In Our Time - The Battle of Salamis

Episode Date: March 23, 2017

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss what is often called one of the most significant battles in history. In 480BC in the Saronic Gulf near Athens, between the mainland and the island of Salamis, a fleet of Greek allies decisively defeated a larger Persian-led fleet. This halted the further Persian conquest of Greece and, at Plataea and Mycale the next year, further Greek victories brought Persian withdrawal and the immediate threat of conquest to an end. To the Greeks, this enabled a flourishing of a culture that went on to influence the development of civilisation in Rome and, later, Europe and beyond. To the Persians, it was a reverse at the fringes of their vast empire but not a threat to their existence, as it was for the Greek states, and attention turned to quelling unrest elsewhere.With Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones Professor in Ancient History at Cardiff UniversityLindsay Allen Lecturer in Greek and Near Eastern History, King's College LondonandPaul Cartledge Emeritus Professor of Greek Culture and AG Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of CambridgeProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, in 480 BC, the Greek and Persian fleets fought in a bay by the island of Salamis, a short distance from Athens, in what's often called one of the most significant battles in history. The Persians are already captured and burned Athens and were on their way to invade Sparta,

to add the whole of Greece to their empire. The Athenians and Spartans, outnumbered, were fighting for survival. The Greeks, though, were victorious, and the following year drove the Persians back to Asia Minor, ushering in an Athenian Golden Age, which went on to nourish the roots of much of the culture we know now. The Persians kept a wary eye open, while continuing to run the largest empire the world had yet known.

Women to discuss the Battle of Salamis are Lloyd Llewellyn Jones, Professor in Ancient History at Cardiff University, Lindsay Allen, lecturer in Greek and near Eastern history, King's College London, and Paul Cartlidge, Emeritus Professor of Greek Culture and A.G. Levantis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College University of Cambridge. Paul Cartlidge, when we say the Greek in 480, what do we mean? We mean a very small selection of quite a large group of people. Of course, they didn't call themselves Greeks.

We call them Greeks because the Romans called them Greeks. They called themselves Hellenes, and they lived all around the Mediterranean, all around the Black Sea. But of that large number of Greeks, about a thousand separate Greek communities, only about 30 plus, 31, 32, 33, managed to get together sufficiently long, sufficiently tightly to actually resist this massive invasion, which was an armada, and of course it was amphibious. It was an invasion both by land and by sea. So when we say the Greeks, we mean a very small selection led by Sparta and Athens, Sparta by land, Athens by C, who decided. And if you think about it, it's quite an amazing thing they did decide to resist. Many Greeks thought it was a foregone conclusion that the Persians would win. So 700 cities states, you say 30, let's say 30 were involved, and of those two were really at it. So it's a very small percentage of the Greeks.

Absolutely, and we're talking about a naval battle, and of course the Persian wars, as we call them, the Greco-Persian wars, as I prefer to call them, were not just naval, they were both land and by sea, so there were four conflicts. Salamis is one of those four, four major conflicts, and this was a victory, and there had been one defeat and had been one draw before this particular battle. Was there one Greek view of the Persians? You've said that Persians are all around the Mediterranean, they're even into Asia, mine, and so forth, Greeks were, Helenes, right? Was there one Greek view of the Persians of the time? This was the massive empire, the biggest empire yet known in history. Absolutely. And a mighty force spreading right.

So what was the Greek view? There was and there wasn't. In other words, all non-Greeks were barbarians. According to the Greek. Yeah, according to the Greeks. So one of those peoples who did. one of those peoples who divided all humans into two, and the distinction was basically linguistic,

so barbarians can't speak Greek, and they go bar-bar like rhubarb on stage. You can't understand them. So they're foreigners, they're inferior. But, unfortunately, they were not totally inferior, because many Greeks, those living in Asia, were actually in the Persian Empire. So Persian Empire had extended as far west as the Iegean by roughly the 520s,

a very, very fast-forming empire. So some Greeks thought all barbarians were equally terrible. Others more sophisticated who actually interacted with Persians actually benefited from scientists, mathematicians. They appreciated Persian high culture. The Persians, through their own links with Babylonians, Chaldeans and so on, preserved learning, which Greeks found admirable. And possibly even some Greeks spoke Persian.

I mean, we don't actually know. them who didn't was Herodotus, but we're going to talk a lot about him. It's his 2,500th anniversary this year, if you believe he was born in 484 BC. He didn't speak Persian, but he did, on the other hand, speak to Persians who spoke Greek. Herodotus is the key historian, but so did the Athenians, the Greeks, Helenes, regard the persons who were the mixture of snobbery and envy? Absolutely right, a combination and fear, because... I forgot fear. Yeah. Well, if you'd like, it sharpened their sensibility about what made them different,

and of course if you thought better, then what it was that their superiority lay in. And one of those things was political. Greeks believed they were free, we would say Republicans. They didn't think kings were great, though actually the Spartans had a couple of them. They were an anomaly. But what most Greeks thought about the Persians

was that they were a kind of autocratic civilization with a kind of dictator as their overall law. the great king of Persia. Lloyd, Lloyd Llewell and Jones, when they came to Salamis, the Persians, they were led by Xerxes. What kind of ruler was he? Well, Xerxes is a quite remarkable figure,

and in a way we've been tempered in our understanding of his character because of Herodotus. We'll come on to that, as we say later on. But if we go back to... Well, let's just get this clear for those things. Herodotus is the major historian. He's a Greek born in Persia.

