Rowing into history

ON WEDNESDAY, JUST OFF THE GREEK COAST, an extraordinary ship propelled by 170 sweaty rowers cut through the waters of the Port of Piraeus, bearing the Olympic torch toward the opening ceremonies of the 2004 games. She was Olympias, the world's only full-scale replica of the ancient Greek fighting ship called the trireme, the vessel that carried classical Athens to naval supremacy.

You could hardly ask for a better symbol of the proud Greek themes of democracy, athletic prowess, and martial skill. That's because nearly 2,500 years ago, in 480 B.C., not far from where the Olympias crew rowed this week, a fleet of 368 triremes annihilated a Persian flotilla nearly twice that size, dashing the foreign ships to driftwood with "their utterly ruinous rams," in the words of the great Greek dramatist Aeschylus, who may actually have been aboard one of the Greek triremes during the clash.

The battle of Salamis, named for the island on which the Greek army camped and the nearby straits where the ships fought, was the key encounter in the Greek war against the Persians. Had it gone the other way, Greek freedom would have perished and this week we might be watching the Istanbul Games.

"I like to say that Salamis is the Gettysburg of the Persian Wars," says Barry Strauss, professor of history and classics at Cornell and author of "The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter That Saved Greece and Western Civilization" (Simon and Schuster), a new account of the Greek triumph. "It doesn't end the war, but after Salamis it is extremely hard for the Persians to win, and the odds have turned in favor of the Greeks."

The battle was one of the greatest gatherings of humanity up to that point. Two hundred thousand warriors manned the ships on both sides at Salamis or watched from shore, waiting to kill survivors. Nearby Athens had been evacuated pending the outcome; the Persian King, Xerxes, watched the unfurling nightmare from a hilltop.Salamis is also one of the great examples of deception in warfare. Around Sept. 24, 480 B.C., the Greek commander Themistocles sent a slave to falsely leak word to the Persians that the Greeks planned to flee Salamis before dawn. The Persians roused themselves and rowed furiously to intercept the Greeks even though they'd already spent much of the night at sea. Themistocles got the battle he wanted all along, in the tight straights that nullified the Persian advantages in numbers.

Persian discipline fell apart, the wine-dark sea went red with Persian blood, and the Greeks struck at the survivors "with broken oars / And the fragments of shipwrecks and / They boned them like tuna or some catch of fish" (Aeschylus again).

Themistocles had deceived his allies, too. Many of them had hoped to retreat at some point and fight elsewhere. "It's very hard to run a coalition in wartime," says Strauss, an admirer of the Greek leader, duplicity and all. "Sometimes you have to present them with a fait accompli."A fractious democratic alliance fighting an implacable Eastern foe: sounds not unfamiliar. But while studying Greek warfare often seems to turn scholars into eager hawks on contemporary matters (think of the National Review writer Victor Davis Hanson and Yale's Donald Kagan), Strauss although he keeps his argument implicit clearly hopes to prompt reflection on the corruption of democracy by imperialism. For no sooner had Athens beat the Persians then she began acting as the thug of Greece, he writes. She became what she fought. "Salamis offered Athens the first taste of the temptation that it could not resist. . . . Athens was free and Greece would be enslaved. Democracy was saved and the Athenian empire was born." Democracies have wrestled with the deranging effects of their own military power down to this day.

As it happens, much of Strauss's knowledge of triremes derives from Olympias, the ship that bore the torch this week. Created from descriptions in Greek texts (since no triremes survive) in a collaboration between the Greek navy and British classicists and naval architects, she first went to sea in 1987 and will now be retired. She will spend the rest of her days in a naval museum near the Port of Piraeus.

The ancient games did not include a crew competition; rowing was for the lower classes. Yet the Olympic ideal shaped the men at Salamis. Like other classicists, Strauss an amateur rower himself, who recounted his midlife conversion to the sport in the 1999 memoir "Rowing Against the Current" says the ancient Olympic ideal bore almost no relation to its modern, fuzzy, we-are-the-world incarnation.

Xerxes himself had thought the Greeks must be unmanly (not to mention poor) because they gave their Olympic victors laurels, not precious metals. He learned a different lesson at Salamis. If Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, then Salamis, Strauss writes, was won in part on the bloody fields of Olympia.

Christopher Shea's column appears in Ideas biweekly. E-mail: critical.faculties@verizon.net.