If her intervention is historical, she was making good points. The Greeks were indeed quarrelsome and were finding it hard to maintain their unity. Feeding all the refugees on Salamis island, the entire Athenian polis, was a very difficult task.
But Xerxes had his own problems. With September drawing to a close, the campaigning season would soon be over. In the ancient world, when the weather at sea during the autumn and winter months deteriorated, warships knew better than to venture out of harbor. To be marooned on the cold and windy beaches of Phaleron until the following spring was an unappealing prospect. Not only would the Persian fleet be in danger of further demolition at the hands of Boreas, but merchant vessels would no longer be able to guarantee a reliable supply of imported food. Local provisions would soon run out, if they had not already done so. The Great King’s hordes might face starvation.
Opposition at the Isthmus, now fully fortified with a rampart along its width of four and a half miles, would be fierce. Thermopylae had taught Xerxes a lesson about the enemy’s defensive capability. In theory the fleet could turn the position by landing on the Peloponnese south of Corinth, but this would be difficult for so long as the Greek navy remained intact. The coasts were inhospitable and uncharted. The island of Cythera to the south of the peninsula was well known to Phoenician traders and had plenty of beaches; in theory, it could make a Persian base for operations against Sparta, but both weather and waters were treacherous.
In sum, Xerxes felt he could not afford to wait. A quick victory over the Greek fleet, holed up in Salamis and still heavily outnumbered, was more likely than one against the hoplites behind their wall on the Isthmus. It would, in fact, make a land battle unnecessary. Assuming a Greek defeat, he began work on a mole designed to stretch from the shore of Attica to the island; this would enable his foot soldiers to cross over quickly to Salamis and slaughter the thousands of Athenian refugees there.
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A very similar debate, in reverse, was being held among the allies. A general war council, attended by commanders of all the allied contingents, sat in almost permanent session. News of the invasion of Attica and the sack of Athens was announced at the meeting and set off a panic. All who contributed an opinion advised retreat to the Isthmus. Eurybiades so decided and the meeting broke up.
Themistocles hurried to the admiral’s ship and argued that the order for withdrawal would break Hellenic unity and if dismissed, the various flotillas would simply scatter to their individual homelands. He persuaded Eurybiades to recall the council. A heated discussion ensued during which Themistocles put the case for fighting the Persian fleet in the narrow waters at Salamis where Greek triremes would have the best chance of victory. He told his colleagues: “If you do not remain here, you will be the ruin of Hellas, for the whole outcome of the war depends on the ships.”
When he saw he was making little headway, he issued an ultimatum. If the decision to leave Salamis was not canceled, the Athenians would renounce the alliance and leave with their families for Italy. There they would found a new polis. This was not a new idea, but had already been in his mind when arguing the case that Athens should invest in a fleet.
The allies had to take the threat seriously, although we do not know how seriously Themistocles meant it. The Greek fleet with approximately 380 warships would be impotent without the two-hundred-and-more Athenian contingent. It would be unable to stop the Persians from sailing wherever they wanted. Wall or no wall at the Isthmus, the Peloponnese would lie open and defenseless to the enemy. Eurybiades rescinded his decision.
A day passed and opinion slid again. The Great King moved his fleet from Phaleron to take up position just outside the Salamis narrows where the Hellenes lay. This was alarming and late in the afternoon another council was called. Once again voices spoke up for reconsideration and retreat. Themistocles feared that Eurybiades might once more feel compelled to alter his ruling.
So he took matters into his own hands. He sent a household slave of his, who was a paedogogus and looked after his children, one Sicinnus, on a special mission. Either a Persian or a Persian speaker, he rowed a boat under cover of darkness to the enemy fleet and delivered a message for Xerxes. He probably gave it to the nearest officers he could find and made a quick exit, but he may have been escorted into the presence of the Great King. Either way, the carefully crafted words of Themistocles reached their intended recipient. In the version of Herodotus they read:
I have been sent here by the Athenian commander without the knowledge of the other Greeks. He is a well-wisher of your king and hopes for a Persian victory. He has told me to report to you that the Greeks are terrified and are planning to escape. All you have to do is prevent them from slipping through your fingers, and you now have an opportunity of unparalleled success. They are at daggers drawn with each other, and will not stand up to you.
As every spy knows, the best cover story is the one nearest to the truth. Themistocles’ account was embarrassingly accurate, but nevertheless it was a trap. The Great King stepped onto the snare and the noose tightened. He ordered his fleet to stay at sea all night outside the narrows to prevent the Greeks from sailing off and sent a detachment to guard the western end of the Salamis bay. Picked Persian infantry was placed on an island called Psyttaleia, which partly blocked the opening of the Salamis channel. Escape was no longer an option for Eurybiades.
Themistocles’ political adversary, Aristides, back from exile like Xanthippus and serving in the armed forces, had just sailed in from Aegina and had noticed Persian triremes gathering off the western coast of Salamis. He called the Athenian admiral out of the council and told him what he had seen. Themistocles asked him to go into the meeting and report that the Greeks were surrounded—they were much more likely to believe Aristides than himself. This he did, but the commanders were unconvinced. Only when an enemy warship defected and gave a full account of Persian movements did they accept the fait accompli. The atmosphere at the council lightened and became constructive.
Attention began to be paid to tomorrow’s battle. Now the allied commanders listened to Themistocles, for whom years of planning were at last coming to fruition. His chief anxiety was to find a way of enticing the Great King’s armada into the narrows. It had to appear that the allies had suffered a catastrophic blow to their morale and were ready simply to be mopped up.
Once Xerxes had accepted the bait, the actual battle should be fairly straightforward. It would be fought in constricted waters, in this way preventing encirclement and lessening the inequality of numbers. A crescent formation would give the Hellenes room for maneuver and opportunities for ramming. The Athenian crews had trained for speed off the mark and for quick turning. Their triremes were lower in the water than those of the Persians and more stable in choppy seas.
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The narrows of Salamis describe a semicircle leading from the Aegean Sea to the bay of Eleusis. Their opening, past Psyttaleia, is about two thousand yards wide between the coast of Attica and a long thin headland on the left (from an entrant’s point of view), Cape Cynosura (another dog’s tail). The channel narrows somewhat because of a second headland farther back on the left, on which stood Salamis town. Although the water then apparently widens again, the presence of a small island named today after Saint George, once again on the left, effectively reduces the channel to a little over one thousand yards. The water then opens up once more and leads on into the bay of Eleusis. The general effect is of a funnel.