VOL. VI.

PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY.

JUNE 24, 1853.

No. 137.

HENSLEIGH WEDGWOOD, Esq., in the Chair.

A paper was read—

"

On the Position and Tactics of the Contending Fleets in the Battle of Salamis." By the Rev. J. W. Blakesley, late Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College, Cambridge.

In describing the details of the battle of Salamis, modern writers have, without any exception so far as I am aware, been exclusively guided by the narrative of Herodotus; and have paid little or no attention to those features of the transaction which appear in other writers, and which are in some cases, as I shall endeavour to show, quite incompatible with the details of the historian's account. This is the more to be wondered at, as Herodotus himself plainly intimates, that there were many particulars about which he was unable to speak positively*; and that about some there was a very great disagreement at the time he wrotet Indeed Colonel Leake, whose view of the matter appears to have been adopted unhesitatingly by the modern historians of Greece, remarks "that, instead of giving a consecutive narrative of the battle, Herodotus has related only a few of the most interesting occurrences: consistently with that determination not to be responsible for any but ascertained facts, which is observable in every part of his history of the Persian invasion."

No person can have a higher opinion of the truthfulness of the so-called Father of History than myself, if by this is meant no more than an honest desire to relate such accounts as he received, in the form in which he received them, -to judge on principles of common sense between conflicting statements, and to avoid the appearance of bestowing credence upon such stories as seemed to him manifestly not to merit it. For this, and for the clear eye of an observer, he deserves entire credit. But neither the character of Herodotus's work, nor anything which has been related of himself by the ancients, warrant us in attributing to him that searching criticism which should lead us (as it might in the case of Thucydides or Aristotle) to prefer his statements to those of a contemporary witness of the events described,-especially if such a one's position had made him an active participator in them.

Now in the case of the battle of Salamis we have the account of a contemporary, deserving of the closest attention,-which, if it had proceeded from a prose-writer, it would probably have received. But the unconscious association in modern minds between the ideas of poetry and fiction has, I believe, deprived the great Greek dramatist of his due weight with our historians. Eschylus, who, even if he did

not himself take a part in the action*, most undoubtedly was perfectly familiar with it under the aspect which it must have borne to those who did take part in it, produced his play The Persians, of which it constitutes the main feature, only seven years afterwards, before an audience chiefly made up of the very men who had manned the victorious gallies; to whom consequently every line of his description must have vividly recalled circumstances with which they were perfectly familiar. If his availableness for the purpose of the modern historian is somewhat curtailed in one respect, that before such an audience he could not enter into details with which they were well acquainted, although it would be most interesting for us to know them, -details most appropriate to the historian, and which we are most thankful to Herodotus for preserving†,-there is on the other hand an advantage which he possesses without a rival. It was perfectly impossible for him, without the certainty of disapproval, to present any view of the transaction which did not commend itself to Athenian eye-witnesses,-full, we may allow, of national prejudices and personal vanity, and quite ready to accept any grouping of the facts which actually occurred that might most flatter themselves, but still eye-witnesses, who would be at once revolted by any picture which contradicted their actual experience. Herodotus, it should be remembered, whatever weight we may please to attach to his individual judgement, is exempted from this corrective influence. Supposing him to have been actuated by even a critical spirit, in the modern sense of the word,-of which however there is not the slightest trace, his facts were a generation old: the Athenians of his time were the sons and grandsons of those before whom the Persians was acted; and in the forty years or more that had elapsed since the battle, its story had been told over and over again in every family, as the twentieth day of Boëdromion returned, and the schoolboys had a holiday to go and see the procession of Iacchus. It is not at all necessary to suppose wilful misrepresentation on the part of those who fought their battles over again to their children and grandchildren on their knees, in order to believe that the gallant bearing of the Athenian sailors, and the brilliant acts of individual commanders, together with such exciting incidents as the device of Artemisia to escape destruction, were more interesting both to tell and hear, than the accurate notice of times and places and other circumstances attending the movements of the forces engaged; although these were of far more vital importance to success, and by the actual combatants would at the time be felt to be so.

I assume it, therefore, as an axiom, that when Æschylus does *Late writers assert, or assume, that he did (Pausanias, i. 14. 5). But though it is very possible that he did, such writers are little to be depended upon for a fact, six centuries old if true, unless it appears that there is some intermediate authority to which they had access.

It is only by an indirect allusion that we can at all infer from Eschylus, that Athens had been burnt, and that the whole hopes of the citizens lay in the fleet at Salamis:

ἔτ ̓ ἄρ ̓ ̓Αθηνῶν ἐστ ̓ ἀπόρθητος πόλις,

ἀνδρῶν γὰρ ὄντων, ἕρκος ἐστὶν ἀσφαλές.—ν. 348. 9.

relate any particulars of the action of such a kind as must have come under the notice of eye-witnesses, his narrative possesses paramount authority; and that if any incident, or any special notice of time or place appears in Herodotus irreconcilable with these, it must be regarded as erroneous. On the other hand, if any circumstance recorded by the historian, of difficult explanation when we merely regard its agreement with his main story, be yet found to harmonize well with the course of events contemplated in the dramatic narrative, it is to be received without hesitation.