He writes the histories. The history. He is the basic person evidence here. There are others, but he's the basic man. We're coming on to him in a minute, as you both said, right. Okay, so if we go back to the Persian sources for Xerxes, and he's a really interesting figure. His father, of course, was Darias the Great. And Darias had come to the throne through a kind of court coup. He had replaced the ruling dynasty, led by Cyrus the Great,

and had, in his coup, made sure that he established himself as undisputed king by marrying into the royal family. He had married the daughters of Cyrus, and one of these, Atossa or a Dusha, she's known in the Persian texts, gave him a son, Cyrus. Now, Zerxes is important for Darius, because Xerxes has Cyrus's blood in his veins.

So he promotes Xerxes to the position of Crown Prince, even though there are earlier sons. He's the fourth son. He's about the fourth, maybe later than, maybe fifth or sixth or six. We'll go with that. Interestingly, when Darius dies, Xerxes puts up an inscription at Pusipolis,

his great imperial capital. It's called the so-called Harim inscription. And he acknowledges that there were many older sons. But Xerxes says, But Darius, my father, made me the greatest after him. Mashishta is the old Persian word. And here I think what he's doing is actually tying himself into Darias. Darius was the greatest.

He is the greatest by default. And how would you describe Zerxes? sees then? He's a very interesting character. I'm going here, not from Herodotus, I'm going here from Persian evidence. One thing we know, for instance, is that towards the middle of his reign,

he erects a series of inscriptions which promote the worship of Ahuramazda, the wise lord, as the sole god. Is that Zoroastrian? I wouldn't want to call it Zoroastrian, I would call it proto-Zoroastrianism. So we couldn't say there's Zoroastrian.

But, but this wise lord, this Ahura Mazda, almost like a royal god, I think. And there is this interplay between the god and the king, which is fundamental to Persian belief. Now, the Greeks misinterpret that as seeing the Persian kings as being divine. No Persian king ever states this, and Xerxes certainly didn't. But what we do have is a link with the divine. I am Ahura Mazda, a huramazda is mine.

It works as a kind of ying and yang, if you like. One and the other, they're interchangeable. So Xerxes inherits. What is his ambition that takes him to raise this massive army to march on the Helene's march towards Greece? It's quite easy. That's retribution. In the four 90s, the city-states of Asia Minor, these Greek-speaking city-states that Paul had talked about already, had revolted against the crown. And they had burnt down, in fact, the city of Sardis, and within Sardis,

they had burnt down the temple of the great mother goddess there. this was a terrible blow to Darius, more on a kind of personal front and also in this idea of this proto-Zoroastrianism that the Persians have in the belief of Arta, Arta being truth and order. Anything that goes against truth and order is rebellion, is drow. So Darius went to punish them. Darius went to punish them, he fails and now Xerxes. First of all, got to get Marathon in.

490. Okay, so Marathon? Okay, we have the Battle of Marathon. but the... Most unexpected defeat for the mighty purpose. Incredible, incredible defeat. I mean, almost head-scratchingly puzzling for them. Darius returned to Sousa and then onto Persepolis.

After his death, his son literally takes up the mantle where his father left off. And his pure aim is to punish the Athenians who had helped the Greek city states of Asia Minor. All of his focus was on Athens itself. Why did it take him 10 years to get the army together? Well, first of all, Greece, we must admit this, was the rocky outcrop of empire in the West. It wasn't Xerxes' greatest concern. When Xerxes came to the throne,

there were lots of other things that he had to settle, first of all. Moments of succession always bringing crisis into great empires of this kind. So one of the things that Xerxes had to put down, first of all, was a rebellion that erupted in Babylon. Babylon was the center of their empire as far as, the fiscal importance of it went also in Egypt as well. Egypt was quite a new acquisition for the Persian Empire.

