Western civilisation does not have an official birthday. Not like Archbishop Ussher’s famous declaration that the creation of the world occurred in 4004 BC, on Saturday the 22nd of October, in the late evening.
If the West had a birthday, though, it would probably be the 22nd of September 480 BC—the traditional date for the ship-splintering battle of Salamis, which finally brought a curtain down on the bloodshed at Marathon and Thermopylae...
This day 2496 years ago, Western civilisation began at Salamis
Dominic Selwood
22 September 2016
The Telegraph
Eva Green as Artemisia in "300: Rise of an Empire"
Western civilisation does not have an official birthday. Not like Archbishop Ussher’s famous declaration that the creation of the world occurred in 4004 BC, on Saturday the 22nd of October, in the late evening.
If the West had a birthday, though, it would probably be the 22nd of September 480 BC—the traditional date for the ship-splintering battle of Salamis, which finally brought a curtain down on the bloodshed at Marathon and Thermopylae.
Suggesting that Salamis was the birth of the West will probably be unpopular in some quarters. “Kings and battles” are no longer the mainstay of history, and that is usually a good thing. Pirate queens and long-distance battle-runners are often far more interesting. But more of them later. Bear with me.
Despite the modern tendency to downplay the significance of battles, some are truly decisive and shape history just as much as the invention of the printing press or the discovery of antibiotics. When the Romans bulldozed Jerusalem off the face of the earth, when Tariq the Berber seized Spain for Islam, and when the RAF saw off Hitler and sent him to his doom in Russia, each of these unequivocally shaped the world that followed. The epic naval battle of Salamis may be less well known than these, but it was far more influential than any of them.
Salamis marked the moment a ragbag of ancient Greek city-states finally saw off the crushing might of the Persian empire. As a direct result, Athenian culture was able to thrive, and quickly entered a Golden Age of democracy, philosophy, art, and drama, laying the foundations of the modern West.
Spartans drive the Persian army over a cliff in the film 300 Credit: Warner Bros
Even Hollywood has twigged that something important was happening in fifth century BC Greece. In “300” the filmmakers stylishly retold the epic tale of the battle of Thermopylae in stunning visual tableaux from Frank Miller’s comic book of the same name. And in “300: Rise of an Empire” they upped the six packs, spandex, sex, and spattered gore in order to give us a fantasy version of the battle of Salamis.
While it is wonderful that the titanic struggle of the Greeks against the Persians is now a multimillion-dollar entertainment franchise, it is a shame that the films are built on the dreary “freedom” motif, and that they portray a struggle more informed by the Star Wars saga than events in the ancient Balkans. For instance, those with an eye for historical detail might wonder why King Xerxes of Persia is an effeminate barely-clad seven-foot hairless Brazilian man-god draped in gold bondage piercings, and why he has a larynx fitted with a built-in synthesiser. Still. These are minor quibbles. The Greek-Persian wars laid the foundations for our modern world, and Hollywood has done its bit to acknowledge this debt, albeit with only a passing nod to the details of the actual events.
So what was really at stake, and what actually happened?
The first thing is that, in this period, there was no such place as “ancient Greece”, only hundreds of independent kingdoms called city-states. The best known and most influential were Athens, with its democracy and culture, and Sparta, famed for its unbending and harsh military ethos. But there were many others that were prominent and famous: like Argos, Corinth, Delphi, Rhodes, Thebes, and dozens more.
The Greek city-states were not politically unified, and frequently descended into civil war. However, to their east, in the land that is now Iran, the Persians had built an empire, stretching from the Indus valley all the way to the western shores of modern Turkey and well into North Africa. Its proper name is the Achaemenid Empire, and it was the biggest in the ancient world. In fact, at 44 per cent of the world’s people, it was the largest empire in history by percentage of the planet’s population.
The problems began with a handful of Greek city-states which dotted the western shore of what is now Turkey. They had been conquered by the Persians, but in 499 BC they banded together and rose in rebellion. In what would turn out to be an epoch-changing decision, Athens decided to get involved by sending a small force to join in the “Ionian revolt”.
The Persians were not pleased and, inevitably, smashed the insurrection. In its aftermath, King Darius of Persia sat in Persepolis and brooded on the unwelcome provocation from Athens. Little by little, he settled on the idea of teaching the Athenians a lesson, and conquering the rest of Greece while he was at it. So he got to work, and before long his armies were marching west.
Philippides, from 'A Vision of Greece', published 1925 (colour litho) by Willoughb Credit: Bridgeman Art Library
In September 490 BC the opposing forces squared off on the fennel-covered plains of Marathon (marathon means fennel in Greek). There are no accurate numbers, but something like 10,000 Athenians and 1,000 Plataeans faced a Persian army of 25,000.
