Plutarch's life of the Athenian statesman who turned a mining windfall into a navy, tricked both Greeks and Persians into fighting at Salamis, and ended his career a fugitive eating bread at a Persian king's table.
Plutarch opens with Themistocles' clouded origins - an obscure father, a foreign mother variously named Abrotonon or Euterpe - and a boyhood already marked by restless ambition; his teacher warns him he will be 'nothing small... but altogether something great, either for good or for ill.' From there the Life traces his rise: robbed of sleep by Miltiades' trophy at Marathon, he persuades Athens to spend its silver-mine revenue on triremes rather than a cash handout, over Aristides' objection, building the fleet that will later save Greece. Anecdotes of his vanity, money-making, and rivalry with Aristides and Cimon fill out the portrait of a man who craved honor above almost everything else.
The center of the work is Xerxes' invasion. Themistocles maneuvers the fractious Greek allies toward a sea fight at Salamis - bribing Eurybiades, facing him down with 'Strike, but listen,' reinterpreting the Delphic 'wooden wall' oracle as the fleet itself, and finally forcing the battle by secretly tipping off Xerxes that the Greeks meant to flee, so that the Persian king encircled them and left them no choice but to fight. The victory at Salamis, and the ruse afterward that dissuades Xerxes from destroying the Hellespont bridge, mark the peak of his career; he is voted first for wisdom at the Isthmus and mobbed with applause at the following Olympic games.
The second half is a fall as sharp as the rise: rebuilding Athens' walls by deceiving Sparta, championing the fleet and the Piraeus over land power, growing 'burdensome to the allies' through exactions, and finally ostracized as the city tired of a man it had used as a plane tree - sheltered under in storms, stripped of branches in fair weather. Implicated by association with Pausanias' Spartan treason, he flees through Greece to the court of the Persian king, delivers a speech of studied self-justification, and ends his days as a Persian pensioner, dying at Magnesia at sixty-five - by poison or bull's blood, Plutarch reports both traditions. Read alongside the parallel Roman life of Camillus, Themistocles stands as Plutarch's case study in a genius whose foresight saved his city and whose ambition undid him, a portrait as attentive to naval strategy and oracle-reading as to table talk and grudges, and a primary source historians still mine for Salamis, ostracism, and the diplomacy of fifth-century Greece and Persia.
“You will be nothing small, my boy, but altogether something great, either for good or for ill.”
— Themistocles
“When Eurybiades raised his staff as if to strike him, Themistocles said, 'Strike, but listen.'”
— Themistocles
“but we have a city, the greatest of the Greek cities, our two hundred triremes, which stand ready right now to rescue you, should you want their protection”
— Themistocles
“He used to say that the Athenians did not honor or admire him, but treated him as they would a plane tree”
— Themistocles
“Boys, we would have been ruined, if we had not been ruined.”
— Themistocles
According to Plutarch, he first persuaded the Athenians to spend their silver-mine revenue on triremes years before the invasion, then maneuvered the reluctant allied commanders into fighting in the narrow strait rather than retreating to the Isthmus. His decisive stroke was sending his slave Sicinnus to tell Xerxes secretly that the Greeks meant to flee, prompting the Persian king to encircle the fleet overnight and leave the Greeks no option but to fight on ground of Themistocles' choosing.
Plutarch says the Athenians turned on him as his power and reputation grew 'oppressive... and disproportionate to democratic equality,' explaining that ostracism was 'not a punishment, but a consolation and relief of envy.' Themistocles himself compared his treatment to a plane tree that people shelter under in a storm and strip of leaves in fine weather.
Yes. After being implicated through the Pausanias treason affair, he fled through Greece and eventually reached the Persian court, where Plutarch stages his audience with Artabanus and then with Xerxes' son, complete with a speech comparing human speech to an embroidered carpet that must be unfolded to be understood.
Plutarch reports two traditions: that he sacrificed to the gods, gathered his friends, and drank bull's blood, or that he took a swift-acting poison. He died at Magnesia at the age of sixty-five, and Plutarch notes that even the Persian king, on learning the circumstances, only admired him more.
Plutarch presents them as opposites from youth - Aristides gentle and honor-driven, Themistocles expedient and ambitious - who became political rivals, with Aristides ostracized partly through Themistocles' influence. Yet Aristides set the rivalry aside to warn Themistocles of the Persian encirclement before Salamis, and later they clashed again, amicably, over Themistocles' proposal to burn the Greek fleet and destroy the Hellespont bridge.
When the Spartan admiral Eurybiades raised his staff as if to strike him during a dispute over strategy, Themistocles replied, 'Strike, but listen,' and used the composure this won him to argue that Athens, with two hundred triremes, effectively was a city greater than any walled town, since its fleet could rescue the allies who abandoned it.
He persuaded them to forgo distributing the revenue from the Laurium silver mines among themselves and instead build triremes, ostensibly for the war against Aegina rather than any distant Persian threat, since fear of Darius or Persia felt too remote to move the citizens.
Plutarch groups lives by shared pattern rather than era; both men saved their city in a moment of extreme danger through decisive, sometimes ethically compromised action, and both were later cast out by the very citizens they had rescued.
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