In the 5th century BC, the Great King of Persia
ruled the greatest empire the world had ever seen.
It stretched from modern Pakistan to Macedonia, and contained one-fifth of the world’s population.
The Persian Empire was sophisticated, rich, and all-conquering.
And in 480 BC, King Xerxes led its mighty forces against Greece, a patchwork of tiny
city-states, that lay on the western fringes of his vast realm.
He had decided to punish the Greeks for having dared to meddle in his affairs.
But seeking vengeance, conquest and glory… he would find only disaster and death… in
deeds of Greeks and barbarians should not go unsung…”
The events that follow are known chiefly from the writings of Herodotus of Halicarnassus,
an ancient Greek colony on what’s now the west coast of Turkey.
About thirty years after the Persian invasion, Herodotus began his Historiai, his enquiries,
into its origins and course.
Like most people in the ancient world, he believed in omens, oracles and divine intervention.
But he also believed that humans could shape their own fate. So he travelled across Greece
and the Persian Empire, reading records and inscriptions, speaking to local people, and
weighing up the evidence according to his own reason.
The Roman writer Cicero would later dub Herodotus, ‘The Father of History’.
“War is the father and king of all: some he has made gods, and some men; some slaves
and some free.”
The root of the conflict between Greece and Persia went back a generation.
In the sixth century BC, King Cyrus the Great brought the Greek colonies of western Anatolia
under Persian rule.
But in 499 they rebelled, and appealed to their fellow Greeks for aid. Only Athens and
Eretria answered the call.
Together, the Greeks burned the provincial capital Sardis, and its temple to the earth-goddess
Cybele.
It seemed like a major victory. But the Persians responded with impressive speed, and the Greeks
were soon in full retreat, back to the coast.
It took the Persians four years to finally stamp out the revolt in western Anatolia.
Then the Great King, Darius turned his attention to the Greeks across the sea, who’d dared
to aid the rebels.
He sent ambassadors to the many city-states of Greece, demanding earth and water as tokens
of submission.
Many submitted, but two did not:
Athens, a young democracy, fiercely protective of its liberty…
… and Sparta, a conservative, militarised state that took orders from no one.
Both cities answered the Great King by kicking his envoys down a well – where, they were
told, they might find all the earth and water they required.
In 490 BC, Darius despatched a mighty expedition to bring the Greeks to heel.
Naxos was the largest of several islands to submit.
Eretria was sacked and burned.
Then the Persians landed at Marathon, to mete out the same punishment to Athens.
Athenian troops, with those of their small neighbour Plataea, met them on the beach.
Though outnumbered two-to-one, the Greek soldiers attacked. Their hoplite infantry fought with
large heavy shields and spears, in a tight phalanx formation.
The more lightly-equipped Persians could not stand up to their onslaught.
Persian troops were slaughtered on the beach. The survivors scrambled back to their ships.
Athens had been saved.
Four years later, Darius died, and was succeeded by his son Xerxes. He now took up the task
of punishing the Greeks, and avenging his father’s humiliation.
The new King of Kings summoned troops and ships from across his empire, and ordered
a bridge of boats to be built across the Hellespont.
In spring 480 BC, his gigantic invasion force crossed from Asia… into Europe.
Herodotus estimated its size at 2.3 million men - an impossible number, that could not
have been fed or watered.
Modern historians think 200,000 more likely – still vast for the age.
It was accompanied by an enormous fleet, a thousand warships or more, supplied by Persia’s
vassal states across the Eastern Mediterranean.
Greece appeared an easy target. Its many independent city-states were notorious for constant infighting.
But in the face of the Persian threat, 31 states put aside their differences and convened
a council of war at the Isthmus of Corinth, to plan the defence of Greece.
These states were later commemorated on a giant serpent column at Delphi, the Greeks’
most sacred site.
At the top of the list, the Lacedaemonians, another name for the Spartans, followed by
the Athenians, and Corinthians.
Knowing the Persians would invade from the north, the Greeks sent 10,000 men to hold
a mountain pass at Tempe, near Mount Olympus. But when the troops arrived, they found the
position could be easily outflanked. Nor were they confident about the loyalty of Thessaly
to their rear. So, the troops withdrew.
Instead, the Greeks would make their stand at Thermopylae, with 7,000 men, led by the
Spartan king Leonidas.
