Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy & the Birth of Democracy (11 page)

On the following day the crews rested on shore till well after the midday meal. When only a few hours of daylight remained, the Greeks launched all their ships and rowed north toward Aphetai. The customary hour for a naval battle was early morning, the time of calm winds and flat water. A late-afternoon attack would take the enemy by surprise. More important, Themistocles had realized that the approach of darkness would ensure that, even if the fighting went against the Greeks, the battle would be too short for the Persians to win a decisive victory.

When the Persians saw the enemy fleet rowing toward them, they decided that the Greeks must be insane. Communication among the scattered beaches at Aphetai was difficult, but before long the Persian ships in their hundreds were bearing down on the Greek line. As they neared the enemy, the Persians began to fan out. The enveloping movement was not carried out in order but at varying speeds. Bolder commanders spurred their crews as they strove to be first to take a Greek ship and thus secure a reward from the Great King. All were eager to capture an Athenian.

Before the two fleets came close enough to engage, the trumpeter on the Spartan flagship blew a signal. In response the Greek line began to bend like a bow, curving back in an immense convex arc as the Athenians on the right wing and the Corinthians on the left reversed their oar strokes and backed away from the advancing Persians. They kept their bronze rams constantly pointed toward the enemy, who were now prowling around them like wolves around a herd. Frustrating the Persian attempt at a
periplous,
the Greek line finally contracted into an immense ring. The ships that had occupied the extreme ends of the original line were now side by side at the rear of the
kyklos
or circle, facing south. All the sterns and steering oars were drawn together in the center, while the outer rim of the vast circle presented a continuous array of rams. It was as if a hedgehog had curled into a ball with all its spines pointing outward.

Themistocles was counting on the defensive appearance of the
kyklos
to make the enemy overconfident. With the Persian fleet milling around the circle’s perimeter, carelessly exposing their ships’ sides, Eurybiades had his trumpeter blow another call, this time the familiar signal for an attack. At the sound the Greek rowers pulled their hardest, and the triremes lurched from a standstill to a sprint. Bursting from the protection of the circle, each Greek steersman targeted an enemy hull or oar bank in the disorganized throng that surrounded them. The Persians were caught completely off guard. Ship after ship was immobilized as the Greeks smashed hulls or sheared off oars with their rams. The disabled triremes were left to drift in the melee, until their attackers could come back and tow them off. Elsewhere in the crush some Greek marines leaped across to the decks of enemy triremes. They killed or captured the fighting force on board and then claimed the ship as a prize, with its rowing crew intact.

Once the Persians recovered from the shock of the initial Greek charge, they began to counterattack, but nightfall put an end to the battle before they could turn the tide. The demoralized crews of Xerxes’ grand armada returned to their havens. A current from the straits carried after them the debris of battle: wrecked ships, broken oars, floating corpses. The Greeks’ performance had been so impressive that one trireme from the Aegean island of Lemnos deserted from the Persian side. The Athenians were so grateful to the Lemnian trierarch for joining the resistance that they awarded him a grant of farmland on the island of Salamis.

Acting like judges at a musical or athletic contest, the Greek commanders voted to honor those who had contributed most to the victory. The Athenians received the group prize for valor, and one of their own, Themistocles’ kinsman Lycomedes, won the individual prize. He had been the first trierarch to take an enemy ship.

The following day at Artemisium the Greeks spotted a large squadron of triremes rowing toward them from the west. It was not the encircling Persian squadron that the diver had foretold, but the fifty-three Athenian triremes that had been left behind in Attica. They were welcome both as reinforcements and as bearers of good news. Violent storms had wrecked the southbound enemy squadron on the dangerous stretch of coast called the Hollows of Euboea. As the Delphic Oracle had predicted, the winds still seemed to be fighting for the Greeks.

Late in the afternoon, as on the previous day, the Greeks put out to sea. This time they engaged just one isolated division of Xerxes’ navy. The target was the contingent from Cilicia in Asia Minor, one hundred strong. The javelins and cutlasses of the piratical Cilicians proved to be no defense against Greek rams, and they lost many triremes in the fighting. Few Asiat ics knew how to swim, so the sinking of a ship inevitably caused many deaths. By the time the skirmish ended, the Cilicians had been virtually destroyed.

