The Daring Book for Girls - Andrea J. Buchanan [20]
Yet Artemisia was different from many ancient queens (and kings), whom we are told wanted only to battle. When Xerxes asked his general Mardonius to gather the commanders for counsel before storming Salamis, they all encouraged him to go ahead with the sea battle and assured him of victory. Except Artemisia. She warned Xerxes that the Greek ships were stronger than their own. She reminded him that he already held Greece’s mainland with Athens and had lost many troops at Thermopylae. She contradicted all the other commanders in advising him to quit while he was ahead.
Xerxes admired Artemisia, but he decided, fatefully, to go with the opinion of the majority. The battle went wrong—terribly wrong—as Artemisia had predicted. Battle’s end found the Persians watching from shore as their ships burned. Still, Artemisia kept her word to Xerxes and commanded her ship. She came under pursuit by an Athenian ship and faced a terrible decision either to be captured or to run into the Persian ships that were ahead of her.
Artemisia made the decision to save her crew, ramming one her allies’ ships and sinking it in the effort to escape from the Greek ship. Some have said that she had a longstanding grudge against its commander, King Damasithymos of Calyndia. The commander of the Greek vessel chasing her turned away, assuming perhaps she was a sister Greek ship, or even a deserter from the Persian navy. The Persians lost the battle at Salamis, all the men on the Calyndian ship died, but Artemisia and her crew escaped unharmed.
After that battle, Herodotus tells us, King Xerxes again sought advice from his commanders. And again all the commanders wanted to stay and fight for the Grecian islands, except Artemisia. Disagreeing with the group once more, the level-headed queen counseled Xerxes to consider another option: leave 300,000 soldiers behind to hold the mainland and return to Persia himself with the rest of his navy.
Artemisia reminded Xerxes for a second time that he had already torched Athens and taken the Greek city-states. It was enough. The king took Artemisia’s wisdom more seriously this time, knowing she had been right before. This time, he listened to the wise woman over the majority, choosing to leave a contingent of troops in Greece and turn toward home instead of battling.
And after that? Herodotus makes a brief mention of Artemisia ushering Xerxes’ sons from Greece to safety in the city of Ephesus, on the Turkish mainland. After that, we have no further information about Artemisia’s life. Herodotus concerns himself with describing the next battle, and the next, and because Artemisia declines to fight, she disappears from his pages.
A small vase provides our last evidence of Artemisia: a white jar, made of calcite, that is now at the British Museum. Xerxes gave the jar to Artemisia, a gift for her loyalty and service, and he inscribed it with his royal signature. Artemesia must have bequeathed the jar to her son, and from there, it stayed a family treasure for generations. One hundred years later, another member of her royal line, also named Artemisia, built a burial monument to her husband—the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. There, in the 1850s, the British archaeologist Charles Newton excavated Xerxes’ gift to the first Artemisia and uncovered the final trace of the wise queen.
Knots and Stitches
A GOOD KNOT assures that your boat will be there when you return, your tire swing will hold, and your dog won’t run into traffic. Here are a few useful knots with many everyday uses, and a few words on stitches, which come in handy for small repairs.
A piece of rope is all you need to begin. In each of our directions, “rope” means the stable or standing part of the rope. “End” refers to the part you are working with to make the knot, the working