The Greek fleet arrived at Artemisium, to guard the sea flank.
Like the alliance itself, the Greek fleet was an uneasy coalition, with ships from city-states
like Athens and Aegina, that had until recently been at war.
The Athenian contingent was by far the largest.
It only existed thanks to the discovery, three years earlier, of rich silver mines at Laurium.
It had taken the foresight of Themistocles, an Athenian statesman and general, to persuade
the people of Athens not to spend this windfall on cash handouts for themselves.
Instead, he’d urged them to spend the money on a fleet of 200 triremes, for their own
future security. It was a decision that may ultimately have saved Greece.
Athens, however, was so distrusted by other Greeks that they refused to serve under an
Athenian admiral.
So Themistocles tactfully accepted the appointment of a Spartan, Eurybiades, to lead the fleet,
even though Spartans had no expertise in naval warfare.
Spray flying from the oars, The fleets sweep together
Ploughing through the swell Ram teeth bared.
Both the Greek and Persian fleets relied on a single type of warship: one that dominated
naval warfare in the Mediterranean: the trireme.
Sleek, agile and delicate, the trireme carried masts and sails for cruising…
But in combat, these were lowered, and the ship relied on three banks of rowers, which
gave the trireme its name.
The ship carried 170 oarsmen in total, who could produce a top speed of around 10 knots…
… to smash their primary weapon, a bronze-sheathed ram, into the hull of an enemy ship, leaving
it crippled.
Boarding the enemy was another tactic.
A Greek ship usually carried fourteen marines: ten hoplites armed with spear and shield,
and four archers.
The ship’s commander, the trierarch, sat at the stern…
…alongside the helmsman, the kybernetes, who guided the ship’s course with twin rudders.
A bosun and bow officer relayed orders to the oarsmen, while a piper helped them keep
time.
A carpenter and ten sailors brought the ship’s total complement to 200 men.
Every ship had a name…
… and a painted eye on the bow to avert ill fortune.
Herodotus describes the Greek ships as more heavily-built than the Persian ships, although
in what way, we’re not sure. He also tells us that Persian ships carried many more marines:
44 in total.
“Here the sons of Athens set in place the bright foundation stone of freedom”
While Leonidas and the Greeks held the pass at Thermopylae, the Persian fleet sailed south
along the rugged coastline of Magnesia.
But one night, while at anchor, they were hit by a violent storm.
Hundreds of ships were wrecked and damaged. Thousands of sailors drowned.
According to Herodotus the Persians further weakened their force, by sending 200 triremes
around the island of Euboea to cut off the Greek retreat… but the entire squadron was
destroyed by another storm.
Herodotus offers little supporting evidence for this operation, which would’ve been
extremely reckless, and some historians doubt it ever happened.
Despite Persian losses, the Greeks still faced odds of nearly three to one at Artemisium.
And they weren’t just outnumbered.
The Persian fleet was more experienced in naval warfare, particularly the elite squadron
from Phoenicia, in modern Lebanon.
Nevertheless, over three days of tense naval combat, the Greek fleet held its nerve, and
kept the Persians at bay.
But at the end of the third day, disastrous news arrived - Leonidas and the Greeks at
Thermopylae had been encircled: the Spartan king and half his men had been killed. The
pass had fallen.
It seemed the efforts of the Greek fleet had been in vain – central Greece, and Athens
itself, now lay open to the Persian onslaught.
As the Greek fleet withdrew, the Persians marched south, burning cities, farms and sanctuaries
– though sparing Thebes, one of several Greek city-states to side with Persia.
To Athenian dismay, the Greek army, dominated by troops from the Peloponnese, gathered at
the Isthmus of Corinth, and began building a great wall, to protect their own homes from
the invader.
Athens was to be abandoned.
The Greek fleet began to evacuate civilians to Troezen, Aegina, and Salamis.
“Pallas Athena cannot appease Olympian Zeus… But the wooden wall alone, the wooden wall
shall stand.“
In the months before the Persian invasion, the Athenians had sent a delegation to the
Greeks’ holiest shrine, the Oracle of Delphi, seeking guidance for the upcoming war.
They’d received only a terrifying warning: “Why are you sitting there, you fools? Flee,
flee to the ends of the earth!”
