Of naval battles which exercised any marked influence upon public events, or changed dynasties, or the fate of nations, the first of which we have a full and definite description is the battle of Actium. But before proceeding to describe that most important and memorable engagement, we may look at two or three earlier sea fights which had great results, some details of which have come down to us. NAVAL BATTLES, ANCIENT AND MODERN. I. SALAMIS. B. C. 480. This great sea fight took place at the above date, between the fleet of Xerxes and that of the allied Greeks. Salamis is an island in the Gulf of Ægina, ten miles west of Athens. Its modern name is Kolouri. It is of about thirty square miles surface; mountainous, wooded, and very irregular in shape. It was in the channel between it and the main land that the great battle was fought. Xerxes, in the flush of youth, wielding immense power, and having boundless resources in men and money, determined to revenge upon the Greeks the defeat of the Persians, so many of whom had fallen, ten years before, at Marathon. After years of preparation, using all his resources and enlisting tributary powers, he marched northward, in all the pomp and circumstance of war, and laid a bridge of boats at the Hellespont, over which it took seven days for his army to pass. His fleet consisted of over 1200 fighting vessels and transports, and carried 240,000 men. Previous to the naval battle of which we are about to speak, he lost four hundred of his galleys in a violent storm; but still his fleet was immensely superior in number to that of the Greeks, who had strained every nerve to get together the navies of their independent States. Such leaders as Aristides and Themistocles formed a host in themselves, while the independent Greeks were, man for man and ship for ship, superior to the Persians and their allies. Of the Greek fleet the Athenians composed the right wing; the Spartans the left, opposed respectively to the Phenicians and the Ionians; while the Æginetans and Corinthians, with others, formed the Greek reserve. The day of the battle was a remarkably fair one, and we are told that, as the sun rose, the Persians, with one accord (both on sea and land, for there was a famous land battle as well on that day), prostrated themselves in worship of the orb of day. This was one of the oldest and greatest forms of worship ever known to man, and it still exists among the Parsees. It must have been a grand sight; for 240,000 men, in a thousand ships, and an immense force on the neighboring land, bowed down at once, in adoration. The Greeks, with the “canniness” which distinguished them in their dealings with both gods and men, sacrificed to all the gods, and especially to Zeus, or Jupiter, and to Poseidon, or Neptune.