Why was the battle of Salamis important to Greece?

Answer 1

It is chiefly Salamis's proximity to Athens that gave the island its importance in ancient Greek history. The island is located in the Saronic Gulf just off the coast of Greece near Athens. The most famous episode involving Salamis was during the 2nd Persian War in the Battle of Salamis. This was when Themistocles, one of the Athenian generals taking part in the allied resistance against the Persians, realized his city could not be saved from Persian attack. He convinced all the women, children and elderly of Athens to take refuge on the island of Salamis while the able-bodied men of Athens and many other Greek city-states took to ships (called triremes) and fought the Persians on the water instead of on land. The geography of the Saronic Gulf around Salamis helped to minimize the Persian's main advantage, the sheer number of troops and ships, and even the odds for the far fewer Greek fighters. So while the Persians were able to burn the city of Athens (making way for the Parthenon and many other famous buildings still present today), they were not able to defeat the Athenian people, partly because of the island of Salamis.

Answer 2

The Battle of Salamis was immortalized by the Ancient Greeks and became one of their most prized victories. However, there are no Ancient Persian sources on the battle whatsoever. It would seem, as John Curtis suggests, that the battle was largely over-exaggerated and meant far more to the Greeks than to the Persians.

Persia at that time was one of the world's first real "superpowers". They controlled a large amount of land from India and the Punjab in the East, to Egypt and the borders of Greece in the West. They had been rapidly expanding for the last three generations of Great kings.

Greece was grossly outnumbered during the whole campaign of the Graeco-Persian wars. Their defeat of the Persian forces under Darius and subsequently Xerxes was a largely unpredictable occurrence. Such a victory could only prove the might of Greece and could only be attributed to the fact that Greek gods were obviously more powerful than the Persians.

The naval battle of Salamis, along with the land combat at Marathon, were embedded into the national psyche. It inspired pride and nationalism within the people and promoted the unity within the Pan-Hellenistic era, although for the Persians, the outcome was proportionally.

Another View:

Its success removed the threat of the Persian fleet to the city-states of southern Greece, and allowed them to then send out their armies, which they had kept at home defending their cities, to combine and then defeat the Persian army. These defeats of this Persian invasion force on sea and land began the long effort to persuade the Persians to give up their ambitions to include all the Greek cities within their empire.