And both of these states were in flux at the time of the succession of Xerxes. So these had to be put down into place first. And we don't really know about the far east of the empire, Bactria, huge state nowadays. We're not going to know much either, so let's move on. Fair enough. So it takes him 10 years because he's otherwise. otherwise engaged. Okay, Lindsay Allen. The Persians set off with this mighty army and with old

sorts of tales, peasants watching them go by, watch them go by for days and days and days and days, these people, these warriors are going. Confident of winning, one presume. What state were they in when they set off to punish the hellenes of Greeks? Well, I think one's got to imagine the expedition as a sort of display and an enterprise in itself. So it's not necessarily the case that

there is a defined outcome and a definite set of objectives. But part of the purpose in the Persian king going, travelling, is to expose himself really as a sort of ruler, a legitimate ruler. Part of the motivation for Xerxes really to be out in the empire is to be viewed as the legitimate ruler. In the spectacular fashion? Yes, there's a lot of imagery associated with Xerxes enthroned.

Herodotus spends some time. describing this image. So it's a powerful motif, really. So the idea that there's a definite outcome being envisaged other than generalised victory of some kind is a little bit hard to pin down. But nevertheless, let's pin down the fact that he isn't going on a walk. He's going to sort of try to conquer the Helene, isn't he?

He's going on a sort of frontier expedition. And here I would really... I love it, the way you qualify in your nose. He must have been setting off to do something with an army. Was it something to have a battle with Helene's or not? Yes. He's off to establish supremacy, both on the border of the empire,

but also for himself in his own legitimacy. So to add to what Lloyd said, is that he is adding to his legitimacy, as the first stable succession since this aberrant reign of Darius I first. Can you give us some idea of variety of tribes and peoples inside this mighty army

which Paul referred to it as a great armada, the biggest empire of the world had yet seen, he's moving them all a massive distance to crack this nut? The way that Herodotus portrays it as if the whole empire has embarked on a seaside holiday in a way part of Herodotus's portrait is directed at giving a sort of geopolitical epic

in which the peoples of the empire are pitted against the particular distinctiveness, the particular strengths of the Greek cities. So we have a span of people reaching right the way from the Scythians in the north, the northwest, to Egyptians who are a significant part of the, army and the Navy. For example, on the western frontier, the Phoenicians as part of the Navy, and also Samian ships from the Western frontier. So we have an idea both of an incredible depth in the army of multiple ethnic groups, but also a particular strength from the sort of equipment heavy Western end of the empire. On the way to San Amis, there was Thermopylae, how significant was that

for the Persians in the Western canon it's sort of, it's making a massive victory out of a defeat which the West does in a way, held them up 300 Spartans or whatever it was about that. What did the Persians think of Thermopylae, a minor stop on the way? It's hard to know. It's true that Thermopyla becomes a much bigger event in retrospect. I mean, all of the battles in Herodotus are key,

moments. They're all represented in some way a victory, even if just a moral victory for the Greeks. And Thamapley's therefore presented as a moral victory for the Greeks. Did you feel like that for the Persians? The Persians seem to have lost some key aristocratic manpower

in that battle. It may have been a tough fight. We have two sons of Darius who die in that battle. Xerxes is said by Herodotus to have set a sort of exhibit after the battle of corpses left by the battle so that everybody may view, everybody in his expeditionary army may be able to view what a great victory it was.

So the hint in Herodotus is that it's used propagandistically as a positive event. Thank you very much. Paul, they burnt down Athens, their version. And they, why didn't they go home after that? Why didn't they think, well, we've achieved what we want to achieve? You know, that's a very fair. And burnt there, said, you taught them a lesson we're going back. That's a very fair question. From the Athenian point of view, of course, this was an utter disaster.

And not only did the Persians burn their secular homes, but also the sacred buildings on the Acropolis. So this is really very, very nasty for the Athenians. But, well, you've got to ask that same question. When we come to Salamis, why did the Persians decide to fight there? rather than elsewhere. Or why did they not wait until the Greeks were in such a bad state that there really wasn't going to be much of a battle at all? So there are oddities. Perhaps Lloyd, perhaps Lindsay, has a different view, but I think it's one of those unanswerable questions in a way. Xerxes presumably, having brought a fleet, a massive fleet, I mean sources differ, possibly as many as 1,200 to begin with, but by the time of Salamis, possibly of the order of 600.

but anyway, huge numbers, multiply each ship by 200. You're talking about 120, you know, lots and lots, thousands of people. So he might have thought, well, it'd be a bit pathetic, merely to return home with the fleet rather than use it. And the other thought might be, well, let's smash the Athenians complete, because the Athenians provide the majority of the Greek fleet, the defence fleet. The other thought might be, and then I don't know whether my colleagues have views on this, but at some point I suspect Xerxes must have thought, well, a punitive raid is one thing. What about the future?

What if these pesky Athenians do what they did before, which was ally with my subjects in Asia and caused me difficulties on my Western frontier? Perhaps I ought to conquer the whole of what we call mainland Greece. So that could be what is going on here. Lloyd, Ludwian, could you come in on this? And who was leading the reefs this time? Yeah, I agree with you, Paul. I think that here, I think the time is right for them to strike, and I think that pulling back at this time would have signalled the wrong thing.

