Themistocles

Themistocles was born in Athens around 524 BCE, the son of Neocles, an Athenian of modest standing, and a mother who was probably not Athenian by birth. Later writers named her Abrotonon of Thrace or Euterpe of Caria, though the tradition is uncertain ^[1]. What mattered in the politics of the day was that he did not belong to the great landed families such as the Alcmaeonids or the Philaids, whose members had dominated Athenian public life for generations.

Ancient biographers, above all Plutarch, preserved stories of a restless and combative boy who preferred composing practice speeches to the usual amusements of his classmates ^[1]. Whatever the truth of such anecdotes, they reflect a consistent picture: a man who compensated for lack of pedigree with relentless preparation. He is said to have trained his memory deliberately and to have made a point of learning the names of ordinary citizens, a habit that served him well when Athens moved toward broader popular participation in government after the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 BCE ^[2].

His youth coincided with an unstable period. Athens expelled its tyrant Hippias in 510 BCE, fought off Spartan interference, and then built a new political order based on ten tribes and a council of five hundred. Themistocles grew up inside this experiment, and his entire career depended on institutions that gave weight to the votes of ordinary rowers, craftsmen, and farmers rather than to birth alone ^[2].

The first firm date in the career of Themistocles is his archonship, the senior civic magistracy at Athens, which he held in 493 BCE according to the historian Thucydides and later chronographers ^[3]. As archon he began developing the Piraeus, the rocky peninsula southwest of the city, as a fortified harbor complex. Athens had previously used the open beach at Phaleron. The choice of the Piraeus, with its three natural basins, signaled a conviction that the future of the city lay on the water ^[3].

In 490 BCE the Persian king Darius sent an expedition that landed at Marathon, and the Athenian hoplites defeated it in a single afternoon. Themistocles probably fought in the battle, though the glory went chiefly to Miltiades ^[1]. While most Athenians treated Marathon as the end of the Persian threat, Themistocles argued that it was only the opening move, a judgment that the events of the next decade proved correct.

His great opportunity came in 483 or 482 BCE, when the state silver mines at Laurium yielded an unusually rich strike. The customary proposal was to distribute the windfall among the citizens. Themistocles persuaded the assembly instead to spend it on warships, and Athens laid down a fleet that soon numbered about 200 triremes, by far the largest in Greece ^[4]. Herodotus records that the ostensible justification was the ongoing petty war with the neighboring island of Aegina, but the fleet's real work would come against Persia ^[4]. During these same years several of his rivals, including Aristides, were removed from the city by ostracism, the ten-year banishment voted by the citizens, leaving Themistocles the dominant figure in Athenian politics ^[2].

When Xerxes led his invasion into Greece in 480 BCE, Themistocles commanded the Athenian contingent within the allied Greek forces. After an indecisive naval engagement at Artemisium, fought at the same time as the land stand at Thermopylae, the Greeks withdrew south. Themistocles then carried through the hardest decision of the war: the evacuation of Athens itself. The population crossed to Salamis, Aegina, and Troezen, and the Persians burned the empty city and the temples on the Acropolis ^[4].

An oracle from Delphi had promised that a wooden wall would keep the Athenians safe. Themistocles argued that the wooden wall meant the ships, an interpretation the assembly accepted ^[4]. The so-called Themistocles Decree, an inscription found at Troezen in 1959 and now in the Epigraphical Museum in Athens, purports to record the evacuation order; scholars still debate whether it is a genuine copy or a later reconstruction, but it shows how firmly his name remained attached to the decision ^[5].

At Salamis in September 480 BCE the allied fleet of roughly 300 to 400 triremes faced a larger Persian force. Herodotus reports that Themistocles, fearing the Peloponnesian commanders would retreat to the Isthmus of Corinth, sent a secret message to Xerxes claiming the Greeks were about to flee, which drew the Persian fleet into the narrow strait ^[4]. In the confined water the heavier Greek ships and disciplined crews destroyed a large part of the Persian navy while Xerxes watched from the shore. The victory broke the momentum of the invasion. Xerxes withdrew to Asia with much of his army, and the land force he left behind was beaten at Plataea the following year ^[3]. Herodotus judged that the Athenians, by choosing to fight at sea, had been the decisive factor in saving Greece, and behind that choice stood one man's fleet policy ^[4].

Victory did not end the work. Sparta, uneasy at the prospect of a fortified rival, urged the Athenians not to rebuild their city walls. Thucydides tells how Themistocles went to Sparta as an envoy and deliberately stalled the negotiations while the entire population of Athens, men, women, and children, threw up the fortifications using whatever stone came to hand, including broken tomb monuments. By the time the Spartans understood what had happened, the walls stood high enough to defend, and Themistocles informed them bluntly that Athens would decide its own affairs ^[3]. Stretches of this hastily built circuit, known as the Themistoclean Wall, are still visible in the Kerameikos district of modern Athens ^[6].