But… a second oracle offered the Athenians a sliver of hope – Athens could trust in
its ‘wooden wall’.
A few Athenians thought the oracle referred to a thorn hedge that had once enclosed the
city’s acropolis, its citadel. So they fortified themselves there. But when the Persians arrived
they were surrounded and slaughtered.
Xerxes then burned Athens and its temples, to avenge the destruction of Sardis eighteen
years before.
Themistocles argued that Athens’s ‘wooden wall’ was her new fleet.
But as Greek naval commanders met at Salamis in mid-September, the situation looked grim.
A King of Sparta was dead. Athens was burning. The Greek alliance was on the brink of collapse.
Themistocles was desperate to stop the Peloponnesian ships retreating to the Isthmus.
He warned them that the enemy’s greater numbers and faster ships meant the Greeks
would be defeated if they fought on the open sea.
But in the narrow straits of Salamis, with less room to manoeuvre, the Persians wouldn’t
be able to exploit their greater numbers, and the heavier Greek ships had the advantage.
Themistocles even warned the other Greeks that if they retreated now, the Athenian ships
would quit the alliance, and sail to Italy.
So the fleet commander, Eurybiades, accepted Themistocles’ plan.
But Themistocles worried that the Peloponnesians would change their minds. Secretly, he ordered
a trusted servant to go to the Persian camp, to tell Xerxes that the Greeks were in a state
of terror, and would flee at first light.
Just 8 miles away at Phaleron, the Great King sought the counsel of his generals and admirals.
All advised him to attack the Greeks immediately, to win the final victory that would end the
war.
All except Queen Artemisia of Halicarnassus, commanding five ships from Caria.
Why risk battle, she argued, when the Great King had only to threaten southern Greece
by land or sea, and the Peloponnesians would rush home to defend their land, and the Greek
alliance would split. Then victory was certain.
But Xerxes sought the glory of battle, and was confident of an easy victory.
Then Themistocles’ messenger arrived, telling the King exactly what he wanted to hear: the
Greeks were terrified, and preparing to flee. He must strike immediately.
Xerxes ordered the Persian fleet to sea that night, so they would be in position to annihilate
the Greeks as they tried to escape at dawn.
Meanwhile at the Greek camp, an Athenian named Aristides arrived, with sacred relics from
Aegina to inspire the fleet. He also brought news that the enemy had put to sea, and blocked
the straits.
Themistocles’s ruse had worked. Retreat was no longer an option.
The Greeks would have to fight at Salamis.
“O divine Salamis, you will be the death of mother’s sons.”
The earliest surviving accounts of the battle that followed, by Herodotus and the Athenian
playwright Aeschylus, are sometimes vague, and allow different interpretations.
But they are detailed enough to allow us to reconstruct the most likely course of events.
The Persian fleet put to sea at night – around 600 triremes, outnumbering the Greeks 3 to
2.
Expecting hard fighting at the entrance to the strait, they landed 400 soldiers on the
tiny island of Psyttaleia.
Their role was to finish off any shipwrecked Greeks who made it to shore.
Then, keeping close to the mainland, the Persian fleet silently advanced into the narrow strait,
the elite Phoenicians leading the way.
According to a later Greek historian, Diodorus Siculus, the Persians also sent an Egyptian
squadron around Salamis, to cut off any Greek escape into the Gulf of Megara. But this event
is not mentioned in earlier sources, and may be an invention.
At dawn, Xerxes arrived at an observation post, overlooking the strait.
The Great King was confident that his presence would inspire his captains to fight with more
determination than they’d shown at Artemisium, a few weeks before.
He was accompanied by scribes, ready to note down the names of captains who fought well…
and those who did not.
The Persian fleet lined the northern side of the strait, ready to hunt down Greek ships
as they fled.
What they saw instead was 368 Greek triremes emerging from the bays of Salamis, ready to
fight.
They formed a line of battle, with the best squadrons on each flank – on the left, the
Athenians; on the right, the Aeginetans.
As they rowed, they sang paeans, Greek hymns of battle.
At first, they held formation, perhaps waiting for the morning breeze to blow at their back…
or for more Persians to crowd into the strait.
Then a Greek ship saw an opening, and attacked.
Soon both fleets were fully engaged. The battle became a chaotic mass of ships, wheeling,
weaving, looking for a chance to ram an enemy, and avoid the same fate themselves.