Enter Pheidippides (or Philippides). His job title was hemerodromos, or day-runner. His role in life was to run fast, carrying messages. Once the Athenian generals had seen the size of the Persian army, they ordered Pheidippides to hotfoot it to Sparta and request reinforcements. He was good at his job, and covered the 140 miles in a day and a half. The Spartans listened to his request, and agreed to help—but explained that they would only be able to start marching east once they had finished a couple of days of religious rites.
Back at Marathon, things were not progressing. For whatever reason—perhaps unsuitable terrain and unfavourable battle lines—neither side had launched an assault. Then, oddly, the Persian cavalry returned to their ships, perhaps hoping to move further along the coast to find a more favourable battle site. Sensing that this could be their moment, the Athenians attacked, taking the remaining Persians completely by surprise. In a single afternoon, the Athenians killed 6,400, while losing only 192 of their own (according to Herodotus).
It was a stunning victory. One small city had taken on and defeated the vast might of Persia.
By now, Pheidippides had returned from Sparta, and was promptly ordered to speed as fast as he could to Athens, where he was to tell the people of the great victory, and warn them of likely Persian reprisals. Ever obedient, he strapped on his sandals, and set off on the 25-mile run. (The modern marathon of 26.2 miles is based on the length of the 1908 Olympic games in London, which set a course from Windsor Castle to the royal box in the stadium at White City.) When Pheidippides arrived in Athens, he gasped, “Nike!” meaning victory, and died on the spot of exhaustion. The Athenians were naturally jubilant at the news, but the story was far from finished.
Over in Persepolis, Darius soon died, and the throne passed to his second son, Xerxes, who was not a seven-foot hairless man-god in gold knitted speedos, but a normal human with a lot of hair and a long corkscrew beard. He inherited his father’s desire to put Athens in its place, and to conquer the rest of the Greek cities for good measure. Xerxes took care in his preparations and, ten years after the humiliation at Marathon, he was ready.
His invasion army marched overland, crossing the Hellespont into Greece on enormous purpose-built pontoons near modern-day Gallipoli. Simultaneously, his ships shadowed the army’s route by sea, hugging the Aegean coastline. One incident here gives an insight into his character. When a storm smashed some of the pontoons, he ordered the sea to be whipped three hundred times for its disobedience to him.
The statue of King Leonidas of ancient Sparta stands over the battlefield of Thermopylae, some 106 miles north of Athens in central Greece
It was August 480 BC. Herodotus says the invading Persian army was five million strong, half of whom were combatants. This is almost certainly a wild exaggeration—the fighting force was probably more like 200,000.
Having pushed west through Thrace and Macedon, the Persians swung south and began the long march down to Athens. So far, all the Greeks they had encountered had surrendered to them. But that was about to change.
Once through Thessaly, the route continued along the Malian Gulf and into Locris, but narrowed to a tight pass at Thermopylae, or the “Hot Gates”, named after the sulphur springs nearby.
At Marathon it was the Athenians who had stood against the Persians. Now, at Thermopylae, only around 89 miles north-west of Marathon, the Persians came face to face with a confederate army of around 7,000 Greeks led by King Leonidas of Sparta, who claimed descent from Hercules.
Leonidas had chosen to wait at Thermopylae for a very specific reason. The pass was only two chariots wide, and it would even up the disparity in the size of their armies.
Once at the Hot Gates, the Persians made camp for four days, and marvelled when their spies told them that the Spartans had stripped for exercise and were doing one another’s hair. On further enquiry. the Persians learned that these were traditional elements of the Spartans’ preparation for battle.
On the fifth day—with no alternative available—Xerxes ordered his men to begin filing through the killing funnel, and for two solid days they took heavy losses.
Enter Ephialtes. Although he was a Malian Greek, his greed was stronger than his national pride. He crossed to the Persian camp, and told them of a secret raiders’ path around the mountains. He explained that it would take them to the other side of the pass, where they could cut off the Greeks from the rear, trapping them.
Overjoyed, Xerxes dispatched his crack troops, the Immortals, who swarmed over the mountains to outflank the enemy.
Catching wind of developments, Leonidas managed to send most of the Greek army away to safety. But Spartans never surrender, so 300 of them stayed with their king (along with 1,200 Thebans and Thespians, but “300” is a much better film title than “1500”).
When the Persians eventually launched their attack, the Thebans surrendered without a fight, but the Spartans and Thespians fought on until they were annihilated. Leonidas’s corpse was crucified and decapitated, and his head mounted on a spike. Today the topography of the narrow pass has changed beyond recognition, but a statue of King Leonidas stands there with the simple words, “Come and take them”, which was his reply to Xerxes’s demand that he and his men lay down their weapons.
