Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/145

Rh favour that policy and to predict destruction to Athens.

But Themistocles saw that the final result rested with the fleet. The wall across the isthmus would be of little service to the Peloponnesian states, if the huge flotilla of the king was free to sail round the coast and make descents wherever the leaders chose. If this fleet, however, was beaten or dispersed the land army would before long be crippled. The failure of provisions, the terror of being so far from home without the means of return afforded by the ships, he felt sure, would bring the invasion to an end. He therefore resolved to stake all on the navy, leaving an empty city on which the enemy might wreak his wrath; while he employed the Athenian ships in transporting the inhabitants of Athens to the Salamis, Troezen, and other neighbouring towns. The king's army duly occupied and destroyed the abandoned city, without any resistance except from a handful of men on the Acropolis, and his fleet arrived along the Attic coast, and could be seen stretching from Phalerum to Sunium. But this sacrifice would be all in vain if Themistocles could not persuade the Greek captains to keep the fleet together and engage the enemy where the confined space and narrow seas would deprive him of the advantage of his superior number of vessels. In fact it was by a trick that Themistocles finally secured that the battle should be fought where it was. At his instigation a secret message was sent to the king informing him that the Greek captains meant to elude him by sailing along the north of Salamis, through the narrow waters between that