Note 141 — Chapter VIII · ARTEMISIUM.

The manœuvre of the διέκπλους seems one of the most simple things in the world when it has been discovered. Yet in modern times it took the English sailors more than a century of hard fighting to find out its effectiveness. Thucydides, who knows what he is talking about in naval matters, certainly conveys the impression that it was an invention of his own time, or, at any rate, that it had, as a manœuvre, been gradually evolved within the period of the Pentekontaëtia. And yet, here we have it at Artemisium! Nay, more than that, fourteen years earlier, according to Herodotus, Dionysios of Phokæa was trying to teach it to those unappreciative Ionians at Ladé. It is probable that both in this passage and in the one relating to Ladé, Herodotus is guilty of an anachronism in attributing that manœuvre to the naval warfare of the first quarter of the fifth century. The term was probably much in men’s mouths at the time which he wrote, and, in his ignorance of naval matters, he assumed that the ruling idea in the sea tactics of his own day might be safely attributed to the previous generation. Compare also H. viii. 11 with Thuc. ii. 83, ad fin.