Salamis 480 BC: Themistocles' False Message Lures Xerxes Into the Strait

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Xerxes I invaded Greece to finish the grudge his father Darius I held over Athens' role in the Ionian revolt and the Persian defeat at Marathon in 490 BC. He bridged the Hellespont with pontoons and cut a canal through Mount Athos, but feeding hundreds of thousands of soldiers and camp followers meant he needed quick victories before winter. After the Spartan stand at Thermopylae and the naval stalemate at Artemisium, the Greek alliance formed at Corinth in 481 BC lost central Greece. Athens was evacuated to Troezen and Salamis, and its people watched the Persians burn the empty city. In the Greek war council the Peloponnesians wanted to fall back and wall off the Isthmus of Corinth, while the Athenian general Themistocles argued that a wall was useless if the Persian fleet could sail around it and that the narrow straits of Salamis were the place to fight.

Unable to win the argument, Themistocles sent his servant Sicinnus to Xerxes at night with word that the Greeks were about to flee. Xerxes had his fleet row all night to block the exits. At dawn the rested Greeks, about 371 to 378 triremes against perhaps 600 to 800 Persian ships, sang their paean, backed water to draw the enemy into the narrows, and turned the fight into a melee of rams and armored hoplite marines. Xerxes withdrew to Asia, fearing for his Hellespont bridges, and the army he left under Mardonius was beaten at Plataea the next year while the Greek navy finished the Persian fleet at Mycale.

• Xerxes watched from a golden throne on Mount Aegaleos with scribes ready to record his heroes.
• Persian crews favored the diekplous, rowing through gaps to shear off enemy oars, a move that needed open water.
• The Persian admiral Ariabignes, Xerxes' brother, was speared while boarding a Greek ship and thrown into the sea.
• Trapped by her own side, Queen Artemisia of Halicarnassus rammed and sank an allied Calyndian ship, and her Athenian pursuer gave up the chase.
• Xerxes, thinking she had sunk a Greek ship, said his men had become women and his women men, though before the battle she had advised him not to fight at sea.