On Strategy and Oracles, 480/79

Extract

On the basis of Labarbe's new arguments in favour of July 21st rather than August 19th as the date of the full moon occurring about the time of the Thermopylae campaign, which involves our acceptance of a gap of something like five weeks between the Persian arrival in Attica and the battle of Salamis, R. Sealey has recently revived (Hermes xci (1963) 376–7) Munro's view that the Greeks had placed a regular garrison on the Acropolis in 480, so enabling it to hold out against the Persian assault for a considerable period and delaying any further military or naval operations. The validity of Labarbe's arguments has now been challenged by C. Hignett, Xerxes' Invasion of Greece, 449–51 (cf. A. R. Burn, Persia and the Greeks, 403–5), who also meets, 212 f., most of the arguments originally put forward in support of the same thesis by Bury (CR × 1896). Hignett himself explains the delay before Salamis, on his view a delay of some three weeks, in terms of the unwillingness of the Persians to enter the Salamis strait, coupled with their recognition that it was impossible to by-pass it. The Acropolis is held to have resisted, rightly I believe, for only a few days, a resistance to be explained by its natural strength rather than because of any garrison placed upon it. The dismay attributed to the Greeks by Herodotus (viii 56) upon the news of the fall of the Acropolis, however, still appears to Hignett a difficulty needing explanation and he suggests that Herodotus' emphasis upon it may be no more than a transitional device leading up to the next act of the drama (203).