Now, in the description of Herodotus there is an instance of the application of each of these principles. It is, I believe, quite incompatible with the view of the battle taken by Eschylus, that the engagement should have commenced-which Herodotus implies it to have done with the Persian fleet formed in line along the strait between Salamis and the main. This is the position assigned to it by Leake, and it is a view in which he has been unhesitatingly followed. Assuming this position to be the true one, Leake naturally finds a difficulty in another notice of Herodotus*, in which it is stated that with a view of enclosing the Greeks between the island Salamis and the main, the Persians caused a squadron of ships at Ceos and another at Cynosura to close up. Cynosura was the name of the cape forming the northern headland of the bay of Marathont, and as this was more than sixty geographical miles from Salamis,—a distance which could not be completed in the time required-and as Hesychius adds that it was a generic name given to everything like a peninsula, Leake identifies it with the cape of Saint Barbara (Aghía Varvára), in the island Salamis. But independently of there being no foundation in ancient writers for this arbitrary allocation, Ceos, the island to the S.W. of Sunium, is more than forty geographical miles from Salamis;-a distance almost equally unmanageable in the time which Herodotus allows for the operation. Leake is therefore driven to the necessity of supposing "it is possible that Ceos may have been a place in Salamis, or on the Attic coast opposite to Cape Cynosura: it is also possible that there is some error in the text‡." I will endeavour to show in the sequel that Ceos and Cynosura are the well-known island and promontory, and that the real difficulty is occasioned, not by their distance, but by the erroneous notion conceived by Herodotus of the operations of the Persian fleet, which is to be corrected by the help of the description of Eschylus.

Before, however, proceeding to contrast the narrative of the two writers who come near to the time of the events they describe, it will be well to turn for a while to that of Diodorus. Of course no one would wish to compare so vague and modern a compiler with Herodotus, if the question were merely between the judgement of the one and the other; but here our attention is attracted by the fact that in his account of this celebrated action, he is not epitomizing from Herodotus and superadding further facts from his various collections, but is undoubtedly following an entirely different authority;-a circumstance the more remarkable, as a very short time before, he had * viii. 76. + Hesychius, sub v. Appendix II. p. 260, note.

been taking Herodotus as his text-book. According to the latter, after the Persian fleet had been collected in the bay of Phalerum, the army having in the meantime overrun the whole of Attica and burnt Athens, a council of war is held, and the result of this is, that on the day before the great engagement, it having been determined to fight by sea in the presence of the king, the fleet (or at least the main portion of it) advances to Salamis, and makes dispositions at its leisure with the intention of engaging the next day; while the vanguard of the army marches the same evening upon the isthmus of the Peloponnese, where the Greeks were assembled to oppose it. Diodorus, for his part, makes the Persian fleet proceed at once from the open sea, to attack the Greeks who are drawn up across the strait of Salamis, their line occupying the ferry between the island and the Heracleum on the main *. Other circumstances in which he differs from Herodotus will be mentioned in the sequel; but here it is sufficient to observe the important fact, that according to the authority he followed, whatever it may have been, the great engagement begins by the Persians attempting to force their way into the eastern entrance of the strait of Salamis, the Greek line being drawn up across it to oppose them, while in Herodotus they are supposed to be already within the strait and drawn up in line along it, the Greeks being ranged opposite to them along the northern coast of Salamis.

Now if we turn to Æschylus, we find another important variation. His description makes the Persians completely taken by surprise, the Greeks advancing upon them at daybreak quite unexpectedly, and they themselves having made preparations, not for fighting, but only for intercepting an enemy which they imagine to be dispersing stealthily. The narrator attributes the whole calamity which has befallen his countrymen to the false intelligence sent by Themistocles. So indeed do Herodotus and Diodorus. But in those two writers the only benefit resulting to the Greeks from the movements which that intelligence occasioned is, that they are compelled to give up all thoughts of retreating, and to put confidence in themselves. Far different is it in the view of the dramatic poet. With him the intelligence becomes the cause of the Persians altering a disposition which was favourable for fighting, taking up one in which they were quite disqualified for engaging, and, while in this, being brought unexpectedly to an action. This will be plain if attention be given to the several features brought prominently forward in his description, although the very fact of his audience having been engaged in the battle would necessarily (as observed above) prevent him from detailing the manœuvres in the way that would be proper for an historian.

Taking Herodotus as our guide up to the point where Eschylus's description commences, we have the great bulk of the Persian war gallies, on the day before the action, advanced from Phalerum to Salamis, too late in the day to render it desirable to fight; so that all they do is to make arrangements at their leisure for engaging the next day. There is every reason to believe that their disposition

* xi. 19.