And also, don't forget, we're just about to go into the non-sailing season into winter as well, when most of the fleets would have been drawn out of the sea as well. So it's now or never. If they had retreated to that point, then I think it would have taken another year for them to return, in which case the Athenians could have galvanized themselves again. I get a feeling that really what they wanted to do was to take their... fleet, the Persian fleet, down to Argos, and to put in there because, of course, the Argylid was part of the Confederacy with Persia. If they had done that, of course, then we'd be singing a very different

song here today, indeed. Now, as for, the leadership was under a remarkable individual called Themistocles. We know very little about his upbringing at all. He was certainly the son of an Athenian man, but a non-Athenian woman. Some people say he comes from a good family, but certainly not the kind of horse-breeding elite. So what did he do that was important? Well, what he did was he had a vision. He had a real sense of the future, really. When, for instance, silver mines were discovered near Attica,

he thought, and he put this to the people, rather than spending this silver... Well, who's the people who put it to it? To the Athenians themselves. We're a democracy. We're a proto-democracy. A proto-democracy, I do like protein. But that proto-trust.

He said, rather than spending it on ourselves and beautifying our city, why don't we build ships out of this? and it was agreed on. And this was a remarkable foresight. I mean, to take that huge strain of silver and actually put it into the protection of the... And about the latest ships, Carthaginian and latest fighting ships?

This is the kind of thing, yeah. I mean, the ship's style of the Athenians was very different from the kind of style of the ships that the Phoenicians were rowing for the Persians, for instance. He's been likened to Churchill in both his physical appearance. We have this remarkable herm of him,

where he's got a bulldog-like, thick-necked and you can see this kind of resolution in him and I think it's a very true portrait and you know in this kind of hour of need like Churchill he really came to the foreground what's sad about him again we have to bring in Herodotus here is that after the defeat of the Persians his reputation becomes tarnished

Yeah but let's stick with it we haven't got there yet you're rushing ahead of yourself again please so he rallies the Greeks me and others and they decide that they're going to they are interested in is it Xerxes who says we're going to have a fight or does the Greeks see it coming and say

okay we're going to have a fight who's up for the fight do you want to talk about that Lindsay well there seems to be a bit of a debate going on whether the Greeks feel that they are up for a fight and the mystically is represented by Herodotus as being persuading them to stand and fight

rather than retreating to the isthmus where you have a series contingent of states surrounding that area who want to set up defences of their land rather than worry too much about Attica, which they regard it as already gone. And they're also conscious, of course, that if they do resist, that qualifies them for savage retribution.

Basically the way it runs is if you come to terms all the way through Beosha north of Attica, the Macedonians have been helping, as it were, communities come to terms with the Persians as they progress southwards. So there has been an attempt to come to terms on the Persians part. So there's a sense that they might talk rather than fight. So Thimistocles is one of those who is trying to persuade the Greeks to fight, and he is represented by Herodotus as taking a... an ever so slightly shifty approach to inviting the Persians in to fight

into the bay, by sending a message to Xerxes saying, well, I'm on your side really, and we will run and fight. We will run and not fight if approach. So now is a good time. He didn't say it was through his teacher or through a slave. He got a message across that the Greeks were in there, but they're going to run away if Xerxes came in to chase them. Yes, in the meantime.

Mr. Cleese has already somehow put up some cliffside billboards, apparently, encouraging Ionians, that's the Persian term for the Greeks in their forces, the Ionians in the Persian Navy, to turn coward to not fight against their fellow Greeks. So there's a representation of Themis in this drama as sending slightly confusing but apparently undermining messages all over the Very crafty really. Extremely crafty. The way you've described, they're fairly consistent, really. If he wants to win, they're consistent.

Maybe confusing to the Persians, that was the point. It's crafty throughout. I mean, Thimistocles is represented. I mean, he's clearly, and this is where Lloyd's sort of mentioning the future reputation of Themistocles is relevant. He does have a reputation for perhaps being able to collaborate with the Persians as well as fight against them and that never completely dissipates

so his portrayal in Herodotus is partly taking that role into account Paul Paul Cartlett can you, is there any way you can describe the battle and without reference to erotus of course you can't

so what does erotus say about the battle we have two or three other with the Great East Coast I was going to say there is a way there is a way then he's got the outlines of the battle he's teased in

Zerxes is teased in to the bay and the battle commended right. Well, there are different views on what actually provoked the actual conflict and also where the Persian fleet was immediately before the conflict. How far that's to say Xerxes had any plan before hostilities started? Broadly speaking, the Persian seemed to have been drawn up in three files, whereas the Greeks seem to have been in two files. Greeks are on the West, Persians on the East. Persians next to Attica, the Greeks, the resisting Greeks, based on Salamis. and however it actually develops Herodotus' account focuses on individuals

and probably nobody really knew much. This is true of all major battles. He wrote 40 years afterwards, didn't he? He wrote 40 years after it, he had to talk only to survivors. He didn't have a Persian perspective. He wasn't privy to, though he claims to be privy to, the inner councils of the Persian High Command. He's very keen on one of his own fellow countrymen, actually a countrywoman,

