Persian fleet

“ Sixty thousand men-rowers and warriors were crowded on board the Greek fleet. At least twice as many must have been borne on the decks and rowers' benches of the Persian armada. Midway in the opening of the straits the Persians had occupied the rocky island of Psytalia. Its ledges and its summit glittered with arms, and beside it some light craft had taken post to assist friendly vessels in distress. Past the islet the great fleet swept in four successive divisions driven by the measured stroke of tens of thousands of oars. ”

“ He ordered an immediate attack. From a lofty throne upon the shore he himself overlooked the scene and watched the result. The Persian fleet was broken to pieces and two hundred of the ships destroyed. [Footnote: The entire Persian fleet numbered about seven hundred and fifty vessels; the Grecian, about three hundred and eighty-five ships, mostly triremes.] ”

“ The Persian fleet at Ladé is stated to have been six hundred (H. vi. 9) . At Marathon it is the same (vi. 95) . These may be mere vague calculations without any real foundation; it may be that six hundred was the ordinary official number of vessels that belonged to the Persian war fleet, and that Herodotus has assumed that on each of these occasions the whole fleet was employed. In the present instance, he does not mention any save the Greek contingents. It is extremely unlikely that the Greeks could furnish six hundred vessels. ”

“ What good could have been attained by breaking down the bridge, had not a sufficient force been left behind to maintain the command of the Hellespont against the Persian fleet? Could not a strait no broader than many parts of the lower Danube have been easily crossed by means of ship and boat transport? If the Greek fleet were once entangled in that region, could the possibility the Persian fleet or of part of it doubling back to the European coast be ignored? THE “THEMISTOCLES” TRADITION. Above all, did the Greek fleet know [415] whither the enemy had gone? ”

“ Up to 500 B.C. Persia as a naval power had not played any part in the Ægean. It seems, indeed, to have been during the Ionian revolt that she developed to the full this arm of her service. After Ladé, in 494 the Persian fleet in the Western seas becomes ever more prominent and more important. Islands previously unsubdued begin to fall one by one into her hands. ”

“ The narrowness of the strait rendered the great numbers of the Persians of no avail. The superior discipline of the Greeks gave them a further advantage. The want of concert in the Persian allies was another aid to the Greeks. They were ready to run one another down in the wild desire to escape. Soon the Persian fleet became a disorderly mass of flying ships, the Greek fleet a well-ordered array of furious pursuers. In panic the Persians fled; in exultation the Greeks pursued. One trireme of Naxos captured five Persian ships. A brother of Xerxes was slain by an Athenian spear. ”

“ Unless the retreat from Thermopylæ were begun many hours before the withdrawal of the fleet, the army must be caught in a trap. With a light-armed enemy in vastly superior numbers in hot pursuit, the retreat could not have been rapid, and the Persian fleet would have had ample time to land troops in such a position as would make it possible to cut the line of it. ”

“ The possibility of the landing of Persian troops behind the defences of the Isthmus was not a question so much dependent on the action of Argos as on the success or failure of the Greek fleet in checking the advance of the enemy’s ships before they succeeded in crossing the Saronic Gulf. Had the Persian fleet once succeeded in establishing itself in some harbour of the coast of Argolis, the defence of the Isthmus must have collapsed, whatever the attitude of Argos might have been. ”

“ One part of the argument is very striking, because it is, perhaps, the only passage in Herodotus which gives an indication of what must have been of necessity the case,—the dependence of the Persian army on the fleet Themistocles points out to the Greeks that, if they keep the Persian fleet at Salamis, the Persian army can never reach the Isthmus, or even invade the Megarid. ”

“ As soon as sunlight warms the ground no more,
And gloom enwraps the sanctuary of sky,
Range we our fleet in triple serried lines
To bar the passage from the seething strait,
This way and that: let other ships surround
The isle of Ajax, with this warning word—
That if the Greeks their jeopardy should scape
By wary craft, and win their ships a road,
Each Persian captain shall his failure pay
By forfeit of his head. So spake the king,
Inspired at heart with over-confidence,
Unwitting of the gods' predestined will. ”

“ The penteconter was an early prototype of the galley of the Christian era.
The Persians had been reduced by this time to about 600 ships, although there had been numerous reënforcements since the disaster at Cape Sepias. The fleet was "Persian" only in name, for, except for bands of Persian archers on some of the ships, it was composed of elements levied from each of the subject nations that followed the sea. Indeed Persia is a curious example in history of a nation with a purely artificial sea power, for its navy was composed of aliens entirely. ”

“ The Persians were thereupon driven back into the sea all along the line, and, although the majority regained their ships, no less than 6400 were left dead, as against 192 Athenians. The Persian fleet, of which perhaps a detachment had been sent on before the battle, now sailed round Cape Sunium in order to effect a landing at Phalerum, close by Athens, and with the help of traitors within the walls to take the city by surprise. ”

“ Seeing the land-army in its old position, they supposed the Persian fleet to be still at Phaleron, which bay would be hidden from their position in the strait by the high promontory of the Piræus; and, under this impression, they prepared to meet a second attack. It is remarkable, but quite evident, that the Greeks under-estimated alike the moral and material damage they had inflicted on the enemy. They show none of the jubilation which follows a decisive victory ”

“ Exaggerated as are the numbers given in Herodotus, the mere fact that the Persian commanders ventured thus to divide their fleet in face of an enemy with 271 ships, together with the comparative ill-success with which the Greeks fought with that part of the fleet which remained at Aphetæ, shows that the Persians must, even after the disaster on the Sepiad strand, have had a very large number of vessels at their disposal. ”

