The Historians' History of the World 03 [Greece to the Peloponnesian War]

In this disastrous battle itself, as in the debate before the battle, the conduct of Artemisia of Halicarnassus was such as to give him full satisfaction. It appears that this queen maintained her full part in the battle until the disorder had become irretrievable; she then sought to escape, pursued by the Athenian trierarch, Aminias, but found her progress obstructed by the number of fugitive or embarrassed comrades before her. In this dilemma, she preserved herself from pursuit by attacking one of her own comrades; she charged the trireme of the Carian prince, Damasithymus of Calynda, ran it down and sunk it, so that the prince with all his crew perished. Had Aminias been aware that the vessel which he was following was that of Artemisia, nothing would have induced him to relax in the pursuit, for the Athenian captains were all indignant at the idea of a female invader assailing their city; but knowing her ship only as one among the enemy, and seeing her thus charge and destroy another enemy’s ship, he concluded her to be a deserter, turned his pursuit elsewhere, and suffered her to escape. At the same time, it so happened that the destruction of the ship of Damasithymus happened under the eyes of Xerxes and of the persons around him on shore, who recognised the ship of Artemisia, but supposed the ship destroyed to be a Greek. Accordingly they remarked to him, “Master, seest thou not how well Artemisia fights, and how she has just sunk an enemy’s ship?” Assured that it was really her deed, Xerxes is said to have replied, “My men have become women; my women, men.” Thus was Artemisia not only preserved, but exalted to a higher place in the esteem of Xerxes by the destruction of one of his own ships, among the crew of which not a man survived to tell the true story.

Of the total loss of either fleet, Herodotus gives us no estimate; but Diodorus states the number of ships destroyed on the Grecian side as forty, on the Persian side as two hundred; independent of those which were made prisoners with all their crews. To the Persian loss is to be added the destruction of all those troops whom they had landed before the battle in the island of Psyttalea: as soon as the Persian fleet was put to flight, Aristides carried over some Grecian hoplites to that island, overpowered the enemy, and put them to death to a man. This loss appears to have been much deplored, as they were choice troops; in great proportion the native Persian guards.

THE RETREAT OF XERXES

Great and capital as the victory was, there yet remained after it a sufficient portion of the Persian fleet to maintain even maritime war vigorously, not to mention the powerful land-force, as yet unshaken. And the Greeks themselves, immediately after they had collected in their island, as well as could be done, the fragments of shipping and the dead bodies, made themselves ready for a second engagement. But they were relieved from this necessity by the pusillanimity of the invading monarch, in whom the defeat had occasioned a sudden revulsion from contemptuous confidence, not only to rage and disappointment, but to the extreme of alarm for his own personal safety. He was possessed with a feeling of mingled wrath and mistrust against his naval force, which consisted entirely of subject nations—Phœnicians, Egyptians, Cilicians, Cyprians, Pamphylians, Ionic Greeks, etc., with a few Persians and Medes serving on board, in a capacity probably not well suited to them. None of these subjects had any interest in the success of the invasion, or any other motive for service except fear, while the sympathies of the Ionic Greeks were even decidedly against it. Xerxes now came to suspect the fidelity, or undervalue the courage, of all these naval subjects; he fancied that they could make no resistance to the Greek fleet, and dreaded lest the latter should sail forthwith to the Hellespont, so as to break down the bridge and intercept his personal retreat; for, upon the maintenance of that bridge he conceived his own safety to turn, not less than that of his father Darius, when retreating from Scythia, upon the preservation of the bridge over the Danube. Against the Phœnicians, from whom he had expected most, his rage broke out in such fierce threats, that they stole away from the fleet in the night, and departed homeward. Such a capital desertion made future naval struggle still more hopeless, and Xerxes, though at first breathing revenge, and talking about a vast mole or bridge to be thrown across the strait to Salamis, speedily ended by giving orders to the whole fleet to leave Phalerum in the night, not without disembarking, however, the best soldiers who served on board. They were to make straight for the Hellespont, and there to guard the bridge against his arrival.