Artemisia, who he claims actually was a very key advisor to Xerxes, a woman, telling Xerxes what he should do. And one thing she tells him is do not rush into the strait. Xerxes overrides that, well, it's only a woman, after all, and the Greek as well. Anyway, what happens is a kind of land battle at sea. And the Greeks have heavier ships. They have fewer ships, but in a way, in the situation of this terrific crush, actually helps that their ships are heavier. Why they're heavier? Because maybe they're not so well dried out,

maybe because they have more marines on board, maybe they're just not so well made as the Phoenician and Egyptian ships. Whatever, the Greeks win, by ramming, by shearing off the oars of the enemy and sinking. And Herodotus says a major reason why they lost, why the Persians, Phoenicians and Egyptians, they couldn't swim. And the Athenians had a phrase that if you don't know your letters,

if you're illiterate and can't swim, you're really nothing. So for them, for Athenians for Greeks, swimming was a major cultural thing, as well as a practically useful feat. So can you go to the sources now? Can you go to the sources, Lloyd, the other one is Iskolis.

Iskolas, the playwright, the great drum. He fought there. He was there. He was there. And he wrote a play about it. And he wrote to play about it. And he wrote... I think it's highly likely... What we get is a really good sense of the battle, though.

And I think it's a soldier's eye view because the feeling of it is so very intense. And he writes the play just eight years after the battle. And what we have... I mean, we even hear the battle cries in that play. I really get this feeling he was there. And what's remarkable about... If you think about the staging of this play,

on the slopes of the Acropolis, that was burned to the ground just eight years before. We have in this theatre, these open airspace, veterans of the war, people who have lost relatives in that war, watching the account of that war again. It's really very, very intense. It's a remarkable play. It's modern history on the Athenian stage.

And the Athenians had tried this concept some years before with a play which talked about the second. of Miletus and they'd rejected it entirely. They couldn't bear the pain of listening to this. So Iskalas does something which is quite remarkable, and I think the remarkable thing is he twists, he turns the setting into Sousa, so we're at the Persian court,

and we see all of this war reflected through Persian eyes. Now in 1978, when Edward... Can I just hold your line because I want to concentrate on this. What does he tell us, that Herodot does he doesn't tell us, what does he bring to the table in terms of information about what happened at that battle? very little more, actually, that he tells us than Herodotus does. Again, it's of no more use than Herodotus in giving us an outline of the battle.

What he does, I suppose, in more detail, is to talk about the trauma of the battle itself. So he does talk about drowning soldiers, for instance, and the cries that come from the seas. Some things obviously resonate with him. And I think what's remarkable, when this play was... was analysed by Edward Said in 1978 in his great book Orientalism. He laid this whole idea of the construction of the East squarely on the shoulders of East Scullus, saying that here we have a primitive East being depicted in this great Greek text. Well, I wonder how closely he ever read that play,

because it's certainly not about that at all. Iskullus gives us a scene, and one of the most remarkable things is that the mothers of the Athenians mourning for their lost sons, and the mothers of the Persians in Sousa, mourning for their lost sons. And this is why I really think this is a soldier's eye view. He understands the terrors of war. Lindsay, what did Xerxes do after the defeat? Well, what's interesting about Herodotus is that he gives a sort of weirdly contradictory

and slightly fragmented account of the aftermath of battle. He says that Xerxes continued to make some efforts to reach Salamis. by starting to build out a mole into the bay. But he also gives a sort of a dramatic account of Xerxes' interior life that he's scared and he wants to run. He gives a couple of different versions, or at least there are a couple of different references to how Xerxes made his way back to Sardis.

So Xerxes did, in fact, then at the close of the campaigning season, effectively decide not to winter out in Greece, but head back into Persian territory. And what value do you give to Herodotus? He's the main man. He does most of the stuff you've been talking from, even though it has been quite rightly qualified and tested and we haven't and so on and so forth. But you, what value do you give to Herodotus? Well, I'm a big fan of Herodotus. And what I find is so fascinating about him is that that although he may not give us the blow-by-blow factual account that we always crave for antiquity,

what he gives is a really elaborate political tapestry. So, for example, the accounts that are in the battle, the stories that are embedded in the battle, include this wonderful sort of Aresteia for this kind of great moment in the battle for Artemisia, who rams one of the ships on Xerxes's side in order to escape a pursuing attic ship. And the attic ship, seeing her ramming a Persian ship,

thinks, oh, that person must be on our side, and so pulls off the pursuit. So you've got this wonderful miniature drama in the middle of the battle, which is really all about the Halicarnassians, which is the community that Herodotus is also from, and the Athenians who were the main players in this battle. So as with an awful lot of ancient battle accounts,

and especially those in Herodotus, but also later into the 4th century, there is an awful lot in the story, which is about retrospective reshaping in the light of, say, later 5th century events. And so a lot of what Herodotus is putting together is knitting together are political themes from the whole of the 5th century and representing them within the world. this frame of the Persian wars. Paul Cardley, but further, Xerxes went, but the army didn't go, not all of it.

