Western civilisation does not have an official birthday. Not like Archbishop Ussher’s famous declaration that the creation of the world occurred in 4004 BC, on Saturday the 22nd of October, in the late evening.

If the West had a birthday, though, it would probably be the 22nd of September 480 BC—the traditional date for the ship-splintering battle of Salamis, which finally brought a curtain down on the bloodshed at Marathon and Thermopylae.

Suggesting that Salamis was the birth of the West will probably be unpopular in some quarters. “Kings and battles” are no longer the mainstay of history, and that is usually a good thing. Pirate queens and long-distance battle-runners are often far more interesting. But more of them later. Bear with me.

Despite the modern tendency to downplay the significance of battles, some are truly decisive and shape history just as much as the invention of the printing press or the discovery of antibiotics. When the Romans bulldozed Jerusalem off the face of the earth, when Tariq the Berber seized Spain for Islam, and when the RAF saw off Hitler and sent him to his doom in Russia, each of these unequivocally shaped the world that followed. The epic naval battle of Salamis may be less well known than these, but it was far more influential than any of them.