The Persians in the fleet at Aphetai were well aware that they were keeping their royal master waiting and as yet had nothing to show for the delay. On the third day Xerxes’ naval commanders finally took the initiative, launching their entire force at about noon and bearing down on the Euboean shore. The crews yelled their battle cries, flaunted their insignia, and shouted encouragement from ship to ship. The competitive scramble of the first day’s attack was gone: the various contingents kept good order as they crossed the channel. The Greeks awaited the charge in silence. They planned to hug their own coast, leaving as little sea room as possible to their rear so as to hamper any enemy attempt at a
diek plous
or
periplous.

The Persians began with an enveloping movement. Their left and right wings stretched forward in two curving prongs menacing the ends of the shorter Greek line, like the horns of a bull or a crescent moon. At last Eurybiades gave the order to attack. The two fleets collided all along the line. The Persian order broke with the collision. In the chaos that followed, their ships fouled one another as much as they injured the Greeks. Still they did not retreat, and the Egyptians among others began to perform with success. Ships were lost on both sides, but in the end Xerxes’ mighty navy once more got the worst of it. After three successive engagements at Artemisium, Themistocles’ interpretation of the Delphic Oracle still held true. The Wooden Wall had endured.

The retreating Persians left the Greeks in control of the sea. They carried out the sacred duty of picking up the floating corpses of their comrades and towed the wrecked vessels back to Artemisium. After the heavy ramming action on that third day of fighting half the Athenian triremes needed repairs. Given their small numbers, the Greeks could ill afford to lose any ships. Yet they had survived and had refused to let the enemy drive them from the sea. At the victory celebration on the beach they again voted to award the prize for valor to the Athenians. This time the individual prize went to a noble Athenian named Cleinias. His ship had not been built with public money from the silver strike but was a trireme of his own, as in the buccaneering days of old, furnished with a crew of followers in Cleinias’ pay.

While the Greeks were taking their evening meal, the lookouts caught sight of a vessel coming in fast from the west. It was the Athenian galley from Thermopylae. As soon as it reached shore, Abronichus made his report. There was no message from Leonidas: the king was dead. For two days the Spartans and other Greek allies had succeeded in repelling wave after wave of Persian attacks, even though the main Peloponnesian army had still not arrived. That morning, however, scouts had come running down from the hills with the news of a Persian breakthrough.

In the night a local Greek turncoat had led the dreaded spearmen whom the Greeks called “The Immortals” around Thermopylae by a path running along a high mountain ridge. Within a short time Leonidas was trapped between two fires. The Spartan king now had only three options: flight, surrender, or death. Xerxes would have been only too delighted if his opponent had agreed to terms, but Leonidas, achieving true heroism in his final hours, resolved that he would fight to the death in the pass. His courage inspired the three hundred Spartans and a thousand men from the town of Thespiae to follow his lead. Leonidas sent the bulk of his army away toward the south and dispatched Abronichus and his Athenian crew to their triakontor at the same time. By staying behind, Leonidas and his thirteen hundred meant to hold the Persians long enough for the other allies to escape. They, at least, would live to fight another day.

Marshaling his hoplites for the last time, Leonidas led them to the end of the pass in battle array. He had to defend himself from enemies in front and to the rear, as “The Immortals” were now clambering down from the hills into the narrow roadway behind him. When it became clear that the Greeks would not surrender, Xerxes responded with such an avalanche of men that some Persians on the edge of the mass were pushed into the sea and drowned. The Greeks fought like men possessed. When their spears broke, they went on fighting at close quarters with swords and finally with their bare hands. Even after Leonidas fell, the Greeks would not surrender. In the end Xerxes had to send in his light-armed troops to finish the job with a hail of missiles. The road to the south now lay open. Powerless to help, the Athenians had watched until they could no longer doubt the outcome. Then they set off as fast as they could row to warn the fleet.