They said there were further battles. What happened there? Further battles won in particular, the Battle of Pletia the following summer. So Xerxes returned to his capitals in Iran, and he left behind Mardonius. And in Herod's much earlier account, Mardonius had been a leading proponent of the expedition in the first place, first in the four-90s and then in the four-eighthies. That battle was the decisive battle of the entire Greco-Persian Wars 48479 because still had Mardonius won that, which I believe he should have done, the Persians would have achieved their objectives of defeating the Greek alliance,

if that was their main alliance. So I've written about this battle at some length, and it is, of course, something that the Greeks themselves argued about there was a very long-running dispute after the war, who most was responsible for defeating the Persians? Was it the Athenians, Salamis, was it the Spartans? And overall, we should say, by the way, that even at Salamis, the overall Greek commander,

the commander of the Greek resistance, was technically a Spartan. And that's ridiculous, because Spartans contributed only a few ships and there are land-lobbing power. But the point was that had the Spartans not led the alliance, There wouldn't have been an alliance at all. Lloyd, why did the versions fail then?

That's a big one. Well, you must have thought of it before you came on a programme. Of course we have many, many times we've thought of it. There are some Herodotus, again, put forward the idea that because the Greeks were fighting with such a fervor, because they realized that this was a battle for their freedom and for an identity, then they fought with a vigour which the Persians simply didn't have.

This allied forces brought together piecemeal under the pay of the Great King just didn't have the drive, the willpower, or the identity that clearly unified the Greeks. And I think in a way he really hits on a point here. For the Greeks, I think Salamis and Plataea, it was now or never.

either they were going to win this or the lands would be decimated and it would never be the same again. So you do get a feeling in Herodotus that it is this constant drive, this absolute energy that comes from the Greeks, that unifies them. And in a way, yes, I think he's right. I think Herodotus is right on this.

So they were fighting for survival? Survival, yes, absolutely. Lindsay Allen, what would you say Salamis and Napoleon and Pletia were decisive of? What decision did they make, as it were, the history, the unfolding history of the Hellenes and the Greeks? I think they are, they provide a resource, a rhetorical resource for Greek speakers in the communities around the Aegean for the next 150 years to start to talk about the possibility of their power, yes.

They provide a resource for all sorts of number of different situations, even those in which Greeks are working with Persians or are working for Persians. So it's a sort of, it's an occasion, it's a reservoir of pride in all situations. I would say that this in a sense is actually a response to Persian ideology itself, which places, if one looks back at the inscriptions of Darius, a massive emphasis on the individual ethnic characteristics and contributions that peoples of the empire can make. So whether you're within the empire or outside of the empire, the emphasis is on what your own special skills are. And the way the Greeks take this up is to say, well, we're Greeks and we don't necessarily accept what you're telling us to do. But there is very much a sort of marginal in and out sort of setting to that framework for that.

We have a really interesting fragmentary poem from probably just before this period, but it's worth quoting. It simply says, you know, when you're an old man and it's wintertime and you're sitting beside a fire eating chickpeas and somebody comes to see you, you should ask them certain questions. And the question should be, who are you, where are you from? And what age were you when the Persians came? You know, it's something that defines the Greeks from here on. It gives them an identity.

You know, how old were you when the Persians came? Paul, Paul Carter, you said that this was not only a decisive battle at the time, but it had a global significance. Can you develop that? Well, I'd give three answers, I suppose, in the immediate term, and then because of the way in which we in the West receive antiquity, I would say that they're all equally important now. First of all, Herodotus, but for the Persian Wars, no Herodotus.

Herodotus, father of history, we've heard from Lindsay, his many qualities, and he is my founding father of my profession. I wouldn't do what I do, but for Herodotus. Secondly, a certain building called the Parthenon on the Acropolis. Some people think it's the most famous building in the entire world. Some people think it's the most beautiful building in the entire world. There's no doubting the shadow that the Parthenon casts is immense. And thirdly, within Herodotus, one of the most interesting passages is the very first example of Western political theory.

