Themistocles: the man who saved Greece at sea

Themistocles saw before anyone else that Greece would be saved not on land but at sea. He talked a city of farmers and hoplites into building a fleet, and when the Persians came he lured their navy into the narrows at Salamis and broke it, in one of the most decisive battles in history. Britannica calls him the creator of Athenian sea power and the chief savior of Greece from Persian rule. Yet the city he saved drove him out, and he died in the service of the empire he had beaten.¹

Early life: an outsider's son

Themistocles was born about 524 BC, the son of Neocles, from the village of Phrearrhioi in Attica; Livius.org gives his dates as about 525 to 459 BC. His father belonged to the Lycomid clan, but his mother was not an Athenian. Plutarch quotes a verse that made her a Thracian woman called Abrotonon, and adds that the writer Phanias said she was a Carian named Euterpe, and Neanthes that she came from Halicarnassus. Britannica notes that he probably owed his citizenship to the reforms of Cleisthenes, which in 508 BC made citizens of all free men of Athens.²

Plutarch paints a boy who spent his free time composing speeches rather than playing, and whose teacher told him he would become something great, for good or ill. Livius.org warns that such stories of his youth are probably read back from his later fame.³

Archon and the harbor at Piraeus, 493 BC

The first certain event of his life is his election as archon in 493 BC. In that year, Britannica and Thucydides both record, he began the works that would turn the rocky bays of Piraeus, about five miles from Athens, into fortified harbors in place of the open beach at Phaleron. Thucydides explains the attraction: three natural harbors, and a base from which Athens could reach for power at sea.⁴

After the Athenian victory at Marathon in 490 BC, most Athenians thought the danger was over. Themistocles did not. Plutarch has him say that the trophy of Miltiades would not let him sleep, and Britannica explains his reasoning: Marathon was a victory for armored spearmen, and it could not be repeated against an enemy much stronger in archers and cavalry. The only hope was to beat Persia's fleet and so starve its army of supplies.⁵

The silver of Laurion and the new fleet, 483 BC

In 483 or 482 BC a rich new vein of silver was struck in the state mines at Laurion, near Cape Sunium. Herodotus says the Athenians meant to share the money out at ten drachmas a man; Themistocles persuaded them to build warships instead, for the running war with the island of Aegina. Herodotus says the money paid for 200 ships, Plutarch for 100. Britannica gives the result: the fleet stood at 70 ships before the vote, and when Xerxes marched in 480 BC Athens had 200 triremes.⁶

The 480s were years of bitter politics in which several leaders were ostracized one after another, among them Xanthippus and Aristides. Themistocles' name turns up on many potsherds found in the Agora, but he was not voted out. Britannica sees a class struggle behind the naval debate: ships meant higher taxes for the rich and political weight for the poor citizens who rowed them.⁷

When the Athenians asked Delphi what to do against the coming invasion, the oracle told them to trust in a "wooden wall" and spoke of "divine Salamis". Herodotus says Themistocles, a man lately risen to the first rank, argued that the wall meant the ships, and that an oracle meant against Athens would have said "merciless Salamis". The Athenians took his reading.⁸

Artemisium, 480 BC

Themistocles also sold his strategy to Sparta and the Peloponnesians: the allied fleet would fight forward, in the narrows north of Euboea, while a land force held the pass at Thermopylae. Because Corinth and Aegina would not serve under an Athenian, the command went to the Spartan Eurybiades, with Themistocles leading the Athenian ships. Livius.org counts 127 Athenian galleys at Artemisium.⁹

Herodotus tells a story that shows the man. When the allies wanted to retreat, the Euboeans paid Themistocles thirty talents to keep the fleet in place; he passed five to Eurybiades as if from his own purse, three to the Corinthian commander, and kept the rest. Livius.org repeats the bribe. The fleets fought for three days, in what Britannica describes as a defensive half-moon formation, and both sides suffered heavily; with Thermopylae lost behind them, the Greeks withdrew south.¹⁰

Salamis, September 480 BC

Athens was abandoned. Britannica credits Themistocles with persuading the Athenians to send their women and children to the Peloponnese and to fall back on Salamis. An inscription found at Troezen records a decree, proposed by him, to evacuate the city and settle the families at Troezen; Livius.org dates the stone to about 300 BC but thinks its main text is probably genuine, while noting that Herodotus places the evacuation much later.¹¹

The Peloponnesian captains wanted to retreat to the Isthmus of Corinth. Herodotus says Themistocles warned Eurybiades that if they left, the Athenians would take their families aboard and sail to Siris in Italy. Then, Herodotus and Britannica agree, he sent a secret message to Xerxes; Herodotus names the messenger as Sicinnus, the tutor of his sons, and Britannica says the message suggested that Themistocles himself was ready to change sides. Livius.org notes that some historians doubt the ruse, though Aeschylus' Persians, staged only eight years later, tells it too.¹²

