Enter the Scoundrel
The scoundrel’s name was Themistocles. The other Greek cities looked on him with suspicion, and so he had made a large gesture of deferring command of the fleet to a Spartan, Eurybiades. As far as Themistocles was concerned, it was perfectly all right for Eurybiades to have the title of commander as long as he, Themistocles, turned the actual wheel of power. And this is what he did, accepting and offering bribes, sending secret messages to Greeks and Persians alike, and holding command of the Athenian navy, which was the mass of the allied command anyway.
Themistocles, in fact, had much practice at finding the wheels of power and turning them. He was a young man when Athens became a democracy, and he was the foremost inventor and applicator of populist techniques for the new form of government.
Not that he was only in it for himself. He seems to have cared deeply about Athens. He just thought that for Athens to thrive, he would sometimes need to deceive her citizens for their own good. This was in fact the reason the Greeks had a fighting chance against the much bigger Persian navy; just a few years earlier, Themistocles had convinced the Athenians to build 180 state-of-the-art warships, known as triremes. Themistocles was looking ahead to the looming threat of the Persians, but he did not believe that his fellow citizens had far enough foresight to be concerned, so instead, he offered the pretext of fighting another Greek city state.
Enter the Good Man
The good man’s name was Aristides, known as the “Just” by his contemporaries. He was a man not only famous for his fighting against the Persians in the Battle of Marathon, but also for his sterling character: a politician in the still newborn Athenian democracy who would never take bribes or in fact do anything unethical to get ahead. He was a political enemy of Themistocles, and Themistocles had punished him for this by convincing the Athenians to exile him.A famous story, whether true or not, is related about this incident. Once, when Aristides was walking around Athens, an illiterate citizen asked him for help in filling out a kind of ballot. Every so often, the Athenians would vote on whether and whom they wanted to exile, a process known as ostracism. Aristides agreed, asking the man whose name he wanted to write down. “Aristides,” he said. Without blinking an eye Aristides inscribed his own name, and then asked the man what he had against this Aristides. “I’m just tired of hearing him called the Just,” was the reply. The politics of envy and the manipulation of envy was just one tool in the work belt of Themistocles.
The Battle
On the evening before battle, at the council of the Greek naval commanders on Salamis, Themistocles tried to convince the commanders to remain together instead of dispersing each to his own city. Suddenly, Aristides arrived at the meeting. He had returned to stand with his ungrateful city at its direst hour, and brought a terrible message: The Persian fleet had blocked off all possible seaways. The only option was to fight, and so Aristides full heartedly supported the motion of his enemy, Themistocles, and the rest of the Greeks followed suit
The following morning, the Persian fleet confidently sailed into the straits of Salamis. This was a result of a stroke of genius and possibly skullduggery on Themistocles’s part: He had sent a messenger to the Persian emperor Xerxes earlier, stating that the Greek navy was about to disintegrate and flee. While looking like a brilliant ruse, it was nearly true: the Greek fleet had almost decided to part ways. There is the uneasy possibility, with historians knowing Themistocles’s character, that he considered sending this message a contingency plan, a way to curry some favor and obtain mercy if the Persians ended up conquering Greece.
In any case, it was not a disintegrating array of squabbling Greek mini navies, but a resolute battle line of ships that faced the Persians.
Ancient sources feature accounts of the battle that conflict in some details, but they agree on major facts. One of these is the fortunate early killing of the Persian admiral. In addition, the narrow straits eliminated the advantage of the best sailors in the world at the time, the Phoenicians, who fought for the Persians; they now were not able to exploit their prowess at naval maneuver and open sea fighting.
While ships sunk on both sides, the slaughter of the Persians was greater, especially as they did not know how to swim. Ships were already running aground in the narrow strait, and when the Greeks eventually broke through the Persian line, this wedged even more Persian ships to shipwreck on either shore. The remaining Persian forces retreated, and the battle ended with Aristides leading a company of Greek marines to kill a garrison of Persians on the little island of Psyttaleia.
The Battle of Salamis was one of the greatest victories of the Greeks in the Persian Wars, ranking with the Battle of Marathon as a decisive moment in which an empire failed to destroy an alliance of small nations. The daring rascal and the good man made this happen.