Western, I put it that way, of course you could call it universal. He has three Persians, extraordinary, not Greeks, arguing amongst themselves the merits and demerits of rule by one, rule by some, rule by all. So a version of monarchy, a version of oligarchy or aristocracy, a version of democracy. And insofar as we today think democracy is of key value, not merely an institutional way of deciding things, but actually has ideological and spiritual value. We do democracy totally differently from them, but there is a linkage ideologically back to them, and this notion of freedom, equality and democracy,

ultimately goes back to Salamis and Herodotus. And do you think that this unlocked what became the glory that was Greece, the philosophy, the drama, the medicine, the mathematics, the whole extraordinarilyness of that intensity of thought. which spun through 2,500 years. What I would say is that the Persian Empire itself serves as a catalyst for that too. And so the dialogue, the intercultural dialogue, which is happening because of the opening up of this vast amount of territories

and different linguistic groups who are all beginning to communicate at the top level in the Persian Empire, there's use of Aramaic as an international diplomatic language. So there are multiple different interactions going on as part of, again, this opposition, this point of opposition on the West. So it's a combination both of the sense of opposition on Greek part, but also of the contact

and conversations that are having with the rest of the continent of Western Asia. Yes, so is tributaries, and that's a point well made, but there is this torrent that happens in this one place and is this battle, the success of this battle, the thing that sort of lets the torrent flow, what do you think? I think that it gives impetus to something which was nascent in the Greeks

until this moment. I have a feeling. I mean, if you take almost like Greek sculptures as a model for this, we have a kind of a static, archaic form barely released from the stone, and within 10 years after Salamis, we're having masterpieces of Phidian sculpture where the body comes into its own. And I think that is literally released from the Persian wars. The Greeks find something in themselves, a self-expression, which I don't think they ever had a clue were there in the beginning to tell you.

This is fascinating, isn't it? It's victory, it's democracy, and then it's culture. Yeah. And you see connections direct, Paul. You've been different about this. You see a complete line and a cause and effect. I mean, it's very important that Athens is the capital of culture. Athens is not Greece, but lots and lots of Greeks are drawn in.

So it's sort of like Florence at the end of the 15th century. It serves as a catalyst of all kinds of things that, as Lloyd said, had already been adumbrated, but they don't achieve full maturity until the second and third quarters of the 5th century BC. And I should say as well that, you know, once the wars were over, these aren't forgotten, of course, but a new relationship develops with Persia in which Persian things, Persian luxury items in particular,

become very, very fashionable within Athens. So a different kind of relationship opens up with Persia. We know that there are regular diplomatic embassies into Iran and that the Persian presence is constantly there. But it's really interesting to see that the Athenians in particular buy into the Persianism that they actually try to reject as well. But do you buy into, to bring up a phrase, the idea of this great battle was the ignition of the culture?

I do wonder whether it might have happened anyway. It's a sort of process of state formation that's happening on the edge of a big superpower. I think it may be happening elsewhere, for example, in the Caucasus, but we don't have the same textual attestation of it. We don't have the same philosophers, dramatists. No, we don't have the text.

That's why we don't have them. Until we discover them, we don't have it. I put it the other way, Had Salamis gone the other way, then possibly that movement would have been stifled. I don't think the Persians would have tolerated a radical Athenian democracy for very long. No Greek, no programmes well. Thank you very much, Paul Gardner, Lindsay Allen and Lloyd Llewellyn. James next week we'll be discussing the Japanese artist Hokosai.

Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. So what did we miss out? Themistocles' defection to the Persian was in the four-sixth. He dies as a governor of a city, it's Greek, Magnesia, and another one in that area. It's in the far west of the Persian Empire. He's a pensioner, he's an employee of the Great King, Arctic Csumazis. No, no, no.

It's relevant to how he appears in Herodotus. Yeah, exactly. So it's completely equivocal the whole way through. Herodotus writes a version of Themistically based on the outcome and the Athenians of his day It's the prism for the entire interpretation of his career The fact that you could read every bit of anecdote about him

The other way Which is that actually he was working on behalf of the king You see that there's a dual interpretation to his career And the Athenians would not allow his remains To be reburied in his own land He was a kind of anathema The Athenians thought that he was double-crossing them really Well, by, in the four...

In my opinion, he had a very good reason for defecting to the Persians that his own city was concentrating particularly too much on the Persians in Themistically's view. Sparta was the real enemy of Athens and in the long run how right he was. So, since

they rejected that notion, whereas they'd accepted the notion in the 480s, they must resist the Persians. In the 470s, 460s, no, we must keep hammering the Persians and Themisky said, no, Hang on, guys. Sparta is really our enemy. And that's not such an easy thing to get across.

He failed and he was booted out. He was ostracized, which is Athenian democratic practice, which the Athenians developed very controversially. And then there's a really strong tradition of stories about Themistocles that then start to crop up. So by the fourth century, there's a whole net. There's a whole kind of complicated, yeah, including sort of. of apocryphal letters attributed to him, which are really rather fun, written from his exile.

I mean, there's this huge themistically in tradition. And the aspect of it that's my favourite is the fact that he then kind of becomes the archetypal Greek in the Persian court. There's a famous wall painting genre that gets cited much later on, where it's themistically giving advice to the Persian king as kind of best of Greek. It obviously fascinate you, But the first is that the battle is, way behind you that.