In the narrow strait, the Persian squadrons became increasingly disordered.
Any ship trying to fall back ran into other ships trying to press forward, their captains
eager to impress the Great King.
What’s more, the Persian oarsmen had been rowing all night, and soon began to tire.
The Greeks were fresh, and fighting for their freedom.
The Phoenician squadron suffered heavy losses at the hands of the heavy Greek triremes.
Some Phoenician captains, who’d abandoned their ships and made it to shore, were brought
before Xerxes.
They blamed the unfolding disaster on the cowardice of their allies, the Carians and
Ionians.
Just at that moment, Xerxes saw an Ionian ship ram an Athenian trireme, before it was
rammed in turn by an Aeginetan ship.
Undaunted, the Ionian marines counterattacked, boarding and taking the Aeginetan ship.
After observing this evidence of Ionian bravery, Xerxes ordered that the Phoenician captains
be taken away and executed.
Wrecked ships, floundering men and corpses clogged the strait, as the battle turned decisively
against the Persians.
Aeschylus the playwright, who almost certainly fought in the battle, compared the Greeks
killing Persians to fishermen spearing tuna.
As Persian ships tried to escape, they were hit in the flank by the Aeginetans, who distinguished
themselves above all other Greeks that day.
Queen Artemisia was among those trying to escape the slaughter… with an Athenian trireme
in hot pursuit.
Seeing her path blocked by a friendly ship, she gave the order to ram it.
When the Athenian captain saw this, he thought he must be pursuing an allied ship, and went
looking for other prey.
The remnants of the Persian fleet streamed back to Phaleron.
In a final, ruthless act of the battle, Aristides landed with a force of hoplites on Psyttaleia,
and massacred the 400 Persians who’d been abandoned there.
In total, the Persians lost around 200 ships and 12,000 men, including the fleet commander
Ariabignes, a half-brother of the Great King himself.
The Greeks lost just 40 ships.
It proved to be one of the greatest naval victories in history.
“Our land bewails the men she bore, Slaughtered for Xerxes, who has fed
Hell’s hungry jaws with Persian dead.”
The Greeks had inflicted a humiliating defeat on Xerxes, and ended all hopes of an easy
conquest.
Now the King heeded Queen Artemisia’s advice, and ordered his general Mardonius to continue
the campaign in spring, while he returned to Asia with the bulk of his army.
If Mardonius was victorious, Artemisia had told him, the glory would belong to Xerxes.
If Mardonius was defeated, the blame belonged to Mardonius.
But there was no victory for Mardonius.
The next summer, he faced the combined Greek army at Plataea. In a crushing Persian defeat,
Mardonius was killed, along with much of his army.
On the very same day, according to Herodotus, the Greek fleet inflicted another heavy defeat
on the Persians, at Mycale.
The threat of Persian invasion was over. In the years that followed, the Greek counterattack
would begin, led by a new Greek alliance, the Delian League.
Salamis has been credited with more significance than almost any other battle in history: the
victory that saved Greece from slavery, and paved the way for its classical age.
This was the period in which the arts, democracy, science and philosophy flourished in the Greek
world.
Thus, Salamis has been hailed as the battle that saved the “cradle of Western civilisation”.
It’s a dramatic argument, that can be overstated:
Greek defeat would not necessarily have led to the extinction of Greek culture. And though
5th century Athens was a revolutionary, pioneering experiment in democracy, it is not the sole
blueprint on which modern democracy’s based.
Nevertheless, Salamis remains a decisive battle, and a turning point of history. And thanks
to Herodotus, it survives as one of history’s oldest examples of an heroic struggle against
the odds, and struggle for freedom.
We have many people to thank for their help in making this video:
Nedim Can Incebay provided our Total War gameplay footage – you can watch his reconstructions
of other historical battles on his YouTube channel - we highly recommend his epic depiction
of the Battle of Crecy.
The brilliant ‘Divide et Impera’ Total War mod team provided crucial modding support.
You can find out about their work transforming Total War Rome 2 on their website, divideetimperamod.com.
Russel Herneman created the original artwork.
And big thanks to Bill Manthopolous for producing much of the music in this video.
Check the video description to find out more about all the contributors who helped make
this video.
Last but not least, thank you as ever to all our Patreon supporters, for making Epic History
TV possible.