In the great strait that runs along the east coast of Attica, ship-to-ship actions went on for three days, dawn to dusk. The Persians had what must have seemed an unlimited number of warships, but the Greeks were better motivated, with free citizens as rowers, men who had families in Athens.

When Leonidas was finally killed, the Persian land army surged through the pass. It was only then that Themistocles made his extraordinary decision – to pull back and evacuate Athens. The Spartan navarch, Eurybiades, wanted to pull the fleet right to the Peloponnese, but Themistocles overruled him, saying if he did, it would be without the Athenian ships. In bending the Spartan to his will, Themistocles kept the fleet together. Pericles, son of Xanthippus and Agariste, was part of that mass movement of people to the island of Salamis, the boy aged around fifteen. It would have been a memory that stayed with him his entire life.

In the evacuation, crews rowed themselves to exhaustion, back and forth, crammed each time with fearful women and children. They managed it, but when the Persian fleet appeared, the Greek galleys remained to finish the job – stuck in the narrow strait by Salamis, once again denied the open sea they desperately needed to manoeuvre. On the land, visible to all, they saw the plume of smoke that meant the Persian army had begun to burn Athens to the ground.

Hope died, but Themistocles was there. It is rare to be able to say one man saved a country, on one day. In the case of Themistocles, that is the simple truth – as I’ll describe in the next book.

Conn Iggulden, London, 2019

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First published 2020

Copyright © Conn Iggulden, 2020

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover images: shield © Getty Images and © Charlotte Day; soldiers and back cover helmet © Ancient Hoplitikon of Melb. Inc.
Retouching by Lee Gibbons
Inside cover: © Bridgeman Images

ISBN: 978-1-405-93737-5

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