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lian coast, it was utter ruin for the ships despatched round Euboia to cut off the Greeks at Euripos.

Two days later the Persian leaders determined to begin the attack which should decide whether they or their enemies should remain masters of this strait. The battle was a fierce one; but although the Persians lost more both in ships and in men, the Spartans and their allies had been so severely treated that retreat once more appeared the only course open to them. If, however, there had been any hesitation thus far, all doubt was removed when they heard that Xerxes was master of the pass which formed the gate of southern Hellas. At once the Greek fleet began to retreat, the Corinthians leading the way, the Athenians following last in order.

So ended the double conflict, which, we are told, was carried on at the same time at Thermopylai and Artemision. The one thought of the Spartans and Corinthians was now, it would seem, fixed on the defence not of Boiotia or Attica but of the Peloponnesos alone; and their ships would, it is said, have sailed at once to the Corinthian isthmus, had not Themistokles, by words rather than bribes, persuaded them to make a stand at Salamis, and thus to give the Athenians time to remove their households from Attica and otherwise to form their plans. Here then the fleet remained, while the Peloponnesians were working night and day, breaking up the Skironid road and raising the wall across the isthmus. But the barrier thus completed imparted little confidence to its builders, and none it would seem to the Peloponnesian seamen in the ships at Salamis. We have, in fact, reached the time of the greatest depression on the side of the Greeks; nor can we doubt that this depression marks the moment at which the enterprise of Xerxes had been brought most nearly to a successful issue.

Meanwhile the Persian king was advancing in his career of conquest. To the north of Attica he had overcome practically all resistance. Phokis had been utterly devastated; but an attack on Delphoi had been foiled by the direct interposition of Apollon and the heroes Phylakos and Autonoös. This inroad of the Persians on Delphoi is the turning point of the great epic of Herodotos. It is the most daring provocation of divine jealousy and wrath by the barbarian despot: and it immediately precedes his humiliation.

The wrong done to the lord of light was punished in part on the spot. The more signal vengeance of the god was re

served for the shores of Salamis, where the ships of those Hellenic cities which had not submitted themselves to the invader or chosen to be neutral in the contest were gathered together. The Persian fleet had not yet advanced so far to the south; and Xerxes was still moving on upon the path which, as he fancied, was to lead him to his final triumph. Four months had passed away since his army crossed the bridge over the Hellespont, when the tyrant set his foot on Attic soil. But we are told that he found the land desolate. The city was abandoned; and there remained on the Akropolis only a few poor people and the guardians of the temples who, rather to carry out the letter of the oracle than from any serious notion of defence, had blocked with wooden palisades or doors the only side of the Akropolis which was supposed to lie open to attack. Behind these wooden walls this scanty garrison underwent the dignity of a blockade. Arrows bearing lighted tow were discharged against the fence in vain: and Xerxes thus foiled gave himself up to one of his frequent fits of furious passion. But on the northern side there is a fissure in the rock, and here some Persians managed to scramble up. Presently Xerxes was lord of Athens: and he lost no time in despatching a horseman to Sousa with the tidings. The streets of the royal city rang with shouts of exultation when the news was received, and were strewn with myrtle branches. The fears of Artabanos were falsified, and the harems of the king and his nobles could now await patiently the advent of the Spartan and Athenian maidens whom Atossa had long ago wished to have as her slaves.

The fleet of the confederates had been gathered at Salamis rather to cover the migration of the Athenians than with any notion of making it a naval station; and now not only was the Persian fleet drawn up before them in the harbour of Phaleron, but Athens itself had been taken. A poor semblance of debate was followed by a decision to retreat on the following day and take up a permanent position off the Corinthian isthmus. One man alone felt that the abandonment of Salamis would be a virtual confession that common action could no more be looked for, and resolved that whether by fair means or by foul he would not allow this dastardly retreat to be carried out; and this man was Themistokles.

