Evacuation Order Attributed to Themistocles (Troezen Decree Tradition)

As Persian columns moved through Boeotia toward Athens, the city chose to live afloat. A later inscription found at Troezen, the so‑called “Themistocles Decree,” lays out an evacuation: women and children away, the elderly to safer towns, fighting men to the ships and Salamis [21]. Its letters date to the 3rd century; scholars doubt it is a verbatim decree of 480. Yet the plan it records fits the facts and the strategy Themistocles pressed [21][22].

Authenticity is the quarry here. Epigraphers point to forms on the stone that do not match early fifth-century hands; others see an independent tradition captured later, possibly reflecting a public memory or a local copy [22]. Either way, the text mirrors the logic of the moment: save lives, preserve crews, and concentrate naval strength in the Saronic narrows. It is administration as strategy, writ in stone after the fact.

In Athens, the soundscape changed. Doors shut. The Agora thinned. At the Piraeus, and at the coastal towns of Phaleron and Mounichia, the noise rose: oar benches inspected, water casks loaded, children crying over the din. The color of the procession was not triumphal but practical—the sober whites and browns of bundles tied for flight. Across the straits, on Salamis, the olive groves would soon host camps and the hymns of men who had become sailors.

Place-names anchor the decision’s breadth: Troezen in the Argolid as refuge; Salamis as fortress in water; the Acropolis—soon to burn—as a symbol left behind to save the city’s core, its people and its fleet. Herodotus’ account of the “wooden walls” reading makes such an evacuation coherent: if ships are the bulwark, then the city must empty to man them [2]. The Troezen stone turns that logic into a civic program [21][22].

If the stone is later, the experience was immediate. Evacuation created the human basis for victory: 180 Athenian hulls filled with crews who knew their families were safe across the water [4]. It also set a pattern for later wars in the Aegean, where islands like Euboea and Aegina would serve as forward bases and havens for communities uprooted by sea-borne conflict.

By the time Xerxes reached the blackened Acropolis, the city had already moved to the sea. The policy that Herodotus attributes to Themistocles—fight by sea—found its administrative twin in evacuation. Strategy and bureaucracy aligned, whether in 480 or in the memory a century later [2][21][22].