A History of War in 100 Battles. Richard Overy

      © Peter Horree/Alamy

      German artist Wilhelm von Kaulbach painted an imaginative version of the Battle of Salamis in 1858. Kaulbach (1804–74) was famous for his paintings of scenes from world history.

      That same day, the Persian army tried to break through at Thermopylae, only to find that the few thousand Greeks, with the 300 Spartans at their core, could hold the narrow pass with their longer spears and heavier armour, while the Persian archers could not find room to manoeuvre effectively. But on 31 August, Xerxes was told of a narrow gorge that led through the hills beside Thermopylae and dispatched his 10,000 crack troops, the ‘Immortals’, to navigate the path and attack the Greeks from the rear. Leonidas sent most of his forces south to escape destruction, and with just 1,400 men he came out for a final battle with the vast Persian army. They all died where they stood, fighting, according to Herodotus, with ‘their hands and teeth’ when their swords and spears were lost.

      Themistocles received news of events at Thermopylae in the camp at Artemisium, and ordered the fleet to sail south at once. They arrived a few days later in the straits by the island of Salamis, which lay opposite Athens and the Piraeus. Xerxes’s army marched through Attica, sacked Athens, and reunited with the Persian fleet at the city’s port. The Greek allies argued about the next step: the Spartans, whose admiral Eurybiades commanded the fleet, wanted to withdraw once again to the Peloponnese; Themistocles pointed out that this would allow the Persians to land forces wherever they wanted and insisted on staying at Salamis to engage the enemy fleet. Themistocles won the day and the outcome at Salamis showed that his strategic thinking, as the Athenian historian Thucydides later wrote, ‘displayed genius in the most unmistakable way’. Yet arguments between the Greek allies continued until, on 23 September, the Persian fleet arrived at the mouth of the narrow Salamis Strait.

      The ancient accounts do not make clear why Xerxes sought a battle when the Greek fleet could have been blockaded. Modern views suggest that the Persian emperor wanted to avenge the losses to his fleet by one decisive battle that would salve his pride. On the day of Salamis, he set up a throne on Mount Aegaleus overlooking the Strait to watch what he expected to be a decisive victory. The Greeks still had an estimated 360 ships. The Persian fleet, though still vastly greater, now contained only an estimated 600–800 vessels after the earlier losses. The Persians drew up the fleet in three ranks on a north-south axis in open sea, but the ships then had to turn sharply to the west to enter the narrow straits in much smaller lines, and here their numerical superiority was no longer an advantage – it was the naval equivalent of Thermopylae. The Greeks, according to the chronicles, sang a paean before they sailed, which put the stakes clearly before them: ‘Forward sons of the Greeks…Now is the fight for everything.’

      The details of the battle itself remain frustratingly sketchy. To encourage Xerxes to attack, Themistocles sent a messenger to the Persian camp with false news that the Greeks were intending to flee, but the lines of Greek ships, drawn up north to south across the narrow channel, instead did the equivalent of what Leonidas’s Spartans had done, luring the Persian ships on, then moving out to ram and board them. The disadvantage of greater numbers soon became evident. The Persian ships crashed into each other, lost formation, and even, it seems, attacked each other in error. It is possible to picture the water full of a mess of drowning men, capsized ships, the debris of broken oars, the wounded and dying. The heavier Greek vessels were at an advantage when it came to ramming, while their more heavily armed marines could be deployed more easily on a narrow battlefront. Persian ships tried to escape and instead became entangled. The Greek marines disembarked to finish off isolated groups of Persians who had struggled to shore. Herodotus has Greek ship losses at 40, but Persian losses at 200 sunk and more captured. Whether these figures are precise or not, the Persian defeat was real enough.

      According to Aeschylus, who served at Salamis, Xerxes ‘shrieked aloud’ at the sight of the disaster, ‘rent his clothes’ and ordered a retreat. Salamis was a decisive battle, entirely against the odds, and it demonstrated how sea power, properly exploited, could, in the right geographical circumstances, compensate for any weakness on land. Fortunately for the Greeks, Themistocles turned out to be a strategic genius. A smaller Persian army returned in 479 BCE, but was shattered at the Battle of Plataea, while the Persian fleet was finished off the same year at Mycale. Even more than Marathon, the victory at Salamis saved Greece and opened the way to the extraordinary flowering of classical Greek culture that followed.

      Every schoolchild knows the phrase made famous by Julius Caesar: ‘Veni, vidi, vici’ – ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’. However, the battle at which he is supposed to have uttered the immortal words is all but unknown. At the town of Zela (now Zile in modern-day northern Turkey), Caesar’s legions faced a very much larger enemy on the very site where, 20 years earlier, a Roman army had been comprehensively beaten. The Battle of Zela was a much riskier venture than Caesar’s brief epigram suggests, but in the end it was indeed a short, sharp victory for the Roman side.

      The battle was prompted by events during the civil war that had raged between Caesar and Pompey (his erstwhile colleague in the First Triumvirate). The war ended with Pompey’s defeat at Pharsalus and his subsequent murder in 48 BCE on the orders of Ptolemy XIII, one of two claimants to the throne of Egypt. Caesar arrived in Alexandria shortly after Pompey’s death and began a notorious affair with Cleopatra VII, the other claimant to the throne. After summoning Roman reinforcements and allies from the garrisons of the Middle East, Caesar defeated Ptolemy, and Cleopatra became queen (as co-ruler with her younger brother Ptolemy XIV). With Egypt secure as an ally, Caesar left with just 1,000 men to settle affairs in the Roman provinces in the Middle East and Anatolia, where some of the local rulers had supported Pompey. One province in particular took his attention. While the civil war distracted Roman commanders, Pharnaces II, who had been installed by Pompey as king of the Crimea, arrived in Anatolia to claim back the kingdom of Pontus, taken from his family by the Romans a few years after the first Battle of Zela. Pharnaces defeated Caesar’s local commander Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus, seized the region, castrated and enslaved all Roman citizens and murdered Roman tax collectors. This was a challenge Caesar could not allow to go unpunished.

      As Caesar approached, Pharnaces tried to buy him off with the offer of his daughter and a heavy golden crown in return for the right to rule his ancestral lands, but Caesar was not to be appeased. The details of the battle that followed are scanty. The number of men on each side is at best an estimate: perhaps 20,000 with Pharnaces, while Caesar brought four badly depleted legions, one composed of local troops from neighbouring Galatia, which Caesar had compelled the ruler, Deiotarus, to provide as penance for supporting Pompey. It is likely that the seasoned troops with Caesar were greatly outnumbered. Pharnaces made camp on a hilltop at Zela, confident that he would repeat the victory over the Romans won by his father Mithridates in 67 BCE. Caesar was camped 8 kilometres (5 miles) away, but during the night of 31 July moved his force to the opposite side of the valley from Zela to await the probable battle. While Caesar’s troops began to fortify their hilltop, Pharnaces moved to catch them unprepared.