those who
manned the Ionian and Phoenician squadrons the crews of the Persian fleet
were much less at home on the sea than the Greeks. And we know from the
result of many battles, from Marathon to the victories of Alexander, that
on land the Greek was a better fighting man than the Asiatic. The soldiers
of the "Great King," inferior in fighting-power even on the land, would
therefore find themselves doubly handicapped by having to fight on the
narrow platforms floating on an unfamiliar element, and the sight of ships
being sunk and their crews drowned would tend to produce panic among them.
So the Greek wedge forced itself further and further into the mass of
hostile ships, and in the narrow waters numbers could not tell. The Greeks
were never at any given moment engaged with a superior force in actual
hand-to-hand conflict, and they had sufficient ships behind them to make
good any local losses. Such a battle could have only one result.

All order had been lost in the Persian fleet at an early stage of the
fight. The rearward squadrons had pressed into the strait, and finding that
in the crowded waters they were endangering each other without being able
to take any effective part in the battle they began to draw off, and the
foremost ships, pressed back by the Greek attack, began to follow them
towards the open water. The whole mingled mass of the battle was drifting
eastward. The movement left the island of Psytalia unprotected by the
Asiatic fleet, and Aristides, the Athenian, who had been watching the fight
from the shore of Salamis, embarked a force of spearmen on some light
vessels, ferried them across to Psytalia and attacked its Persian garrison.
They made a poor show of resistance, and to a man they were speared or
flung over the rocks into the sea. The poet AEschylus, who was fighting as a
soldier on one of the Athenian triremes, told afterwards, not in pity, but
rejoicing at the destruction of his country's enemies, how the cries of the
massacred garrison of Psytalia were heard above the din of the battle and
increased the growing panic of the Persians.

Even those who had fought best in the Asiatic armada were now losing heart
and taking to flight. Queen Artemisia, with her five galleys of
Halicarnassus, had fought in the front line among the ships of the Ionian
squadron. She was now working her way out of the melee, and in the
confusion rammed and sank a Persian warship. Xerxes, watching the fight
from his