Within weeks of the defeat, Xerxes left a ruined Athens. He sailed for the Hellespont in panic with survivors of the imperial fleet. A rearguard of sixty thousand infantry accompanied him by land. The king left behind his surrogate commander Mardonius, with a still sizable landed and cavalry force to continue the struggle the next spring and summer. The remaining Persian army quickly retreated northward for the winter through the pastures of Boeotia into northern Greece. The Athenian refugees for a time got back their burned-out city.
Although the Greeks had immediately declared victory after Salamis, a few months later Mardonius returned over the pass from Boeotia to reoccupy Athens. The population again fled, the Persians torching the city a second time. The brilliant victory at Salamis nevertheless did not prevent this subsequent Persian reoccupation. After camping in a deserted and largely ruined Athens, Mardonius then sent the Persians back into Boeotia yet a third time in late summer 479 to prepare for the expected Greek infantry counterattack. After the flight of Xerxes, some seventy thousand reenergized Greeks flocked to Plataea near the mountainous Attic border to finish off Mardonius. There, on a small plain near the Asopos River on the lower slopes of Mount Kithairon, the Greeks crushed the Persians, killed Mardonius, and watched the survivors scatter to the north.
With the storm and losses at Artemisium, and the subsequent naval defeat at Salamis, Xerxes may have lost cumulatively more than nine hundred triremes. Now with Mardonius’ annihilation in Boeotia, perhaps as many as a quarter million Persian imperial infantry and sailors had perished in Greece. Rarely in the ancient world had so few killed so many. The cultural result was exultation in newfound Greek freedom: “No longer was there a bridle on the speech of mortals, for the people were set free to say what they wished, once the yoke of power was broken.”32
Soon after the Persian defeat at Salamis, Themistocles vanished from accounts of the great campaign of 479 B.C. to mop up the tens of thousands of Persians who were on their own after the flight of Xerxes. Themistocles did not take part in the land battle, and he may well have fallen out of favor with his Athenian allies and his own countrymen, tired of his endless boasting of Salamis and his oversized ego. Instead, he stayed at sea pursuing enemy vessels along the coast of Asia Minor. He did not resurface prominently until the Persian Wars were over. Salamis was Themistocles’ great moment, and when it passed, the war could go on largely without him.33
A Most Unheroic End (Magnesia, Persian-held Asia Minor, 459 B.C.)
About twenty years after Salamis, the legendary Themistocles, in his midsixties, was found dead—and in Persian-held Asia Minor, of all places. The rumors flew back across the Aegean that the old man had killed himself. The story went on that he was poisoned with some lethal concoction laced with the blood of a bull. Of course, the illustrious savior of Athens was not supposed to die like this, old, exiled, disgraced, as a would-be satrap no less, in pay to the very Persian Empire that had once sought to destroy his homeland.34
As an Athenian exile five years earlier, Themistocles had been ostracized, fled his native Athens, and earned a bounty on his head and a posse at his heels. The old man without a polis had serially worn out his welcome among a variety of suspicious Greek hosts—at Argos, Corcyra, Epirus, Pydna, Naxos, and Ephesus. Finally only his ex-enemies would welcome him in across the Aegean—the usual dénouement when a maverick had alienated both Athens and Sparta as places of refuge. Of course, many other Greeks of the age had turned traitor and joined the Persians, including the former Spartan kings Demaratus and Pausanias. Nearby Persian Asia Minor served as an ancient version of turn-of-the-century Mexico, the Aegean a sort of Rio Grande, across which prominent Greek outlaws often fled from various posses. Later the Athenian general Alcibiades served a Persian satrap Tissaphernes. But none of these infamous betrayers were as hallowed a figure in their time as was Themistocles. If nearly all great Greek generals—Miltiades, Pericles, Alcibiades, Epaminondas—given the jealousy inherent in the nature of ancient consensual societies, at one time in their careers were either tried, fined, or exiled, none had experienced quite such acclaim followed by such utter shame.35