With the road out of Thermopylae now clear, Xerxes did not wait for the dust to settle. He had won a decisive victory. Two, in fact, as while he had been fighting at Thermopylae, his armada had beaten the Greeks at sea at nearby Artemisium.
Now his army raged south for the remaining 83 miles to Athens, which they stormed, looted, and burnt to the ground.
The humiliation of Marathon was avenged.
The tomb of the dead in the area of the battle of Marathon Credit: Paul Grover
The Athenians had evacuated their city before Xerxes and his army arrived, and taken refuge on the neighbouring island of Salamis, just off the west coast of the Athens peninsula opposite the port of Piraeus. Following the rout at Thermopylae, they knew that they had no chance of defeating Xerxes by land, so chose to take the battle to the waves.
Fortunately, the Athenian navy had just been enlarged to 180 triremes, each propelled by 170 skilled oarsmen (not slaves, despite the dodgy plotline in “Ben Hur”). Supported by 198 vessels from other city-states, the Athenian navy waited patiently in the straits between Piraeus and the island of Salamis.
The man in charge of the Greek armada was Themistocles, an Athenian politician and general. He was well aware that the Persian ships vastly outnumbered his. But he also knew that the Greek ships were significantly heavier, so if he could trap the Persians in the narrow straits, then he might have a chance.
A plan formed in his mind, and he sent Sicinnus, a Persian slave, as a spy to Xerxes, with orders to tell him that the Greek ships were going to make a run for it. This ploy was intended to exhaust the Persians by keeping them up all night watching for Greek activity, to get them to split their fleet in order to block the exits, and to encourage them to attack.
The next day, when the Greeks started moving away, north into the straits, it looked like Sicinnus had been telling the truth and the Greeks were fleeing. Xerxes turned to his senior advisers for guidance.
Enter Artemisia. She was queen of Halicarnassus (now Bodrum in Turkey), which was also the home of Herodotus, the first historian, who rather admired her, and left us her story, along with all the details of the Greek-Persian wars. Although Halicarnassus was a Greek city-state, it was under Persian rule, and Artemisia had thrown her lot in with Xerxes, with whom she got on rather well. She provided five ships for the Persian navy, and commanded them personally from her flagship. (Fans of “300: Rise of an Empire” will recall that Eva Green plays a psychotic, sadistic, nymphomaniac, Barbie doll, Greek warrior and naval commander in Xerxes’s inner circle. There you go.)
Xerxes’s council advised him to attack the Greeks as they fled, chasing them up the straits of Salamis. Artemisia alone sensed a trap, and warned him to wait. She advised that he had already burned Athens to the ground, which is what he had come to do. She suggested he turn away and celebrate his achievements. He was grateful for her advice, but gave orders to attack, then had his throne placed a little way up nearby Mount Aigaleo overlooking the water, from where he could watch his ships claim victory.
However, as the Greek triremes turned and began smashing the Persian fleet to matchwood, Xerxes realised his catastrophic mistake. The crush of vessels in the congested waterway deprived his lighter ships of their superior manoeuvrability, leaving them defenceless against the heavy Greek rams.
In the chaos, Artemisia distinguished herself, changing her colours from Persian to Greek several times as she sank Greek ships and avoided capture by anyone wanting the reward of ten thousand drachmas the Greeks had placed on her head. In the end, the straits were so clogged she rammed and sank a Persian ship to escape.
When it was over, of the 800 Persian ships, 300 had been sunk. In contrast, the Greeks had only lost 40 of their 378.
It was a thumping win for the Greek confederacy, and the first major sea battle in recorded history.
In the face of the disaster, Xerxes again asked his advisors what to do next. Artemisia counselled him to head home. This time he listened. With a heavy heart, he knew he would never control Greece if he was not master of its waters.
So he returned to Persia for the winter, leaving his armies on the Greek mainland. The following year he tried again. His army looted Athens a second time, but at Plataea a confederacy of Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and Megara finally trounced Persia and half a dozen Greek city-states who had joined Xerxes. Persia’s grandiose ambitions for Greece were at an end. Low level skirmishing continued on and off, but the steam had definitively gone out of the Persian conquest plans.
With the threat of renewed conflict receding, the Athenians rebuilt their city from the ashes, and it entered its Golden Age. Under the inspired leadership of Pericles, they built the Parthenon with its sublime sculptures, and nurtured a culture of intellectualism and art that gave us the philosophers Socrates and Plato; the historians Herodotus and Thucydides; the playwrights Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles; the sculptors Myron, Pheidias, and Praxiteles; and many others.
