Battles Of Salamis And Plataea

The Greeks Defeat the Persian Empire and Determine the Course of European Civilization

Over the swaying, rolling roadway they marched, thousand upon thousands of them. Soon the second roadway would be in position and still more would be swarming over that; there would be parallel streams of small, brown-skinned men, lightly armed (which was well, for the journey to their battlefield was long), thousands of Persian soldiers flooding over this bridgehead into Europe, a bridge they had built themselves. It crossed the Hellespont at its narrowest point, a mile in width; it had been made by the King’s engineers in an incredibly short space of time, by locking three hundred ships together with rope, laying a wooden roadway across their decks. The second bridge, nearly finished, would embody another three hundred and sixty of Xerxes’s ships.

But these ships were but a small part of Xerxes’s navy. He had assembled, in addition to the vast army now crossing into Europe, three thousand naval transports and a thousand warships, and these, while the army marched northward, westward, southward towards the lands of the Athenians and Spartans, would sail across the Aegean in a massive combined operation, a punitive expedition which would destroy forever the ability of these tiresome Greeks, these irritating little independent states, to interfere with the slow, beneficent spread of the Persian Empire. Xerxes was new to his throne, but he had every intention of carrying on where Darius, lis father, had left off, and indeed, it was vital that he do so; be seen to do so: new kings, and Xerxes was no exception, are shaky on their thrones.

The last engagement between Greeks and Persians had been ten years back, in 490 B.C., at Marathon, when Darius was still alive, and it had ended in shameful defeat for the Persians. The little Greek states, small, independent, though they were, had a remarkable ability, Darius had discovered, to coalesce in times of danger. Five years later, in 485, while he was preparing to avenge Marathon in 1 way that would leave no doubt in any mind, Greek or Persian, he died. He had been hindered in his preparations by a revolt in Egypt, a revolt which had to be crushed, crushed like a snake before it could poison the rest of the Empire. It was still uncrushed when Darius died; his son Xerxes was left to inherit not only the initial unease of a new ruler, but a full-scale revolt in a part of his kingdom.

For all this, the Greeks heaved sighs of relief. It had soon become obvious that, though Marathon had seemed a splendid victory, it was the beginning, rather than the end, of a campaign. The Persian Empire was large, very large, with unlimited resources in manpower and wealth. Its soldiers were not so well trained as the Greeks, nor so heavily armed, but there were thousands more of them. There would always be thousands more of them.

And yet, if the Greeks could repulse this new invasion and inflict one more defeat on the enemy, they might succeed in turning his attention elsewhere.

This, as we shall see, they did. It is for this reason that the twin battles of Salamis and Plataea, in 480 and 479 B.C., are of greater importance in world history than any others. No battles in history have had more lasting effect than these two: we can, with some accuracy, say that the whole of Western civilization stems from them. Had the Persians won, not the Greeks, the world would have become a Persian empire, with an Asian civilization. Greek civilization would have been snuffed out.

By 484, the revolt in Egypt had been dealt with and the young Xerxes began to prepare in earnest for his drive into Greece. His Empire was divided into twenty “satrapies”, and now each of these was called on to provide a large contingent. As Herodotus put it: “There was no nation in all Asia which Xerxes did not bring against Greece.” He gives a figure of two and a half million combatants raised in this way, and though the number is probably exaggerated, there were far too many to be transported by sea: hence the bridges over the Hellespont.

News of Persian plans and Persian moves travelled ahead of Xerxes: the various Greek city-states had already called together a Pan-Hellenic Congress to consider the problem of this all-out invasion of their homelands. Xerxes had sent messengers to all States except Athens and Sparta, the ones he was determined to crush, messengers who demanded earth and water, twin symbols of submission. From Athens and Sparta, even were those states willing to send them, they would not be acceptable: defeat, bloody, immediate and total, was Xerxes’s plan for these two.

And although a few States sent tokens, the majority resolved to tight at the side of Athens and Sparta. The question was: where in all Greece to make a stand against an army and a navy far bigger than one’s own?

