Loyalty Sullied By Ambition

“Themistocles

 

By Michael Scott

 

Yale, 224 pages, $28

 

In 1815, following the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte wrote a letter of surrender to the Prince Regent in England. In it, he compared himself to one of the great statesmen of ancient Athens: "I have terminated my political career, and I come, like Themistocles, to throw myself on the hospitality of the British people." Themistocles led the Athenian navy against the Persians in the Battle of Salamis in 480 B.C., but when he fell out of favor with the Athenians, he offered his services to the Persian king, who made him governor of a city in Asia Minor. Napoleon could not have expected such magnanimous treatment from the British. Perhaps during his years of exile on St. Helena, the comparison convinced him that he was, like Themistocles -- as he asserted in his letter -- a "victim of the factions which distract my country."

 

In the excellent biography "Themistocles," part of Yale's Ancient Lives series, Michael Scott, a professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Warwick in England, addresses a central question: How could a man who had devoted his life to Athens -- a veteran of the Battle of Marathon in 490 and the hero of Salamis a decade later, a leader who had built Athens's navy into the most powerful in Greece -- have turned his back on all that and served the enemy against which his career had been built? Mr. Scott draws on the main extant sources -- Herodotus, Thucydides and Plutarch -- to weave the story of Themistocles' life through the tumultuous years leading up to the victory over Persia and its aftermath, showing how personal ambition and the constraints of public service could lead a man to the highest office and as swiftly cause his downfall.

 

The decades immediately before the so-called Golden Age of Athens, in the mid-fifth century B.C., were a formative time for the development of democracy. The demos, meaning "people" -- in practice, all adult male citizens of free birth -- enacted laws through elected assemblies and councils. Having suffered through the rule of tyrants in the late sixth century, they imposed reforms designed to prevent another such period. The Athenians disliked leaders who "towered above them," in the words of Plutarch. Around the time Themistocles became a chief magistrate in 493, a developing concept was isonomia: equality before the law. One tactic the demos employed was ostracism, voting those who "towered" into exile. For the Athenians, demokratia, literally "people power," meant endlessly striving to find ways of harnessing the tendency of leaders toward autocracy.

 

The Athenian navy, over which Themistocles held sway, had its own democratic turn. In the lull between the Battle of Marathon in 490 and the renewed Persian assault in 480, Themistocles appears to have persuaded the Athenians to use a newly discovered vein of silver to fund a massive expansion of the navy. The port was improved, and a new fleet of warships was constructed. These were triremes, a revolutionary design in which the ship was a weapon in its own right, with banks of oarsmen driving a bronze ram into an enemy vessel.

 

Previously, Athenian military enterprise had depended on a small elite, men wealthy enough to provide horses to serve as cavalry or to equip themselves as hoplites, a type of armored infantry. Now, a much wider swath of the demos was represented. To build and man the triremes required a large number of men, many from the lower economic class. It was these rowers, whose only qualifications were their citizenship and their being able-bodied, who dealt the blow to the Persians at Salamis. The battle was won partly by the leadership prowess of an individual, Themistocles, but mainly by the strength -- physical and political -- of the demos, an achievement that sustained the Athenian self-image through the Golden Age.

 

As Mr. Scott points out, the only surviving material evidence of Themistocles in his lifetime is a series of coins impressed with his name from Magnesia, the city in present-day Turkey that he ruled on behalf of the Persians. But his achievements can be seen in the construction work he initiated in Athens and Piraeus. Underwater excavations under the auspices of the Danish Institute at Athens and in collaboration with the Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities of Piraeus have revealed shipsheds and slipways for triremes dating to the time of Themistocles.

 

According to Plutarch, Themistocles' father tried to warn him off public life by showing him rotting warships abandoned after they were no longer of use, a metaphor for how Athens dispensed with leaders who could no longer, as Mr. Scott puts it, "maintain that crucial balance between strong leadership and political freedom." Themistocles himself was said to have claimed that the Athenians treated him like a plane tree: "They ran beneath his branches when there was a storm and there was a danger of getting drenched, but when they had a period of fine weather, they plucked and pruned him." But even after his ostracism, Themistocles never lost his loyalty to the demos. When the Persian emperor demanded he take up arms against Athens, Plutarch wrote, he took his own life.

 

Mr. Scott charts a course through these momentous events with great skill, producing a book that is readable and accessible but bedded in authoritative scholarship. The book will be ideal for students and those who might have little grounding in classical history, as well as for scholars who will benefit from a refreshing take on one of the great lives of antiquity.

 

The fact that Napoleon was able to refer to Themistocles in his letter to the Prince Regent reflects the familiarity of the ancient world to educated people of the period. When lawmakers have pondered the best ways to put checks on personal power, it is to classical Athens that they have often looked. Mr. Scott's book deserves to be widely read as a superb introduction to the life of Themistocles and the foundations of democracy.

 

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Mr. Gibbins is the author of "A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks."” [1]

 

1. Loyalty Sullied By Ambition. Gibbins, David.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 09 Mar 2026: A15.