The Battle of Salamis

The naval battle fought in the straits between the island of Salamis and the Attic coast in September 480 BCE, in which the combined Greek fleet, with Athens supplying the largest contingent under Themistocles's effective command, destroyed the numerically superior fleet of the Persian king Xerxes I. Coming weeks after the Persian sack of an evacuated Athens, the victory ended the immediate threat to the Greek mainland and is read in the Athenian tradition, following Herodotus, as the fulfillment of Delphi's oracular promise that a wooden wall, rightly understood as the fleet, would not fall, and that holy Salamis, named divine rather than accursed in the oracle's own wording, would bring destruction on the invaders rather than on Athens. Xerxes, who watched the battle from a throne set up on the mainland, withdrew the greater part of his army from Greece within the year, leaving a reduced force under Mardonius that was defeated the following year at Plataea.