Ancient Greece · 483–480 BCE

What Happened at the Battle of Salamis? Themistocles' Gamble

By the Aurelius editorial team · 3 min read · Updated 15 October 2026

Last time: Athens won at Marathon in 490 BCE, and in 480 BCE Xerxes broke through at Thermopylae and marched on Athens.

In 483 BCE miners at Laurion, south of Athens, struck a rich vein of silver. The Athenians planned to share out the money among themselves. One man talked them into building warships instead, and three years later those ships were all that stood between Greece and the king of Persia.

Silver into ships

Themistocles, son of Neocles, did not come from Athens' oldest families, but he saw earlier than most that Athens' future lay at sea. When the Laurion silver came in, he persuaded the Assembly to spend it on a fleet. Herodotus says 200 ships, built for a war with the nearby island of Aegina; Aristotle's Constitution of Athens says 100.

The ship was the trireme: about 37 metres long, driven by some 170 rowers on three levels, with a bronze ram at the bow. Rowers did not need armour, so poorer citizens could serve. Athens' new strength rested on its poorest men.

The wooden wall

As Xerxes approached, the Athenians asked the oracle at Delphi for advice. The first answer told them to flee to the ends of the earth. The second, Herodotus says, promised that a “wooden wall” would not fail them and spoke of “divine Salamis”.

Some thought the wooden wall meant the old fence round the Acropolis. Themistocles argued it meant the ships. The Athenians took his reading: they sent their families to Troezen, Aegina and Salamis and manned the fleet. An inscription found at Troezen in 1959 claims to record his evacuation decree, but it was carved about two centuries later and its authenticity is debated.

A message for the king

After Thermopylae the Persians burned the abandoned Acropolis. The allied fleet, under the Spartan Eurybiades, lay off Salamis, and the Peloponnesian captains wanted to fall back and defend the Isthmus of Corinth. Themistocles threatened that the Athenians would sail away and found a new city in Italy.

Then he sent his slave Sicinnus to Xerxes with a message: the Greeks were about to flee, and Themistocles was secretly on the king's side. Xerxes ordered his fleet to close the exits of the straits during the night.

Battle in the straits

At dawn in September 480 BCE the Persian ships rowed into the narrow channel between Salamis and the mainland. The Greeks had about 380 triremes, 180 of them Athenian; the Persian fleet was larger, but in the straits its numbers became a crowd. Greek ships rammed, backed off and rammed again.

Xerxes watched from a throne on the slopes of Mount Aegaleos. Aristides landed Athenian hoplites on the islet of Psyttaleia and killed the Persians stationed there. By the historian Diodorus' count, the Greeks lost 40 ships and the Persians more than 200.

Hero, exile, Persian governor

In 479 BCE Themistocles stalled the Spartans with talk while every Athenian, Thucydides says, worked on the city's new walls. Success made him enemies. Around 471 BCE he was ostracised, and later condemned for treason with Persia.

He fled, of all places, to the Persian court. Xerxes' son Artaxerxes I made him governor of Magnesia in Asia Minor, where he died around 459 BCE; Thucydides says of illness, though some claimed he took poison.

In their own words

“A Hellene, from the Athenian host, came to your son Xerxes and told this tale: that, when the gloom of black night should set in, the Hellenes would not remain in place, but, springing upon the rowing benches of their ships, would seek, some here, some there, to preserve their lives by stealthy flight.”

Aeschylus, The Persians, lines 355–360, 472 BCE

Translation by Herbert Weir Smyth (Loeb Classical Library, 1926). A Persian messenger reports Themistocles' trick to Xerxes' mother. Aeschylus, a veteran of Marathon, staged the play in Athens eight years after the battle.

Why it happened

• The Laurion silver strike gave Athens the money for a large fleet, and Themistocles persuaded it to build one.
• Thermopylae fell, leaving the fleet as the Greeks' best hope of stopping Xerxes.
• Themistocles' message lured the Persians into fighting in narrow waters where their numbers did not count.

What happened next

• Xerxes went home; his army was beaten at Plataea the next year. Read the story →
• With the largest navy in Greece, Athens took the lead of an anti-Persian alliance. Read the story →
• The rowers who won Salamis were poorer citizens, which strengthened their voice in the democracy. Read the story →

Why it still matters

Nobody knew for sure how a trireme worked until the Greek navy built one. The reconstructed Olympias, launched in 1987, was rowed by volunteer crews in sea trials that tested ancient descriptions of speed and manoeuvre. It is still a commissioned ship of the Hellenic Navy, based at Palaio Faliro near Athens.

Connected stories

• The Persian Wars: Marathon and Thermopylae: Salamis was fought weeks after Thermopylae, in the same invasion.
• Aristides and the Delian League: The fleet built for Salamis became the core of the Delian League's navy.
• The Punic Wars: Rome Against Carthage: Athens planned its navy years ahead; Rome had to improvise one in a hurry to fight Carthage.

Sources

• Herodotus, Histories 7.139–144 and 8.40–96
• Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.89–93 and 1.135–138
• Aeschylus, The Persians
• Barry Strauss, The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter that Saved Greece — and Western Civilization (2004)

Images are credited under each picture. Paintings and photographs come from public collections via Wikimedia Commons; scenes with no surviving image are marked as illustrations.