Themistocles, the primary leader of the Athenians, played a double game, sending messages to Xerxes, pretending to be a traitor. Themistocles informed Xerxes that the Greeks were divided because of the rivalries between the city-states (this was at least half-true) and that this was the opportune moment to send in Phoenician ships and sailors to crush the Greeks. Xerxes took the bait.
What was the Battle of Salamis like?
The 480 B.C.E. naval battle was a raging, swirling confrontation between about 600 Persian ships and 500 Greek ones. The Persians—actually manned by Phoenician sailors—had the numerical advantage, but the narrow waters in the Bay of Salamis prevented them from using this to its full extent. The Greeks and Persians exchanged ramming techniques, but the Greeks used something fairly new in naval combat: they stripped the oars of their opponent’s vessels. This was accomplished by coming close alongside the enemy ship, and, at a crucial moment, making a sharp right-hand turn. The Greek vessel, from prow to stern, would then pass by the Persian one, ripping or stripping all of its oars. The Greeks would then leave their opponent—who could no longer maneuver—and come back later, at an opportune time, to capture him.
The Battle of Salamis by nineteenth-century artist Wilhelm von Kaulbach. Although the Persians had more ships than the Greeks, it didn’t matter because the narrow Bay of Salamis made it impossible to maneuver around the Greeks, who would be victorious that day.
How decisive was the Battle of Salamis?
It was even more earth-shaking than Marathon. The Greeks captured or destroyed 300 Persian ships, meaning that Xerxes’ victory at Thermopylae was useless. Lacking an effective fleet to supply and transport his troops, the King of Kings feared being trapped in Greece. Soon after the Battle of Salamis, he led three-quarters of his army in a forced march to the pontoon bridge he had built across the Hellespont. One-quarter of the Persian army remained to sustain an active threat to Greece, but it was thoroughly defeated in 479 B.C.E. at the Battle of Plataea.
Put together, the Greek victories at Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea ended the Greco-Persian Wars. Any doubt as to Greece’s continued independence disappeared with remarkable, long-lasting effects. Historians often name Marathon and Salamis among the most important battles of world history because if the Persians triumphed, Greece would have become a province of the great empire, and the Greek contributions to science, literature, drama, and the visual arts might well have been lost.
Why did the Greeks win so often, even when they were heavily outnumbered?
The answer is threefold. First and foremost, the Greeks fought in defense of their homeland and were much more familiar with the terrain. Second, Greek troops had a strong spirit of individuality and fought with greater cleverness—as well as desperation—than their opponents. The third, often overlooked, aspect is the Greeks’ athleticism. Greek soldiers were—on average—faster and nimbler than the Persians, a quality derived in part from their interest in the science of the body.
Why did the Peloponnesian War begin? Was it inevitable?
According to the great historian Thucydides, it was the growing power of Athens, and the resultant envy of this power among Spartans, that brought on the Peloponnesian War in 432 B.C.E.
Whether the war was inevitable remains debatable. The Athenians demonstrated arrogance during the Greek Golden Age, and they certainly made other Greeks feel “less than.” Even so, negotiations, and a better understanding of what each city-state had to offer, might have staved off the war. Instead the war came, with a league of city-states led by Athens arrayed against a league led by Sparta.
Was the Peloponnesian War what we call the battle between the elephant and the whale?
By 432 B.C.E., Athens had definitely become whalelike, a great maritime power whose ships ranged over the eastern and central Mediterranean. By 432 B.C.E., Sparta was still the great land power, but the numbers of its fighting men had declined, thanks to a loss of population to other, more exciting Greek city-states. When the war commenced, most observers believed that Athens would prevail within a few years because of its fleet, its trade, and above all its treasury, which had grown in recent years.
Pericles, leader of the Athenians, expressed his war policy in the following way. Athens and its allies would surely win, he asserted, so long as they did not fight Sparta on land. When the Spartans came north, the Athenians—their countrymen included—huddled within the famous “Long Walls” of Athens. The Spartans could ravage the countryside all they wanted, but Athens was still supplied by sea. Using this defensive posture at home, Athens would go on the offense against Sparta’s allies, and in the end, wear them down. It was an excellent strategy, but it overlooked the law of unintended consequences.
Pericles led the Athenians with a combination of military and political skill. This is a bust of the Athenian kept at the British Museum.
What kind of plague visited Athens in the third year of the war?
Quite possibly it was the bubonic plague, which would later become a byword for horror in medieval times. One third of all the Athenians died because they were packed in the city for reasons of defense. Pericles was among those who perished.
The loss of so many people meant that Athens could not attack Sparta’s allies, and the war dragged on for a number of years, with Sparta giving better than it received. In 415 B.C.E., however, Athens found a new, charismatic leader. A kinsman of Pericles, handsome and well spoken, Alcibiades seemed like the perfect new general. Most important of all, he was vouched for by none other than Socrates, whose life he had saved in an earlier battle.
What went wrong with Alcibiades’ new plan for Athens?
Alcibiades violated a key aspect of Pericles’ former policy: to avoid unnecessary entanglements or adventures. Because the Greek city-state of Syracuse on the eastern side of the island of Sicily was a Spartan ally, Alcibiades decided to strike there. Nearly half of the Athenian fleet sailed, with 10,000 troops aboard, but Alcibiades did not go; he was deprived of his command by the city fathers almost at the last moment. Not only did the Siege of Syracuse fail, resulting in the loss of nearly all the soldiers, but Alcibiades soon turned traitor, offering his services to Sparta. In one of the most circular movements of any military leader, Alcibiades went from being an Athenian admiral to a Spartan general, but he then defected from Sparta to Persia. While considering yet another defection—this time back to Athens!—Alcibiades suffered a defeat at sea and committed suicide.
How did Sparta finally win the Peloponnesian War?
Though Alcibiades was a major disappointment to Sparta, the Spartans used his strategy, which was to seek a naval alliance with Persia. This resulted in the creation of a Persian-built fleet, manned by Spartan sailors. In 405 B.C.E., Sparta won the naval Battle of Aegospotami. As a result, Athens lost the ability to resupply its population with grain from the Black Sea, via the Sea of Marmara and the Hellespont.
Athens sued for peace, and the terms were harsh. Sparta required that the Long Walls—running from the city proper to the naval port—be pulled down. Athens had to yield practically all its war-making capacity, and at the end of the war, only one-third of the population of the city survived. Sparta’s allies wanted to go even further. They urged Sparta to kill all adult Athenian males, but that was too much, even for the elephant which had finally conquered