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 Page B

the part of Themistocles on the eve of the battle. He secretly sent his own slave Sicinnus on a mission to Xerxes, with a purported warning of an unexpected Greek withdrawal. The Persians might well have swallowed that strange story of Themistocles’ treachery, given the rumors of Greek infightingand the well-reported Peloponnesian desire to go home. Themistocles’ intention with the trick was threefold: First, he wanted to incite the Persians hastily to deploy and prematurely man their ships in the dark. Second, he hoped to fool them into splitting their larger enemy fleet to cover unnecessarily all the exits from the straits of Salamis. Third, Persian preemption would force reluctant Greek allies to commit to the sea battle and mobilize immediately in the face of the advancing Persian enemy. A fourth result, or so it was also alleged in antiquity, was that Themistocles could later claim that he had tried to do the Persians a favor, if they won, or if in the future he needed exile in a safe place. Apparently, the agreement to stay at Salamis had strengthened the position of Themistocles. In the few hours before battle, he began to exercise tactical authority despite the nominal overall command of Eurybiades.
    In response, the Persians, without careful planning, rowed out into the straits of Salamis, just as Themistocles anticipated—but not before dispatching parts of their Egyptian squadrons to block the southern and western entrances to the strait. In short, Xerxes had sent some of their best contingents on a wild-goose chase to ambush a Greek retreat that never came. The result was the Persians could not make full use of their numerical superiority inside the confining narrows of the Salamis strait itself, where the battle was to be fought. 29
    Xerxes probably attacked just before dawn. As the September morning breeze picked up, the Persian fleet rowed forward in three lines against the Greeks’ two, its captains worried that they “would lose their heads” should the enemy fleet escape. Quickly the attackers became disorganized due to the Greek ramming and the confusion of having too many ships in too-confined waters—and the shocking sight that the Greeks—the Athenians on the left wing, the Spartans on the right—far from fleeing, were heading en masse right toward them. Themistocles himself was at the vanguard of the advancing Greek triremes. Xerxes, in contrast, watched his Persians from afar, purportedly perched on his throne atop nearby Mount Aigaleos on the Attic shore. In the words of the dramatist Aeschylus, “The mass of ships was crowded into the narrows, and none was able to offer help to another.” 30
    The sea battle was fought all day—most likely sometime between September 20 and 30, 480 B.C., perhaps on the morning of September 25. By nightfall half the Persian fleet was sunk, due both to poor tactics and leadership and to the superior morale and seamanship of the crews ofthe Greek triremes, who knew far better the tides and currents of Salamis Bay—and that defeat meant the enslavement of their families watching from the beaches. The surviving Persian fleet headed back to port and made preparations to flee back to Asia Minor before the Greeks demolished their pontoon bridge over the Hellespont.
    The morale of the surviving fleet was shattered, despite their collective fear of the outraged king watching from above. The Persians suffered “utter and complete ruin.” Although in theory the surviving defeated enemy still outnumbered the Greek fleet, the Persian armada was neither battleworthy nor eager to reengage the victorious Greek triremes. Perhaps more than eighty thousand imperial sailors were killed, wounded, missing, or dispersed—which would make Salamis the most lethal one-day naval battle in history, more bloody than even an Ecnomus, Lepanto, Trafalgar, Jutland, or Midway.
    Ancient accounts record the macabre scene of the human carnage where Persian corpses were “battered by the