It was a short engagement, which came to an end at dusk. The Greeks captured thirty enemy warships, a minor but significant victory and a boost for morale.
That night Boreas made his second intervention. A tempest raged, torrential and continuous rain poured down, and thunder pealed around the mountain peaks. The main Persian fleet at the open anchorage of Aphetae was badly hit. Apparently corpses and wreckage got entangled with ships’ prows and oars, panicking crews and marines.
The detachment of triremes that was sailing around Euboea was caught in open seas opposite the island’s dangerous southwestern coast. The wind blew them along in the sodden darkness. They had no idea where they were heading and most of them crashed against the barren lee shore. It seems that not one ship survived. If there had been any still afloat, they would have been mopped up by the Athenian reserve of fifty-three warships. Its job had been to guard home waters, but, now that it was obvious that the Great King was not intending a sudden southern push by sea against Attica, it was en route to join the fleet at Artemisium.
The Persians gave themselves twenty-four hours to recover from their latest battering, but, fearful of the Great King’s wrath, they came out from Aphetae again at noon on the following day. Still numerous, they formed up into a crescent and as before tried to outflank the enemy. The Greeks engaged them and fierce fighting ensued. The two sides were just about an even match and both sustained serious losses, but the allied fleet under Eurybiades and Themistocles seems to have had the better of it, for after the fighting was over it controlled the site of the encounter with its corpses and wreckage.
Sore and exhausted, they had reason to congratulate themselves on their performance. But then, as the sun sank, a thirty-oared cutter turned up at Artemisium. It had been stationed off Thermopylae and its job was to report to the fleet any important developments on land. It brought news of Leonidas’s last stand the day before, when, ironically, everything had been quiet at sea.
There was no longer any reason to stay. Themistocles ordered the men to leave their campfires burning so as to deceive the enemy of their intentions. Then the allied warships slipped away as quietly as possible under cover of dark and made their way down the Euripus channel.
With a squadron of the best Athenian triremes Themistocles brought up the rear. He could not stop thinking of cunning plans. The Ionian Greeks had been compelled to contribute triremes to the Great King’s fleet, and the Athenian admiral told his fellow-commanders that he had thought of a way of dislodging their loyalty. At every coastal site where there was drinking water, he had his men carve a message into the rocks. It asked the Ionians to change sides and join their fellow-Hellenes. If they could not do that, they should at least adopt a posture of neutrality. “Fight on purpose like cowards.”
Even if this propaganda had no direct effect, it might at least plant seeds of suspicion in the mind of the Persian high command.
—
The sea fighting at Artemisium was not decisive, but it had the great advantage of substantially reducing the Persians’ numerical superiority. Even more important, it gave the Greeks in general and the Athenians in particular some valuable experience of the realities of warfare at sea. Despite the odds, they saw that they could, just possibly, win. Plutarch wrote:
They learned from their own achievements in the face of danger that men who know how to come to close quarters and have the will to fight have nothing to fear from numbers of ships, brightly painted figureheads, boastful shouts or barbaric war-chants….Pindar understood this when he wrote that Artemisium was
Where the brave sons of Athens erected
The radiant cornerstone of liberty.
12
“O Divine Salamis”
The war was as good as over.
The Great King swept through central Greece in the autumn of 480, meeting no resistance. Despite the fact that the oracle at Delphi was on excellent terms with Persia, most of the local population felt that discretion was the better half of valor and left town. The priests themselves consulted the Pythia as to what to do, and were tersely informed that the god knew how to protect his own property.
And so he did. Although Xerxes probably did not intend to sack Delphi, he sent some troops to secure it. When the soldiers approached, a violent rainstorm broke out that set off an avalanche of rocks; they hastily retreated.
Other places were not so fortunate. Not only did the army help itself to provisions wherever it found them, it also burned and pillaged as it went along. Those who had not yet quit Athens for Salamis or Troezen did so now.
When the Persians entered Attica, they ravaged the countryside, burning temples and villages. Athens was a ghost town. Only the few people on the Acropolis remained. Members of the family of Pisistratus, the long-dead tyrant, were still hoping against hope for a restoration to power. They proposed an honorable surrender, but to no avail. Persian archers occupied the hill of the Areopagus, which faced the entry to the citadel; they shot flaming arrows at the defensive wooden stockade and set it alight. But the Acropolis was almost impregnable and the invaders were unable to storm it until some Persians noticed a path up a steep cliff where the defenders had not bothered to post guards.
When the Athenians saw that enemy soldiers had climbed up onto the Acropolis, they gave up hope. Some threw themselves off the cliffs and died, while others escaped into the inner sanctuary of Athena, where they were found and massacred. Then all the buildings on the citadel were set alight.
Xerxes had accomplished his mission. He had destroyed the holy places of Athens in revenge for the firing of the temples at Sardis all those years ago. It was the most prominent objective of the campaign and he had met it. He sent a jubilant message to the court at Susa and, especially, to Artabanus, whom he had sent home earlier in the year as punishment for his pessimism. The news was received with public rejoicing. People strewed the roads with myrtle boughs, burned incense, and gave themselves over to sacrifices and pleasure. Xerxes was victorious and everyone was going to know about it.
—
But if he was victorious, the Great King had yet to win. That is to say, he had managed to sack Athens and lay waste to much of Hellas, but had not defeated his opponents in a decisive engagement either in the field or on the waves. Would they see sense and surrender, he wondered, or would he have to do some serious fighting?
As for the Greeks, they had not yet lost the war, but they could very well do so in an afternoon. They were unsure what was their best course of action. After sailing down from Artemisium, they put in at the Salamis narrows on the express request of Themistocles. This gave his triremes time to evacuate any remaining fellow-citizens across the water from Attica, after which he joined the others.
A little later, the Persian fleet arrived at Phaleron bay where, according to Herodotus, Xerxes paid it a personal visit. He wanted to meet his commanding officers and seek their guidance for his next step. He asked his commander-in-chief, the great survivor, Mardonius, to chair the discussion. Most of those in attendance, guessing what the Great King really wanted to hear, advised an early engagement with the Hellenes. A dissenting voice was raised. This came from Artemisia, fiery queen of the Greek city-state of Halicarnassus in southwest Caria. She had taken power after her husband’s death and shown herself to be a capable ruler.
In her opinion, Xerxes should not offer battle at sea. “The Greeks will not be able to hold out against you for very long,” she said. “I hear they are running short of food on the island.” The main army was marching threateningly towards the Isthmus and she predicted that the Peloponnesians would think better than to hang around at Salamis just to please the Athenians.