I mean, you're trying to say that we should go 20 years down the line and take that as a sort of lever most you look at. And I'm saying this battle happened, he lost, he went back. The Greeks, you said 10 years after he'd gone, we have all these things springing up. So I don't know why the continued career is interesting, but why it's important? Because our only source for our esteem for this. event is retold only through this retrospective knowledge. Yeah, but that's a source. It isn't a fact. Well, let me bring in what we were talking about,

which is Eastclos as Percy. Why did Iskoulos, with Pericles as his producer, choose to write that play in that year then? Only two years later, Themistocles is ostracized. Themisties cannot be mentioned. You can't mention a living person by name in a tragedy, but everyone knew that the way in which Iskyllis told the story of Salamis was massively pro-Thomistocles. So it's a political act, and Greek tragedy, Athenian tragedy, was part of a democratic theatre festival, and it had a direct political implication. So it didn't work, but Pericles is the heir of Themistocles in his attitudes to naval warfare, to empire, to Sparta, Well, let's again, the result of Salamis more than anything else, isn't it?

Yeah, absolutely. No, you're quite right that we didn't deform our account of Salamis by not talking about Themistakis later career, but this strain in Herodotus, he says Themistocles was in it just for the money. Was he? I don't think so. That's what Herodotus's sources said. They were hostile. Yeah. I think also that, you know, there are little readings you can do in Herodotus that sometimes go under the radar.

So there's this famous sequence where Themistocles employee, Pida Gorgos, of his sons, Sikimus, goes out in a sort of skiff, the dead of night, and shouts over to the Persians, this plan that Lindsay talked about, in Aramaic, presumably, yeah, you know, we, the Athenians are going to come over on your side, if you go out now, you know, you can take this battle. And of course, what he tells there is an outright lie. Now it's interesting, of course, who's lying to whom?

So the Greeks are lying to the Persians. And it's not the first lie, because before Thermopyla, there's a similar kind of thing that goes on as well. Now, it's kind of interesting for Herodotus to pick up on this and to embroider this little story, you see, because he writes, when he first encounters the Persians, he writes that there are three things that they admire,

and that is to ride, to shoot the arrow, and to tell the truth. And in this, he's absolutely on point, because all of the Persian inscriptions talk about Arta, talk about truth, and therefore lie is rebellion, it is unholy, it is unethical. And I think what Heurrodists does there, being a subject of the Persian Empire, after all, is to embroider this idea of truthfulness and the lie together in this,

it's remarkable little story. Historically, what he's trying to explain is the point that I made, why did Xerxes charge in to Salamis the least favourable sight for a naval battle with his forces against those forces. And that's what, he's got to explain it by some sort of trickery. Ders-Exie can't have been that stupid is the thought. And he never calls Zerzi's stupid. He calls him sacrilegious.

Huberistic in this kind of thing. What do you think, is it? I know this has just diverted me onto another thought about the fact that it's the landscape of Greece itself, which is being represented as repelling the person. Persians and that's a massive theme in Herodotus. The land repels. But again, it's about this distinctive characteristic

and how that just in itself is anti-Persian. Yes. I think that's something there. I think more anti-Persion are the boats inside the back. Yes, but also, you know, the Herodos likes to mention that there's an earthquake on the morning of the battles.

Well, you didn't mention that. Why didn't you mention it if the earthquake at the morning and the battle? It's a bit significant. Lots of earthquakes in Greece. But obviously this one is one that's going to be remembered because you know it's narratively important. But there's also a structure

with the ships that's interesting isn't it? Because if I'm right, the Greeks form into a circle, don't they? And then if we, you know, from what the territory, yeah, absolutely, the rudimentary stuff we go on. And then the Persian seem to be circling. Like that. Yeah. So prouring around kind of thing. Which means that then the Greeks could

kind of like whip out from this circle and strike the triremes. where at Earth they're weakest, which is in the long section of them, of course. And if you're right, and I'm sure you are actually, these weren't well-constructed ships and certainly didn't have them. We've been building this type of ship for two or three years. As the Persians, it had them for 50-odd years.

I mean, the one thing that we don't, did we mention the fact that the Persians came back the following year and... We had Pletia. No, but to Atta again, to occupy and sack Athens for a second year. So in a sense, and this is one thing to mention about Salamis, that it didn't stop the Persians coming back to Athens. But not with Xerxes.

No, no, no. Well, I don't think he was interested anymore. That's the thing as well. I really don't think. I don't think that's that important. I don't think that's far, far bigger fish to fry. It's more interesting what's going on in Babylon. The Persians had no records that we can access or that they had.

In which they might have recorded these. You're going to be saved by the bell. This is Simon. Save that. I just offered tea or coffee. There are many more history and discussion programmes from Radio 4 to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.com.uket slash radio 4.