At first it was decided that the defence of the Isthmus of Corinth, the narrow channel that divides the large southern part of Greece, the Peloponnese, from the northern and central parts, would be the only answer. The states of the Peloponnese regarded it as the citadel of Greek independence, and its defence was vital. But when the plan was considered more carefully, the Greeks realized that if only the isthmus were held, all northern and central Greece would fall into the enemy’s hands! Then, using it as a base, he could easily turn the isthmus defence from the sea, and the whole of the Peloponnese would fall into Persian hands. No, if a defence were to be put up, it must be well to the north. But as both the Greek Navy and the Greek Army (the contingents, aggregated, from the city-states) were inferior in numbers to those of the Persians, this could only be done in the narrow seas and the narrow passes.

All this was frantically considered, discussed, argued, amended, while Xerxes’s troops were swarming over the Hellespont and his warships were sailing across the Aegean. Desperately, the Greeks appealed to the most powerful ruler in their world, Gelo of Syracuse, or his Navy. Syracuse was not yet threatened by the Persians, but it was a Greek city, and as such it would be threatened soon.

Gelo knew this. But, and this is where Persian strategy was so far-seeing, far-ranging, the Carthaginians had been urged, by Xerxes, to invade Sicily. Every man, every ship, of Gelo’s was needed to repel the Carthaginian attack.

The Greeks decided to precipitate, if they could, a naval battle in the cramped and narrow Euboean Channel between their east coast and the large island of Euboea, a hundred miles long, and couple this naval tactic with the defence, on land, of the Pass of Thermopylae, the only place, it was believed, where an invading land force could get between impassable mountains and the sea. A picked band of men could hold the Pass indefinitely and to this end Leonidas, King of the Spartans, was despatched with a force. Once Xerxes’s army was held up, so the Greeks reasoned, he would force his fleet southward through the Channel to outflank the defenders, and here, the Greeks felt, they stood a good chance of beating him. Accordingly, they assembled as large a fleet as they were able, a fleet out of all proportion to the handful of men who were guarding the Pass of Thermopylae.

And this was a major blunder: Leonidas had far too few troops to do the job allotted him. He held up the Persian Army with little difficulty: the lightly armoured Persians, however much they might outnumber the Greeks, were unable to beat back the heavily armoured soldiers in the narrow confines of the Pass. But Leonidas failed to consider what might happen if the Persians discovered a path over the mountains, and when he found that they had, that they were streaming over the hills, outflanking him, he had too few men to stop them. He refused to surrender, was killed with all his force, and the mass of the Persian Army poured through the Pass. Outflanked by land, the Greek Fleet sailed hurriedly south to the isthmus.

And now Themistocles of Athens, the man who had fought so long to give his city a powerful fleet, and had succeeded, saw with a sudden thrill of pride that nothing less than the saving of Greece depended on the Athenian Fleet. It was, in fact, most of the allied navy: many ships from the other contingents had been destroyed in a storm and more in a preliminary skirmish with the Persians. Themistocles rushed his fleet towards the island of Salamis in the Saronic Gulf, to the west of Athens, last defence of the Isthmus of Corinth, and the Persian Fleet followed. Then the Persian Army reached Athens, laid siege to the Acropolis, and slaughtered its defenders.

Themistocles decided to trick Xerxes into a naval battle in the narrowest part of the Gulf, between Salamis and the mainland, where the distance between the two was less than a mile and a half. He sent a messenger to the Persian king, informed him the Greeks “no longer agree among themselves, so that they will not now make any resistance”. The best way of destroying them, the messenger suggested, was to bottle them up in this narrow strip of water. They would surrender, of course: then the ships could be burnt, the men taken captive.

Xerxes fell into the trap. Had he refused to go near Salamis, had he instead sailed straight for the all-important Isthmus of Corinth, at the widest part of the Gulf, he would easily have defeated the Greeks, but now, falsely assured that they were on the point of surrender, he sailed close to the shore. The Greek captains had needed persuasion to stay there and wait for him, but now they did so, and with their heavier, more armoured, and far fewer, vessels they were able to butt into the tightly packed mass of Persian shipping, shearing off the oars on one side, making them impossible to navigate, wheeling round and ramming them amidships. On each Athenian ship was a boarding-party of fourteen armoured hoplites and four archers; what ships the triremes failed to sink by ramming or artillery, they boarded and destroyed. Eventually, what was left of Xerxes’s mighty fleet turned tail and fled.

