keleustes, who presided over the rowers and gave the signal for each stroke, and the pilot, who was supposed to have a knowledge of the local waters and of wind and weather, and who acted as steersman, handling alone, or with the help of his assistants, the long stern oar that served as a rudder. The fighting men were not sailors, but soldiers embarked to fight afloat, and their military chief commanded the ship, with the help of the pilot. For more than two thousand years this division between the sailor and the fighting element in navies continued throughout the world. The fighting commander and the sailing-master were two different men, and the captain of a man-of-war was often a landsman.

In the Greek fleet which lay sheltered in the narrows, behind the long island of Eubœa while the Persians were battling with the tempest off Cape Sepias, the Admiral was the Spartan Eurybiades, a veteran General, who knew more about forming a phalanx of spearmen than directing the movements of a fleet. The military reputation of his race had secured for him the chief command, though of the whole fleet of between three and four hundred triremes, less than a third had been provided by Sparta and her allies, and half of the armada was formed of the well-equipped Athenian fleet, commanded by Themistocles in person. As the storm abated the fleets faced each other in the strait north of Eubœa. In the Persian armada the best ships were five long galleys commanded by an Amazon queen, Artemisia of Halicarnassus, a Greek fighting against Greeks. She scored the first success, swooping down with her squadron on a Greek galley that had ventured to scout along the Persian front in the grey of the morning. Attacked by the five the ship was taken, and the victors celebrated their success by hanging the commander over the prow of his ship, cutting his throat and letting his blood flow into the sea, an offering to the gods of the deep. The cruel deed was something that inspired no particular sense of horror in those days of heathen war. It was probably not on account of this piece of barbarity, but out of their anger at being opposed by a woman, and a Greek woman, that the allied leaders of Greece set a price on the head of the Amazon queen; but no one ever succeeded in qualifying to claim it.

The Persians, hoping to gain an advantage from their superior numbers, now detached a squadron which was to coast along the eastern shores of Eubœa, enter the strait at its southern end, and fall on the rear of the Greeks, while the main body attacked them in front. Eurybiades and Themistocles had early intelligence of this movement, but were not alarmed by it. Shortly before sunset the Greeks bore down on the Persians, attacked them in the narrow waters where their numbers could not tell, sank some thirty ships by ramming them, and then drew off as the night came on.

It was a wild night. The Greeks had hardly regained their sheltered anchorage when the wind rose, lightning played round the mountain crests on either hand, the thunder rolled and the rain came down in torrents. The main Persian fleet, in a less sheltered position, found it difficult to avoid disaster, and the crews were horrified at seeing as the lightning lit up the sea masses of debris and swollen corpses of drowned men drifting amongst them as the currents brought the wreckage of the earlier storm floating down from beyond Cape Sepias. The hundred ships detached to round the south point of Eubœa were still slowly making their way along its rocky eastern coast. Caught in the midnight storm most of them drove ashore and were dashed to pieces.

In the morning the sea was still rough, but the Greeks came out of the strait, and, without committing themselves to a general action, fell upon the nearest ships, the squadron of Cilicia, and sank and captured several of them, retiring when the main fleet began to close upon them. On the third day the sea was calm and the Persians tried to force the narrows by a frontal attack. There was some hard fighting and loss on both sides, but the Greeks held their own. As the sun set the Persians rowed back towards their anchorage inside Cape Sepias.

When the sun rose again the Greek fleet had disappeared. Eurybiades and Themistocles had agreed in the night after the battle that the time was come to abandon the defence of the Eubœan Strait and retire to the waters of Salamis. The Persian army was now flooding the mainland with its myriads of fighting men, and was master of Attica. A fleet, depending so much on the land for supplies and for rest for its crews, could not maintain itself in the straits when the Persians held the mainland and were in a position to seize also the island of Eubœa. Before sunrise the Greek ships were working their way in long procession through the Strait of Negropont. Early in the day they began to pass one by one the narrows at Chalcis, now spanned by a bridge. Then the strait widened, and there were none to bar their way to the open sea, and round Cape Sunium to their sheltered station in the straits behind the island of Salamis.

They had been reinforced on the way, and they now numbered 366 fighting ships. 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. The odds were serious, but not desperate.

But while the Persian fleet was directed by a single will, there were divided counsels among the Greeks. Eurybiades had most of the leaders on his side when he argued that Athens was hopelessly lost, and the best hope for Greece was to defend the Peloponnesus by holding the isthmus of Corinth with what land forces could be assembled and removing the fleet to the waters of the neighbouring waters to co-operate in the defence. Themistocles, on the other hand, shrank from the idea of abandoning the refugees in the island of Salamis, and he regarded the adjacent straits as the best position in which the Greeks could give battle. There, as in the channel of Eubœa, the narrow waters would do something to nullify the Persian advantage of numbers. For the Greeks, formed in several lines extending from shore to shore, could only be attacked by equal numbers. Only the leading ships of the attack would be in action at any given moment, and it would not matter how many hundred more were crowded behind them. With a column of spearmen on land the weight of the rearward ranks, formed in a serried phalanx, would force onward those in front. But with a column of ships formed in several successive lines in narrow waters any attempt of the rearward ships to press forward would mean confusion and disaster to themselves and those that formed the leading lines. This would have been true even of ships under sail, but in battle the war galleys were oar-driven, and as the ships jammed together there would be entangled oars, and rowers flung from their benches with broken heads and arms. Better discipline, more thorough fighting-power on the Greek side, would mean that the leading ships of their fleet would deal effectually with their nearest adversaries, while the rearward ships would rest upon their oars and plunge into the mêlée only where disaster to a leading ship left an opening.

A doubtful story says that Themistocles, foreseeing that if the battle was long delayed the Spartan party would carry their point and withdraw to the isthmus, ran the risk of sending a message to King Xerxes, urging him to attack at once, hinting at a defection of the Athenian fleet, and telling him that if he acted without delay the Greeks were at his mercy, and that they were so terrified that they were thinking chiefly of how they might escape.