The ancestral hero of Salamis was Aias (“Ajax”), the son of Telamon. Pausanias saw a stone near the harbour upon which Telamon sat, as it was said, looking after his children departing to join the Greek fleet at Aulis. When Aias fell upon his sword before Troy the hyacinth, according to the usual tale, sprang up inscribed with the exclamation of woe “Ai! ai!” the first syllable of his name. But, as Pausanias would have it, a local flower, different from the hyacinth, made its appearance in Salamis inscribed with the same letters. Ajax, as was to be expected, appeared and offered divine aid to the Greeks at the battle of Salamis. In his honour the “Aianteia” festival was celebrated, and the young Athenian ephebi used to go over annually to contend at Salamis in friendly rivalry with the Salaminian youth in foot-races and in boat-races resembling those rowed from Munychia to the Cantharus harbour in Piræus. In addition to the Ajax traditions, here, as elsewhere, other sagas were invented or reshaped to give personification to the remote past and to be handed down to satisfy the pride of succeeding generations. Solon was a more tangible memory, and Demosthenes, in speaking of his statue standing in the market-place of Salamis, quotes the Salaminians as saying: “This statue was set up not yet fifty years ago.” But the dominant memory evoked by the name of Salamis is, naturally, the defeat of the Persians in the narrow straits. For the Athenians everything was at stake. The wives and children who had not been sent to the Peloponnesus were on the island. Euripides, according to an enticing tradition, was born there at the time of the battle. Xerxes sat on his throne on the mainland to overawe disaffection and to watch the spectacle. He had no doubt as to the outcome. His fleet was numerous enough to allow him to detach the Egyptian squadron for guarding the narrow exit of the northwest channel and still to leave more ships than could be used for closing in the eastern approaches. The Greeks were thus hemmed in, and the unwilling allies from the Peloponnesus were forced to remain and give battle instead of withdrawing to the Isthmus. Themistocles, the great admiral, had his will. To-day, if one sails in a small boat across from Piræus to the harbour of the modern Ambelaki, the details of the battle as narrated by Æschylus and Herodotus explain themselves. The long, bare reef of Psyttaleia cumbers the entrance to the channel. The messenger, in the “Persians” of Æschylus, in describing to the Queen Mother the scene enacted on this tiny island, introduces Pan, the old ally at Marathon:— “An island lies before the shores of Salamis; ’Tis small, for ships a risky mooring, but its reef, Sea-swept, dance-loving Pan frequents.” Here Xerxes stationed a picked body of Persians to save their friends and to slay the Greeks escaping from the wreckage, which, it was plain to foresee, would come bearing down upon the reef.