Battle of Salamis

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 fleet of allied Greek city-states, guided by the Athenian Themistocles, defeated the larger navy of the Persian king Xerxes I. It was perhaps the largest sea battle of the ancient world and the turning point of the Persian invasion of Greece.

Xerxes invaded Greece in 480 BC to complete the conquest his father, Darius the Great, had begun. After the Persians broke through at the Battle of Thermopylae, the Greek fleet, which had fought an inconclusive action at Artemisium, fell back to Salamis to help evacuate Athens. The Persians burned the Boeotian towns that had resisted and occupied the empty city. Most of the Peloponnesian allies wanted to defend the Isthmus of Corinth, where they were building a wall, and to move the fleet there. Themistocles argued instead that the Greeks should fight in confined waters, where Persian numbers would count for little, and he won the argument.

According to Herodotus the Greeks had 378 triremes, though his figures for the individual cities add up to 371; Athens supplied the largest share, about 180. The Spartan Eurybiades held the formal command. Ancient writers, including the playwright Aeschylus, who fought in the battle, put the Persian fleet at 1,207 ships at the start of the campaign. Many of these were said to have been lost in storms and at Artemisium, and most modern historians think that somewhere between 600 and 800 Persian ships were present at Salamis, while some suggest fewer still.

The date is uncertain; late September is usually suggested. On the eve of the battle, according to Herodotus, Themistocles sent a servant named Sicinnus to Xerxes with a message that the Greek allies were quarrelling and planned to slip away that night. Xerxes ordered his fleet to block the exits of the straits and placed troops on the islet of Psyttaleia. His ships spent the night at sea, while the Greeks prepared for battle. Xerxes watched the next day's fighting from a throne on the slopes of Mount Aigaleo.

The ancient accounts are vague, and no single participant could have seen the whole action. As the Persian ships pushed into the narrow channel they lost formation, and their front line was driven back onto the ships behind it. On the Greek left, Xerxes' brother Ariabignes, an admiral, was killed early on, and many Phoenician ships were forced onto the shore. Greek ships broke through the Persian centre. Herodotus tells how Artemisia, queen of Halicarnassus, escaped pursuit by ramming a ship on her own side. Ships from Aegina caught retreating Persian vessels as they left the straits, and Athenian troops under Aristides landed on Psyttaleia and killed its garrison. Herodotus gives no total for Persian losses; modern estimates of 200 to 300 ships rest on his statement that the fleet numbered 300 the next year. Greek losses are usually put at about 40 ships.

Fearing that the Greeks might cut his bridges over the Hellespont, Xerxes returned to Asia with much of his army, leaving the general Mardonius to continue the war. In 479 BC the Greeks defeated Mardonius at Plataea and destroyed much of the remaining Persian fleet at Mycale. Persia never again tried to conquer mainland Greece, and over the following decades the Greeks, increasingly led by Athens, drove Persian power out of Thrace, the Aegean islands and Ionia.

Our 500 BCE map shows the Achaemenid Empire before the invasion; the battle belongs to the wider Greco-Persian Wars.