As much as the writers of the “300” films enjoy riffing on the idea that the plucky Greeks were natural heroes because of their innate love of freedom and democracy, the fact is that only Athens was a democracy. And, if one is honest, it was not one that the modern world would recognise. Women had no vote or existence in public society. Slavery was part of everyday life. Pederasty was a social institution. Justice was crude – they tried one of their greatest minds, Socrates, for impiety in failing to acknowledge the city’s gods, and for corrupting youth with his questioning ideas. He was convicted, and sentenced to death by drinking hemlock.
Greeks Attacking Persian Ships. Credit: Bettmann/CORBIS
Sparta was not a home of modern freedom either. They eugenically killed off weak male babies on the hillsides. Boys were separated from their parents aged seven and enrolled in the agoge, strict state-run military training from which they did not return until aged 30. Pederasty was rife. And a small minority of citizens (one in seven at the time of Thermopylae and Salamis) ruled a kingdom of slaves known as helots. Every autumn a war was declared on the helots, and Spartan soldiers of the Krypteia were tasked with stalking the villages and murdering the strongest ones.
After Salamis and Plataea, as in insurance policy against further Persian attacks, Athens roped a large number of other city-states into a self-defence confederacy known as the Delian League. It might have been a good idea, but Athens insisted that the other states pay taxes, which Pericles then partly diverted into his civic building programme—including using the money to finance, build, and decorate the numinous Parthenon, which he used as a treasury for the tax money. Before long it all went wrong. The League started to be seen by other cities as an Athenian Empire. Sparta declared war on Athens, and the two were soon tearing each other apart in the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC). The Spartans eventually won, and rose to become Greece’s leading power. The scintillating but brief Golden Age in Athens was effectively over, and renewed civil wars became a feature of life all over Greece.
Despite the Hollywood insistence that Persia invaded Greece because the Persian despots did not like democracy, the Persians had little practical interest in the political systems of their client kingdoms. Persia built its empire on the notion that conquered peoples could keep their kings and religion as long as they acknowledged Persia as overlord. Hence the king of Persia took the title “King of Kings” (shahanshah), which was later borrowed in the Bible for Jesus.
In terms of religion, the Persians were Zoroastrians, which is the oldest major monotheistic religion in the world. They did not expect other races to convert to Zoroastrianism, and did not punish people merely for having other religions. Famously, Cyrus the Great (king of Persia eight years before Darius) conquered Babylon (in modern-day Iraq) and found there the Jews who had been deported from Israel in the “Babylonian Exile”. He freed them to return to Israel, and in return the Biblical book of Isaiah gives Cyrus the title of “Anointed One”, which is, of course, Christ in Greek, or Messiah in Hebrew. That said, Cyrus’s own titles were already pretty good, including, “King of the Four Corners of the World”.
Returning to today’s anniversary of the battle of Salamis, it can fairly be said to mark the birth of the West because it allowed Athens to flourish culturally and intellectually as no other city before it. From that blossoming of thought and creativity the city bequeathed a legacy that was to be the foundation of the modern West.
As for the main characters in the story, their fates were varied.
The tale of Pheidippides the runner is almost certainly myth. Herodotus (writing a few decades after the battle) says he run to Sparta. The follow-on run from Marathon to Athens does not appear in any records until several hundred years later. Still, this has not quenched the popularity of the modern marathon race—or even the Spartathlon, which recreates his extraordinary sub-48-hour mission to Sparta.
Artemisia also achieved the important ancient Greek goal of isterophimia, or being remembered long after death. Legend says she jumped from the rock of Leucas to win love, but died and was buried there. This gave rise to the tradition of jumping from the same rock to be cured of love. Notable victims of the jump include the poetess Sappho. Artemisia is also remembered in Persia. In 1969 the Iranian navy named one of their destroyers in her honour, reflecting her status as one of their most famous naval commanders.
And as for the Athenian general, Themistocles—the victor of Salamis and saviour of Greece—he eventually fell out of favour in both Athens and Sparta, and went into exile. He travelled to Persia, won the trust and respect of Xerxes’s son, and ended up as a high ranking official in the Persian empire.
Finally, although not a person, the island of Salamis remains a byword for Greek seamanship, and is now the home of the Hellenic navy.
So, on this special anniversary, tonight you can sit down to an entertaining evening of flesh-and-phalanxes with “300” and “300: Rise of an Empire”. You can toast the day, and marvel at Hollywood’s ability to turn a story as multidimensional as the Greek-Persian wars into a binary good-versus-evil slick choreographed martial arts gore-fest in defence of the American dream.
