Artemisia I of Halicarnassus

Artemisia I ruled Halicarnassus, a Dorian Greek city on the Carian coast of south-western Anatolia, together with the neighbouring towns of Cos, Nisyros and Calydna, as a subject-dynast of the Achaemenid King at the time of Xerxes' invasion of Greece in 480 BCE. She is one of the most vivid figures in the whole Greek record of the Persian wars, and almost everything known of her comes from a single source who was her fellow townsman, Herodotus of Halicarnassus. That coincidence governs the entry. She is at once a genuine historical person, a Carian queen who commanded ships at Salamis, and a figure worked up by a great writer whose home city she had ruled, into whose mouth he puts the campaign's shrewdest counsel and around whom he stages some of his heaviest points about Persian kingship and Persian manhood. To read Artemisia is therefore to do in miniature what this compendium does throughout: to weigh a rich and partisan Greek narrative for the real subject-dynast behind it, and to notice that the subject in this case was a woman, a Greek, and a servant of the King all at once.

The Lygdamid dynasty of Halicarnassus

Artemisia belonged to the ruling family of Halicarnassus, the Lygdamids, one of the many local dynasties through which the Achaemenid empire held its Anatolian coastlands. Herodotus gives her pedigree in the one passage where he introduces her, and it is worth quoting whole, because it is the fullest thing we have and because its tone, admiring and proprietary at once, colours all that follows:

"Of the rest of the officers I make no mention by the way (since I am not bound to do so), but only of Artemisia, at whom I marvel most that she joined the expedition against Hellas, being a woman; for after her husband died, she holding the power herself, although she had a son who was a young man, went on the expedition impelled by high spirit and manly courage, no necessity being laid upon her. Now her name, as I said, was Artemisia and she was the daughter of Lygdamis, and by descent she was of Halicarnassos on the side of her father, but of Crete by her mother. She was ruler of the men of Halicarnassos and Cos and Nisyros and Calydna, furnishing five ships." (Herodotus 7.99, trans. Macaulay)^[1]

Several facts of her position sit inside this sentence. She ruled as a widow, in her own name, though she had a grown son (later sources name him Pisindelis) who might have ruled instead; her authority was thus personal, not merely a regency. Her house was of mixed descent, Dorian Greek on her father's side, Cretan on her mother's, in a city that was itself a Dorian colony set on Carian land, so that "Greek" and "Carian" are not clean alternatives in her case but overlaid identities. And she governed not a single town but a small cluster of them, Halicarnassus with its island dependencies, exactly the kind of sub-dynastic holding out of which the empire's Carian levy was built. The reference-standard treatment of the region notes that the family of Artemisia at Halicarnassus is among the best-documented of these local dynastic houses, holding power across several generations, and cites precisely this Herodotean material as the evidence.^[2]

Caria under the King, and the making of a naval levy

Halicarnassus lay in Caria, which the Achaemenids governed first as part of the great satrapy of Sparda (Lydia), administered from Sardis, and only much later, under the Hecatomnid dynasty of the fourth century, as a satrapy in its own right.^[2] In Artemisia's day Caria was not a unitary province but a patchwork of small principalities, each under its own dynast, loosely gathered under the satrap at Sardis. Pierre Briant uses her to illustrate exactly how the empire's tribute and military obligations were devolved through such local rulers. The Carians as a whole were assessed, in Herodotus' list, within the second tribute-district; the burden of ships was then parcelled out among the individual dynasts, and Herodotus' "personal interest in Artemisia, the queen of Halicarnassus, affords us an interesting detail": she was required to provide five of the seventy ships the Carians owed to Xerxes.^[3] The number is small, five ships out of a fleet the Greek sources numbered in the hundreds, and it is the measure of her actual weight in the campaign. What makes her loom so large in the narrative is not her force but Herodotus' attention.

The five ships were reputed the best in the fleet after the Sidonians'. Herodotus says so directly, and Briant notes that hers were the only ships whose quality the historian rates as comparable to the famous Phoenician vessels of Sidon.^[3] The compliment is real, but it is also of a piece with the local pride that runs through the whole Artemisia material: the Halicarnassian historian gives his home city's queen the finest squadron on her side of the water.

