The Savior Generals

How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lostfrom Ancient Greece to Iraq

BLOOMSBURY PRESS

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Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Athens Is Burning

Themistocles at Salamis—September 480 B.C.

Athens Aflame (September 480 B.C.)

The "Violet-crowned" Athens of legend was in flames. It no longer existedas a Greek city. How, the Athenians lamented, could their vibrantdemocracy simply end like this—emptied of its citizens, occupied by thePersian king Xerxes, and now torched? How had the centuries-old polisof Theseus and Solon, with its majestic Acropolis, now in just a fewSeptember days been overwhelmed by tens of thousands of Persianmarauders—enemies that the Athenians had slaughtered just ten yearsearlier at Marathon?

News had come suddenly this late summer to the once hopefulAthenians that the last-ditch Hellenic defense, eighty-five miles awayat the pass of Thermopylae—the final gateway from the north intoGreece—had evaporated. A Spartan king was dead. There were no Greekland forces left to block the rapid advance of the more than a quartermillion Persian sailors and infantry southward into central Greece.The Greek fleet at Artemisium was fleeing southward to Athens andthe Peloponnese. Far more numerous Persian warships followed in hotpursuit. Nearly all of the northern Greek city-states, including the importantnearby city of Thebes, had joined the enemy. Now the residentsof a defenseless Athens—on a desperate motion in the assembly oftheir firebrand admiral Themistocles—faced only bad and worsechoices, and scrambled in panic to abandon their centuries-old city toKing Xerxes.

Desperate Athenians rowed in boats over to the nearby islands or thenorthern coast of the Peloponnese. Anyone who stayed behind in the lostcity would meet the fate of the Spartans and Thespians at Thermopylae—killedto the last man. It was as if the great Athenian infantry victory atMarathon that turned back the first Persian invasion a decade earlierhad never occurred—like the French who lost their country in May 1940to the Germans despite the valor of Verdun a generation earlier. All ofGreece was to be the westernmost satrapy of an angry Xerxes' ascendantPersia that now for the first time incorporated European land into itsempire. Athens—and everything north of it—was already Persian. Thewar seemed, for practical purposes, almost over, with only some moppingup of the crippled and squabbling Greek fleet at Salamis.

The ensuing mass flight of Athenians was a landmark moment in thehistory of Greece. Centuries later, the Roman-era biographer Plutarch,who in his own times could not conceive of Asians in Europe rather thanEuropeans controlling Asia, summed up the Athenian panic and the decisionto forgo a last glorious land battle with the brief obituary: "The wholecity of Athens had gone out to sea." But what exactly did that mean? Coulda Greek polis—traditionally defined concretely by its locale, monuments,and landed patrimony—survive in name only without a home? ManyGreeks could not conceive of handing over their shrines and tombs oftheir ancestors to the enemy without even a fight. That is, until the popularleader Themistocles had convinced them all that they had no choice but toleave. Only that way would the gods fight on the Athenian side and eventuallygive them victory and what was left of their charred city back.

Soon almost all the fighting-age resident males—perhaps as many asthirty thousand to forty thousand Athenian citizens—had abandonedthe city to man its fleet of triremes off Salamis. More than a quarter millionelderly, women, and children had sought safety outside Attica, oneof the largest transfers of population in the ancient world. In their haste,the despondent Athenians abandoned some of the ill and aged in the cityor left them to their own devices out in the Attic countryside. Meanwhile,well over a hundred thousand Athenian civilians would crowdacross the bay from the city to the rocky island of Salamis. They weregambling that their own seamen, along with still unconquered Greek alliesfrom the Peloponnese, could wreck the Persian fleet before they allstarved—and before the onset of autumn.

