pp. 141-142:
“… in 472
B.C., Aeschylus would again win first prize at the festival, this time for a
tragic trilogy that included The
Persians, his play about Salamis. He wrote from experience, because he had
served at Salamis himself. So says Ion of Chios (ca. 480s–before 421 B.C.), a
poet who came to Athens, knew Aeschylus personally, and published memoirs with a
well-deserved reputation for accuracy. But after Aeschylus died in 456 B.C.,
his gravestone mentioned only Marathon and not Salamis. Perhaps the poet had
ordered that, in order not to look as if he was trying to outdo his brother
Cynegirus.
But what
might really have moved Aeschylus was snobbery. The better people in Greece, as
the upper classes called themselves, loved Marathon but turned up their noses
at Salamis. Marathon was won by good, solid, middle-class farmer-soldiers, but
Salamis was a people’s battle, fought by poor men who sat on the rower’s bench.
And Aeschylus, who grew ever more conservative with age, might have had ever
less use for those people. So, the poet might have preferred to forget Salamis.
“
p. 145:
“The
Spartans provided the commanding general, so they were assigned the traditional
position of honor at the extreme right of the line, at the southern end of
Ambelaki Bay. The Greeks considered the extreme right to be the position of
honor, because in an infantry battle, each hoplite held his shield in his left
hand, which left his right flank exposed. Every man was able to protect his
right by taking advantage of the overlapping shield of the man in line to his
right, except for the man on the extreme right. He stood in the most dangerous
and therefore the most honorable place.
Tradition
also assigned a spot to the city that claimed the next position in importance:
the left wing. At Salamis, that honor went to Athens, whose ships were
presumably moored in Paloukia Bay. Aegina held the spot to Athens’s right, to
judge from the close communication between an Athenian and an Aeginetan
commander during the battle.
According
to this arrangement, the Spartans stood opposite the Ionians and perhaps other
Greeks, while the Athenians and perhaps the Aeginetans faced the Phoenicians.
In other words, the best Greek triremes were matched against the best Persian
triremes. …
With full
complements, 368 ships would have been filled with about sixty-two thousand
rowers. As they took their seats, the rowers turned to one another and shook
hands. These men were the backbone of the battle, and yet we do not know the
name of a single one. Only a few captains and commanders are known by name. In
fact, the ancient literary sources –histories, dramas, lyric poetry, philosophy–
never mention a single rower by name, except for mythical heroes like the Argonauts.
Their silence reflects both an age-old tendency in naval warfare to focus on
boats instead of individuals and the upper-class bias of ancient literature.
But in spite of the literary writers, the names of several hundred rowers in
the Athenian fleet around 400 B.C. do survive, preserved in a public document,
that is, in a lengthy inscription on stone. There we learn, for instance, of
one Demochares of the deme of Thoricus, an Athenian citizen; of Telesippus of
Piraeus, a resident alien; of Assyrios the property of Alexippos, a slave; and
of Simos, a mercenary from the island of Thasos. These names, of course, mean
almost nothing today, but perhaps that is the point. At Salamis, the freedom of
Greece depended on ordinary men with undistinguished names. It was indeed
democracy’s battle.”
p. 193:
“But why
did the Persian triremes continue to come forward after their best squadrons
had been thrashed? Surely, somehow the message of defeat was spread from ship
to ship. The problem was not communications; on the contrary, the more news of
defeat, the greater the ambition of the rear ranks to get to the fore. Persian
captains jockeyed for a place in the front lines in order to ram an enemy ship
while Xerxes was watching and thus to be recorded in his list of men to reward
afterward. While the Greek contingents at Salamis managed to put aside their
rivalries and each fight for the common good, the Persian contingents each
thought about its separate relationship with the Great King.
By the same
token, the Persian ships had little interest in continuing the struggle past
the point where they might collect their reward. Compare the Spartan
willingness to fight to the last man at Thermopylae with the Phoenicians’
decision to turn and leave the line at Salamis after they realized that they
could not defeat the Athenians. The Spartan king Leonidas served a transcendent
cause, while the Phoenician king Tetramnestus merely calculated the odds.
Freedom was worth dying for, but there was no percentage in giving one’s life
in exchange for power from the Great King that one would never enjoy.”
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