The news from Thermopylae changed everything. Exhausted after a full day of rowing and fighting, the Greeks had no choice but to retreat from Artemisium immediately. If they waited until daylight, they would have the Persian fleet dogging their tails. Their foresight in posting the Athenian galley at Thermopylae had bought them a few hours’ head start on the Persians. Xerxes had no boats at Thermopylae to carry a message to his naval forces, and it would take at least a day for any of his mounted couriers to reach Aphetai.

Themistocles did what he could to improve their chances of escape and raise the morale of the men. He proposed a plan to provision the ships at once for the long row ahead and recommended heaping more fuel on the campfires along the beach. With extra wood the fires would burn through the night and perhaps convince the enemy at Aphetai that the Greek fleet was still at its battle station. Themistocles also heartened the men with a novel scheme to induce the eastern Greek contingents to defect from the Persian fleet. He would inscribe messages on the rocks at the watering places on the way south, appealing to the Ionians to join their fellow Greeks in the fight for freedom.

It remained to settle on their destination. Knowing that Xerxes’ army and navy would converge as rapidly as possible on Attica, Themistocles persuaded Eurybiades that the Greek fleet should fall back not to the Isthmus of Corinth but to Salamis. On that island the Athenian elders had established their headquarters in exile. They could help provision the Greek fleet, just as the Euboean islanders had done at Artemisium. And in the protected waters of the Salamis channel, the Greeks might hold Xerxes’ armada at bay until the onset of bad weather closed the seaways for the winter. Thermopylae had given the resistance its first heroic martyrs. The spirit of Leonidas and his men could already be seen in the Greek fleet’s decision to seek and hold another pass.

Nothing, however, altered the discouraging fact that their struggle at Artemisium had been in vain. With every stroke of the oars they would now be drawing Xerxes’ armada after them into the heart of Greece. At that dark hour no Athenian could have predicted that a poet would one day hail Artemisium as the place “where the sons of Athens laid the shining cornerstone of freedom.”

As the full moon rose, casting a glittering silver path down the channel, the Greek crews pushed off from shore and began the retreat. Behind them the campfires burned brightly on the deserted beach. Themistocles went first with a squadron of the fastest ships. Then came the Corinthians at the head of the main fleet, followed by the other allied contingents and last of all the long line of Athenian triremes. Several hours later the vanguard reached the westernmost cape of Euboea, pointed like a dart toward the Greek mainland. Fifteen miles ahead of them, across a wide stretch of water and alluvial flats, lay Thermopylae.

At the Hot Gates the distant coast appeared lit by an unearthly glow. In and around the pass shone the myriad flames of the Persian camp: victory bonfires, watch fires, fires for roasting meat, and the blazing fire altars of the Magi. Xerxes’ army was celebrating its first taste of Greek blood. Somewhere amid the eerie wisps from the hot springs stood Xerxes’ proudest trophy: the head of Leonidas, cut from his body and stuck on a pike. Out at sea, hidden by darkness, the ghostly line of ships made its way past the scene of revelry and vanished southward into the night.

CHAPTER 5

Salamis
[END OF SUMMER, 480 B.C.]

—Aeschylus

 

 

 

 

FOR HOURS THAT NIGHT PERSIAN SENTRIES ON THE BEACHES at Aphetai watched the distant fires of the Greek camp while the crews and fighting men slept. Sometime after midnight the quiet was broken by the sound of oars approaching from across the channel. A small boat appeared on the moonlit water, rowing fast for shore. Out of the darkness a voice hailed them. A Greek on board the boat claimed to have a message for the Persian commanders. The boat landed, a Greek-speaking translator was roused from among the thousands of sleeping rowers and soldiers, and the man poured out his story to the officers in charge of Xerxes’ armada.

He told them that he came from Histiaea, a town on the Euboean coast west of Artemisium. Earlier that evening he had heard or seen the ships of the Greek fleet rowing past, headed west. Instantly the man had realized that they were retreating homeward, leaving the islanders to their fate. After the last trireme disappeared into the night, the watcher from Histiaea gathered a crew and crossed the channel with the news, hoping for a reward or at least favorable treatment for his town. If the Persians launched a pursuit at once, they might attack the fleeing Greeks from the rear and destroy them all.