SEEING the size and splendour of the Persian fleet, some Greeks quailed and were preparing to desert until a daring Athenian, Aristides, broke through enemy lines to warn them that the Persians had cut off all escape from the Strait of Salamis.
Themistocles took Aristides aside, and confessed to deliberately leaking details of his position so Xerxes would bottle up the deserters; besides, a close fight in the Strait was what he wanted, as he forecast a stiff breeze to come and play havoc with the Persians’ clutter of clumsy, top-heavy galleys. Aristides listened in awe. Xerxes meanwhile seated himself comfortably on a golden throne overlooking the Strait,* but watched in horror as amid frenzied fighting and windswept seas two hundred Persian ships sank, five times the Greeks’ losses. Evening confirmed the utter ruin of his fleet, and his campaign.
Greek spies now spread another fairytale, whispering that Themistocles was preparing to demolish Xerxes’s bridge over the Hellespont.* The panic-stricken barbarian beat a hasty retreat across it with his dispirited army, and never returned.
On Mount Aigaleo, a short distance northwest of Athens and with a commanding view of the Strait of Salamis, which lies some six miles from the peak. See A view of Mount Aigaleo looking across to the hill from the Erechtheon on the north side of the Acropolis in Athens.
Plutarch tells us that at first this was a serious proposal, but Aristides urged that far from destroying the bridge ‘we ought rather, if possible, at once to build another, and send the man out of Europe as quickly as possible.’ Themistocles then dreamt up this bluff as a ruse to hurry the Persian king away.