Themistocles

Themistocles was an Athenian statesman and naval commander of the early fifth century BC, whose career is inseparable from Athens’s transformation into a sea power and from the Greek resistance to the second Persian invasion. He was born in Athens, in the deme of Phrearrhioi of the tribe Leontis. His father was Neocles, a man of modest standing rather than of the old landed aristocracy; ancient authors disagree about his mother, who is described in some traditions as a Thracian or Carian woman, a detail later used by enemies to belittle his birth. He was associated with the Lycomid family. The principal narrative sources are Herodotus, Thucydides, and, writing centuries later, Plutarch and Cornelius Nepos. They concur on his intelligence, energy, and ambition, while differing in emphasis: Herodotus is comparatively reserved, Thucydides analytical, and Plutarch anecdotal. No contemporary document records an exact year of birth. He belonged to the generation that fought at Marathon and then had to decide how Athens would meet a renewed attack from the Achaemenid Empire.

In the years after Marathon he argued that the Persian danger had not passed and that Athens’s security lay in warships rather than in a land force alone. When a surplus from the silver mines at Laurium became available, he persuaded the assembly to spend it on a large fleet of triremes instead of distributing the money among the citizens. He also promoted the fortification and commercial development of the Piraeus, giving Athens a defensible harbour. He held the annual archonship in the early fifth century BC; Dionysius of Halicarnassus places that year in 493/2 BC. During the 480s he was among the leading figures in Athenian politics and survived the contests of ostracism that removed some rivals. His policy created the navy that Athens would use both against Persia and, later, in the Aegean.

When Xerxes I invaded Greece in 480 BC, Themistocles was central to the Athenian response. He was influential in interpreting the Delphic oracle’s mention of a wooden wall as a command to trust the fleet, in evacuating the civilian population of Athens, and in seeking a sea battle in confined waters. Greek squadrons fought the Persians at Artemisium in parallel with the land defence at Thermopylae. After the fall of Thermopylae and the occupation of Attica, the allied fleet, of which Athens furnished the largest contingent, engaged the Persians in the straits of Salamis. Nominal command at sea belonged to the Spartan Eurybiades; the ancient narrative tradition, especially Herodotus, assigns Themistocles the decisive strategic role, including the message that drew the Persian fleet into the narrows. The Greek victory at Salamis destroyed the naval arm of the invasion. The following year the land victory at Plataea and the operations at Mycale completed the repulsion of Persian forces from the Aegean seaboard of mainland Greece.

After the war Themistocles pressed for the rebuilding of Athens’s walls and for harbour works that made the Piraeus defensible, against Spartan objections. He used delay and diplomacy while the walls went up. His influence then declined as Aristides and subsequently Cimon gained ground, and as Sparta and parts of the Athenian elite turned against him. He was ostracized and withdrew to Argos. He was later accused of complicity in the medism of the Spartan regent Pausanias. Thucydides already treats the charge with caution, and whether it was well founded remains uncertain. Rather than stand trial in Athens, Themistocles fled, moving from the Peloponnese to Corcyra, then to the court of Admetus of the Molossians, and eventually across the Aegean to Asia, where he sought refuge with the Persian king, generally identified in the Thucydidean tradition as Artaxerxes I.

The king received him and granted him the revenues of several cities in western Asia Minor, including Magnesia on the Maeander, Lampsacus, and Myus. He lived there as a local dynast under Persian authority. He died in Magnesia. Ancient authors do not agree on the cause: Thucydides reports illness, while later writers describe suicide by poison, sometimes linked to an inability or refusal to serve Persia against the Greeks. A public tomb in the marketplace of Magnesia is attested; a rival tradition claimed that his bones were brought back secretly to Attica. He was married. Plutarch names Archippe, daughter of Lysander of Alopece, as his wife and records sons including Archeptolis, Polyeuctus, and Cleophantus, as well as children by another woman and several daughters. He held no Christian ecclesiastical office, belonged to no religious order, and was never canonized. Later Greek and Roman literature remembered him as the architect of Athenian naval supremacy and as a symbol of resourceful, sometimes unscrupulous, statesmanship.