Dominic Selwood is the author of Spies, Sadists and Sorcerers: The History You Weren’t Taught in School. His latest novel, The Apocalypse Fire, is out on 31 October 2016.
If the West had a birthday, though, it would probably be the 22nd of September 480 BC—the traditional date for the ship-splintering battle of Salamis, which finally brought a curtain down on the bloodshed at Marathon and Thermopylae...
This day 2496 years ago, Western civilisation began at Salamis
Dominic Selwood
22 September 2016
The Telegraph
Eva Green as Artemisia in "300: Rise of an Empire"
Western civilisation does not have an official birthday. Not like Archbishop Ussher’s famous declaration that the creation of the world occurred in 4004 BC, on Saturday the 22nd of October, in the late evening.
If the West had a birthday, though, it would probably be the 22nd of September 480 BC—the traditional date for the ship-splintering battle of Salamis, which finally brought a curtain down on the bloodshed at Marathon and Thermopylae.
Suggesting that Salamis was the birth of the West will probably be unpopular in some quarters. “Kings and battles” are no longer the mainstay of history, and that is usually a good thing. Pirate queens and long-distance battle-runners are often far more interesting. But more of them later. Bear with me.
Despite the modern tendency to downplay the significance of battles, some are truly decisive and shape history just as much as the invention of the printing press or the discovery of antibiotics. When the Romans bulldozed Jerusalem off the face of the earth, when Tariq the Berber seized Spain for Islam, and when the RAF saw off Hitler and sent him to his doom in Russia, each of these unequivocally shaped the world that followed. The epic naval battle of Salamis may be less well known than these, but it was far more influential than any of them.
Salamis marked the moment a ragbag of ancient Greek city-states finally saw off the crushing might of the Persian empire. As a direct result, Athenian culture was able to thrive, and quickly entered a Golden Age of democracy, philosophy, art, and drama, laying the foundations of the modern West.
Even Hollywood has twigged that something important was happening in fifth century BC Greece. In “300” the filmmakers stylishly retold the epic tale of the battle of Thermopylae in stunning visual tableaux from Frank Miller’s comic book of the same name. And in “300: Rise of an Empire” they upped the six packs, spandex, sex, and spattered gore in order to give us a fantasy version of the battle of Salamis.
While it is wonderful that the titanic struggle of the Greeks against the Persians is now a multimillion-dollar entertainment franchise, it is a shame that the films are built on the dreary “freedom” motif, and that they portray a struggle more informed by the Star Wars saga than events in the ancient Balkans. For instance, those with an eye for historical detail might wonder why King Xerxes of Persia is an effeminate barely-clad seven-foot hairless Brazilian man-god draped in gold bondage piercings, and why he has a larynx fitted with a built-in synthesiser. Still. These are minor quibbles. The Greek-Persian wars laid the foundations for our modern world, and Hollywood has done its bit to acknowledge this debt, albeit with only a passing nod to the details of the actual events.
So what was really at stake, and what actually happened?
The first thing is that, in this period, there was no such place as “ancient Greece”, only hundreds of independent kingdoms called city-states. The best known and most influential were Athens, with its democracy and culture, and Sparta, famed for its unbending and harsh military ethos. But there were many others that were prominent and famous: like Argos, Corinth, Delphi, Rhodes, Thebes, and dozens more.
The Greek city-states were not politically unified, and frequently descended into civil war. However, to their east, in the land that is now Iran, the Persians had built an empire, stretching from the Indus valley all the way to the western shores of modern Turkey and well into North Africa. Its proper name is the Achaemenid Empire, and it was the biggest in the ancient world. In fact, at 44 per cent of the world’s people, it was the largest empire in history by percentage of the planet’s population.
The problems began with a handful of Greek city-states which dotted the western shore of what is now Turkey. They had been conquered by the Persians, but in 499 BC they banded together and rose in rebellion. In what would turn out to be an epoch-changing decision, Athens decided to get involved by sending a small force to join in the “Ionian revolt”.
The Persians were not pleased and, inevitably, smashed the insurrection. In its aftermath, King Darius of Persia sat in Persepolis and brooded on the unwelcome provocation from Athens. Little by little, he settled on the idea of teaching the Athenians a lesson, and conquering the rest of Greece while he was at it. So he got to work, and before long his armies were marching west.
Philippides, from 'A Vision of Greece', published 1925 (colour litho) by Willoughb Credit: Bridgeman Art Library
In September 490 BC the opposing forces squared off on the fennel-covered plains of Marathon (marathon means fennel in Greek). There are no accurate numbers, but something like 10,000 Athenians and 1,000 Plataeans faced a Persian army of 25,000.
