The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq (7 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

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.

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The building of the armada.
Had Themistocles earlier (483) not urged the Athenians to build their fleet with the sudden revenues from the unexpected strike at the silver mines of Laurium, there would probably have been no chance for a Greek defense at Salamis. Themistocles plowed ahead against the advice of most Athenians, quite contrary to the received infantry wisdom from the recent victory at Marathon. That he claimed the ships were necessary to defeat a nearby widely hated and tangible enemy like Aegina—Pericles later called the nearby island the “eyesore” of the Piraeus—perhaps made the radical measure more palatable. In short, Themistocles alone appropriated the money, invested it in a navy, and so had a fleet on hand ready to save Athens.

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The abandonment of the city.
Had Themistocles not persuaded the Athenians in September 480 to evacuate Athens and the surrounding
Attic countryside, their hoplite land army would have been wiped out in a futile Thermopylae-like last stand. An orphaned fleet would have retreated southward or westward. Had the Athenians stayed inside the largely indefensible city to withstand a siege, they would have likewise perished in toto or been forced to join the Persians. Nor after Thermopylae did Themistocles try to persuade the Greek allies to march northward to stop the Persians in the plains of Boeotia or Attica. Of course, Themistocles had fought at Marathon and co-commanded the failed defense at Tempe in the summer of 480. Yet he knew by mid-September that the gallant veterans of Marathon could not overcome ten-to-one odds. Even the infantry fight the next year at Plataea was a close-run thing—and winnable only after tens of thousands of Persians had been killed at Salamis or retreated home. The victory was also predicated on a massive mobilization of tens of thousands of Panhellenic soldiers, most of whom mustered only after hearing that Xerxes had fled Greece in defeat.