While in Asia Minor for the last five years of his life (463–459), Themistocles had played on his former fame and knowledge of the Greeks to curry enough favor with the Persian king to win a well-paid imperial sinecure in Magnesia. King Artaxerxes, the despot who inherited the kingdom, supposedly shouted of the arrival of the self-made Athenian, “I have Themistocles the Athenian! I have Themistocles the Athenian! I have Themistocles the Athenian!” when he heard that the Greek hero had first entered Persian territory voluntarily rather than in chains. Apparently the famous traitor, even if past sixty, was proof to Artaxerxes that the Persians had at last evened the score at Salamis, well aside from the hope that the Persians were expecting to acquire dated Greek intelligence from the old captain.36
In the last year of Themistocles’ exile in Magnesia, amid a new revolt of the Egyptian provinces, the Persians were once again at war with the Greeks—although fighting to hang on to their empire rather than to expand it in the west. In King Artaxerxes’ mind it was probably past time for the refugee Themistocles to repay the king’s five-year hospitality with active resistance against his own countrymen. Themistocles may have balked at that and thus finally killed himself in distress at the thought of joining the enemy. Or was he worn out by the ingratitude of the Athenians and simply could not stomach his rivals back home using the fleet that he created to win continuous glory as it once more carved away at the Persian Empire? It is impossible to know why he killed himself—if he in fact did commit suicide. (The story may have been a later Greek invention to explain Themistocles’ despair over an unfair charge of treason.)
In any case, that Themistocles left Athens during its ascendance to enter Persian service at the start of the eastern empire’s slow decline was only the culmination of his run of misfortune. Themistocles’ father had once warned him about the fickleness of Athenian democratic politics—showing the young Themistocles the abandoned skeletons of ancient triremes on the shore, emblems of what happens to wartime heroes when their service to the state is no longer needed. Themistocles himself, always prone to a bit of self-pity and dramatics, often remembered that morality tale—and trumped it by comparing himself not to the keel of a rotting warship, but to the proverbial ubiquitous Greek plane tree, whose expansive shade is appreciated only when men seek refuge from the storm. In his defense, the litany of charges against Themistocles was probably personal in nature—part of an unfortunate aspect of an envy-prone Athenian democracy to bring down the preeminent and send its best military minds scurrying across the Aegean to find safety and lucre among the enemy Persians.37
The Road to Perdition (Athens, 480–463 B.C.)
The brilliant victory at Salamis (480) some twenty years earlier was not the capstone of Themistocles’ career. Rather, it marked the catalyst for an even more radical subsequent agenda of transforming Athens itself—thereby offending most of the city’s powerful landed families. It was almost as if Themistocles saw the victory over the Persians not as the end, but only the end of the beginning of an ambitious plan to reinvent Athens itself.
The postwar Spartan-Athenian alliance against Persia was over almost before the war ended. It certainly lasted no longer than did the equally unlikely Soviet-American pact following the common defeat of Nazi Germany. Themistocles’ subsequent decadelong expansion of the fortifications of the city of Athens and enlargement of the fleet immediately provoked, by intent, the rival Spartans and their conservative sympathizers at Athens. Especially galling to Themistocles’ rich and pro-Spartan countrymen was his ruse of going down to Sparta to agree to the utopian dream of an unwalled Greece. Ostensibly the Greeks agreed that that way, the returning Persians would never again have citadels to quarter in, while the city-states would not exhaust themselves in expensive sieges. Instead, without walls, all Greeks would remain in perpetual brotherhood, or at least fight it out through
short, and less costly, decisive hoplite battles on the plains. But while the itinerant Themistocles was assuring the gullible Spartans of Athens’s ecumenical pacifism in the new postwar era, his democratic supporters back home feverishly fortified their city and harbor in hopes of nullifying Spartan infantry supremacy.38
Themistocles also understood that walls in general weakened traditionalists. Fortifications meant less need for the city’s own landowners to rally the Athenians to battle against any enemy that threatened their own farms. Instead, the city’s new defenses divided the population more sharply into landed and landless classes. The new ramparts reduced political and economic clout for the traditionally powerful in Attica who held vulnerable farmland outside the walls, which could sometimes be sacrificed for the common good. Was not such realignment the demagogue Themistocles’ real intent, after all—his agrarian critics charged—to reorder the class priorities of Athens, to favor the poor under the guise of new national defense strategies?
