‘All political lives…end in failure’, as Enoch Powell said;Footnote ¹ and Themistocles son of Neocles died twice. His first life ended with his ostracism in the late 470 s, after which he was dead to an Athens enthralled by Cimon; but he would not lie down. This article considers his two afterlives: one which ended about 459 in Magnesia on the Maeander, and the other which commenced in the fifth century but continues to resonate today. The examination, however, will be in reverse order, considering first the Themistocles who at Athens was written into what Tim Whitmarsh would call ‘the archive’, then drawing inferences from that literary afterlife to comment on Athenian politics in Themistocles’ years of ostracism, then exile.

Thucydides, resolute demythologizer, insisted that ‘a sickness put an end to [Themistocles’] life’,Footnote ² aiming to counter the legend (which Aristophanes enshrines) of Themistocles meeting a heroic death by drinking the blood of a bull.Footnote ³ In Aristophanes’ play, Demosthenes (in 424) deplores his and Nicias’ helplessness in the face of Cleon's colossal ascendancy:

Nicias’ answer brings in Themistocles’ heroic death. In thirty-five-year hindsight (and on the comic stage) it seemed an honourable end. Confronted by a demand from ‘the fiery lord of populous Asia’,Footnote ⁵ Themistocles, or so Plutarch was to say five hundred years later, killed himself to avoid helping Artaxerxes I address his Hellenic problem.Footnote ⁶

Themistocles never had been a man to speak plainly;Footnote ⁷ he was not even the kind of person to tell the truth if something else were more likely to get him what he wanted. But if some impulse towards candour had taken hold of him, some urge to unroll his Persian carpet,Footnote ⁸ during the last years of his life, when he was ruler of the city of Magnesia on the river Maeander,Footnote ⁹ he might have been justified in claiming to have made a lasting difference in Athenian politics – to have created, as the word is today, a legacy. Not so much because he tricked the Persians into attacking the Greek fleet in the narrows at Salamis,Footnote ¹⁰ since battles are here today, gone tomorrow; but because he was behind making the Piraeus into Athens’ principal harbour,Footnote ¹¹ he was behind using Athens’ silver from Laurium to build a fleet,Footnote ¹² and he was behind fortifying Athens with walls after Xerxes’ invasion.Footnote ¹³

In addition to infrastructure, Themistocles’ legacy included a meme. In between Solon and Pericles, he was one of the lawgivers ‘our ancestors chose’, as Lysias wrote for a client in Against Nicomachus, in 399;Footnote ¹⁴ and the Athenians ‘made the fullest and fairest contribution in aid of the freedom of the Greeks by providing Themistocles as commander’, as Lysias or someone else later wrote in the Epitaphios, perhaps in 392.Footnote ¹⁵ In the Meno, written perhaps in the 380 s, Plato's Socrates gets Anytus to agree that Themistocles was a good man – but one who did not pass on his goodness to his son Cleophantus, although he did teach him to ‘keep his balance standing upright on horseback, and hurl the javelin while so standing, and perform many other wonderful feats’.Footnote ¹⁶

Xenophon's Socrates, in the Symposium (written after 378Footnote ¹⁷), tells Callias that if he wants to win Autolycus’ affections, he must ‘find out what sort of knowledge it was that made Themistocles able to give Greece liberty’. Then a little later, probably after 371, Xenophon in the Memorabilia has Critobulus ask Socrates how Themistocles made the city of Athens love him: not by casting a spell with the power of rhetoric, Socrates says, but περιάψας τι ἀγαθὸν αὐτῇ, ‘by hanging some good amulet about her’ (as E. C. Marchant translates it).Footnote ¹⁸

Lawgiver, commander, good man, man of knowledge, charmer: all these qualities in retrospect. In documenting the failure of Greek generals to give Themistocles the prize of excellence (ἀριστήια) at the end of the war against Xerxes, Herodotus had reported that Themistocles was at any rate thought much the wisest man of all the Greeks.Footnote ¹⁹ But time marched on. By the fifth decade of the fourth century, Isocrates could cite his name as a cipher in a rhetorically colourless proof that the former days were better than these: ‘Aristides and Themistocles and Miltiades were better men than Hyperbolus and Cleophon.’Footnote ²⁰