“ An event of no great importance turned this uneasiness into panic. Two out of three ships which had been detached to keep a look out were captured by an advanced Persian squadron of ten ships. In consequence of this disaster, the fleet hastily retreated some fifty miles to the south to a spot where the channel between the mainland and Eubœa is at its narrowest. It would probably have gone still further south but for the heavy loss which the Persian fleet suffered during a four days' storm. No less than four hundred ships were destroyed, and with them an uncounted multitude of men. ”

“ Diodorus supplies the connecting link between the two formations, when he says that the Persians when they came into the strait were compelled to withdraw some ships from the line.
If the chart of the strait at this point be examined it will be seen that, after passing Psyttaleia and Kynosura, it not only narrows but turns westward at right angles. The Persian fleet had consequently to accomplish a difficult manœuvre of a double kind, namely, (1) to reduce the length of their front; (2) to execute a wheeling movement to the left, of which their extreme left wing would form the pivot. ”

“ Even this vessel is only permitted to navigate in and about the waters of the Mourdab ("dead water") , a large lake, a kind of encroachment of the sea, eighteen to twenty miles broad, which separates Enzelli from Peri-Bazar, the landing-place for Résht, four miles distant. The imperial yacht did once get as far as Astará (presumably by mistake) , but was immediately escorted back to Enzelli by a Russian cruiser. There is, however, a so-called Persian fleet—the steamship Persepolis, anchored off Bushire, in the Persian Gulf, and the Susa, which lies off Mohammerah. ”

“ If you engage off the Isthmus you will fight in the open sea, and it is highly inexpedient for us to put out thither, because our ships are heavier and fewer in number; and, again, you will lose Salamis, Megara, and Ægina, even if we are successful in other respects. For the Persians’ land army will accompany their fleet, and so you will be responsible for bringing them to the Peloponnese, and will place the whole of Greece in peril. ”

“ A land so mountainous as Greece is was unsuited to the operations of cavalry, the most efficient arm of the service in the Persian Army, as in most oriental ones. Ignorance of local conditions, combined with the dangerous nature of the Greek coast, exposed their ships to the risk of destruction; while the composite character of the fleet, and the jealousies of its various contingents, tended to neutralize the advantage of numbers. In courage and discipline, the flower of the Persian infantry was probably little inferior to the Greek ”

“ If the Greeks of Asia, like so many of their brethren in Europe, had grown weary of their tyrants and were desirous of rising against them, they would be compelled to contemplate the chances of a successful resistance to the Persians. And here there were circumstances in the recent history calculated to inspirit them and give them hopes. Six hundred Greek ships, manned probably by 120,000 men, had been lately brought together, and had formed a united fleet. The fate of the Persian land-army had depended on their fidelity. ”

“ The scheme of the battle given in nearly all the modern histories of Greece, represents the Persian fleet as drawn up on the morning of the battle along the Attic coast, from the narrows at the entrance of the bay of Eleusis almost to the mouth of Piræus harbour, while the Greek fleet is opposite, extending from a point some way north of the island of St. ”

“ The great prosperity of the island, due, no doubt, in a great measure to its being the only Greek trading community on the Asiatic side which was not under the Persian dominion, enabled him to raise and maintain a large body of mercenaries as well as a fleet of a hundred fifty-oared war-ships. He furthermore entered into negotiations with Egypt, with a view to mutual defence. ”

“ Those of Sparta and the Peloponnesus were 89, the Athenian fleet 180, while 97 more were supplied by the Greek islands, some of the ships from Melos and the Cyclades being penteconters, large vessels whose long oars were each manned by five rowers. Losses by storm and battle had reduced the Persian armada to some six hundred effective ships. ”

“ It is really only possible to come to one conclusion on the subject. As a description of the movement made in the night by the Persian fleet, this passage in Herodotus is wholly mistaken. He has almost certainly used in his description notes of the movements of the fleet made in the actual battle, for the very good reason that he had previously used his notes of the night-movement in describing a movement which he supposed to have taken place on the previous afternoon. Either he did not possess or he overlooked any note which he had made on the blocking of the western strait ”

“ Learning that the Persian leaders with a large army and fleet were lying in wait for him in Pamphylia, and wishing to rid the seas of them as far as the Chelidoniæ, or Swallow Islands, he set sail from Knidus and the Triopian Cape with a fleet of two hundred triremes, whose crews had been excellently trained to speed and swiftness of manœuvring by Themistokles, while he had himself improved their build by giving them a greater width and extent of upper deck, so that they might afford standing-room for a greater number of fighting men. ”

“ To use a fleet, you must have a fleet; but their whole naval interest had been starved by the intolerable costs of the Persian war. Immense had been the expenses of Heraclius, and annually decaying had been his Asiatic revenues. Secondly, the original position of the Arabs had been better than that of the emperor, in every stage of the warfare which so suddenly arose. In Arabia they stood nearest to Syria, in Syria nearest to Egypt, in Egypt nearest to Cyrenaica. ”

“ They built for the Persian king Xerxes the Hellespontine bridges over which he marched his immense army into Greece (see p. 81) . They furnished contingents of ships to the kings of Nineveh and Babylon for naval operations both upon the Mediterranean and the Persian and Arabian gulfs. Their fleets served as transports and convoys to the expeditions of the Persian monarchs aiming at conquest in Asia Minor or in Europe. They formed, too, the naval branch of the armaments of the Pharaohs; for the Egyptians hated the sea, and never had a native fleet. ”

“ The size of the Persian monarch's fleet was in itself a sufficient proof of the extent of the naval power of the Levantine states; but an equally convincing proof of the maritime power of another Mediterranean state, viz., Carthage, at that early period—about 470 b.c. —is forthcoming. This State equipped a large fleet, consisting of 3,000 ships, against the Greek colonies in Sicily; of these 2,000 were fighting galleys, and the remainder transports on which no less than 300,000 men were embarked. This mighty armada was partly destroyed in a great storm. ”