Themistocles

Athenian statesman and admiral

• Born: c. 524 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Athens, Greece
• Died: c. 460 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Magnesia, Asia Minor (now in Turkey)

Themistocles engineered the naval defeat of the Persians at Salamis and thus made possible the subsequent Golden Age of Athens.

Early Life

Themistocles (thee-MIHS-toh-kleez) was born about 524 b.c.e. to an Athenian father, Neocles, and a non-Athenian mother. His father’s family, the Lycomidai, was respected, but his father achieved no great prominence. Six centuries later Plutarch related a number of anecdotes showing Themistocles to be clever, resourceful, and interested in politics from the start. In one of these stories, Themistocles was walking home from school when he saw coming toward him the tyrant Pisistratus. When the boy’s tutor cautioned him to step aside, Themistocles answered, “Isn’t the road wide enough for him?”

The political and military events of the final decades of the sixth century b.c.e. shaped the course of Themistocles’ life. Even before he was born, the rapidly expanding Persian Empire had entrenched itself in Lydia, directly east from Athens across the Aegean Sea, with its countless islands available as stepping-stones to the Greek mainland. In his teenage years, Themistocles would have heard older Athenians discussing the ominous Persian advance across the Bosporus into Thrace and Macedonia to the north as well as into the easternmost Greek islands.

He was growing up in an increasingly commercial culture fostered by Pisistratus and maintained by his successors until Sparta, the strongest Greek state, expelled Hippias in 510 and enrolled Athens in its Peloponnesian League. Athens found itself the focus of a struggle between the militant Spartans and the advancing Persians. It might have occurred to Themistocles early in his manhood that a strong naval force might become the key to Athenian defense.

The career of Hippias must have seemed particularly instructive. Having fled to Persia after his deposition, Hippias was first offered reinstatement as the price Athens must pay for Persian neutrality. Sparta later brought Hippias back and offered to restore him in Athens to block any increase in Persian influence. Given these political situations, freedom was precarious, and Themistocles certainly would have learned how participation in such maneuvers could impair the credibility of a leader. Despite achievements much more brilliant than those of Hippias, he would eventually face both exile and suspicion himself.

Life’s Work

By 493, Themistocles had attained sufficient stature to be chosen an archon in Athens, then a post of considerable authority. Nothing is known of his role in the famous Battle of Marathon in 490, which resulted in victory for the Athenian general Miltiades the Younger, and because the whereabouts of Themistocles are unknown until 483, some historians doubt the earlier archonship. In the latter year, however, he manifested his leadership by persuading the Athenians to use the proceeds of a newly discovered silver mine to modernize the navy and expand its fighting strength to two hundred vessels. Accepted as the unquestioned leader of Athens, Themistocles directed the campaign against the great Persian commander Xerxes I. Ordering a series of strategic retreats as the Persians, fresh from their victory at Thermopylae, swept down on Athens from the north, Themistocles at length committed the newly enlarged fleet to battle at Salamis, off the Attic coast, in 480. He used deception—at which he excelled—to lull the Persian fleet into overconfidence, and he used eloquence to bolster Athenian morale. Along with its Greek allies, the Athenian navy maneuvered the larger Persian fleet into a narrow strait and decisively defeated the invaders, who fled back across the Aegean.

Themistocles resented the Athenian failure to honor him sufficiently and went to Sparta, where he was given an olive crown and a chariot described by the historian Herodotus as the most beautiful in Sparta. After a shower of praise, Themistocles enjoyed an escort of three hundred Spartan soldiers, who accompanied him to the border. Back in Athens, which had borne the brunt of the Persian offensive, only remnants of the city wall stood, and a massive rebuilding project loomed. A Spartan delegation tried to persuade the Athenian leaders not to reconstruct the wall, ostensibly so that no foreign invader could capture the city and hold it as the Persians had before Salamis. In reality, as Themistocles saw it, Sparta and its other allies to the south feared that with its new naval eminence, a fortified Athens represented too strong a potential foe. Regarding the rebuilding as essential, Themistocles persuaded his fellow Athenians to send him back to Sparta to negotiate the matter and meanwhile to put all men, women, and children to work at the reconstruction. In Sparta, Themistocles used all of his wiles to postpone the talks. He explained that he could not proceed without his colleagues, who had been unaccountably delayed. When reports came back that the wall was already rising, he labored to convince the Spartans of their falsity. Eventually he suggested that a trustworthy inspection team be sent, while at the same time he secretly sent instructions to delay the visitors in every possible way.

With the wall in place, Themistocles admitted the deception but defended it stoutly. The Athenians, he pointed out, had abandoned their city in the first place on their own; furthermore, they had devised the strategy that had lured the invaders to their defeat. Whenever they had consulted with their allies, the Athenians had displayed good judgment. Now it was the Athenian judgment that without walls Athens could not contribute equally with other walled cities of the alliance. Sparta had no doubt expected such arguments from Themistocles, though not after the fact. Nevertheless, he extricated himself from Sparta without drawing any overt hostility. Through his deception, he had obtained improvements that he never could have negotiated, for the workers had substantially increased both the thickness of the walls and the area they enclosed. Following Themistocles’ advice, they had also fortified the “lower city,” Piraeus, in accordance with his theory that as long as Athens maintained naval superiority, safety lay in the lower city, with its natural harbors on both sides of the peninsula that it straddled.