Enter Pheidippides (or Philippides). His job title was hemerodromos, or day-runner. His role in life was to run fast, carrying messages. Once the Athenian generals had seen the size of the Persian army, they ordered Pheidippides to hotfoot it to Sparta and request reinforcements. He was good at his job, and covered the 140 miles in a day and a half. The Spartans listened to his request, and agreed to help—but explained that they would only be able to start marching east once they had finished a couple of days of religious rites.
Back at Marathon, things were not progressing. For whatever reason—perhaps unsuitable terrain and unfavourable battle lines—neither side had launched an assault. Then, oddly, the Persian cavalry returned to their ships, perhaps hoping to move further along the coast to find a more favourable battle site. Sensing that this could be their moment, the Athenians attacked, taking the remaining Persians completely by surprise. In a single afternoon, the Athenians killed 6,400, while losing only 192 of their own (according to Herodotus).
It was a stunning victory. One small city had taken on and defeated the vast might of Persia.
By now, Pheidippides had returned from Sparta, and was promptly ordered to speed as fast as he could to Athens, where he was to tell the people of the great victory, and warn them of likely Persian reprisals. Ever obedient, he strapped on his sandals, and set off on the 25-mile run. (The modern marathon of 26.2 miles is based on the length of the 1908 Olympic games in London, which set a course from Windsor Castle to the royal box in the stadium at White City.) When Pheidippides arrived in Athens, he gasped, “Nike!” meaning victory, and died on the spot of exhaustion. The Athenians were naturally jubilant at the news, but the story was far from finished.
Over in Persepolis, Darius soon died, and the throne passed to his second son, Xerxes, who was not a seven-foot hairless man-god in gold knitted speedos, but a normal human with a lot of hair and a long corkscrew beard. He inherited his father’s desire to put Athens in its place, and to conquer the rest of the Greek cities for good measure. Xerxes took care in his preparations and, ten years after the humiliation at Marathon, he was ready.
His invasion army marched overland, crossing the Hellespont into Greece on enormous purpose-built pontoons near modern-day Gallipoli. Simultaneously, his ships shadowed the army’s route by sea, hugging the Aegean coastline. One incident here gives an insight into his character. When a storm smashed some of the pontoons, he ordered the sea to be whipped three hundred times for its disobedience to him.
The statue of King Leonidas of ancient Sparta stands over the battlefield of Thermopylae, some 106 miles north of Athens in central Greece
It was August 480 BC. Herodotus says the invading Persian army was five million strong, half of whom were combatants. This is almost certainly a wild exaggeration—the fighting force was probably more like 200,000.
Having pushed west through Thrace and Macedon, the Persians swung south and began the long march down to Athens. So far, all the Greeks they had encountered had surrendered to them. But that was about to change.
Once through Thessaly, the route continued along the Malian Gulf and into Locris, but narrowed to a tight pass at Thermopylae, or the “Hot Gates”, named after the sulphur springs nearby.
At Marathon it was the Athenians who had stood against the Persians. Now, at Thermopylae, only around 89 miles north-west of Marathon, the Persians came face to face with a confederate army of around 7,000 Greeks led by King Leonidas of Sparta, who claimed descent from Hercules.
Leonidas had chosen to wait at Thermopylae for a very specific reason. The pass was only two chariots wide, and it would even up the disparity in the size of their armies.
Once at the Hot Gates, the Persians made camp for four days, and marvelled when their spies told them that the Spartans had stripped for exercise and were doing one another’s hair. On further enquiry. the Persians learned that these were traditional elements of the Spartans’ preparation for battle.
On the fifth day—with no alternative available—Xerxes ordered his men to begin filing through the killing funnel, and for two solid days they took heavy losses.
Enter Ephialtes. Although he was a Malian Greek, his greed was stronger than his national pride. He crossed to the Persian camp, and told them of a secret raiders’ path around the mountains. He explained that it would take them to the other side of the pass, where they could cut off the Greeks from the rear, trapping them.
Overjoyed, Xerxes dispatched his crack troops, the Immortals, who swarmed over the mountains to outflank the enemy.
Catching wind of developments, Leonidas managed to send most of the Greek army away to safety. But Spartans never surrender, so 300 of them stayed with their king (along with 1,200 Thebans and Thespians, but “300” is a much better film title than “1500”).
When the Persians eventually launched their attack, the Thebans surrendered without a fight, but the Spartans and Thespians fought on until they were annihilated. Leonidas’s corpse was crucified and decapitated, and his head mounted on a spike. Today the topography of the narrow pass has changed beyond recognition, but a statue of King Leonidas stands there with the simple words, “Come and take them”, which was his reply to Xerxes’s demand that he and his men lay down their weapons.