A woman in command, in the King's service

The first thing the Greek tradition found remarkable about Artemisia is the first thing this compendium should hold onto: she was a woman exercising power and, more unusually still, military command, in an ancient Mediterranean world where both were overwhelmingly male preserves. Herodotus frames her participation as a marvel and attributes it to "high spirit and manly courage," a phrase that already tells us how the fact was to be understood, as a woman crossing into a man's role. The Persian empire itself gave real scope to royal and noble women, who held estates, commanded workforces and travelled with the court, as the Persepolis administrative tablets show for the King's own wives and daughters; but a woman leading warships was exceptional even by that standard, and Herodotus treats it as such.

The deeper point for the empire is the second one: the command was in the King's service. Artemisia fought for Xerxes, against the Greeks of the mainland, and she did so as a loyal client whose ships, counsel and person were at the King's disposal. She is thus a standing refutation of the tidy opposition the later tradition drew between free Greeks and enslaved Persians. On the losing side at Salamis, by the Greek reckoning, were large numbers of Greeks, the Ionians and Dorians of the empire's Aegean coast, and their most celebrated captain was a Greek-speaking queen. When the Athenians later set a special price on her head, Herodotus says, it was precisely because they could not endure that a woman should sail in arms against Athens (8.93); the outrage was double, at her sex and at her siding with the King, and both halves of it dissolve the simple ethnic frame.

The wise adviser: the counsel against Salamis

Herodotus casts Artemisia in one of his favourite narrative roles, the "tragic warner" or wise adviser whose sound counsel a doomed king fails to heed. On the eve of Salamis, when Xerxes sends his general Mardonius round the assembled client-rulers at Phaleron to canvass their views on giving battle by sea, every commander urges a sea-fight except Artemisia, who alone speaks against it, and whose speech is a clear-eyed reading of the fleet's real weakness, its dependence on unreliable subject navies:

"Spare thy ships and do not make a sea-fight; for the men are as much stronger than thy men by sea, as men are stronger than women. And why must thou needs run the risk of sea-battles? Hast thou not Athens in thy possession, for the sake of which thou didst set forth on thy march, and also the rest of Hellas?... thou, who art of all men the best, hast bad servants, namely those who are reckoned as allies, Egyptians and Cyprians and Kilikians and Pamphylians, in whom there is no profit." (Herodotus 8.68, trans. Macaulay)^[1]

Her advice is to keep the ships by the shore, advance the land army on the Peloponnese, and let the Greek coalition, short of supplies and pulled apart by the separate interests of its cities, dissolve of itself. The King, Herodotus says, was delighted with her opinion and thought the more of her for it, but followed the majority and fought, reasoning that his men had held back off Euboea only because he had not been watching, and that now "he had made himself ready to look on while they fought a sea-battle" (8.69). The counsel was, in the event, correct, and the disaster she predicted followed.

The scene is superb narrative and dubious history. The most recent study of the campaign from the Persian side, John Hyland's, reads the Phaleron council not as a real war-council at all but as a piece of imperial stagecraft, a ritual enactment of the relationship between the King and his clients through their voiced obedience, "not designed to elicit actual advice on the decision to fight."^[4] Xerxes did not himself speak; he had Mardonius put the question, and the rulers answered through interpreters in Phoenician, Greek, Carian, Lycian and more, the multiplicity of tongues itself a display of the empire's reach. Into this ceremony Herodotus inserts Artemisia "as a straight-talking warner whose advice against battle is ignored, despite Xerxes's condescending approval of her independence of opinion," and Hyland judges the historicity of her opposition at this moment "questionable, and irrelevant to the point of the actual event."^[4] Briant, more willing to grant a kernel, observes that if the local chiefs including Artemisia were consulted at all, it was for their genuine expertise in seafaring, while responsibility for strategy rested with the King alone.^[5] Either way the speech as we have it is Herodotus' composition, and its function in his design, the lone voice of prudence overridden by a King who must fight because he must be seen to fight, is plain.

