Battle of Salamis (480 BC): The Naval Victory That Saved Greece

The Battle of Salamis was a naval battle fought in September 480 BC in the narrow straits between the island of Salamis and the coast of Attica, near Athens. A Greek fleet led by the Athenian Themistocles lured the much larger Persian navy of King Xerxes into the confined waters and defeated it. The victory turned the tide of the Persian invasion and is often counted among the most important battles in history.

Background: Athens builds a navy

After the Greek victory at Marathon in 490 BC, many Athenians believed Persia would return. Themistocles, a leading politician, argued that the city’s future lay at sea.

In 483/482 BC a rich new vein of silver was found in the state mines at Laurion in southern Attica. Instead of sharing the windfall among citizens, Themistocles persuaded the assembly to spend it on warships, officially for a war with the nearby island of Aegina. According to Herodotus, this produced 200 triremes, which made Athens the leading naval power in Greece.

A trireme was a fast warship rowed by about 170 oarsmen on three levels, with a bronze ram at the bow. Rowing it required large numbers of free citizens, many of them poor, which later strengthened their political voice.

Themistocles also had to win the political battle at home. His chief rival, Aristides, opposed the naval programme and was ostracised in 482 BC, leaving Themistocles the dominant figure in Athenian policy. In 481 BC, as news arrived of Xerxes’ preparations, Athens settled its war with Aegina and joined Sparta, Corinth and other states in a defensive alliance, often called the Hellenic League, that agreed to put aside local quarrels until the danger had passed.

The Persian advance

In 480 BC Xerxes invaded Greece with a vast army and fleet. In August or September the Greeks held the land pass at Thermopylae while their fleet fought for three days off Artemisium. When Thermopylae fell, the fleet withdrew south.

The Persian army marched into Attica. Athens was evacuated: women, children and the elderly were sent to Troezen in the Peloponnese, to Aegina and to Salamis. The decision followed a Delphic oracle advising the Athenians to trust in their “wooden wall”, which Themistocles interpreted as the fleet. A stone inscription found at Troezen in 1959, known as the Decree of Themistocles, records the evacuation order, but it is a copy made around two centuries later and its authenticity is debated.

The Persians took the Acropolis, killed its few defenders and burned its temples. From Salamis the Greeks could see the smoke rising from the city.

The Greek council of war

The allied fleet of about 370–380 ships gathered at Salamis. Its commander was the Spartan Eurybiades, as Sparta led the alliance, but the Athenians provided nearly half the ships.

Most Peloponnesian commanders wanted to withdraw to the Isthmus of Corinth, where a wall was being built across the narrow neck of land. Themistocles argued that fighting in the open sea off the Isthmus would favour the larger, faster Persian fleet, while the narrow channels of Salamis would cancel out its numbers. He also warned that the Athenians would sail away and found a new city in Italy if the fleet abandoned Salamis.

Eurybiades agreed to stay, but the debate continued. According to Herodotus, Themistocles then secretly sent his slave Sicinnus, tutor to his children, across to the Persians with a message that the Greeks were divided and planned to escape by night, and that the Athenians might change sides.

What happened

The exact day of the battle is not recorded. Ancient references to the festival calendar and to an eclipse mentioned by Herodotus have led historians to propose dates in late September 480 BC, but no single date is certain. Nor is the precise layout of the fleets agreed, because Herodotus and Aeschylus describe the movements in different ways and the coastline has changed since antiquity.

Xerxes took the bait. During the night his fleet moved to block both ends of the straits, and Persian troops landed on the small island of Psyttaleia at the entrance. The Persian crews spent the night at their oars.

Aristides, the Athenian statesman who had been ostracised and recently recalled, slipped through the blockade from Aegina and confirmed that the Greeks were surrounded. Now there was no choice but to fight.

At dawn the Persian fleet, with its strongest squadrons of Phoenicians on one wing and Ionian Greeks on the other, rowed into the straits. Xerxes watched from a throne on the slopes of Mount Aigaleo. As the Persian ships crowded into the narrow channel, they lost formation. The Greeks, who may have been backing water at first, then attacked.

