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

grotesquely gnawed by marine scavengers.
    Salamis—the name is still synonymous with abstract ideals of freedom and “the rise of the West”—is not associated with a bloodbath. Although no battle better deserves such an association, references to the battle disasters during the Persian Wars evoke images of the final Spartan contingent at Thermopylae (480 B.C.), which was wiped out to the man, King Leonidas, the leader of the famous 299 Spartans, decapitated and his head impaled on a stake—or the Persians at Plataea (479 B.C.), who were butchered mercilessly by Spartan hoplites and sent fleeing into the croplands of Boeotia. Yet at least two hundred imperial ships were rammed and sunk at Salamis. Most went down with their entire crews of two hundred rowers and auxiliaries, ensuring that at least 40,000 sailors drowned and countless others were captured or killed as they washed up onshore. Because the strait of Salamis is so narrow and the Persian armada was so large—somewhere between 600 and 1,200 ships—the dead were unduly conspicuous and made a ghastly impression on the Persian king, Xerxes, who viewed the battle from the nearby Attic heights.
    Because the frenzied Greeks were determined to annihilate the occupiers of their homeland, and since, as Herodotus points out, “the greater part of the Barbarians drowned at sea because they did not know how to swim,” Salamis remains one of the most deadly battles in the entire history of naval warfare. More perished in the tiny strait than at Lepanto (ca. 40,000–50,000), all the dead of the Spanish Armada (20,000–30,000), the Spanish and French together at Trafalgar (14,000), the British at Jutland (6,784), or the Japanese at Midway (2,155). In contrast, only forty Greek triremes were lost, and we should imagine that the majority of those 8,000 Greeks who abandoned their ships were saved. Herodotus says only a “few” of the Greeks drowned, the majority swimming across the strait to safety. Rarely in the history of warfare has there occurred such a one-sided catastrophe—and rarely in the age before gunpowder have so many been slaughtered in a few hours.
    The Greco-Persian Wars, which until the battle of Mycale were fought exclusively in Europe, witnessed terrible butchery—none more awful than the thousands who drowned off the Attic coast. Drowning, in the Greek mind, was considered the worst of deaths—the soul wandering as a shade, unable to enter Hades should his body not be found and given a final proper commemoration. Almost eighty years later the Athenian court would execute its own successful generals after the sea victory at Arginusae (406 B.C.), precisely for their failure to pick up survivors bobbing in the water—and the idea that hundreds of Athenian husbands, fathers, and brothers were decomposing in the depths without proper burial.
    Who were Xerxes’ 40,000 sailors thrashing about in the strait of Salamis? Almost all of them are lost to the historical record. We know only a few names of the elite and well connected, and then only from Greek sources. Herodotus singles out only King Xerxes’ brother and admiral, Ariabignes, who went down with his ship. Aeschylus has a roll call of dead generals and admirals: Artembares “dashed against the cruel shore of Silenia”; Dadaces “speared as he jumped from his vessel”; the remains of the Bactrian lord Tenagon “lapping about the island of Ajax”; and so on. He goes on to name more than a dozen other leaders whose corpses were floating in the channel. In a particularly gruesome passage, presented on the Athenian stage a mere eight years after the battle, the playwright has a Persian messenger describe the human mess:
    The hulls of our ships rolled over, and it was no longer possible to glimpse the sea, strewn as it was with the wrecks of warships and the debris of what had been men. The shores and the reefs were full of our dead, and every ship that had once been part of the fleet now tried to