Within five years of the victory at Salamis, a reaction set in against Themistocles. He probably contributed to this reaction through boasting and heavy-handed attempts to exact payments toward the cost of his military campaign from Athenian allies. He appears to have had little to do with the ascendancy of Athens in the Delian League, formed in 477 to combat future Persian aggression. It is difficult to determine whether Themistocles’ absence from leadership in this important defensive alliance springs from distrust on the part of his colleagues or his own perception that Sparta, not Persia, represented the most likely future enemy. While the new leaders, Cimon and Aristides, supported Sparta and the alliance, Themistocles opposed any extension of Spartan influence. In this respect, he showed more foresight than the men who had replaced him in power.

Themistocles had obvious faults. Herodotus depicts him as constantly seeking personal gain; even if his assiduous fund-raising went largely for the common good, suspicions to the contrary were bound to arise. He appears to have been vain and egotistical. Even his wiliness, so valuable against enemies, posed a threat. Like Homer’s Odysseus, Themistocles had built his reputation not so much on valor as on duplicity. In the Athens of the 470’s, it would not have been difficult to see this devious man with his unpopular anti-Spartan bias as dangerous to Athenian security.

For whatever reason, around the year 472, he was ostracized. Many prominent citizens were exiled without specific accusations or formal trials in that era, and ostracism was only temporary, but Themistocles never returned to Attic soil. He first chose anti-Spartan Argos as his refuge, but in his absence he was condemned as a traitor. He found it necessary to flee to the island of Corcyra in the Ionian Sea, but he found no welcome there and continued to Epirus in northwestern Greece. His odyssey continued in the land of the Molossians to the east and then to Pydna on the Aegean coast. Thucydides reports him to have sailed on a merchant ship to Ionia, but a storm carried the ship to Naxos, an island then under Athenian siege. Bribing the captain, Themistocles persuaded him to sail to the coast of Asia Minor, and there he applied to his old enemies the Persians for refuge. He was granted not only refuge but also honors, in fact the governorship of Magnesia, in what is now west-central Turkey, probably after the death of his old adversary Xerxes in 465. Magnesian coins bearing his imprint have survived.

One story of Themistocles’ death has him committing suicide by drinking bull’s blood to avoid the necessity of leading a military expedition against the Greeks, but it is much more likely that he died a natural death around 460.

Significance

An Odyssean leader, Themistocles excelled at outwitting his military and political opponents. He demonstrated the true leader’s capacity to resist the popular mood and to redirect popular energy toward prudent ends. His decision to devote windfall profits from silver mines, which others wanted to divide up among the populace, to naval defense, saved Athens from almost sure defeat at the hands of the Persians and preserved Athenian autonomy in the face of Spartan ambition. Although Themistocles did nothing personally to promote Athenian democracy, its later flowering surely depended on his actions in defense of a strong and independent city-state.

Not always a good man, Themistocles was an indisputably great leader. Despite the fact that at various times he opposed all of them, the three major states of his region—Athens, Sparta, and Persia—all heaped honors on him. Thucydides reports that the Magnesians, whom Themistocles led in his last years, erected a monument to him in the marketplace. They saw him not as a former enemy but as a man whose talent for governance, frustrated in his own land, needed scope and opportunity. His brilliance and energy in public projects outweighed the devious means by which he achieved them and his penchant for boasting of them afterward. Thucydides regarded him as an intuitive genius who could operate successfully in matters for which neither his training nor his experience had prepared him. Adversity brought out the best in him and inspired him to bring out the best in the troops and citizens whom he led.

Bibliography

Gomme, A. W. A Historical Commentary on Thucydides. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. One section of Gomme’s learned commentary on the work of the most respected ancient Greek historian deals with Themistocles. Gomme is particularly interested in the gap between his archonship and shipbuilding activity a decade later. Skeptical of the theories advanced to explain the gap in Themistocles’ career, Gomme is inclined to doubt the archonship and places his rise to power in the 480’s rather than the 490’s.

Herodotus. The Histories. Translated by Robin Wakefield. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Of the two great ancient Greek historians who write of Themistocles, Herodotus is more likely than Thucydides to accept fanciful sources of information and shows less understanding of military affairs, but his subject encompasses the years of Themistocles’ most notable exploits. Herodotus lived and wrote at a time when many witnesses of the Persian Wars were still living.

Keaveney, Arthur Peter. Life and Journey of Athenian Statesman Themistocles, 524-460 B.C. as a Refugee in Persia. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003. This volume seeks to illuminate the years in Themistocles’ career between his finally leaving Athens for exile and his death some years later as a refugee in the Persian Empire.

Lenardon, Robert J. The Saga of Themistocles. London: Thames and Hudson, 1978. This is the only true biography of book-length form for English-speaking readers. Lenardon’s method is to place before the reader the full variety of evidence, with many substantial quotations from ancient sources, and encourage readers to draw their own conclusions in cases of dubious or conflicting evidence. His cautious approach can be maddening to anyone looking for an authoritative assessment of his subject, but his presentation of the facts could not be more scrupulous.

Plutarch. Life of Themistocles. Edited by J. L. Marr. Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips, 1998. Plutarch is the ancient biographer most skillful at conveying a sense of his subjects’ personalities. There can be little doubt that many of his anecdotes are inventions, but others may have a basis in fact. His semi-fictionalized life of the Athenian leader makes absorbing reading.

Thucydides. The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Giude to the Peloponnesian War. Edited by Robert B. Strassler. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. This early historian’s general reliability and his relative closeness to Themistocles in time (his birth came close to Themistocles’ death) make his account preferable wherever, as often happens, early authorities disagree.