There was little help from anywhere. None of the dwindling numberof surviving but terrified large Greek states to the south—Argos, Corinth,Sparta—on the other side of the Isthmus of Corinth wished to send arelief force to its likely destruction on the Attic plain. The Greeks of AsiaMinor were on the side of Xerxes, those in southern Italy and Sicily toodistant to offer help—had they been willing. Apparently the remainingfree Greeks to the south would write the Athenians off as an extinct raceas they looked to their own defenses, or found some sort of accommodationwith Persians. Most were still terrified by the news that King Xerxes'Persians, hot after the Greeks retreating from Thermopylae, had arrivedin Attica to level Athens and demonstrate a similar fate waiting for othercity-states to the south. The Persian king was becoming legendary, aforce that could not be stopped by man or god; and in fact Xerxes wasthe first Asian invader to reach this far south into Europe in the long historyof the Greeks—and he would be the last to do so in force until theOttoman Turks entered Athens in 1458, nearly two millennia later.

Inside the empty city, the occupying Persians began the laborious taskof destroying the stone shrines and temples and torching homes. Theyquickly finished off a few Athenian holdouts still barricaded on theAcropolis. Meanwhile Xerxes drew up his fleet nearby at the Athenianharbor of Phaleron. The Persians' war to annex Greece was now in a sensealmost over. There was only the Megarid and the Peloponnese to thesouth left to occupy and the easy task of mopping up the retreating Greekships and refugees trapped on Salamis.

The king himself ostentatiously perched his throne on Mount Aigaleosoutside the city. He was eager to watch the final destruction below ofwhat remained of the Greek fleet in the straits of Salamis, if the retreatingGreeks could even be shamed into rowing out. Surely Xerxes' firingof Athens should have been an insult to all the Greeks, one that mightincite some sort of last gasp of resistance. Or perhaps the humiliatedAthenians, like most of the other disheartened Greeks up north, wouldsimply just give up and wisely join the winners. If he could not cut offthe head of another Spartan king, as he had done weeks earlier to Leonidasat Thermopylae, perhaps Xerxes could at least impale a Greek admiralor two.

For six months, Xerxes had enjoyed momentum and glory, like all ofhistory's grand invaders. Their huge spring and summer expeditions atfirst rolled out with little resistance—always admiring their own magnitude,never worrying much about the unseen and surely inferior enemyto come. The legions that joined Napoleon's invasion force in summer1812 sang as they headed out for Czarist Russia, hardly imagining thatmost would die there. The imperial German army that nearly surroundedParis in August and September 1914 had no thought of a Verdunon the horizon. Hitler's Wehrmacht that plowed through the SovietUnion in June 1941 with thoughts of storming the Kremlin by Augustlost not only the theater, but the war as well. Amid such grand ambitions,few commanders wonder how to feed such hordes as supply lineslengthen, the enemy stiffens, the army loses men to attrition and the requirementsof their occupations, the terrain changes, and the fair weatherof summer descends into a crueler autumn and winter in a far distanthostile country.

Likewise, few in Xerxes' horde that crossed the Hellespont in Aprilimagined what a distant September would bring. One side or the otherinevitably would suffer enormous losses that would shake the foundationof their societies for decades after, given the magnitude of forcesand the logistical challenges in play. Xerxes had transported tens ofthousands of sailors and infantry nearly five hundred miles from hiswestern capital at Sardis into southern Europe. He had successfullycrossed from Asia Minor to Europe by constructing at Abydos an enormouslyexpensive cabled pontoon bridge over the Hellespont—all on thegamble of being able to feed his forces in part from conquered or alliedterritory. His army and navy were not merely bent on punishing theGreeks in battle, but rather on absorbing the Greek people into the PersianEmpire. What was left of the collective Greek defense rested uponfewer than 370 ships from little more than twenty city-states, about halfthe size of Xerxes' imperial fleet in the bay of Phaleron a few miles distant.Most of the assembled Greek admirals were already distraught atthe idea of being blockaded by the Persians in the small harbors aroundSalamis. Nearly all commanders were resigned to retreat even further,fifty miles southward to the Isthmus at Corinth to join the last Greek resistanceon land. Indeed, ten thousand Peloponnesians were franticallyworking there on a cross-isthmus wall as the Greeks bickered at Salamis.The historian Herodotus—who was a boy of four or five when Xerxesinvaded—believed from his informants that many in the Greek alliancehad already decided on a withdrawal from the proposed battle. France in1940 or Kuwait in 1990 had at least kept their defeated peoples insidetheir occupied cities. But the conquered city of Athens was both takenover by the enemy and also emptied of its own residents. Unlike otherdefeated Greek city-states that "Medized" (became like Persians) andwere governed by Persian overlords, the Athenians who fought at Salamisfaced a different, existential choice: either win or cease to exist as apeople.