The ramming at Salamis and "my men have become women"

In the battle itself Artemisia is the subject of the single most famous anecdote of the day, and the one that best shows how Herodotus can preserve a vivid particular and load it with meaning at once. Pursued by an Athenian ship and unable to flee, because friendly ships blocked her way, she drove her own vessel at a ship of her own side, a Calyndian ship carrying the king Damasithymos, and sank it. Herodotus tells it with open uncertainty about her motive:

"While she was being pursued by the Athenian ship she charged with full career against a ship of her own side manned by Calyndians and in which the king of the Calyndians Damasithymos was embarked. Now, even though it be true that she had had some strife with him before, while they were still about the Hellespont, yet I am not able to say whether she did this by intention, or whether the Calyndian ship happened by chance to fall in her way." (Herodotus 8.87, trans. Macaulay)^[1]

The manoeuvre saved her twice over. The Athenian captain, seeing her ram a ship crewed by "Barbarians," took her for a Greek or a deserter and turned away; and no one of the sunk ship's company survived to accuse her. Xerxes, watching from the shore and told that the ship she had sunk was an enemy's, is made to utter the line the tradition kept above all others:

"And Xerxes in answer to that which was said to him is reported to have uttered these words: 'My men have become women, and my women men.' Thus it is said that Xerxes spoke." (Herodotus 8.88, trans. Macaulay)^[1]

The episode is a small masterpiece of double-edged storytelling. Read one way it is praise, and the King's own tribute raises Artemisia "higher than ever in Xerxes' esteem," as Briant renders the sense of the passage.^[3] Read another way it is a devastating stroke against Persian kingship: the King is shown gulled, congratulating the destruction of one of his own client's ships as a feat of arms because he cannot see what happened and no witness lives to tell him, and the famous gender-reversal line, which seems to honour Artemisia, in fact completes a running Herodotean insinuation that the King's men were no men. Hyland points out that the line "reinforcing Herodotus's earlier denial of Persian soldiers' masculinity at Thermopylai," where the historian had already unmanned the King's troops; the compliment to the woman is the corollary of an insult to the men.^[6] That Artemisia should secure her escape by killing a fellow vassal and his whole crew also feeds Herodotus' theme of dissension within the King's fleet, the contingents turning on one another, which he sets against the Achaemenid ideal of subjects united in common obedience.^[6] The anecdote is, in short, at least three things at once: a genuine tradition about a Carian queen's conduct in the battle, a piece of Halicarnassian local pride, and a weapon in Herodotus' larger argument about the King. It cannot be read flat.

The second counsel: withdraw and leave Mardonius

After the defeat Herodotus brings Artemisia back for a second turn as adviser, and this time the King takes her counsel. Mardonius has offered to stay in Greece with a picked force and finish the conquest while Xerxes withdraws; the King, uncertain, sends away all his other advisers and asks Artemisia alone, "because at the former time she alone had showed herself to have perception of that which ought to be done" (8.101). Her reply is a cool calculation of royal risk and royal credit:

"It seems good to me at the present that thou shouldest retire back and leave Mardonios here, if he desires it and undertakes to do this... for on the one hand if he subdue those whom he says that he desires to subdue... the deed will after all be thine, master, seeing that thy slaves achieved it: and on the other hand if the opposite shall come to pass of that which Mardonios intends, it will be no great misfortune, seeing that thou wilt thyself remain safe." (Herodotus 8.102, trans. Macaulay)^[1]

Victory won by the general would redound to the King who sent him; defeat would fall on the general alone. Xerxes is "greatly delighted, since she succeeded in saying that very thing which he himself was meaning to do" (8.103), and the course she recommends is the one actually taken. The logic she voices is, in fact, sound Achaemenid strategy, and Hyland notes that Herodotus makes Artemisia articulate "the critical point, also implicit in Bisotun's depiction of military delegation, that victory belonged to the king, whereas failure attached itself to the general alone."^[7] Here the historiographical lesson runs the other way from the mockery of the ramming scene: Herodotus, in the same pages where he paints the King as a weeping fool, puts a genuinely correct royal calculation into the mouth of his Carian queen. The facts and analysis are often reliable; the frame around them, the King unmanned and undone, is the part to distrust.