Fortifications were an even better way of meeting a formidable invasion than in panic evacuating and abandoning the city, as had happened before Salamis. Urban walls certainly required larger government expenditure; their construction tended to spread the wealth through the hiring of poorer workmen. These investments also transferred national defense to the fleet. That brought only further empowerment of the wage-earning poorer and more numerous rowing cohorts. Sea defense at Salamis had been the right choice at the time. But in the aftermath of the Persian retreat, Themistocles saw that his strategy could even be improved upon by evacuating in times of invasion only the countryside of its richer landowners—not, as in 480, sending the poor of the city into makeshift hovels on the surrounding islands.39
Most landowners understandably had long resented this decadelong divisive democratic agenda of Themistocles that soon after Salamis insidiously weakened the power of agrarian heavy infantrymen. In their eyes, the great divider had turned the city from one of “steadfast hoplites into sea-tossed mariners,” as he used worries over national security for partisan domestic advantage.40 Quite venomously, the conservative philosopher Plato, looking back over a century of radical Athenian history, much later wrote that the Athenians would have been better off to have lost sea fights like those at Salamis, even if they had saved Greece, rather than have such Themistoclean victories lead to the establishment of an extremist and unsustainable democracy severed from the land. It was Themistocles, Plato also complained, who had first “stripped the citizens of their spear and shield, and brought the Athenian people down to the rowing-pad and oar.”41
Yet for a decade after the great Athenian victory, the upstart Themistocles lost no occasion to remind the Athenians that he alone had saved them. Only he had ensured them safety from future Persian attack. He continually sought to translate his own military prestige into remaking the very nature of Athens itself. His aim was to reject the old rural polis of the sixth-century Athenian lawgiver Solon and aspire to a cosmopolitan naval empire that would in time rule the Aegean under Pericles—more powerful and more majestic precisely because it would be more egalitarian. Themistocles had used guile to defeat the Persians at Salamis. But this time he was employing that same base cunning to marginalize Athenians at home.
As was the fate of many Greek visionaries, Themistocles’ novel ideas instantly branded him a dangerous radical and earned him exile, yet within decades would be institutionalized by Pericles and others as official imperial policy. The fleet would only grow larger; even greater walls would connect the city to the port at Piraeus; and the poor would find even more avenues of state support. But that acceptance would come only after Themistocles’ exile, and without full acknowledgment of his role as the creator of maritime empire. Themistocles, Plutarch concluded, “increased the power of the common people against the aristocracy, filling them with recklessness, once the control of the state came into the hands of the sailors, boatswains, and captains.”42
It did not help the prophet of sea power that in a status-obsessed democracy, Themistocles was of mixed ancestry. While every freeborn Athenian male in theory aspired to an equality of result under Athenian democracy, good lineage, money, and family influence were, at least privately, still highly prized. Rumors claimed the mother of Themistocles could have been Carian or Thracian. Maybe she was even a prostitute or—who knows?—even a slave. His father was “not very well known at Athens.” A Roman-era marble bust, now at the museum in Ostia, Italy, purports to be a copy of an original fifth-century-B.C. bronze sculpture of Themistocles: The face is unlike almost any other idealized portrait of Greek commanders, in showing a rather coarse figure with cropped hair and beard—more akin to a later Roman military emperor from the provinces of North Africa than a classical Greek hero.43
Apparently the family of Themistocles had little social clout, even if they did have some money. “Too obscure,” Plutarch further sniffed of his father, “to advance his reputation.” Later writers reveled in accounts of his earlier debaucheries and uncouth behavior to prove him an innate boor and profligate upstart. His appetites offered proof that Themistocles would, by virtue of his audacity, “be entirely great—whether for good or evil.” At any rate, the name Themistocles in Greek meant “Famed for Right.”44