Still, memory did not disappear: Aristotle, more sensitive to social nuance, observed in the Eudemian Ethics that ‘people thought…the mission…Themistocles conducted to Olympia was not fitting for him, because of his former low station, but would have been for Cimon’.Footnote ²¹ Thus reminiscence of Themistocles a century after his death had both absorbed him into routine nostalgia for past Athenian greatness and preserved awareness of him as a man who succeeded, although he was not out of the top drawer. The latter observation, centuries later, was to be the first point that Plutarch made in his biography: ‘his family was too obscure to further his reputation’;Footnote ²² Plutarch later added that ‘Themistocles did not possess the worth of three talents before he entered political life.’Footnote ²³

There was occasional Themistocles-scepticism, at least in the philosophical tradition, taking its rise presumably from how, in a canonical text (the Meno), he exemplified a man who failed to teach goodness to his son.Footnote ²⁴ Plato himself, in the course of praising Aristides (his kind of politician), said that ‘Themistocles…and Cimon, and Pericles, filled the city with porches and moneys and no end of nonsense’.Footnote ²⁵ And people said that back in the fifth century, Cleophantus son of Themistocles used to claim that the people of Athens wanted anything he wanted.Footnote ²⁶ His explanation was that anything he himself wanted, his mother wanted; anything she wanted, Themistocles wanted; anything Themistocles wanted, all the Athenians wanted. Yet even philosophers might be kind: Phanias of Lesbos portrayed Themistocles as ‘terrified, feeling that the word of the seer was monstrous and shocking’ when advised that the gods wanted the three sons of Sandauce and Artaÿctus sacrificed to them – and whitewashed him by writing that ‘the multitude…dragged the prisoners to the altar’ at the ceremony beside the admiral's trireme before the Battle of Salamis.Footnote ²⁷ Phanias was a philosopher (with experience of historical literature),Footnote ²⁸ as Plutarch underlines – the kind of witness whose testimony would suffice to acquit Themistocles of active complicity in human sacrifice.

Dennis D. Hughes found the human sacrifice story not to be credible.Footnote ²⁹ His arguments are, first, that the deity sacrificed to – Dionysus Omestes – was ‘a stranger to Athens’ but had a received cult at Lesbos, home of Phanias;Footnote ³⁰ and secondly, that the three Persian youths were brought from Psyttaleia,Footnote ³¹ which was not captured by the Greeks until after the Battle of Salamis – and when it was, all the Persians who were there were killed.Footnote ³² Hughes documents a more or less evenly split jury of modern scholars: most historians without special interest in religion (whom he calls ‘historians proper’) rejecting the account, most historians of religion accepting it.Footnote ³³

It was easy, at Plutarch's remove from events, to blame the shocking incident on the common people and absolve the elite biographical subject; but Plutarch goes a good deal further in his Themistocles in the direction of creating a Themistocles who would fit the philosophical mould as Plutarch, middle Platonist that he was, understood it. He says that Stesimbrotus says Themistocles was taught by Anaxagoras – the same Anaxagoras whom people called Mind (Νοῦς)Footnote ³⁴ because, to him, Mind was the organizing principle of the universe – and also by Melissus, the Samian admiral and Eleatic philosopher.Footnote ³⁵ Then Plutarch takes a step back and says that Stesimbrotus (whose book was called On the Statesmen Footnote ³⁶) has got the chronology wrong: in reality, Anaxagoras gave a pre-Socratic upbringing of world-leading sophistication to Pericles,Footnote ³⁷ a generation younger than Themistocles, while Melissus, so far from teaching Pericles, actually fought against him during the Samian revolt.Footnote ³⁸

As for Themistocles, his education consisted of physical exerciseFootnote ³⁹ and (according to Plutarch) a preparation for practical politics delivered by Mnesiphilus of Phrearii – a teacher local to the deme where Themistocles lived. Plutarch says that Mnesiphilus ‘was neither a rhetorician nor one of the so-called physical philosophers’, but he then explains with care what kind of quality, what kind of σοφία (literally, ‘wisdom’), Mnesiphilus imparted – to wit, ‘cleverness in politics and practical sagacity’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Mnesiphilus appears in Herodotus as ‘an Athenian’ who tells Themistocles what to say to Eurybiades, and then Themistocles tells Eurybiades ‘all he heard from Mnesiphilus, pretending it [is] his own idea and adding many other things’.Footnote ⁴¹ This pericope in Herodotus may be the data from which the inference was drawn (by Plutarch's time) that Mnesiphilus was Themistocles’ teacher.

