The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta by Paul A. Rahe

Author:Paul A. Rahe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-05-01T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Salamis

A man, a Greek, coming from the Athenian host,

Told your son Xerxes these things:

That when dusk arrives and, then, black night,

The Hellenes would not remain, but spring to the rowing benches

Of their ships—scattering in every direction,

Each seeking by clandestine flight to preserve himself alive.

—AESCHYLUS

AT Themistocles’ urging, the Greeks delayed their retreat from Artemisium until well into the night, when their departure would be less apt to attract notice and interference was exceedingly unlikely. In the meantime, mindful that the herds tended by the citizens of Histiaea who found pasture in those parts would soon in all likelihood fall into the hands of the enemy, they seized and slaughtered the animals, roasted the meat over roaring fires meant to be seen on the other side of the straits, and feasted. Then, further to mask their withdrawal, they presumably piled even more wood on the fires, engaging in a subterfuge others would subsequently imitate. When all was ready, they slipped off as unobtrusively as possible by the light of the harvest moon and made their way west, then west-southwest along the northern coast of Euboea past Histiaea toward the channel separating that island from the mainland—with the Corinthians in the lead and the much larger Athenian contingent bringing up the rear.1

That the Greek fleet moved with alacrity we can be confident. The Plataeans were eager to get home and to evacuate their families from Boeotia before the Persians descended upon them, and the same was surely true of the Chalcidians and the Eretrians as well, for the peoples of Euboea had not anticipated the worst and taken precautions.2 The Athenians were, as we have seen, better prepared. Long before, they had planned for just such an eventuality, and there is every reason to suppose that they had by this time already ferried the vast majority of their women and children to Troezen, as originally planned.

The ancient sources are, nonetheless, undoubtedly right in supposing that, at this point, the evacuation of Attica was by no means complete, that the Greek fleet initially put into Salamis for the purpose of helping the Athenians to ferry across to that island those still in Attica, that it was at this time that an evacuation was formally proclaimed, and that Themistocles and his associates enlisted superstition on their side in persuading Athenians reluctant to leave their ancestral homeland that it was imperative that they withdraw. It was probably at this moment also that Cimon son of Miltiades led a contingent of his fellow cavalrymen on a procession through the Ceramicus up to the Acropolis to dedicate to Athena, the city’s patron goddess, the bridles of their horses as a sign of their recognition and acceptance of the fact that, at least for the time being, Athens had to concentrate its energies single-mindedly on the war at sea.3

Some Athenians hoped that the Peloponnesians would mobilize, make a stand in Boeotia, and prevent the Persians from entering Attica; and these men considered their allies’ refusal to do so a betrayal.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.