Nevertheless, in the last, stomach-knotting moments before battle was finally joined, the imperial admirals must still have hoped that the enemy might prove a rabble: for the Greek warships, as though in trepidation, kept backing ever closer to the shore. But then, just when it seemed as though they would run themselves aground, a single ship came darting out of the ranks of retreating triremes. Men would later claim that those on board it had been stung by the words of a female apparition, a phantom who had materialized suddenly before the Greek line and asked, in ringing scorn, “Madmen, how much further do you propose to back off?”23 Now the crew gave their answer: pulling hard on their oars, powering their vessel so that it sped across the open waters which still lay between the two battle lines, maneuvering it so that the bronze of its ram, glinting as it sliced through the sea, was aimed at the stern of a stray Persian ship. The rattling of a drove of arrows on the deck, then a crash and a splintering of wood: the first contact of the battle had been made. There was no clean kill, however, for the oars of the two triremes quickly became entangled, so that the vessels were locked together. Seeing this, captains of other ships brought their craft skimming forward in support of their comrades. Soon all were on the move, and the Greeks, as they advanced “with discipline and in perfect order,”24 sang nevertheless with the joy and frenzy of the killing that was to come.
And in no time the battle was general along the whole course of the channel. It is a mark of the confusion of the engagement that even the identity of the first ship to engage the barbarians should later have been furiously debated: for both the Aeginetans and the Athenians laid claim to the honor. Proper adjudication was impossible. The two contingents were fighting at opposite ends of a line that stretched for upward of a mile—and no one in the straits had a view of the whole panorama of the battle. No wonder, then, that memories of that grim and glorious day should have been, not of strategy, nor of the performance of rival squadrons, nor of the ebb and flow of the fighting, but rather of stirring deeds of individual heroism, exploits that shone all the more brightly for being set against a backdrop of such clamor and carnage and chaos.
The greatest glamour of all attached itself to certain trireme aces. Most celebrated of these was an Athenian, Ameinias, from the village of Pallene. In the shock of the battle’s opening, he dared to attack the flagship of the Phoenician fleet, a towering vessel commanded by one of the Great King’s own brothers. The royal admiral, naturally infuriated by the impudence of his assailant, ordered missiles to be rained down upon the Athenians while he himself led a boarding party—but he was skewered by Ameinias as he made the jump, and pitched overboard. Altogether more ambiguous was the performance of a second of the Great King’s commanders to be attacked by the same Athenian captain: none other than Queen Artemisia of Halicarnassus. Seeing Ameinias bearing down upon her, and panicking, she found her escape blocked by the trireme of one of her own vassals—and so resorted to the startling expedient of ramming it herself. Ameinias, presuming that the queen had deserted the Persian cause, duly abandoned his pursuit of her. And so it was that Artemisia made her escape.
And the Great King, seated upon the heights above the battle, saw it all, and was hugely impressed. As mistaken, in his own way, as Ameinias had been, he imagined that the ship sunk by Artemisia had been Greek; for the ferocity of the fighting was such that his aides found it hard to distinguish friend from foe. Yet, while it might certainly prove a challenge on occasion for the royal secretaries, busily scribbling down examples of particular prowess, to transcribe all the details with total accuracy, they and their master could have had few illusions as to the broader progress of the battle. “My men have turned into women,” Xerxes is said to have cried, watching as Artemisia’s warship pulled away from the wreckage of its victim, “and my women into men.”25 His bitterness was understandable—for the Great King, far more clearly than any of his captains embroiled in the actual fighting, could take in the full sweep of the catastrophe unfolding in the straits. He could see how his crack Phoenician squadrons, left leaderless by the death of their admiral, and hemmed in by the Athenians, were being progressively driven back onto the shore, or else into open flight. He could mark the chaos that was the result of his squadrons’ attempts to withdraw, as rank after rank of them began to lose formation, cramping one another in the narrows, “their bronze rams smashing the sides of their neighbors, shearing off whole banks of oars.”26 He could observe in mounting disbelief how a deadly wedge of Greek ships, massing inward, was splitting his fleet in two, leaving the Phoenicians on the right wing of the battle line trapped like tuna fish in a net, there to be speared or battered or hacked to death. And he could reflect, perhaps, that the order to engage the Greeks had been his own.
That he had blundered in giving it would have been evident to him even before the battle had begun. The triremes which he had observed heading north up the channel toward Eleusis, and which the Greeks among his aides would no doubt have identified as Corinthian, had not, once they reached the northeastern cape of Salamis, continued their flight. On the contrary: after scanning the straits which lay between Eleusis and Salamis, the Corinthians had veered round, lowered their sails and masts, and headed back to the battle line. Clearly, far from panicking, they had been engaged on a reconnaissance mission, making certain that the Egyptian squadron, which had been sent around the island during the night, was not now advancing in the Greek fleet’s rear. Which, of course, it was not. The Egyptian squadron, as Xerxes himself was painfully aware, was still eight miles from a battle in which its extra numbers might well have proved crucial, lurking by the westernmost straits, waiting for a Greek escape bid that was never going to come.
Unsurprisingly, the Great King, in his vexation, was testy in the extreme with any survivors of the fiasco. When a group of bedraggled Phoenician captains, attempting to excuse the loss of their ships, sought to lay the blame for it on the treachery of other contingents in the fleet, he had them decapitated on the spot. Naturally, it was out of the question for the Great King himself to accept any responsibility for the catastrophe; and the Phoenicians, now that their strength had been shattered upon the rocks below his throne, could serve him well enough as scapegoats. Yet Xerxes, as he followed the course of the debacle from his command post, must have felt an increasingly embittered consciousness that his own stratagems, devised with such care and with such confidence of victory, had been turned against him. Midday turned to afternoon, and the Persians began to be swept out of the straits. Perhaps half of those triremes that had entered the deadly channel survived to leave it. Behind them, harrying them as they lurched and limped desperately back to Phalerum, came the Greeks, pursuing them across those same open waters on which, the day before, the Great King had planned to stage his ambush and secure his mastery of Greece.
Perhaps the cruelest cut of all came toward sunset. By now, excepting the “lamentations and screams that echoed across the sea” and the bobbing of Persian corpses as they snarled up the oars of the predatory victors, the straits had been cleared of the Great King’s men. There was only one further deed of slaughter left for the Greeks to perform before the coming of “black-eyed night.”27 The four hundred troops stationed by the Great King on Psyttaleia the previous evening had been left stranded at their post, for there had been no opportunity, amid all the panic and desperation of the imperial navy’s rout, to secure their evacuation. Now, having been ordered to serve as the executioners of any Greeks who might be swept onto the rocks, the unfortunate Persians found that they themselves had become the objects of an execution squad. Slingers, archers and heavily armored marines, debouching from allied warships, won bloody payback for the cornering of the Spartans at Thermopylae. Led by Aristeides, the Greeks “dashed over their enemies like a roaring wave, their voices raised in a single cry, hacking at the limbs of the wretched men until the life had been butchered out of them every last one.”28 The rocks were left slippery after the slaughter, and Aristeides’ men, slithering over the corpses, hacked at them with their knives, harvesting their rings and bracelets, or else waded through the red surge of the shallows, scavenging from the dead that they found drifting there. And the sea for miles was filled with the timbers of countless warships, and they slowly drifted and were dispersed upon the swell of the darkening gulf.