Xerxes ordered an attack. At dawn, Livius.org dates it to 29 September, his ships pushed into the strait. In Britannica's account the Greeks enveloped the head of the Phoenician column as it came out of the narrowest part of the channel and destroyed it; most of the other Asian squadrons escaped, but Xerxes had lost command of the sea for good.¹³ › Battle of Salamis, 480 BC

When the allied commanders voted at the Isthmus for the bravest man of the war, Herodotus says, each voted for himself first, and most of them put Themistocles second. Sparta made up for it: Herodotus and Britannica both describe the honors he received there, an olive wreath for wisdom, the best chariot in Sparta, and an escort of three hundred picked horsemen to the border, the only such escort Herodotus knew of.¹⁴

Command style

Themistocles was a strategist more than a battlefield general. His strength was to see years ahead, from Marathon to the fleet that Persia would have to meet, and then to bend people to the plan by any means at hand: argument, oracles, threats, bribes and deception. Thucydides, who admired him, wrote that he was the best judge of sudden crises and the best prophet of the future, and that he surpassed all others in meeting an emergency by instinct.¹⁵

The same gifts made him distrusted. Herodotus, who tells the bribe at Artemisium and has him already planning a refuge with Persia after Salamis, gives a hostile picture. Britannica argues that the bias came from the Athenian upper classes, who hated him as a democrat and whose views reached Herodotus, and that only Thucydides did him justice.¹⁶

Later life: the walls, ostracism and flight

After the war Sparta tried to stop Athens rebuilding its city walls. Thucydides tells how Themistocles went to Sparta as envoy, played for time by denying the reports, and let the Spartans hold him until the walls were high enough to defend; Britannica and Livius.org tell the same story. He then pushed the fortification of Piraeus to completion.¹⁷ › Sparta vs Athens

His credit at home did not last. In 479 BC, Britannica notes, Athens gave its commands to Aristides and Xanthippus, and Themistocles failed to persuade the people to move their capital to Piraeus. Praised, though not by name, in Aeschylus' Persians in 472 BC, he was ostracized at about the end of the decade. He settled at Argos.¹⁸

Then Sparta accused him of plotting with Persia, a charge Livius.org thinks probably false. Athens condemned him, and officers from both cities went after him. Thucydides follows his flight from the Peloponnese to Corcyra, across northern Greece to the coast of Macedonia, and by merchant ship to Ephesus, slipping past an Athenian squadron off Naxos on the way.¹⁹

Which king received him is disputed. Thucydides and Charon of Lampsacus say he wrote to Artaxerxes, Xerxes' son, newly on the throne; Plutarch notes that Ephorus and others said he came to Xerxes himself, and judges that the chronology favors Thucydides. Livius.org leaves both possible. Thucydides says he asked for a year to learn the Persian language and customs before appearing at court.²⁰

Death at Magnesia

The king made him governor of Magnesia on the Maeander. Thucydides and Plutarch both say three cities were assigned for his upkeep: Magnesia for bread, Lampsacus for wine and Myus for other food. He struck his own silver coins there.²¹

He died at Magnesia about 460 BC; Livius.org gives 459 BC, at the age of sixty-five, the age Plutarch also gives. The sources disagree on how. Thucydides says illness was the real cause and that a story of poison was only a story. Plutarch tells the dramatic version: called on to lead the king's war against the Greeks, he sacrificed, said farewell to his friends and drank bull's blood or a quick poison. Livius.org thinks a forced suicide possible.²²

Thucydides and Plutarch both saw or heard of his monument in the marketplace of Magnesia. Thucydides adds that his relatives secretly carried his bones home and buried them in Attica, since the law forbade burying a traitor there.²³

Legacy and memory

Livius.org credits Themistocles with saving Greece and laying the foundations of the Athenian democratic empire at sea, which his successor in influence, Pericles, son of Xanthippus, would carry to its height. Thucydides' verdict has outlasted the gossip: he called Themistocles a man who showed the most indubitable signs of genius.²⁴

The fleet he built changed Athens itself. Herodotus wrote that the war with Aegina, by forcing the Athenians to become a naval power, proved the salvation of Greece, and the oarsmen of that fleet, Britannica notes, were the poorer citizens whose political weight grew with every ship. His memory stayed alive in Magnesia, where Plutarch says his descendants still enjoyed honors and privileges in Plutarch's own day.²⁵

Read the full story of his victory at Salamis, compare him with the other great commanders of ancient Greece, or follow the war from the other side in the life of Xerxes I.