He also completed the fortification of the Piraeus, giving Athens a secure naval base linked to a commercial harbor. Thucydides presents this as the foundation of everything that followed: the Delian League, the maritime empire, and the wealth of the fifth-century city all rested on the walls and the fleet ^[3].

Yet his standing at home began to erode. The prestige of the new Delian League campaigns went to younger commanders, especially Cimon, son of Miltiades, who favored cooperation with Sparta. Themistocles, who distrusted Sparta, found himself increasingly isolated. Ancient sources also accuse him of arrogance and of enriching himself, charges impossible to verify but consistent with the resentment he provoked ^[1].

Around 472 or 471 BCE the Athenians ostracized Themistocles, and he settled at Argos in the Peloponnese ^[3]. More than 2,000 surviving pottery sherds (ostraka) bearing his name have been excavated in Athens, evidence of repeated campaigns against him; one cache of 190 sherds was written by only a handful of hands, suggesting organized distribution by his enemies ^[7].

Worse followed. The Spartans, pursuing the treason case against their own general Pausanias, claimed to have found evidence implicating Themistocles in dealings with Persia. Athens condemned him in absentia, and agents were sent to arrest him. He fled across Greece, taking refuge at one point with King Admetus of the Molossians, who protected him despite an old grudge, then crossed the Aegean ^[3].

In the most startling turn of a startling life, he made his way to the Persian court around 465 BCE and presented himself to the young king Artaxerxes I, the son of the ruler whose fleet he had shattered. Thucydides says he spent a year learning Persian and then won the king's favor ^[3]. Artaxerxes granted him the revenues of three cities in Asia Minor: Magnesia on the Maeander for his bread, Lampsacus for his wine, and Myus for his fish, according to the tradition reported by Thucydides and elaborated by later writers ^[1].

Themistocles married twice and raised a large family. His first wife, Archippe, bore him several sons, and a second marriage produced daughters; Plutarch names ten children in all ^[1]. Some of his descendants remained prominent at Magnesia, where civic coins were later struck bearing his name and image, and honors to his family persisted there for generations ^[1].

He governed Magnesia as a Persian client until his death in 459 BCE, at about the age of sixty-five. Thucydides, writing within living memory, states plainly that he died of illness, while acknowledging a rumor that he poisoned himself rather than help the king against Greece. Later authors dramatized the suicide story, claiming he drank bull's blood, but the sober contemporary account records a natural death ^[3]. His bones, the tradition held, were secretly brought home and buried in Attica, since a man condemned for treason could not receive open burial; the Magnesians meanwhile maintained a splendid tomb monument in their marketplace ^[1].

The private man remains hard to reach. The sources agree on ambition, quick wit, and a love of honor that shaded into vanity. Plutarch preserves the remark attributed to him that he could not tune a lyre, but he knew how to take a small city and make it great ^[1]. Whether or not he said it, the sentence fairly describes what he did.

Any Themistocles biography must reckon with the verdict of Thucydides, who praised him as a man of natural genius, able to judge situations at a glance and to improvise what the moment required without long study ^[3]. That assessment, from the most hard-headed of ancient historians, has shaped his reputation ever since. Herodotus, closer to the events, presents a more ambiguous figure, brilliant but grasping, willing to extort money from islanders and to hedge his bets with the enemy ^[4]. Both portraits are probably true.

Among Themistocles achievements, the naval program of 483 BCE stands first. Without the 200 triremes there would have been no Salamis, and without Salamis the Persian conquest of mainland Greece was a real possibility. The fleet also transformed Athenian society: the poorest citizens, who rowed the ships, gained a claim to political weight that helped drive the democracy toward its radical fifth-century form ^[2]. The fortified Piraeus and the city walls made possible the Athenian empire and the age of Pericles, developments Themistocles anticipated but never lived to see.

For anyone asking who was Themistocles, the answer resists simple labels: savior of Greece, condemned traitor, Persian governor, and posthumous hero all at once. Modern historians such as Frank Frost and Robert Lenardon have devoted full studies to untangling the legends from the record ^[8]. The essential Themistocles facts survive scrutiny: the archonship of 493, the fleet, the evacuation, Salamis, the walls, the ostracism, and the strange final decade in Persian service. Twenty-five centuries later, he remains the classic study of how a democracy can owe its survival to a man it could not bring itself to trust.