And, to be sure, there had been something eerie in the air for days. Even Greeks in the Great King’s train appear to have sensed that the heavens might be turning against their master. Walking through the deserted fields beyond Eleusis on the day before the battle, Demaratus had seen a cloud of dust billowing up from the coastal road. This could only have been kicked up by the Persian division heading for the Isthmus, but an Athenian collaborator, strolling with Demaratus, had immediately identified the faint singing he could hear coming from the Sacred Way as the “iacche”: the chant of joy raised by worshippers as they journeyed every September to Eleusis. This was impossible, of course, even though it was indeed the time of year for the annual pilgrimage—unless the iacche were being performed by a supernatural procession, in celebration of that great mystery of Eleusis, the return to life of what had appeared to be utterly and irrevocably dead. This, to the Athenian, as he trod the burned soil of his homeland, had proved a most unsettling thought. “I fear,” he said at length, as he gazed towards the dust cloud, “that this presages some great disaster for the king’s forces.” And Demaratus, alarmed though he was by this judgment, had not disputed it. “Only keep quiet,” he urged his companion. “For if your words should reach the ears of the king, then you will be sure to lose your head.”18
Sensible advice—for Xerxes, in his determination to force a victory, was certainly in no mood to tolerate defeatism. That the failure to wipe out the Greek fleet at Artemisium had been due to a lack of backbone on the part of his servants appeared to him self-evident. Concerned to rectify this, he had issued his captains an uncompromising warning that “should the Greeks succeed in evading the terrible fate planned for them, and slip out through the blockade, then all those responsible would lose their heads.”19 Conversely, those who fought well would have the supreme honor of having their exploits personally noted by their master—an incentive that had been sorely lacking off Artemisium. So it was that even as the Greek oarsmen were hurrying to their benches, the Great King, followed by a mighty train of generals, officials and flunkeys, was riding out in his chariot past the southern spur of Mount Aigaleos, and round on to “the rocky brow / Which looks o’er sea-born Salamis.” Here, above a temple of Heracles, he ordered his Nisaean horses reined in. As he descended, first onto a golden footstool and then—for the royal platform heels could hardly be permitted to touch bare earth—along a hurriedly unrolled carpet, servants were busy erecting a throne. The Great King had chosen his vantage spot well. Below him, becoming clearer by the minute, there stretched an unrivaled panorama: of Salamis, the straits, the gulf beyond them, and the distant Isthmus. But what, on the waters themselves, did Xerxes see that fateful morning, as the sun rose behind him, and the fateful moment of battle, long awaited, long maneuvered for, dawned at last?
Not what he had been hoping to see, that much at least is certain: not the spectacle of the Greek fleet shattered in his ambush, spars bobbing in the open sea, corpses twisted and heaped upon the rocks of Psyttaleia. The Great King would have been notified before his arrival above Salamis that the anticipated breakout by the Peloponnesians had failed to occur; even so, the spectacle of the Greek fleet drawn up in the narrows below him would still have come as a sore disappointment. And his own squadrons—where were they as dawn broke? A momentous question: for just as the allied strategy was dependent upon fighting a battle in the straits, so the Great King’s admirals had all along been committed to facing the Greeks on the open sea. The resulting stalemate had already endured for three weeks. Only a conviction that their enemy was indeed a hapless rabble would ever have persuaded the commanders of the imperial fleet to break it, and advance with their squadrons into the channel. A decision as fateful as any in the history of warfare; for upon it rested the future course not merely of the battle, not merely of the war, but of Europe and of Western civilization itself. Infuriatingly, we are not told when or why it was made—only that battle, when it was joined, did indeed take place where the Persians had been most desperate not to fight it: within the straits of Salamis.
Historians have generally presumed that the Persians infiltrated these under cover of darkness. Yet this seems improbable.20 The instructions given to the Great King’s captains by their master had been perfectly clear: “guard the exits leading out to the sounding sea.”21 It is unlikely, with the threat of decapitation hanging over them, that there had been much enthusiasm that night for bold displays of initiative. The signal failure of the Greeks to come blundering out into the ambush that had been so carefully laid for them would only have confirmed the imperial admirals in their resolve not to budge from their station; for their oarsmen, rowing hard just to prevent their vessels from drifting and fouling the line, had hardly been given the ideal night’s preparation for a battle. It may be that the Great King’s dawn arrival above Salamis prompted some captains, eager for royal favor, to order their ships forward into the channel, and that the whole battle line then lurched and followed them. It is more probable, however, that the sight of its master served only to confirm the fleet in its discipline. While individual captains, no matter how desperately they peered from the prows of their triremes, could make out little of what was happening in the straits ahead of them, they could also see how well placed the Great King was to do it for them. And who better than Xerxes to make the final judgment? Who better to give the nod to a gamble on which so much had come to rest?
It seems likeliest, then, that the order to engage the enemy in the straits was given to the Persian fleet shortly after sunrise, and that it came directly from the King of Kings himself. We do not know how the signal was broadcast, nor whether Xerxes was able to communicate to his admirals a sudden and thrilling spectacle, clearly visible to him from his vantage point above the straits: the apparent disintegration of the whole Greek battle line. Some fifty triremes, veering off in the direction of Eleusis, looked to be in headlong flight, making for that narrow channel off the northwest of the island where, evidently unbeknown to their commander, the Egyptians were lurking. So it had happened at Lade, and so it seemed to be happening now—just as the traitorous Athenian admiral had said it would. Time, then, to close the twin jaws of the trap. Time to finish off Greek resistance for good. Time to enter the straits.
A fearsome din of trumpets, amplified by the closeness of the hills on either shore, and the great mass of the Persian battle fleet, breasting the island of Psyttaleia, rounding the southern spur of Salamis, began to quicken its oar strokes. Phoenicians on the right wing, Ionians on the left, Cilicians, Carians and other contingents in the center, they still, during these first minutes of their advance, had no clear view of the enemy, for the angle of the channel precluded it, and spray and the mists of an early autumn dawn would have veiled the waters. But then, rising from ahead of them as the front ranks closed in on the Greek positions, they heard singing, and the paean soared to such a pitch that “a high echo rolled back in answer from the island crags.”22 Hardly the sound of men in panicked retreat—but there could be no turning back now for the Great King’s fleet, not even if certain captains in the front ranks of the battle line felt a sudden lurching in their stomachs, and a presentiment clammy like cold sweat across their brows that it was they who were sailing into the ambush. Already, stretching far behind them, an immense mass of shipping could be seen, crowding the channel, bobbing on the oar-churned waters, as the various squadrons sought to maneuver themselves into position, struggling not to foul one another in the narrowness of the straits. Hugging the mainland, where the shore was reassuringly thronged with their own troops, the Persian captains could hardly doubt now, as they looked toward Salamis, that the Great King had been well and truly conned. The Greek triremes, far from fleeing at their approach, were marshaled in a great battle line of their own along the bays and spurs of the island, from the Athenians on the northernmost wing to the Aeginetans in the south; and the ram of every ship was pointed directly at the Persian fleet.