Who won the Battle of Salamis?
The Greek fleet won a decisive victory at Salamis in September 480 BC, luring the far larger Persian navy into the narrow strait near Athens and breaking it there. Coming just after the Persians had overrun central Greece and burned Athens, the victory turned back one of the largest invasions of the ancient world.2
Weeks after the pass at Thermopylae fell, the Persian army had overrun central Greece and burned Athens. What was left of Greek freedom rested on the decks of its ships, packed into a narrow strait at Salamis. There, a smaller fleet turned back one of the largest invasions of the ancient world.3
After Thermopylae
With the land route open, the Persian king Xerxes poured south and took Athens, whose people had already fled. The allied Greek fleet had fallen back from Artemisium, where it had fought the Persian navy in August, the same month as Thermopylae, and gathered at Salamis, an island lying across a narrow channel from the Athenian harbors. Its supreme commander was the Spartan Eurybiades, although Athens supplied by far the largest squadron: Herodotus and Plutarch both give the Athenians 180 ships.4
The Greek allies argued bitterly about what to do next. Many wanted to fall back to defend the isthmus; the Athenian leader Themistocles insisted they fight at sea, in the strait between Salamis and the mainland. According to Herodotus, he carried the point only by warning that otherwise the Athenians would take their families aboard and sail away to Italy. The battle followed in late September 480 BC, although the exact day is disputed: Livius.org dates it to 29 September, with 28 September less likely, while Plutarch places it around the twentieth of the Athenian month Boedromion.5
How many ships fought at the Battle of Salamis?
Herodotus counts 378 Greek warships at Salamis (380 after two crews deserted from the Persian side) and gives Xerxes 1,207 triremes at the start of the invasion; Aeschylus, in his Persians, gives 310 Greek ships against 1,000 Persian plus 207 fast ones. Modern historians regard these totals as inflated and agree on no figure for the Persian ships that fought.6
Herodotus' own figures do not quite add up. His list of the Greek contingents (8.43 to 48) comes to 366 triremes, 12 fewer than his total of 378. The Persian count is shakier still, because many ships had been wrecked in storms, lost at Artemisium or left to guard ports and supply routes before the fleet reached Salamis. Scholars are still far from agreeing on any figure; Livius.org prefers a reconstruction in which only about a third of Xerxes' ships entered the strait and half of those were destroyed.7
Each trireme was a crowded fighting machine, driven by about 170 oarsmen in three banks; in his own reckoning Herodotus allows 200 men to a ship. Plutarch says every Athenian ship carried 18 fighting men on deck, four of them archers, and the Persian ships generally carried more marines than the Greek ones. Taken at face value, Herodotus' numbers would make Salamis one of the largest sea battles ever fought, but they are far less trustworthy than the crew-based figures Polybius gives for Ecnomus, which is why our guide to the greatest naval battles in history ranks Ecnomus as the largest on the most reliable numbers.8
The gamble of the narrows: why Salamis was a hard place for the Persians to fight
Themistocles knew the Persian fleet was larger and, in open water, would simply surround the Greeks. In the narrow strait (see the map below), that advantage vanished: too many ships in too little space could not maneuver. Herodotus has him remind the allies that their ships were heavier and fewer, and so better suited to a fight in confined water. Livius.org adds a strategic reason: as long as the Greek fleet stayed at Salamis, the Persians could not safely use Phaleron, the Athenian harbor, to supply an army marching on the Isthmus, so Xerxes' admirals had to attack.9
What was Themistocles' trick at Salamis?
According to Herodotus, Themistocles secretly sent his servant Sicinnus, the tutor of his children, to the Persian commanders with a false message: the Greeks were terrified and about to flee, and if the Persians blocked their escape they could destroy them. Believing it, the Persians spent the night sealing the strait.10
Plutarch adds that Sicinnus was of Persian stock, a prisoner of war devoted to his master. The story is early: Aeschylus, whose Persians was staged in 472 BC, has a messenger tell how a Greek from the Athenian side brought Xerxes the same tale. Livius.org judges that this near-contemporary echo makes the story plausible, while noting that the Persians hardly needed the bait, since they had to attack anyway.11
That night, Herodotus says, the Persians landed troops on the islet of Psyttaleia between Salamis and the mainland and moved their ships to close the passages, without sleep; Aeschylus describes the fleet drawn up in three lines to bar the exits. The Greek commanders learned that they were surrounded from Aristides, who slipped through from Aegina, and from the crew of a ship from Tenos that deserted the Persian fleet.12
The trap closes
At dawn the Greeks sang their battle hymn, which Aeschylus describes echoing back from the island's rocks, and rowed out to meet the enemy. Herodotus says the first Greek ships began to back water until the Athenian Ameinias of Pallene charged and rammed an enemy ship, drawing the rest into the fight, although the Aeginetans claimed that one of their ships struck first; Plutarch gives the first capture to another Athenian captain, Lycomedes. The Athenians, on the western wing toward Eleusis, faced the Phoenicians, and the Spartans, on the eastern wing toward Piraeus, faced the Ionian Greeks of the Persian fleet.13
The Persian fleet crowded into the strait and lost its order. The Greek triremes, heavier and rowed by disciplined crews, rammed into the packed enemy ships, holing and sinking them faster than they could turn. In the crush, Aeschylus' messenger says, the Persian ships struck one another and sheared off their own oars, and Herodotus adds that the worst losses came when ships in the rear, pushing forward to show their courage to the king, ran into their own vessels fleeing from the front.
