water with little margin of safety— the oar ports of its bottom bank of rowers were a mere few feet above the waterline. Unlike modern naval warfare, ancient ships offered scarcely any time for the crew to evacuate. Most capsized almost instantaneously when rammed in battle, since even a glancing blow could send water rushing into the ship and quickly toss the crew into the sea. The sailors’ only hope was to make for land or to grab on to any debris that remained floating from the wreckage. For rowers and marines who could not swim—and such unfortunates were numerous in the ancient world and nearly without exception in the Persian fleet—death by drowning would come in seconds. It mattered little that most crews were not shackled like sixteenth-century galley slaves, since triremes could turn over or fill with water without much warning. The long robes of the Persians only made things worse. The playwright Aeschylus, who was probably a veteran of Salamis, eight years later wrote of their helplessness in the water: “The corpses of the Persian loved ones, soaked with saltwater, were often submerged and tossed about lifeless in their long robes”
(Persians
274–76).
    Their burial water between the island of Salamis and the Attic mainland was a small strait, not much more than a mile wide. Like most great sea battles of the preindustrial age, the respective fleets fought in sight of land. The battle, involving more than 1,000 triremes, took place in only about a square mile of sea, ensuring that the dead littered the ocean surface and washed up on the surrounding coast. Aeschylus recalls that “the shores of Salamis and all the neighboring coast are full of the bodies of men who perished by a wretched fate” (
Persians
272–73).
    Thousands of Egyptians, Phoenicians, Cilicians, and assorted Asians were washed up on the shores of Salamis and Attica, a few marooned on the wrecks of what was left of two hundred ships. Greek sailors finished off the dying at sea with javelins and arrows. At the same time, heavy hoplite infantrymen scoured the beaches of Salamis harpooning the few stranded survivors. Despite Aeschylus’s claim that “the entire armada has perished,” hundreds of fleeing Persian ships managed to row past the carnage to safety, too terrified of the ordered lines of pursuing Greek triremes to pick up their kindred. The Athenian architect of the victory, the admiral Themistocles, after the battle purportedly walked along the shore viewing the remains, and invited his men to plunder the gold and silver from the Persian corpses. According to Aeschylus, the bodies were lacerated by the surf and