At the final meeting of the allied generals before the battle to discussthe collective defense of what was left of Greece, one Greek delegate bellowedthat the Athenian Themistocles simply had no legitimacy. Afterall, the admiral no longer had a city to represent—a charge similar tothat often leveled later in the Second World War against General Charlesde Gaulle and his orphaned "free" French forces based in London.The Peloponnesian and island allies saw little point in fighting for anabandoned city. The overall allied fleet commander, the exasperatedSpartan Eurybiades, in a furious debate with Themistocles, next threatenedto physically strike some sense into the stubborn, cityless admiral.No matter: Themistocles supposedly screamed back, "Strike—butlisten!"

Eurybiades, who had far fewer ships under his own command, heardout the desperate Themistocles. He was well aware that the Athenianinfantry generals who had won the battle of Marathon a decade earlier—Miltiades,Callimachus, Aristides—were either dead, exiled, or withoutthe expertise to conduct naval operations. Likewise, his pessimisticSpartan antagonist also knew that three earlier efforts to stop the Persiansto the north had all failed. Why should Salamis end any differently?

In fairness to the Spartan, Eurybiades' reluctance to join Themistoclesin fighting here had a certain logic. King Leonidas had been killed atThermopylae just a few days earlier. No more than twenty-two city-statesremained to fight at Salamis, out of a near one thousand Greek poleisthat had been free a few months earlier. Moreover, the Greek fleet dependedlargely on the contributions of just three key powers, the city-statesAegina, Corinth, and Athens. Their ships made up well over halfthe armada. It seemed wiser for those admirals to retreat back to theIsthmus at Corinth and not to waste precious triremes far from home indefense of a lost city.

Worse still for the coalition, the sea powers Corinth and Aegina werehistorical rivals—and yet both in turn were enemies of the Athenians.The Greeks may have claimed that they were united by a common language,religion, and culture, the Persians divided by dozens of tonguesand races; but Xerxes presided over a coercive empire whose obedientsubjects understood the wages of dissent, while the Greek generals representeddozens of autonomous and bickering political entities whofaced no punishment should they quit the alliance and go home. Even intheir moment of crisis, these free spirits seemed to have hated each otheralmost as much as they did the Persians, who had thousands of subservientIonian Greeks in their service and had shown singular brilliance inbringing such a huge force from Asia and battering away the Greek resistanceat Tempe, Thermopylae, and Artemisium while peeling off morecity-states to their own side than were left with the resistance. Indeed,until Salamis, Xerxes had conducted one of the most successful invasionsin history.

The salvation of Athenian civilization rested solely on the vision of asingle firebrand, one who was widely despised, often considered a half-breedforeigner, an uncouth commoner as well, who had previouslyfailed twice up north at Tempe and Artemisium to stop Xerxes' advance.How well Themistocles argued to the Greek admirals determinedwhether tens of thousands would live, die, or become permanent refugeesor slaves in the next few days. Themistocles had earlier gone up anddown the shores of Salamis rallying the terrified Athenians, and he keptassuring Eurybiades and the demoralized Greeks that they must fight atSalamis to save Hellenic civilization and could assuredly win. He pointedout that the Greeks could do more than just repel the enemy armada andreclaim the Greek mainland. By defeating the Persian navy, they couldtrap Xerxes' land forces and then bring the war back home to Persianshores. Yet to the Peloponnesians, who were about ready to sail away fromSalamis, this vision of the stateless Themistocles seemed unhinged—orperhaps typical of a lowborn scoundrel who throve in the shoutingmatches of Athenian democracy but otherwise had no clue how to stopan enemy fleet three times the size of their own.