Xerxes' brother Ariabignes, one of the Persian admirals, was killed; Plutarch calls him Ariamenes. Greeks whose ships went down swam to Salamis, but most of the men on the Persian side could not swim and drowned. Xerxes watched the disaster from a throne set up on the shore. According to Herodotus, Aristides then took Athenian hoplites from the shore of Salamis across to Psyttaleia and killed every Persian on the islet.14
Who was Artemisia, and what did she do at Salamis?
Artemisia was the queen of Halicarnassus, on the coast of Asia Minor, and commanded ships in Xerxes' fleet. Herodotus says she had advised the king against a sea battle and that, chased by an Athenian ship during the fighting, she escaped by ramming and sinking a vessel from her own side.15
Watching from the shore, Xerxes and his courtiers took the sunken ship for a Greek one, and nobody from its crew survived to say otherwise. Herodotus reports the king's verdict: "My men have become women, and my women men." The Athenians, he adds, had offered 10,000 drachmas to whoever took her alive. According to Britannica, Herodotus also claimed that Xerxes followed her advice when he retreated from Greece at once instead of risking another battle.16
How long did the Battle of Salamis last?
The battle was fought in a single day. The fleets met at dawn and the fighting went on toward dark: Aeschylus says the cries filled the sea until night hid the scene, and Plutarch that the Persians held out until evening.17
Livius.org likewise places the end at nightfall, by which time at least a third of the Persian ships had been beaten. For the Persian crews the ordeal was longer still, because they had spent the whole night before at their oars, holding their positions in the strait.18
How many ships were lost at Salamis?
Every account agrees that the Greeks lost far fewer ships. Diodorus Siculus puts Greek losses at 40 ships and Persian losses at more than 200, not counting ships captured with their crews; Britannica puts the Persian losses at about 300 ships sunk and the Greek losses at about 40. Herodotus gives no total for either side.19
Herodotus does say that many Persians, Medes and allied leaders of note died and that the Greeks lost few men, because they could swim ashore. Diodorus adds that Xerxes, who had not expected defeat, executed some of the Phoenicians he blamed for starting the flight.20
The retreat
The Persian fleet was shattered, though not wiped out, and the survivors fled to Phaleron under the cover of the army. Soon afterward Xerxes sent what was left of the fleet to the Hellespont to guard his bridges, and from there withdrew it toward Persia. Without ships to protect its supply convoys, the huge army could not stay in Greece. Xerxes returned to Asia and left his general Mardonius with a picked force, which wintered in Thessaly.21
The next year, 479 BC, the Greeks destroyed that army at Plataea. On the same day, according to Herodotus, another Greek force landed at Mycale on the coast of Asia Minor, defeated the Persians there and burned the ships they had beached.22
Why was the Battle of Salamis important?
Salamis broke Persia's command of the sea, and with it Xerxes' hope of finishing the conquest of Greece in 480 BC. He withdrew his navy, and the army he left behind, cut off from naval support, was beaten at Plataea the following year. Barry Strauss' history of the battle calls it the naval encounter that saved Greece and Western civilization.23
In that sense Salamis saved Greek independence at the moment it seemed already lost. The classical world that followed, its ideas, art and politics, grew in cities that a Persian victory here would very likely have erased. Livius.org adds a caution: from the Persian side the war was not lost at Salamis, since Xerxes had taken Athens and won at Thermopylae, and the real decision came at Plataea, against an army that no longer had a fleet to support it. Salamis stands with Marathon and Plataea among the greatest battles of ancient Greece, and as the moment the tide turned in the wars of the Persian Empire.24
Where was the Battle of Salamis fought, and what is there today?
The battle was fought in the strait on the east side of Salamis, an island in the Saronic Gulf, between the island and the Attic mainland near the Athenian port of Piraeus. The island still bears the same name and belongs to Greece; its chief town lies on the west coast, away from the strait.25
Before the battle the Greek ships lay beached in the bays of the island's east shore, from the Kynosoura promontory to Paloukia, while the Persian fleet lay in Phaleron Bay, less than 10 km away. Herodotus places Xerxes' throne on the mainland below Mount Aigaleos. According to Greece's Ministry of Culture, the cemetery of classical Salamis lay at present-day Ambelakia, where a marble slab was found with part of an epigram honoring the Corinthians who fell in the battle.26
Salamis is in the Greek battles quiz and the ancient battles quiz. Can you place it on the map? Try Where Was It Fought?
