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 melee 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. Herodotus tells of a council of war of the Persian leaders at
which the fighting Queen Artemisia stood alone in advising delay. She told
the King that in overrunning northern Greece he had done enough for one
campaign. Let him settle down for winter quarters in Attica and he would
see the Greek armament, already divided by jealousies and quarrels, break
up and disperse. He could then prepare quietly for the conquest of the
Peloponnesus in the spring. But Xerxes was more flattered by the opinion of
the satraps who told him that he had only to stretch out his hands to
destroy the Greek fleet and make himself undisputed master of the sea. And,
just as Themistocles was despairing of being able to keep the fleet at
Salamis, news came that the Persians had decided to attack. The news was
brought by Aristides, the son of Lysimachus, who had been unjustly exiled
from Athens some years before, but now in the moment of his country's
danger ran the blockade of the Persians in a ship of AEgina, and came to