Artemisia I of Caria

Any account of the Artemisia I of Caria biography has to begin with the city that shaped her: Halicarnassus, a Dorian Greek settlement on the southwestern coast of Asia Minor, in the region the Greeks called Caria. By the late sixth century BCE the city sat inside the Achaemenid Persian Empire, governed by local dynasts who answered to the Great King rather than by Persian officials sent from the imperial heartland ^[1].

Herodotus records that her father was Lygdamis of Halicarnassus and that her mother came from Crete, which gave Artemisia a mixed Carian and Greek ancestry typical of the coastal cities of Anatolia ^[1]. Nothing reliable survives about her childhood. The historian who preserved her story was born in the same city a generation or so later, and his family may well have known people who remembered her, yet even he passes over her early years in silence ^[2].

Her name honoured Artemis, the goddess widely worshipped in western Anatolia. The date of her birth is not recorded; scholars can only place her adult career in the first decades of the fifth century BCE, around the year 500 and the period that followed ^[3].

Artemisia came to rule through widowhood. Her husband, whose name no ancient source preserves, held the tyranny of Halicarnassus under Persian overlordship, and when he died she took the throne herself rather than yielding it to a regent, even though she had a grown or nearly grown son ^[1]. Herodotus found this remarkable enough to state it plainly: she held power although her son was of age, and she went to war out of spirit and daring, under no compulsion at all ^[1].

Her realm was small but strategically useful. Besides Halicarnassus itself she governed the islands of Kos, Nisyros and Kalymnos, which sit in the sea lanes between the Anatolian coast and the Aegean ^[2]. A ruler in that position controlled harbours, timber, sailors and local knowledge of difficult waters, assets the Persian navy depended on since Persia itself had no seafaring tradition of its own.

As a client tyrant she owed the Great King tribute and military service. When Xerxes began assembling forces for his invasion of Greece after 486 BCE, the coastal dynasts of Caria were expected to contribute ships and to sail with them. Artemisia did both, and did so in person ^[1].

In 480 BCE Xerxes moved against Greece with an army and fleet drawn from across his empire. Artemisia joined the naval arm with five ships, a modest squadron beside the contributions of Phoenicia or Egypt, yet Herodotus writes that after the Sidonian vessels hers were the most renowned in the entire fleet ^[1]. Her ships fought at Artemisium, the series of engagements off northern Euboea fought in the same days as the land battle at Thermopylae ^[2].

The Greeks took particular offence at her presence. The commanders at Salamis reportedly offered a prize of ten thousand drachmas to whoever captured her alive, considering it intolerable that a woman should bear arms against Athens ^[1]. No one ever collected the reward.

Her standing with Xerxes rested on more than her ships. Before the battle of Salamis the king canvassed his commanders, through his general Mardonius, on whether to force a naval engagement. Every other adviser urged battle. Artemisia alone argued against it, telling Xerxes that his fleet had nothing to gain from fighting in the narrow strait, that the Greeks were far superior at sea, and that he could win by waiting: hold the fleet back, advance on the Peloponnese by land, and the Greek alliance would splinter on its own ^[1]. Herodotus adds that her friends feared the king would punish such frankness, while her rivals hoped for exactly that. Instead Xerxes praised her more than ever, though he followed the majority and ordered the attack ^[1].

The battle fought in the strait of Salamis in late September 480 BCE went as Artemisia had predicted. The heavier Persian fleet crowded into confined water where its numbers became a liability, and the Greek triremes broke it ^[2]. Artemisia's own escape from the wreckage of the battle became the most famous, and most debated, episode of her life.

As Herodotus tells it, an Athenian trireme was bearing down on her ship, and with friendly vessels blocking any path forward she chose a desperate expedient: she rammed and sank a ship on her own side, a vessel from Calynda commanded by its king Damasithymus ^[1]. The pursuing Athenian captain, concluding that her ship must be Greek or a defector, broke off the chase. No one aboard the Calyndian ship survived to accuse her. Herodotus, who reports the story with visible fascination, remarks that he could not say whether she had a private quarrel with Damasithymus or struck him simply because he was in the way ^[1].

Xerxes, watching from the shore, was told that Artemisia had sunk an enemy vessel, and the mistake worked entirely in her favour. Herodotus attributes to the king the observation that his men had become women and his women men ^[1]. Whatever the exact words spoken that day, the remark preserved the queen's reputation for the next two and a half thousand years.

Defeat at Salamis forced Xerxes to reconsider the whole campaign, and once again he sought Artemisia's opinion, this time privately. Mardonius had offered to stay behind with a picked army and finish the conquest while the king returned home. Artemisia advised Xerxes to accept: if Mardonius succeeded the credit would belong to the king, and if he failed the loss would fall on a subordinate, while Xerxes and his house would remain safe ^[1]. The king took her advice, and Herodotus adds that he entrusted her with escorting some of his sons to Ephesus on the Anatolian coast ^[1].

With that voyage she disappears from reliable history. Herodotus, writing within living memory of the war, says nothing about her later years or death. A much later and far less trustworthy tradition, preserved in the second century CE writer Ptolemy Hephaestion and repeated by the Byzantine scholar Photius, claims she fell in love with a man named Dardanus of Abydos and leapt from a cliff on the island of Leucas when he rejected her. Modern historians treat this as romantic legend rather than fact ^[3].

Her dynasty outlived her. Her descendants continued to rule Halicarnassus under Persian authority; her grandson Lygdamis II held the tyranny in the mid fifth century BCE, during the years when the young Herodotus lived in the city ^[2]. A later ruler of the same Carian dynastic world, Artemisia II, who built the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus with her husband Mausolus in the fourth century BCE, is often confused with her but was a separate person living well over a century afterwards ^[4].

Anyone asking who was Artemisia I of Caria is really asking about Herodotus, because nearly everything known about her comes from his Histories, written a few decades after Salamis by a fellow citizen of Halicarnassus ^[1]. His portrait is strikingly warm for an enemy commander: brave, shrewd, candid with a king who rarely heard honest counsel. Some scholars suspect local patriotism coloured the account, yet no ancient source contradicts its outline ^[2].

Later writers added their own touches. The second century CE author Polyaenus included her in his Stratagems, crediting her with carrying both Greek and Persian standards aboard ship and flying whichever suited the moment, and with capturing the town of Latmus by staging a religious festival to lure the defenders out ^[5]. These anecdotes, written six centuries after her death, say more about her reputation for cunning than about verifiable events.

Among the durable Artemisia I of Caria facts is a small archaeological one: a calcite jar found in the ruins of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus carries the cartouche of the Egyptian pharaoh Xerxes ruled as successor, inscribed with the name of Xerxes in Egyptian and Old Persian, and many scholars read it as a royal gift that passed down through the Carian dynasty, possibly through Artemisia herself; the vessel is now in the British Museum ^[4]. Her modern afterlife has been vigorous. She appears in histories of women in warfare, in Joyce Salisbury's reference work on ancient women, and, heavily fictionalised, in the 2014 film 300: Rise of an Empire ^[3]. The list of Artemisia I of Caria achievements remains short and solid: she ruled a city and three islands in her own right, commanded a squadron in one of antiquity's decisive wars, gave a king advice that events proved correct, and talked her way out of a battle that destroyed the fleet around her ^[1].