With the road out of Thermopylae now clear, Xerxes did not wait for the dust to settle. He had won a decisive victory. Two, in fact, as while he had been fighting at Thermopylae, his armada had beaten the Greeks at sea at nearby Artemisium.
Now his army raged south for the remaining 83 miles to Athens, which they stormed, looted, and burnt to the ground.
The humiliation of Marathon was avenged.
The tomb of the dead in the area of the battle of Marathon Credit: Paul Grover
The Athenians had evacuated their city before Xerxes and his army arrived, and taken refuge on the neighbouring island of Salamis, just off the west coast of the Athens peninsula opposite the port of Piraeus. Following the rout at Thermopylae, they knew that they had no chance of defeating Xerxes by land, so chose to take the battle to the waves.
Fortunately, the Athenian navy had just been enlarged to 180 triremes, each propelled by 170 skilled oarsmen (not slaves, despite the dodgy plotline in “Ben Hur”). Supported by 198 vessels from other city-states, the Athenian navy waited patiently in the straits between Piraeus and the island of Salamis.
The man in charge of the Greek armada was Themistocles, an Athenian politician and general. He was well aware that the Persian ships vastly outnumbered his. But he also knew that the Greek ships were significantly heavier, so if he could trap the Persians in the narrow straits, then he might have a chance.
A plan formed in his mind, and he sent Sicinnus, a Persian slave, as a spy to Xerxes, with orders to tell him that the Greek ships were going to make a run for it. This ploy was intended to exhaust the Persians by keeping them up all night watching for Greek activity, to get them to split their fleet in order to block the exits, and to encourage them to attack.
The next day, when the Greeks started moving away, north into the straits, it looked like Sicinnus had been telling the truth and the Greeks were fleeing. Xerxes turned to his senior advisers for guidance.
Enter Artemisia. She was queen of Halicarnassus (now Bodrum in Turkey), which was also the home of Herodotus, the first historian, who rather admired her, and left us her story, along with all the details of the Greek-Persian wars. Although Halicarnassus was a Greek city-state, it was under Persian rule, and Artemisia had thrown her lot in with Xerxes, with whom she got on rather well. She provided five ships for the Persian navy, and commanded them personally from her flagship. (Fans of “300: Rise of an Empire” will recall that Eva Green plays a psychotic, sadistic, nymphomaniac, Barbie doll, Greek warrior and naval commander in Xerxes’s inner circle. There you go.)
Xerxes’s council advised him to attack the Greeks as they fled, chasing them up the straits of Salamis. Artemisia alone sensed a trap, and warned him to wait. She advised that he had already burned Athens to the ground, which is what he had come to do. She suggested he turn away and celebrate his achievements. He was grateful for her advice, but gave orders to attack, then had his throne placed a little way up nearby Mount Aigaleo overlooking the water, from where he could watch his ships claim victory.
However, as the Greek triremes turned and began smashing the Persian fleet to matchwood, Xerxes realised his catastrophic mistake. The crush of vessels in the congested waterway deprived his lighter ships of their superior manoeuvrability, leaving them defenceless against the heavy Greek rams.
In the chaos, Artemisia distinguished herself, changing her colours from Persian to Greek several times as she sank Greek ships and avoided capture by anyone wanting the reward of ten thousand drachmas the Greeks had placed on her head. In the end, the straits were so clogged she rammed and sank a Persian ship to escape.
When it was over, of the 800 Persian ships, 300 had been sunk. In contrast, the Greeks had only lost 40 of their 378.
It was a thumping win for the Greek confederacy, and the first major sea battle in recorded history.
In the face of the disaster, Xerxes again asked his advisors what to do next. Artemisia counselled him to head home. This time he listened. With a heavy heart, he knew he would never control Greece if he was not master of its waters.
So he returned to Persia for the winter, leaving his armies on the Greek mainland. The following year he tried again. His army looted Athens a second time, but at Plataea a confederacy of Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and Megara finally trounced Persia and half a dozen Greek city-states who had joined Xerxes. Persia’s grandiose ambitions for Greece were at an end. Low level skirmishing continued on and off, but the steam had definitively gone out of the Persian conquest plans.
With the threat of renewed conflict receding, the Athenians rebuilt their city from the ashes, and it entered its Golden Age. Under the inspired leadership of Pericles, they built the Parthenon with its sublime sculptures, and nurtured a culture of intellectualism and art that gave us the philosophers Socrates and Plato; the historians Herodotus and Thucydides; the playwrights Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles; the sculptors Myron, Pheidias, and Praxiteles; and many others.
