Case file · High strangeness
The dust cloud and the cry of Iacchus before Salamis
Herodotus (8.65) records that two exiles with the Persian army saw a dust cloud 'as of 30,000 men' rise from Eleusis and heard the mystic cry of Iacchus, days before the battle of Salamis.
480 BCE · 38.05, 23.55 · status: legend
The account
The Athenian exile Dicaeus told the Spartan king Demaratus that the cry came from the Eleusinian Mysteries, held although the land was empty of people, and that it foretold disaster for Xerxes' fleet. The cloud then drifted towards Salamis, where the Greeks won soon after.
The sceptical view
The story reached Herodotus through Dicaeus himself and reads as a portent told after the event.