But was Themistocles wrong? He alone of the generals amid the panicfathomed enemy weaknesses that were numerous. He might have failedto save his city from burning, but he still had confidence he could savewhat was left of Athens from the Persians. Hundreds of thousands ofXerxes' army were far from home. The year was waning. And they weregetting farther each day from the supply bases in Asia Minor and northernGreece—even as the army was forced to leave ever more garrisonsto the rear to ensure conquered Greeks stayed conquered. The tippingpoint, when the overreaching attackers could be attacked, would be righthere at Salamis.

Yet the general, and admiral of the fleet, was no wild-eyed blowhard.In his midforties, Themistocles had already fought at Marathon (490),conducted a successful retreat from the failed defense line at Tempe(480), battled the larger enemy fleet to a draw at Artemisium, and thisyear marshaled the largest Athenian fleet in the city's history. In the lastdecade, he knew enough of war with Persians to have good cause for hisconfidence that logistics favored the Greeks.

Nearly a hundred supply ships had to arrive daily just to feed the Persianhorde—given that the summer's grain crops of Attica, and those ofmost of Greece, were long ago harvested. The Persian fleet was withoutpermanent safe harbors as the autumn storm season loomed and alreadyhad suffered terribly from the gales at Artemisium. In late September,rowing on the Aegean began to turn unpredictable. Rough seas were agreater danger to the Persians than to Greek triremes that still had homeports down the coast. Moreover, most of the king's contingents were notPersian. Those subject states—many of them Greek-speaking—for alltheir present obedience, still hated the Persian king as much as they didthe free Greeks of the mainland. The Persian navy proved even moremotley than the polyglot imperial army.

Most of Xerxes' army also had been camped out on campaign formonths. For all its pretense of being an imperial expeditionary force, thevarious allies would be squabbling more the farther they were fromhome, while the remaining Greeks grew more desperate for unity themore their homeland shrank in size. So far from joining the general despondency,Themistocles was supremely confident in the Greeks' chancesat Salamis. Few others shared his optimism, perhaps because a Spartanking had just fallen in battle at Thermopylae, partly because unlike Themistoclesthey still had homes to retreat to for a while longer.

Themistocles was soon to be proved right: The Spartan supreme commanderEurybiades did not realize it, but the Persian fleet had, except fora sortie to nearby Megara, already reached its furthest penetration intoEurope. Logistics, morale, and numbers had already conspired againstXerxes—even as he boasted of his conquest of Greece. Yet right now inlate September 480, few could see it: "We Athenians have given up, it istrue, our houses and city walls," Themistocles declared to the waveringgenerals, "because we did not choose to become enslaved for the sake ofthings that have no life or soul. But what we still possess is the greatestcity in all Greece—our two hundred warships that are ready now to defendyou—if you are still willing to be saved by them."

Themistocles talked of Greeks being "saved," not merely "defended,"as if a victory at Salamis would be a turning point after which Xerxescould not win. Note further that Themistocles was making a novel argumentto his fellow Greeks: A city-state was people, not just a place orbuildings. His "free" Athenians with their two hundred ships were verymuch a polis still, even if the Acropolis was blackened with fire. As longas there were thousands of scattered but free-spirited Athenians willingto fight for their liberty, so Themistocles argued, there was most certainlystill an Athens.

What swung the argument to make a stand at Salamis was not just thelogic of Themistocles, but also unexpected help from his former rival,the conservative statesman Aristides, who advised the other Greek generalsto fight. The latter's reputation for sobriety reassured the Greeksthat the Persians really were in their ships and poised for attack—andthey believed the prior messages from Themistocles himself that theyhad better attack before the Greeks got away. Time had run out. Onlythree choices were left—fight, flee, or surrender.

The Marathon Moment (August 490 B.C.)

What brought the squabbling Greeks to Salamis was a decadelong Persianeffort to destroy Hellenic freedom—and the efforts of Athenians tostop Darius and his son, Xerxes.
(Continues...)Excerpted from The Savior Generals by VICTOR DAVIS HANSON. Copyright © 2013 by Victor Davis Hanson. Excerpted by permission of BLOOMSBURY PRESS.
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