Seated on narrow benches, fingers flexing on the polished handles of long oars, adrenaline already coursing through their veins as they awaited the command to put to sea, crews of the allied Greek triremes knew that the next few hours were make or break. For days, their admirals had been at one another’s throats as old rivals – southerners from Sparta and Corinth, islanders from Aegina, tough wheeler-dealer democrats from Athens – tried to broker an accepted strategy. Yet every meeting had descended into acrimony, as leaders bickered about how to face the huge invasion force, its numbers swollen not just by crack royal Persian regiments and tribesmen mustered from ancestral lands in far-off Asia and Africa but by other hostile Greeks. Just days before, Athenians had looked on, impotent, while palls of smoke belched into the September skies as their beloved temples burned, and heard the wailing of their women, since evacuated here with them to the nearby island of Salamis in the Saronic Gulf west of Athens, as surely other refugees had wailed, watching from wherever they had managed to escape to temporary safety.
Then, this September morning in 480 BC, as cockerels heralded the sunrise, news shot through the camp. Athens’ admiral, Themistocles, had tricked the Persians into thinking that the Greeks would try to slip away the night before. Persia’s Great King Xerxes had scrambled his crews. On high alert, the Persians had spent long hours patrolling the two channels leading from the Bay of Salamis to open waters, determined to catch the fleeing allies unawares. Now they were tired and hungry. Now was the moment that the Greeks could not afford to lose. With light flooding, gold, into the bay, orders rang out, trumpets brayed, and, chanting battle cries, crews put to sea, oars dipping, rising rhythmically like dripping wings, as triremes swung into position. At once the Persian captains countered, blocking the narrows as they struggled to raise their weary crews’ morale. And then a Greek ship shot across the glassy waters, bronze ram slicing the sea-swell, before it crashed at speed into a Persian hull. The battle had begun, and in its outcome lay the fate of Greece.
Even today, the Battle of Salamis – fought 2,500 years ago this year – can stir the blood. Like the victory at Marathon, a decade earlier in 490 BC, and the heroic defeat at Thermopylae just weeks before, it has entered history as one of the key events that shaped the Western world, part of the oft-told heroic Greek struggle of freedom against tyranny, which in time would see great art and architecture, literature, philosophy, and science thrive in the democratic ‘Golden Age’ of Athens. But while such an interpretation makes for a reassuring narrative, the reality (as always) is at once more complicated and more interesting, for at its heart lie truths about how history itself is formed.