In the traditional ancient Greek city-state, ideas and agendas were rarely judged entirely on their own merits, separate from the character, breeding, and background of the men who advanced them. Most ancient accounts of Themistocles’ youth chronicle how he outsmarted the better-born. Both his intelligence and ruthless energy came naturally to Themistocles, what the historian Thucydides later acknowledged as his “native capacity.” Thucydides, who likewise may have been of mixed Thracian ancestry, also claimed that Themistocles’ talent lay in an inbred good judgment unrefined by experience or education. In truth, like most upstarts, he had to study and prepare far more diligently than did his more advantaged rivals to train his “infinitely mobile and serpentine mind.” So, for example, Themistocles purportedly barked to detractors, “I may not know how to tune the lyre or play the harp, but I do know how to take a small and unknown city and make it famous and great.” While Themistocles sought out the best tutors—such as Mnesiphilos, the material philosopher who became his lifelong confidant—he still consciously played on his lowly origins to cement his populist credentials among the Athenian dêmos.45
Usually Athenian democrats appear in the texts of Aristophanes, Plato, the Old Oligarch, Thucydides, Plutarch, and Xenophon as rabble-rousers. Their radically egalitarian ends were always used to justify their uncouth means. In that context, then, Themistocles frequents Athenian literature as the archetypical polypragmôn, the rascally busybody, who rose in Athenian society by his cleverness and limitless troublemaking. He was the antithesis to the more aristocratic and sober Miltiades, Aristides, and Cimon. Those were his chief rivals, and they were all bound by supposed landed reverence and privilege—and, in the case of Aristides, superior character and temperament. In any case, the biographer Plutarch records an entire corpus of popular abuse of Themistocles. In the Greek view, by the time Themistocles died, his deceptions and many ruses had ensured that Athens won the battle of Salamis, split the forces of the retreating Persians, and fortified the victorious city—and yet in retrospect were still seen as proof of his unsavory character.46
By the mid-470s, postwar Athens was mostly secure and on the rise. The city was well into an initial rebuilding of what had been lost in the burning of 480. Revisionism was the order of the day. The now distant victory at Salamis increasingly had become retroactively reinterpreted in the assembly as a logical manifestation of Athenian naval power, rather than, as was true a decade earlier, the most unlikely victory in the history of the Greek people. Some wealthier Athenians even claimed that Themistocles had really done little to ensure the Athenian victory at Salamis. They variously attributed the great victory to either the allies or the sudden arrival of Aristides and his hoplites. Odder still, the radical growth
of Athenian influence in the Aegean between 480 and 471 in the public mind was beginning to become more associated with his conservative rivals Aristides and Cimon than with Themistocles.47
By 459, Themistocles was increasingly politically irrelevant. His reputation was fading among the people and being torn down by his aging rivals who still knew of it. It is indeed likely that Themistocles killed himself, a shameful thing to do in ancient Greek and Roman society—yet often favored by the most honorable figures in antiquity, from the mythical Ajax to the old Roman Cato. But as far as his problems with political rivals go, they were to be expected given Themistocles’ achievements.
How Did Themistocles Do It?
Themistocles’ multifaceted leadership entailed diplomacy, political partisanship, grand strategy, battle tactics, calm in combat, and unabashed cunning. Before the onset of Xerxes, he enacted measures that he believed might check Persian power, and events proved his belief correct. To the historian Thucydides, such “foresight” separated Themistocles from most successful Greek military thinkers of his age, who either had no comprehensive view of strategy or claimed such foreordained knowledge in hindsight. In three precise areas the advice of Themistocles proved critical in saving what had seemed surely lost.
The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq Page 5