Themistocles

#1A fugitive came to the court of the Persian king Artaxerxes.

#2His name was Themistocles.

#3That was a problem, because Artaxerxes' father was Xerxes, the king who had invaded Greece with an enormous army and fleet. And Themistocles had been one of the Athenians who helped make that invasion fail.

#4Now he had no fleet. No army. He couldn't safely go home.

#5The man who had once fought the Persian Empire had come asking it to keep him alive.

#6Artaxerxes could have treated him as his father's enemy.

#7He didn't.

#8He took him in.

#9Why?

#10The answer starts years earlier, when Themistocles was trying to get ordinary Athenians to make a very different choice.

#11Athens had received a windfall from the Laurion silver mines. The obvious option was to distribute the money among the citizens.

#12Themistocles wanted ships instead.

#13He argued for a large fleet of triremes. But he didn't have to sell the idea only with warnings about some distant Persian invasion. Athens already had an enemy people understood perfectly well: Aegina, a nearby maritime rival.

#14If Athens wanted to beat Aegina at sea, it needed a fleet.

#15So the choice became much easier to grasp. Take the money now, or turn it into ships for a war Athens was already fighting.

#16The Athenians chose the ships.

#17A few years later, those ships were facing something much bigger than Aegina.

#18Persia.

#19In 480 BCE, Xerxes invaded Greece. The Greek defense at Thermopylae collapsed, and the Persian army kept moving toward Athens.

#20Now the naval strategy demanded something brutal.

#21The Athenians had to leave their city.

#22Families evacuated. Many of the men who could fight went aboard the fleet. The Persians entered Athens, captured the Acropolis, and burned parts of the city.

#23But Athens hadn't disappeared from the war.

#24Its people still had the ships.

#25The silver that could have gone into individual pockets was now floating offshore as a navy. Athens could lose the physical city and still keep fighting.

#26There was just one problem.

#27The Persian fleet was bigger.

#28Themistocles couldn't make those extra Persian ships vanish. So he went after the next best thing.

#29He looked for a place where having more ships wouldn't help nearly as much.

#30Themistocles wanted the battle near Salamis, where the waters were tight.

#31In open water, a huge fleet has room to spread out. In a confined space, all those ships can become harder to maneuver. More ships don't help as much if you can't use them effectively.

#32But first Themistocles had a problem on his own side.

#33The Greek coalition was divided. Some commanders wanted to leave Salamis and fall back toward the Peloponnese.

#34So Themistocles made a dangerous move.

#35He sent Sicinnus to Xerxes with a secret message.

#36The Greeks were trying to escape, the message said. Move now, and you can catch them.

#37Xerxes moved.

#38The Persian fleet began closing the exits.

#39With one gamble, Themistocles was trying to do two things at once: draw Persia into the waters he wanted and make it much harder for his own divided allies to leave.

#40It looks brilliant after the fact.

#41At the time, it could have gone terribly wrong.

#42Then someone crossed the water to see him.

#43It was Aristides, one of his old political rivals.

#44Aristides and Themistocles had fought each other in Athenian politics. Aristides had even been ostracized and sent away.

#45Then Xerxes invaded, and the stakes changed.

#46The exiles were recalled. Aristides came back.

#47In the later account preserved by Plutarch, Aristides crossed through dangerous waters at night and told Themistocles that the Persian fleet had surrounded the Greeks.

#48That was exactly the situation Themistocles had been trying to create.

#49The two men didn't have to become friends. They just had to understand that there was now something much bigger than their rivalry.

#50Then the Battle of Salamis began.

#51In the confined waters, Persia couldn't use its numerical advantage as easily. Ships from several Greek cities fought together, and Aristides himself took part in the fighting around Psyttaleia.

#52Salamis wasn't one man's victory.

#53But Themistocles had helped create the conditions for it.

#54He hadn't destroyed Persia's advantage.

#55He'd helped move the fight somewhere that advantage was harder to use.

#56Athens survived. Themistocles became a hero.

#57And then the emergency ended.

#58That changed everything.

#59After the Persian retreat, Athens started rebuilding. Themistocles pushed to restore the city's walls. When Sparta objected, he used negotiation and delay while the Athenians hurried the work along.

#60He also kept pushing the importance of Piraeus, Athens' port.

#61For him, the fleet hadn't been a one-battle trick. Maritime power was part of what Athens could become.

#62But once the immediate Persian danger faded, ordinary politics came roaring back.

#63What should Athens do about Sparta? How should it continue the war against Persia? Who should lead the city now?

#64New figures were rising, including Cimon.

#65And Themistocles himself wasn't exactly indifferent to status. Ancient writers repeatedly describe a man who cared intensely about honor and recognition.

#66That mattered in a democracy.

#67Athens could celebrate someone for helping save the city without promising to treat him as politically untouchable forever.