All this is to say that Themistocles had the kind of education that an elite Athenian citizen might be expected to receive in the late sixth century: sport and practical politics. Alexei V. Zadorojnyi seems to go too far when he writes that, in Plutarch, Themistocles is disadvantaged by ‘absence of true, philosophical μουσική’,Footnote ⁴² and that, ‘unguided by paideutic reason, Themistocles’ psyche gradually slips downhill’.Footnote ⁴³ It would be fairer to observe that, after a calculated advance and withdrawal over the question of Anaxagoras, Plutarch does what he can to make Themistocles’ education look as if it fitted a philosophical mould, writing that Mnesiphilus had received his σοφία (‘wisdom’) ‘and handed it down as though it were the doctrine of a sect, in unbroken tradition from Solon’.Footnote ⁴⁴

Plutarch's manoeuvre is about presenting Themistocles in terms familiar to educated readers in the early second century ad, as if an educated gentleman ought to be committed to a philosophical sect (whereas in Themistocles’ day those sects which existed – the Pythagoreans, for example – had not begun to make the impact in the educational world which the sophists and their successors were eventually to have). Themistocles himself was old school, by comparison with politicians who came after him in Athens. He was one of the famous orators of his time, but he spoke with his arm inside his cloak.Footnote ⁴⁵

Plutarch does not, however, drag the scent of sophistic education across the trail for lack of some other story to tell. He cites twenty-one authors by name in the Themistocles,Footnote ⁴⁶ as well as here and there crediting ‘some who tell stories’ (ἔνιοι διηγήματα πλάττοντες),Footnote ⁴⁷ or simply resorting to ‘it is said’ (λέγεται).Footnote ⁴⁸ There was an abundance of sources available – so that Diodorus Siculus perhaps did not merit citation, as Plutarch saw it. Athenaeus of Naucratis, in the third century, throws more names into the mix of writers about Themistocles: Idomeneus, who told stories of Themistocles’ liking for courtesans (being himself the son of a courtesan, if Amphicrates was right in his On Illustrious Men);Footnote ⁴⁹ Neanthes of Cyzicus, who in his Ἑλληνικαὶ ἱστορίαι (Histories of Greece) disagreed with Amphicrates on Themistocles’ mother's name;Footnote ⁵⁰ Possis, whose book about Magnesia on the Maeander rejoiced in the title of Μαγνητικά (Magnetic Matters), and who had some things to say about Themistocles; and Clearchus of Soli, who in the generation after Alexander the Great wrote a book On Friendship in which he described Themistocles’ dining room.Footnote ⁵¹

To the learned, then, and especially to Athenian patriots in the Hellenistic age and beyond, the archived past presented Themistocles in a positive light, as a figure around whom cultural memory gelled.Footnote ⁵² This is the light in which the Themistocles decree from Troezen should be seen. Mikael Johansson has argued that the detail and sequence of events in the inscription from Troezen are possibly alluded to by Cornelius Nepos, but not before – and Nepos’ general misunderstanding of the Persian wars makes the allusion uncertain; but later (Johansson continues) Plutarch and Aelius Aristides were ‘familiar with the text in [the] decree, or at least some parts of it’.Footnote ⁵³

Everything from Themistocles’ evacuation plans to the layout of his dining room, then, could be written affectionately into the archive during Themistocles’ second afterlife. Even ‘Themistocles addressing the Persian court’ could one day become the theme of a painting described by Philostratus, who reads the image as of ‘a Greek among barbarians, a true man among those who are not men, inasmuch as they are ruined and dissolute, surely an Athenian to judge by his coarse cloak’.Footnote ⁵⁴ The smile which the long-term memory of Themistocles left on the Athenian face tells against Rachel M. McMullin's interpretation of his exile, which is that ‘The charge of medism seems to have led to his actual medism.’Footnote ⁵⁵ McMullin, whose article is about Timocreon of Rhodes (an actual medizerFootnote ⁵⁶), comes too close to rolling Themistocles’ ostracism together with his condemnation to exile after a trial for medism, which happened later.Footnote ⁵⁷ George Cawkwell is closer to the mark in arguing that ‘Nowhere…is there a satisfactory explanation of why Themistocles fell.’Footnote ⁵⁸ Later, and during Themistocles’ sojourn at Argos, ‘the evidence which proved that Pausanias was in league with Persia implicated Themistocles’, as Thucydides puts it.Footnote ⁵⁹