The heavier Greek triremes rammed the leading Persian ships, which fouled those behind them. Persian commanders could not use their numbers, and ships collided with each other. Ariabignes, a brother of Xerxes and an admiral, was killed early in the battle.

Fighting lasted most of the day. Meanwhile Aristides led Athenian hoplites onto Psyttaleia and killed the Persian troops stationed there. By evening the surviving Persian ships had fled to Phaleron, the old harbour of Athens.

Herodotus tells how Artemisia, the queen of Halicarnassus who commanded ships for Xerxes, escaped pursuit by ramming a ship of her own side. Xerxes, thinking she had sunk an enemy, is said to have remarked that his men had become women and his women men.

Key people

Themistocles (c. 524–459 BC) was the architect of Athenian naval power and of the Greek strategy at Salamis. He received the highest honours from the Greeks after the war but was later ostracised and died in Persian service.

Eurybiades was the Spartan admiral in overall command. He backed Themistocles’ plan at the decisive moment.

Xerxes I led the invasion and watched the defeat in person.

Artemisia I of Caria, ruler of Halicarnassus, was one of Xerxes’ commanders. Herodotus, himself from Halicarnassus, says she advised the king not to fight at sea.

Aristides led the attack on Psyttaleia and later helped organise the alliance that followed the war.

Consequences

Losses are uncertain. The later historian Diodorus gives about 40 Greek ships lost against more than 200 Persian, figures that many modern historians accept as roughly plausible.

Xerxes still had a large army and a sizeable fleet, but he feared that the Greeks would sail to the Hellespont and cut his bridges. He returned to Asia with much of his army, leaving his general Mardonius with a picked force in Thessaly.

In 479 BC Mardonius was defeated and killed at Plataea, and the Greek fleet destroyed the remaining Persian ships at Mycale on the coast of Asia Minor. The invasion was over.

Athens emerged as a major naval power. In 478 BC it became leader of the Delian League, an alliance of Aegean states against Persia that later developed into an Athenian empire.

Myths and facts

Myth: the Persian fleet numbered over 1,200 ships. Herodotus gives 1,207 triremes at the start of the campaign, but many were lost in storms and at Artemisium. Most modern estimates for the Persian ships at Salamis are 600–800, still roughly double the Greek fleet.

Myth: the Corinthians fled. Herodotus reports an Athenian story that the Corinthian admiral Adeimantus fled at the start of the battle, but he notes that other Greeks rejected it, and Corinthian epitaphs honoured their dead at Salamis. It was probably post-war Athenian propaganda.

Fact: an eyewitness account survives. The tragedian Aeschylus, who had fought at Marathon and, by ancient tradition, at Salamis too, staged The Persians in 472 BC, eight years after the battle. It describes Salamis from the Persian side and is the earliest surviving account of the battle.

Legacy

Salamis secured the independence of the Greek city-states at a crucial time. Many historians argue that the cultural achievements of classical Athens in the following decades, from tragedy to philosophy and the Parthenon, depended on this victory.

The battle also gave political strength to the rowers of the Athenian fleet, usually poorer citizens, whose service underpinned the radical democracy of the 5th century BC.

In modern times the trireme has been studied through the reconstruction Olympias, built in Greece in the 1980s and tested at sea. The battle remains a classic example of how a smaller force can use geography and timing to defeat a larger one.

Timeline

• 483/482 BC: Athens uses Laurion silver to build a fleet of triremes.
• 480 BC, spring: Xerxes crosses the Hellespont into Europe.
• 480 BC, August or September: Battles of Thermopylae and Artemisium.
• 480 BC, September: Persians capture and burn Athens.
• 480 BC, September: Battle of Salamis; the Persian fleet is defeated.
• 480 BC, autumn: Xerxes returns to Asia, leaving Mardonius in Greece.
• 479 BC: Greek victories at Plataea and Mycale.
• 472 BC: Aeschylus’ play The Persians is performed in Athens.

Why it matters

Salamis was the turning point of the Persian invasion of Greece. It ended Xerxes’ hope of quick conquest, made Athens a sea power and opened the way to the classical age that shaped much of European culture.