Having prevailed on Eurybiades to summon a second council, he was hastening, it is said, to address the assembly without

waiting for the formal opening of the debate, when the Corinthian Adeimantos reminded him sharply that they who rise up in the games before the signal are beaten. 'Yes,' said Themistokles gently; but those who do not rise when the signal is given are not crowned.' Then turning to Eurybiades, he warned him that at the isthmus they would have to fight in the open sea to the great disadvantage of their own heavier and fewer ships, while a combat in closed waters would probably end in victory. At this point Adeimantos broke in again upon his vehement eloquence, and with savage rudeness told him that, as since the fall of Athens he had now no country, he could have no vote in the council and that Eurybiades was debarred from even taking his opinion, much more from following it. This speech was a strange one to come from a man who had taken a bribe from Themistokles; nor is it easy to see why with more than twenty Euboian talents still in his possession Themistokles had not again tried the effect of gold on the Corinthian leader before the council began. Telling Adeimantos quietly that he had a better city than Corinth, so long as the Athenians had two hundred ships, he warned Eurybiades that, if the allies abandoned Salamis, the Athenians with their families would at once sail away to Italy and find a new home in their own city of Siris. The Spartan chief saw at once that without the Athenians the confederates could not resist the Persians even for a day; and he issued the order for remaining. But the formal obedience of the allies could not kill their fears; and when on the following day, after an earthquake by sea and land, they saw in the Persian fleet movements in manifest preparation for a conflict, their discontent broke out into open murmurs, if not into mutiny, which made it clear that Eurybiades must give way. Without losing a moment, Themistokles passed quietly from the council and dispatched Sikinnos, his slave and the tutor of his children, in a boat to the Persian fleet. The message which he charged him to deliver was that Themistokles really desired the victory not of the Greeks but of the Persians, and on this account he now took this means of informing them that the Greeks were on the point of running away, and that in their present state of utter dismay they could be taken and crushed almost without an effort. The Persians at once landed a large force on the islet of Psyttaleia precisely opposite to the harbour of the Peiraieus, the object of this disposition being

that they might save the wrecks of ships and slay such of the enemy as might in the battle be driven upon the islet. Towards midnight a portion of the fleet lying off Phaleron began to move along the Attic coast until the line extended to the northeastern promontory of Salamis. It was thus no longer possible for the Greeks to escape into the bay of Eleusis and so retreat to the isthmus without fighting. But of this fact they were still unconscious; and the hours of the night were being wasted in fierce dissensions, when Themistokles, suddenly summoned from the council, found his banished rival Aristeides waiting to tell him that the Greek fleet was surrounded beyond all chance of escape. The reply of Themistokles was not less terse. He rejoiced at the tidings, and informed his rival that the movements of the Persian leaders had been brought about by himself. He begged him further to repeat before the council news to which in all likelihood they would give no credit if they heard it from the lips of Themistokles. Even as coming from Aristeides, it was well-nigh rejected as false, when a Tenian vessel deserting from the Persian fleet established the fact beyond all doubt. Once more they made ready to fight; and as the day dawned, Themistokles addressed not the chiefs but the crews, laying before them all the lofty and ignoble motives by which men may be stimulated to action, and, beseeching them to choose the higher, sent them to their ships.

Early in the morning the Persian king took his seat on the great throne which was raised on a spur of mount Aigaleos to see how his slaves fought on his behalf. The day was still young when the Greeks put out to sea and the barbarians came forward to meet them. According to the Aiginetan tradition a trireme sent to their island to beseech the aid of the hero Aiakos and his children began the conflict after some hesitation, the form of a woman having been seen which cried out in a voice heard by all the army of the Greeks, 'Good men, how long will ye back water?' In the battle the Athenians found themselves opposed to the Phenicians who had the wing towards Eleusis and the west, while the Ionians towards the east and the Peiraieus faced the Lakedaimonians. Beyond this general arrangement and the issue of the fight the historian himself admits that of this memorable battle we know practically nothing. The event in his belief was determined by the discipline and order of the Greeks, while their enemies fell out

of their ranks and did nothing wisely; but it may have depended partly on the fact that the Persian seamen had been working all night, while the Athenians and their allies went on board their ships on the morning of the fight fresh from sleep and stirred by the vehement eloquence of Themistokles. But in spite of his general lack of information Herodotos notes that the

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Persians as a whole fought far more bravely at Salamis than at Artemision, and that few of the Ionians followed the advice of Themistokles by hanging back from the battle. But that there existed a counter-tradition seems to be clear from the charge which in the tumult of the fight the Phenicians brought against these Asiatic Greeks. They had destroyed, it was said, the Phenician ships and betrayed the Phenicians themselves. Hap

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