Timocreon wrote: ‘I praise Aristeides, the one best man to come from holy Athens, since Leto conceived a hatred for Themistocles.’Footnote ⁶⁰ C. M. Bowra argued that by saying that Leto (the mother of Apollo) hated Themistocles, Timocreon was referring to the formation of the Delian League, a political triumph for Aristides, as correspondingly a setback for Themistocles.Footnote ⁶¹ In the 470 s, Cawkwell argues, Themistocles advocated establishing Athenian power in Greece rather than campaigning to win compensation from the Persian Empire for the losses caused by Xerxes’ invasionFootnote ⁶² – the latter being the professed programme of the Delian League. His priority, implicitly, was an anti-Spartan stance, even though he was supposedly friends with the magistrates, who fell for his delaying tactics when he went to Sparta to discuss the building of the walls of Athens.Footnote ⁶³

Themistocles grew unpopular with his fellow-citizens in the 470 s, as Plutarch tells the story,Footnote ⁶⁴ though Thucydides omits all that and brings Themistocles back into his narrative when he is already living at Argos.Footnote ⁶⁵ His escape, moving away from Persian territory not towards it, seems to show that any ‘medizing’ which could be laid to Themistocles’ account in the early 460 s was (as Cawkwell says) a matter of ‘policies of avoiding conflict with Persia’ and no more.Footnote ⁶⁶ Events in Corcyra and Molossia boxed him into a journey over land to Pydna, then on to Ionia and his courtship of Artaxerxes I,Footnote ⁶⁷ who had ascended to the throne of Persia in 465. The happy outcome was the grant to Themistocles of Magnesia, and the revenues of Lampsacus and Myus.

Although Themistocles was tried and found guilty in absentia at Athens (as Alcibiades would later be), matters in Athens moved ahead. Aristides, who had the world at his feet in 478, faded out of Athenian politics after the Delian League was formed, and Cimon's pro-Spartan voice became paramount. Victories at the River Eurymedon and at Naxos maintained Cimon's momentum. And yet the confidence he reposed in Athens’ yoke-fellow was misplaced: he talked the assembly into two expeditions to help the Spartans after the earthquake of 464,Footnote ⁶⁸ not knowing that the Spartans had already secretly agreed with the Thasians to invade Attica in support of their revolt.Footnote ⁶⁹ The career-ending humiliation of his army's dismissal from Ithome by Athens’ so-called allies was a trap that Cimon could hardly avoid. Thucydides, his great-nephew, was too young to warn him of τῆς πολιτείας…τὸ κρυπτόν (‘the secretive character of the political system’).Footnote ⁷⁰

According to Plutarch, Themistocles’ building of a shrine of Artemis Aristoboule near his house in the deme of Melite had been an unpopular move because he seemed to be using the cult title to boast that he himself had been the giver of the best advice during Xerxes’ invasion.Footnote ⁷¹ The shrine, excavated in 1958, appears to have been abandoned and destroyed in the years of Themistocles’ exile.Footnote ⁷² It was rebuilt in due course, however, although it remains unclear when: a deme inscription set up in the shrine c.330, honouring Neoptolemus, son of Anticles, was reused as its threshold at some later date.Footnote ⁷³ The fifth-century abandonment of the shrine is easy to link to Themistocles’ disgrace in the days of Cimon's ascendancy. Any suspicion, furthermore, that restoration of the shrine was done only on the general principle that temples ought to be kept in good order is dispelled by Plutarch's observation that, down to his own time, there was a statue of Themistocles in the shrine.Footnote ⁷⁴ The link was not forgotten.

Events only six or seven years after Themistocles’ ostracism (and the destruction of his shrine to Artemis Aristoboule) seemed to vindicate the anti-Spartan stance that he had taken, and this may be why he was well treated in Athenian and broader Greek hindsight. Return home continued to be impossible (his sentence of exile was never lifted, so that his family had to act in secret when they buried him in Attica),Footnote ⁷⁵ but this was normal: there is little evidence of the great Athenian politicians of Themistocles’ generation having ended their lives comfortably. Cleisthenes’ life after he changed everything at Athens is unattested; Miltiades died in jail, his fine of fifty talents as yet unpaid;Footnote ⁷⁶ Aristides left too little money to meet the cost of his own burial.Footnote ⁷⁷ Themistocles, by contrast, was on easy street at Magnesia during the last years of his political afterlife. As he said to his wife and children, ‘We'd have been ruined, if we hadn't been ruined.’Footnote ⁷⁸