Topic: wars (2)

• PersonArtemisia I of Halicarnassus

  The queen of Halicarnassus and its dependent Carian and Dorian towns at the time of [[xerxes-invasion-of-greece|Xerxes' invasion of Greece]], a widow ruling in her own right who brought five ships to the King's fleet and fought at [[the-battle-of-salamis|Salamis]] in 480 BCE. She matters to this compendium as a triple lens on the empire and its sources. She is a woman wielding power and naval command in the King's service, at a time and in a world where that was remarkable enough for [[herodotus|Herodotus]] to say he marvelled at it. She is a subject Greek-and-Carian dynast fighting *for* the Great King, so that the "Persians against Greeks" frame collapses yet again: the most conspicuous captain in Herodotus' account of the Persian fleet is a Greek-speaking queen from the historian's own city. And she is the sharpest single case in the whole subject of source-bias, because Herodotus is her fellow Halicarnassian and shapes her at every turn: he gives her the "wise adviser" role who counsels against Salamis, reports the King's line that "my men have become women, and my women men," and tells the ambiguous story of her ramming a friendly ship to escape. How much of this is memory and how much Herodotean design is the question the entry keeps open. She should not be confused with Artemisia II, the builder of the Mausoleum, a different Halicarnassian queen more than a century later.

• EventThe Battle of Salamis (480 BCE)

  The naval defeat of Xerxes' fleet in the straits between Attica and the island of Salamis, on a day near the end of September 480 BCE, watched by the King from a throne on the shore. It is the most famous single engagement of the Achaemenid wars against the Greeks, and one of the sharpest tests in this compendium of a rule taken almost entirely from the losers' enemies: our two witnesses are both Greek and both triumphal, Aeschylus' Persae (staged in Athens only eight years after, the earliest account of any Persian event by a contemporary) and Herodotus, with no Persian narrative surviving at all. The fleet that lost was not 'Persian' but the empire's subject navies, Phoenician, Egyptian, Cypriot, Cilician and Ionian Greek; the defeat did not end the war, which ran on a further year to Plataea and Mycale; and what Salamis broke was less the King's army than the image of a king who ruled the sea.