Salamis Island
In the last week of September 480 BC there occurred one of those momentous battles by which the history of the world is changed. To the men who fought in it, it did seem that their world was at stake, but they could have had no inkling that the result of it would deter¬mine the course of European civilization. Salamis, like the destruction of the Spanish Armada or the battle of Trafalgar, was a sea battle which determined for centuries the pattern of life to be lived upon the land. The island of Salamis is easily reached either from Piraeus harbour or from Perama a little further up the coast, after a short bus journey from Athens. In either case you land at the purely functional port of Paloukia, after crossing one of the most historic stretches of water in the world. The Persians, after an indeci¬sive sea engagement off Cape Artemision in Euboea, had occupied Attica; their fleet, now based at Phaleron, was all set to crush the combined forces of Athens and the Peloponnesians which had re¬treated into the narrow waters between Salamis and the mainland. To show how apparently hopeless was the Greek position, here is Pro¬fessor H.D.E Kitto writing in The Greeks:
The northern Greeks had all but submitted and were fighting now with Persia; Attica was lost, no one was left but the Peloponne¬sians, a few islands, and Athens. The Peloponnesian land forces were at the Isthmus, busy fortifying it, and of their sea captains most were in favour of moving the allied fleet back there from Salamis,… Themistocles saw that the narrow waters inside Sala¬mis would give the Greek fleet a chance of victory, while at the Isthmus they would certainly be defeated - even if the fleet held together which was unlikely.
King Xerxes had already set up a throne on Mt Aegaleos over¬looking the straits, to watch the expected victory of his fleet. At this juncture Themistocles, the master Athenian strategist, devised a plan to prevent the Peloponnesian ships from leaving to defend the Isth¬mus. He ‘leaked’ information to the enemy that they were about to do so, whereupon the Persian fleet moved out in force to blockade the
channels to west and east of Salamis, at the same time occupying the | small island of Psittaleia midway between the Kynosura (’Dog’s | Tail’) peninsula and the mainland. This suited Themistocles, as it forced an engagement on his unwilling allies while the enemy fleet was divided, and in waters which favoured the more manoeuvrable Greek triremes - waters which were known to the Greeks as only seamen and fishermen can know a stretch of sea by which they have
been born and bred.
The Greek fleet, outnumbered by about two to one, feigned a retreat into the more open waters of the bay of Eleusis, but in fact withdrew only out of sight behind a convenient promontory. As the Persians advanced up the eastern channel, necessarily in close
formation, the Greek ships tore into them at full speed, using the long metal rams at their bows to deadly effect. At a critical moment an Athenian force under the exiled Aristides recaptured Psittaleia, and the victory was complete. Only three hundred ships out of a thou¬sand, it has been estimated, managed to reach Phaleron Bay in safety. With the winter coming on, and with the fleet which guarded his supply lines destroyed, there was nothing left for Xerxes but retreat. The fate of the invading army was finally sealed in the following year at the battle of Plataea on the borders of Attica and Boeotia.
The course of the battle can be readily imagined by a visitor today, the only doubt being whether Psittaleia was the island today called Lipsokoutali, or one further north called Agios Georgios. It seems appropriate that a shipyard at Perama has built and launched a recon¬struction of a Greek warship from designs made by scholars. Al¬though the trireme had small square sails for use on passages with a fair wind, in battle they relied entirely on oar power generated by something like two hundred rowers. It has been reckoned that this could produce a speed of eight to ten knots, about the same as a modern racing eight.
Paloukia, where the little all-purpose ferries land, is of no scenic or other interest, though it is important for the big naval and military base which occupies the whole area to the north of it - the headquar¬ters, in fact, of the modern Greek navy. From Paloukia you can reach by bus or taxi the other centres of this not unattractive island. The least attractive is Koulouri, usually shown on the map as Salamina, a big sprawl of concrete houses and characterless bungalows at the head of Salamis Bay, a water which deserves better things, but is chiefly notable for its colonies of Japanese pearl oysters, introduced accidentally in 1959 from far eastern ships laid up here.
Beyond Koulouri the road crosses to the north coast of a finger of land pointing in the direction of the big Isthmus town of Megara - a regular ferry plies between. One vantage point on the Salamis road is the convent of the Panagia Phaneromeni. This contains a few sur¬prises, not least on the approach road, which is enlivened on one side by cages for peacocks and other poultry, including sometimes a pair of quails and their family. The farmyard atmosphere is kept up out¬side the walls to the south, where there are cowsheds and sheep pens. The main church was originally cruciform with a cupola over a short red-tiled tower, but it was extended westwards later to make a richly decorated basilica with a double row of columns. There is a good deal of wall painting, mostly of the nineteenth century, but the whole
of the west end is covered by a fresco of the Second Coming, very faded and blurred, which was the work of Georgios Markos, an artist in the medium who lived in the early eighteenth century. There is a smaller church to the south which contains some authentic early ikons, and heaped in a comer of the grounds is a jumble of marble masonry - columns, capitals and mouldings - which look like the remains of an earlier Christian basilica church. Overall the place is a curious mixture of homeliness and religious opulence.
Looking across from here to the mainland one realizes suddenly that the narrow coastal plain between mountains and sea carried one of the most celebrated highways in history - the only road which joined Athens and the north to Argos and Sparta and the other cities of the Peloponnese. Along it Phidippides must have run on his mis¬sion to alert Sparta to the Persian threat in 490 BC; by this way came the Spartan army on its annual foray to devastate Attica during the Peloponnesian War.
There is not much else to see in the island. Abalakia, south of Paloukia, is near the site of classical Salamis; Selinia is a Greek holiday resort, and in the south of the island, reached by road only from Koulouri, there is another monastery, delightfully called Agios Nikolaos tis Lemonias (’St Nicholas of the Lemon Tree’), with a basilica church reconstructed from a Byzantine one of the twelfth or thirteenth century. The largest village in the south is now called Eandio, whose classical form Aiantio reminds us that Ajax the son of Telamon was prince of Salamis and took twelve ships with him to the siege of Troy.
Telamon himself was a son of Aeacus, legendary ruler of neighbour¬ing Aegina, and was forced into exile in Salamis after his brother Peleus (father of Achilles) had accidentally - or possibly on purpose - killed their half-brother Phocus with a discus. Aegina was the name of one of Zeus’s many mistresses, a daughter of the river god Asopus, and Aeacus was their son. It was he who changed the name of the island to honour his mother, for it was previously called Oenopia or Oenona, a word of doubtful origin but probably connected with the nymph Oenone rather than having anything to do with wine. Aeacus acquired a reputation for justice, and first established the dignity of a city state which up to the middle of the fifth century BC rivalled Athens in sea power.
Until the Athenians had secured either the friendship or the de¬struction of Aegina, they had no security for their own sea routes.
76