Artemisia

The Persian Empire under King Xerxes in the year 480 B.C. was the Superpower of its day, a large confederation of city-states of widely divergent ethnicity. One of them, Halicarnassus, on the west coast of what is now Turkey, was ruled by Artemisia, who was such a canny strategist and so valiant in battle that Xerxes asked her to join his military council. When Xerxes ignored her advice not to engage in an unnecessary naval battle when Persia already had its armies in Greece, the ensuing debacle has gone down in history as one of the most important and decisive naval losses of all time. As Artemisia saw from her ship that the battle, indeed, was lost, she turned to escape and purposely rammed her ship full throttle into the side of one of her enemies’ ships, causing Xerxes to exclaim, “The men behaved like women, and the women like heroes!”