The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq by Victor Davis Hanson Read Free Book Online

Athenians, for example, still wished to fight on the Attic plain, not at sea, in some sort of decisive infantry confrontation that might repeat the verdict of Marathon and save their city while restoring the prestige of the hoplite class. But that dream was quickly tabled after the disaster at Thermopylae. The rapidity of the Persian onslaught, the absence of willing allies, and the fact that King Xerxes this time had far more land forces than his father, Darius, had sent ten years earlier, for now all madeanother Marathon impossible. Those at Marathon had been outnumbered three to one. But the Persian land forces were at least ten times larger than the Athenian hoplite army. Only a few isolated pockets of Athenians remained holed up in the Attic countryside. 23
    The second option, of garrisoning the city proper, had already proved suicidal. The few who had remained at Athens to defend the wooden ramparts on the Acropolis were dead.
    A third choice was simply for Athenians and the remaining allies to quit and join the Persians. Some Athenians were furious at the Peloponnesian city-states for abandoning them to the Persians without a fight. Many felt their cause was hopeless. Still, most at Salamis stayed firm. As long as the surviving Greek states had nearly four hundred ships, and the soil of the Megarid and the Peloponnese was still Greek, such surrender seemed premature, even if it meant tens of thousands of Athenians camping in the countryside without adequate shelter and food.
    Most of the remaining allies, in fact, initially preferred a fourth and more defensible choice: to fight on land behind makeshift ramparts along the six-mile-wide isthmus. That strategy might save what was left of Greece to the south. The ships of Athens that way could retreat southward and engage the enemy somewhere off the coast of the Peloponnese. Who could object to that? The maritime Athenians, after all, earlier had not offered any of their ten thousand hoplites to fight at the shared land defense of Thermopylae. Now, in tit-for-tat fashion, the land powers of the Peloponnese preferred not to risk any of their own ships in the defense of an evacuated Athens.
    Still, Themistocles wondered whether the Spartan proposals even served their own best interests. What then would prevent a Persian amphibious landing behind an isthmus wall (of the sort the turncoat Demaratus had in fact advised Xerxes to make)? Would not fighting in more open seas off the Peloponnese only give more advantages to a far larger enemy fleet? Why would the Athenians be willing to sacrifice any hope of recovering their city only to fight on behalf of Peloponnesians who clearly all along cared only for their own defense? More immediately, what would the assembled Greeks do about thousands of hungry refugees on Salamis, whose safety depended on the Greek ships in the harbors of the island? Who could restore morale after four successive withdrawals—from the Vale of Tempe in Thessaly, Thermopylae, Artemisium, and Salamis? An alliance that either loses battles or does not fight them finds it almost impossible to turn on its aggressor and cede no more ground. 24
    The squabbling Greeks before Salamis heard yet a fifth alternative—a most bizarre threat from Themistocles himself. He warned that the furious and betrayed Athenians would pull up stakes entirely. If the Athenians were to be sacrificed by their Peloponnesian and island allies, and a general retreat ordered to the south, then Themistocles would round up the city’s refugees. He would sail them to distant Sicily and shuttle more than two hundred thousand Athenian residents near their colony at Siris—rebirthing Athenian culture in safety eight hundred miles to the west and ensuring that the Greeks’ largest fleet would not fight for those still free in the Peloponnese.
    “If you do not [fight at Salamis],” Themistocles warned his Peloponnesian allies, “then we quite directly shall take up our households and sail