previous next

When at last Eurybiades and Themistocles had completed the disposition of their forces, the left wing was held by the Athenians and Lacedaemonians, who in this way would be opposed to the ships of the Phoenicians; for the Phoenicians possessed a distinct superiority by reason both of their great number and of the experience in seamanship which they inherited from their ancestors. [2] The Aeginetans and Megarians formed the right wing, since they were generally considered to be the best seamen after the Athenians and it was believed that they would show the best spirit, seeing that they alone of the Greeks would have no place of refuge in case any reverse should occur in the course of the battle. The centre was held by the rest of the Greek forces.

This, then, was the battle-order in which the Greeks sailed out, and they occupied the strait between Salamis and the Heracleium1; [3] and the king gave order to his admiral to advance against the enemy, while he himself moved down the coast to a spot directly opposite Salamis from which he could watch the course of the battle. [4] The Persians, as they advanced, could at the outset maintain their line, since they had plenty of space; but when they came to the narrow passage, they were compelled to withdraw some ships from the line, creating in this way much disorder. [5] The admiral, who was leading the way before the line and was the first to begin the fighting, was slain after having acquitted himself valiantly. When his ship went down, disorder seized the barbarian fleet, for there were many now to give orders, but each man did not issue the same commands. Consequently they halted the advance, and holding back their ships, they began to withdraw to where there was plenty of room. [6] The Athenians, observing the disorder among the barbarians, now advanced upon the enemy, and some of their ships they struck with their rams, while from others they sheared off the rows of oars; and when the men at the oars could no longer do their work, many Persian triremes, getting sidewise to the enemy, were time and again severely damaged by the beaks of the ships. Consequently they ceased merely backing water, but turned about and fled precipitately.

1 The Heracleium was a shrine of Heracles on the mainland where only a narrow passage separated the island from Attica (Plut. Them. 13.1).

Diodorus Siculus. Diodorus of Sicily in Twelve Volumes with an English Translation by C. H. Oldfather. Vol. 4-8. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd. 1989.

The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.

Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (1989)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Attica (Greece) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (6 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: