tack. 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 Euboean 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 Euboea. 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 Euboea, 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