#68There were policy fights, rivalries, tensions with Sparta, and questions about Themistocles' own pursuit of distinction.

#69Eventually, Athenians picked up pieces of pottery and wrote down a name.

#70Themistocles.

#71Themistocles was ostracized.

#72The reversal was hard to miss.

#73Years earlier, he'd helped convince Athenians to leave their city so Athens could survive.

#74Now the Athenians told him to leave.

#75But this wasn't yet a conviction for treason.

#76That came from a different crisis later.

#77After his ostracism, Themistocles lived in Argos. Then the Spartan war hero Pausanias came under grave suspicion of dealings with Persia.

#78As that scandal unfolded, Themistocles' name was pulled into it.

#79How deeply he was actually involved is uncertain. The evidence doesn't justify turning him into a proven Persian agent all along.

#80The consequences were real anyway.

#81Athens and Sparta moved against him. This was no longer just political exile.

#82Themistocles was now a fugitive.

#83And that's when the story took its strangest turn.

#84A man accused of suspicious connections with Persia actually began fleeing toward Persia.

#85Themistocles no longer had an Athenian fleet behind him. His survival came down to one person after another deciding not to hand him over.

#86Corcyra wasn't safe. Protecting him meant risking the hostility of both Athens and Sparta.

#87So he moved again and eventually reached Admetus, king of the Molossians.

#88They weren't natural allies. Themistocles had opposed a request from Admetus in the past.

#89Now he needed that same king's protection.

#90Ancient accounts turn the supplication into a dramatic scene, but the important part is clear: Admetus didn't surrender him.

#91Themistocles escaped again.

#92On the voyage toward Asia Minor, he faced another danger of falling into Athenian hands. He revealed himself to the ship's captain and made the captain understand that if Themistocles were caught, the captain could be in danger too.

#93Once, he'd maneuvered cities and kings.

#94Now he had to make one frightened captain decide that hiding him was the safer choice.

#95It worked.

#96And eventually Themistocles reached the strangest possible destination.

#97The Persian king.

#98Themistocles couldn't hide his past from Artaxerxes.

#99So he used it.

#100In the account given by Thucydides, Themistocles openly pointed out that when Xerxes attacked him, no Greek had done more damage to the Persian king's house than he had.

#101That's a strange pitch from a refugee asking for protection.

#102But it carries another message too.

#103Look what I'm capable of.

#104Themistocles also claimed that he'd helped Xerxes during the Persian retreat. Thucydides himself indicates that part of this was self-serving rather than simply true.

#105Themistocles was reframing his past for the person who now controlled his future.

#106Then he asked for time.

#107One year.

#108He spent it learning the Persian language and customs.

#109At Salamis, he'd tried to understand what Xerxes would believe and how the king would move. Now, stripped of his fleet and political power, he was learning the language and rules of Xerxes' son's world.

#110Artaxerxes had his own calculation to make.

#111This man had helped wreck his father's invasion. But he also knew Greek politics, warfare, and Athens unusually well. And now he was cut off from both Athens and Sparta.

#112The dangerous enemy of the father could look very different to the son.

#113Artaxerxes accepted him.

#114Themistocles built a second life in Persian territory, closely associated with Magnesia on the Maeander. He wasn't simply hiding there. He received substantial support and revenues under Persian rule.

#115And something else survives.

#116Coins associated with Themistocles from Magnesia.

#117Put those beside what survives from Athens, and the contrast is hard to miss.

#118In Athens, his name was scratched onto pottery to send him away.

#119In Persian territory, his name appeared on coinage connected with the position he'd gained there.

#120Athens got rid of Themistocles.

#121It didn't get rid of the kind of Athens he'd helped build.

#122The fleet remained. Piraeus mattered more and more. Long after Themistocles was gone, Athens kept growing as a maritime power.

#123Again and again, he'd faced people and powers he couldn't simply overpower.

#124He got Athenians to see ships where they'd seen silver. He got Xerxes to see Greeks slipping away and move his fleet. And before Artaxerxes, he tried to turn himself from the king's father's enemy into a useful exile.

#125There was one choice he couldn't keep shaping forever.

#126Athens' choice about him.

#127Themistocles could help draw the enormous Persian fleet into waters where its strength was harder to use.

#128He couldn't make his own city need him forever.

#129Later generations gave Themistocles a death almost too perfect for his life.

#130One tradition said the Persian king eventually expected him to help attack Greece. Rather than fight his own people, Themistocles supposedly chose death. One version even had him drinking bull's blood.

#131But Thucydides says he died of illness and mentions deliberate poisoning only as another story people told.

#132The man who'd spent his life reshaping how other people saw him was reshaped one more time after his death—by people who wanted an extraordinary ending for an extraordinary exile.