As much as the writers of the “300” films enjoy riffing on the idea that the plucky Greeks were natural heroes because of their innate love of freedom and democracy, the fact is that only Athens was a democracy. And, if one is honest, it was not one that the modern world would recognise. Women had no vote or existence in public society. Slavery was part of everyday life. Pederasty was a social institution. Justice was crude – they tried one of their greatest minds, Socrates, for impiety in failing to acknowledge the city’s gods, and for corrupting youth with his questioning ideas. He was convicted, and sentenced to death by drinking hemlock.
Greeks Attacking Persian Ships. Credit: Bettmann/CORBIS
Sparta was not a home of modern freedom either. They eugenically killed off weak male babies on the hillsides. Boys were separated from their parents aged seven and enrolled in the agoge, strict state-run military training from which they did not return until aged 30. Pederasty was rife. And a small minority of citizens (one in seven at the time of Thermopylae and Salamis) ruled a kingdom of slaves known as helots. Every autumn a war was declared on the helots, and Spartan soldiers of the Krypteia were tasked with stalking the villages and murdering the strongest ones.
After Salamis and Plataea, as in insurance policy against further Persian attacks, Athens roped a large number of other city-states into a self-defence confederacy known as the Delian League. It might have been a good idea, but Athens insisted that the other states pay taxes, which Pericles then partly diverted into his civic building programme—including using the money to finance, build, and decorate the numinous Parthenon, which he used as a treasury for the tax money. Before long it all went wrong. The League started to be seen by other cities as an Athenian Empire. Sparta declared war on Athens, and the two were soon tearing each other apart in the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC). The Spartans eventually won, and rose to become Greece’s leading power. The scintillating but brief Golden Age in Athens was effectively over, and renewed civil wars became a feature of life all over Greece.
Despite the Hollywood insistence that Persia invaded Greece because the Persian despots did not like democracy, the Persians had little practical interest in the political systems of their client kingdoms. Persia built its empire on the notion that conquered peoples could keep their kings and religion as long as they acknowledged Persia as overlord. Hence the king of Persia took the title “King of Kings” (shahanshah), which was later borrowed in the Bible for Jesus.
In terms of religion, the Persians were Zoroastrians, which is the oldest major monotheistic religion in the world. They did not expect other races to convert to Zoroastrianism, and did not punish people merely for having other religions. Famously, Cyrus the Great (king of Persia eight years before Darius) conquered Babylon (in modern-day Iraq) and found there the Jews who had been deported from Israel in the “Babylonian Exile”. He freed them to return to Israel, and in return the Biblical book of Isaiah gives Cyrus the title of “Anointed One”, which is, of course, Christ in Greek, or Messiah in Hebrew. That said, Cyrus’s own titles were already pretty good, including, “King of the Four Corners of the World”.
Returning to today’s anniversary of the battle of Salamis, it can fairly be said to mark the birth of the West because it allowed Athens to flourish culturally and intellectually as no other city before it. From that blossoming of thought and creativity the city bequeathed a legacy that was to be the foundation of the modern West.
As for the main characters in the story, their fates were varied.
The tale of Pheidippides the runner is almost certainly myth. Herodotus (writing a few decades after the battle) says he run to Sparta. The follow-on run from Marathon to Athens does not appear in any records until several hundred years later. Still, this has not quenched the popularity of the modern marathon race—or even the Spartathlon, which recreates his extraordinary sub-48-hour mission to Sparta.
Artemisia also achieved the important ancient Greek goal of isterophimia, or being remembered long after death. Legend says she jumped from the rock of Leucas to win love, but died and was buried there. This gave rise to the tradition of jumping from the same rock to be cured of love. Notable victims of the jump include the poetess Sappho. Artemisia is also remembered in Persia. In 1969 the Iranian navy named one of their destroyers in her honour, reflecting her status as one of their most famous naval commanders.
And as for the Athenian general, Themistocles—the victor of Salamis and saviour of Greece—he eventually fell out of favour in both Athens and Sparta, and went into exile. He travelled to Persia, won the trust and respect of Xerxes’s son, and ended up as a high ranking official in the Persian empire.
Finally, although not a person, the island of Salamis remains a byword for Greek seamanship, and is now the home of the Hellenic navy.
So, on this special anniversary, tonight you can sit down to an entertaining evening of flesh-and-phalanxes with “300” and “300: Rise of an Empire”. You can toast the day, and marvel at Hollywood’s ability to turn a story as multidimensional as the Greek-Persian wars into a binary good-versus-evil slick choreographed martial arts gore-fest in defence of the American dream.
Dominic Selwood is the author of Spies, Sadists and Sorcerers: The History You Weren’t Taught in School. His latest novel, The Apocalypse Fire, is out on 31 October 2016.