After the battle: guardian of the King's children

Artemisia's last appearance in Herodotus is a mark of the King's trust. As Xerxes prepared his own return to Asia, he entrusted to her the safe conduct of his illegitimate sons, who had accompanied the army, sending her to bring them to Ephesus:

"He commended Artemisia therefore and sent her away to conduct his sons to Ephesos, for there were certain bastard sons of his which accompanied him." (Herodotus 8.103, trans. Macaulay)^[1]

The children travelled under the care of the eunuch Hermotimus of Pedasa, "in the estimation of the king second to none of the eunuchs" (8.104), who was presumably their regular tutor; Artemisia's role was the honour of escort, a public sign of the King's favour.^[8] Beyond this the sources fall silent. Herodotus says nothing of her afterwards, and Briant, reviewing the meagre later evidence, concludes only that "it is clear that she remained the king's faithful ally, since he made her the guardian of his illegitimate sons," and notes a potsherd from Halicarnassus inscribed with the name of Xerxes as "Great King" that suggests the city's ties to Persia were not loosened after the war, though he cautions that the evidence is slight.^[9] The later stories of her end, in particular a romantic tale that she threw herself from a cliff for unrequited love, come from much later and unreliable authors and have no claim on history.

Herodotus and his queen: the source problem

Every serious account of Artemisia has to reckon with the fact that our whole picture of her is drawn by a man from the city she ruled. Herodotus was born at Halicarnassus, probably within a generation of the events, when the Lygdamid house, or its successors, still governed there; his own relation to that dynasty was not simple (a tradition in the Suda makes him an opponent of the later tyrant Lygdamis, a descendant of Artemisia's line, and an exile from the city). The material bears the stamp of this closeness at every point. Artemisia receives more space and more admiration than her five ships can explain; she is given the finest squadron after Sidon, the shrewdest counsel in the fleet, and the two great set-piece speeches; and the anecdotes about her, the ramming, the King's line, the price on her head, are exactly the kind of memorable local lore a Halicarnassian historian would have grown up hearing. Modern readers have long debated how to take this. Some read it as straightforward pride in a famous compatriot; others, noticing how thoroughly the Artemisia scenes serve Herodotus' larger polemic against Persian kingship and manhood, read her as in part a literary instrument, the wise woman whose very competence shames the King's men. The truth is probably that both are present at once, and cannot now be separated: a real Carian queen, remembered with local pride, and shaped in the telling to the needs of a Greek argument about the war. What is not in doubt is the outline, a widowed dynast of Halicarnassus who ruled a small Carian and Dorian domain, owed the King five ships, brought them to Salamis, and fought. Around that spare fact the sources have built a portrait we cannot fully verify and cannot wholly discount.

Artemisia I and Artemisia II: a persistent confusion

One correction to the received view is a matter of simple identity, and it must be stated plainly because the error is old and common. There were two famous queens of Halicarnassus named Artemisia, and they are frequently run together. Artemisia I, the subject of this entry, ruled about 480 BCE and fought at Salamis. Artemisia II lived more than a century and a half later, in the fourth century BCE, and was the wife and sister of the Hecatomnid satrap Mausolus of Caria; on his death about 353 BCE she completed the vast tomb at Halicarnassus that took his name, the Mausoleum, counted among the seven wonders of the ancient world, and she is remembered in the Greek tradition for her grief (she was said to have mixed his ashes in her drink) and for a brief, war-torn reign of her own before her death about 351. The two are entirely distinct: different centuries, different dynasties (Lygdamid and Hecatomnid), different deeds. The confusion is easy to make and easy to find; even the reference-standard Encyclopaedia Iranica entry on Halicarnassus, when it names "Artemisia," means the Mausoleum-builder, Artemisia II, and does not treat the Salamis queen at all.^[10] Anyone consulting the sources on "Artemisia of Halicarnassus" must therefore check which queen is meant. This compendium's Artemisia is the earlier one, the naval commander of 480, and the later queen belongs to a different chapter of Carian history under a different Achaemenid arrangement, the Hecatomnid satrapy.

Why she matters

Artemisia I is a small figure in the events of 480, five ships in a fleet of hundreds, a client-ruler of one Carian city, absent from the record before and after her single campaign. She matters out of all proportion to that, for three reasons this compendium keeps returning to. She shows a woman holding real power and command inside the Achaemenid world, and being thought remarkable for it even by those who admired her. She shows a Greek fighting loyally for the Great King, one of the many whose existence makes nonsense of a war of "Greeks against Persians" and reveals instead an empire whose subjects included Greeks who served it well. And she shows, more clearly than almost any other figure, how the Greek sources work: how a real person can reach us only through a writer who had every reason to shape her, given the finest ships and the wisest words and the most memorable deeds, so that we admire exactly the portrait we must learn to distrust. To study Artemisia is to hold a genuine Carian queen and a Herodotean creation in the same hand, and to keep them from collapsing into one.