The day, 23 September, 480 B.C., was a major victory for the Greeks, not so much for the number of Persian ships destroyed, but for the tremendous blow they had dealt to Persian pride, and particularly to the confidence of the new king. Up till now, his navy had been supreme in the Aegean: no doubt, if he wanted, he could make it supreme again, by rebuilding, but at the moment both the Persian Fleet and Persian morale lay at the bottom of that shallow sea.

Xerxes, still not secure on his throne, departed in haste to suppress rebellions nearer home, but left his general, Mardonius, in the Greek state of Thessaly with a large force. Mardonius now decided to persuade the Athenians to break loose from Sparta, to join his Persian force in an expedition against the Spartans, in exchange for a free pardon.

This the Athenians refused to do and instead persuaded the Spartans to join them in an all-out attempt to get Mardonius and his Persian invaders off Greek soil. The Spartans secure, since Salamis, in their Peloponnesian fastness, were slow to rally, but eventually they despatched a force to the mainland. Mardonius had now reached Athens: when he heard that the Spartans were coming, he set fire to the city and withdrew into the countryside where his Persian cavalry would have more room to manoeuvre. But so hasty was he, so anxious to inflict a defeat at the first opportunity, that he attacked the Spartans under their leader Pausanias, while they were still in the foothills, and here his cavalry, in broken, hilly country, was defeated.

Determined not to risk more of this, Mardonius moved his main force into the plain between Plataea and the river Asopus and here, according to Herodotus, the two armies faced each other for eight days and nights before battle was joined. Then the Persian Mardonius opened up with his archers. These soon placed the Spartans in an intolerable position, for they were unable to get close enough, against the barrage, to indulge in hand-to-hand fighting.

And at this point, Mardonius made his crucial blunder. His bowmen were wreaking havoc among the Greeks, but instead of leaving them, a flexible front line, to withdraw and advance as the battle dictated, he rushed up a mass of infantry behind them, ready to burst through. These, though, were jammed solid behind the archers, leaving them no room to manoeuvre. When the Greeks saw this, they made, under Pausanias the Spartan, one final, all-out effort, scattering the archers and their wicker shields like confetti, hacking their way deep into the Persian line. This line, unable to withdraw, too close for archery, found itself in panic. According to Herodotus, the Persians “many times seized hold of the Greek spears and broke them, for in boldness and warlike spirit the Persians were not a whit inferior to the Greeks; but they were without bucklers, untrained, and far below the enemy in respect of skill of arms. Sometimes singly, sometimes in bodies often, now fewer and now more in number, they dashed forward upon the Spartan ranks and so perished.”

And Herodotus concludes:

“Thus did Pausanias… win a victory exceeding in glory all those of which our knowledge extends.”

The date of this second Greek victory, the final and decisive Battle of Plataea, was 27 August, 479 B.C. From now on, Persia would retreat, soon to leave Europe altogether. The Greeks rushed to follow up their successes, rushed to capture or destroy the Persian bridges over the Hellespont and, after a whole winter’s siege of the northern terminal, Sestus, they did so. What remained of the Persian Army in Europe made its painful way overland to the Bosphorus and there crossed back to Asia.

The decisive battles of Salamis and Plataea destroyed on one hand the prestige of the Persian Empire, leading to its eventual ruin; and built up, on the other, the prestige of the Greeks, starting that people on its amazing course of civilization. Poets sang songs about the two battles, linked them with the Trojan Wars; sculptors alluded to them in their sculptures. Greece was proud again: victorious, wise and strong.

With Plataea and Salamis the Western world came to the edge of the future, a future which Greece; Greek civilization would make great, which Greek intellect would conquer. For centuries to come, perhaps forever, the mark of Greece would be seen, clear and lasting, on the civilization of the West.