480 BC The Greeks were up against it. The Athenians had evacuated their city for the island of Salamis off the coast of Attica, close enough to watch in agony and fury as the invading Persians sacked their city, setting fire to the sacred temples on the Acropolis. Offshore, the Persian fleet threatened with 700 or 800 triremes and support vessels. Within the straits between the island and the mainland some 360 allied Greek warships lay waiting.
But only for a while. Some of the allies were growing edgy, thinking they had better get their ships back to defend their own city states. Themistocles, the senior tactician of the battle, hit upon a way of turning this hazard into an advantage. If he could tip off Xerxes, the Persian commander, that certain of the Greek triremes were about to escape, he could lure the Persians into the straits, where limited room to manoeuvre would cancel their superior numbers. Sure enough, the Persians swallowed the bait, rowing all night to reach and then patrol the southern exit to the straits, leaving them exhausted the next morning.
As the Persians entered from the south, thinking to pursue some allied ships that appeared to be fleeing the scene, the main body of Greek triremes fell on their flank from the west, using their heavy rams to stove in the ships’ sides, then sending their marines to board and fight hand-to-hand. In the confusion more than 200 Persian ships ran aground, or into each other, or turned turtle and sank. The Greek allies lost fewer than 30. The Persians retreated, taking their occupying army with them. Historians still consider Salamis to have been the most important sea battle ever.
Taking part in the battle was Aeschylus, the Athenians’ greatest dramatist. It’s as though Shakespeare had fought in the Battle of Agincourt. Naturally the playwright wanted to use his experience, but there were two problems. First, he was a tragedian and this victory was anything but a tragedy for the Athenians. Second, the plots of tragedies were conventionally based on myths or legends, and this was near-contemporary history.
As for the second difficulty, he may have thought the sea battle so important – deciding as it did the fate of Greek, and especially Athenian, civilisation – as almost to have reached mythic significance. The solution to the first was to set the play in Persia, at the court of King Xerxes, where Salamis really was felt as a tragedy – though more in the modern newspaper-headline sense than the Aristotelian. As a result, The Persians (472 BC) was not packed with action; the climax (from the vantage point of its vast Greek audiences) was a long speech by a messenger reporting the battle to a shocked Queen Atossa, mother of Xerxes. It is one of the most powerful descriptive passages in all Greek drama, full of details like blood-bespattered shipwrecks and corpses rolled by the waves onto rocky shores. You could tell that Aeschylus had seen it for himself.