Themistocles by Smith Jeffrey

Author:Smith, Jeffrey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Military
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Part III

The Hegemon of Athens and Greece

Chapter 8

A Defeated Persia, A Wounded Themistocles

He had single-handedly brought Greece to the brink of victory at Salamis, but he hardly participated in the rest of the war. 479 BC, the year after Salamis, was one of the most difficult of Themistocles’s life. He was forced to distance himself from the politics of both Athens and Greece, completely vanishing from Herodotus’s narrative shortly after Salamis and never reappearing despite two more large battles in the war. Leadership in the Hellenic League and in Athens was handed off to other men, the latter role falling to Xanthippus, who replaced Themistocles as admiral of the Athenian navy. Themistocles was thereby utterly denied the chance to experience the sweetness of celebrating the triumph of a Greek win in the Greco-Persian Wars.

The reasons for his decline are found in his actions after annihilating the Persian fleet at Salamis. The postscript of the Battle of Salamis was fully written by Themistocles’s Athenians. In perhaps another propaganda campaign, the Athenians fervently denied the heroic claims of two other Greek city-states that helped defeat Xerxes. First, the Aeginetans claimed that they were the first to draw Persian blood in the straits. The ships of Aegina won prizes of valour and had ultimately been the best performers of the day, proportional to the smaller size of their fleet, regardless of whether they truly attacked first. But the Athenians would not tolerate any other city-state in their spotlight, especially after Polycritus’s taunting of Themistocles. Herodotus notes the disparate accounts of the Aeginetan performance at Salamis; the Athenians recast the narrative to say that the Aeginetans were little more than auxiliary to the heroic deeds of the Athenian fleet, and shot down Aegina’s claims to the contrary.

Next, the Athenians worked to underplay the Corinthians’ role in the battle. The Corinthians claimed that they had stymied the Egyptians’ attack from the north and protected the rear of the main Greek fleet. This was, after all, the formal battle plan devised by Themistocles, and the Egyptians had not managed to outflank the Greeks. But the Athenian report was far less kind. They claimed that Adimantus, the Corinthian admiral who had repeatedly and publicly challenged Themistocles, was ‘struck with terror and panic, and hoisting his sails fled away; and when the Corinthians saw their admiral’s ship fleeing they were off and away likewise.’1 Athenian heroism, of course, made up for the Corinthian cowardice. The Athenian account even included Athena herself chastising Adimantus for his failure to act with arete. It was an outlandish tale but, since the Athenians undoubtedly orchestrated the victory, it was a story that Themistocles was able to spread across Greece effectively.

The Athenian hubris bled over into policy decisions. After engineering the retreat of Xerxes and the bulk of his army, Themistocles set his sights on consolidating Athenian influence over Greece. The first step in this process was to subdue the Persian-allied territories closest to Attica and Athens, chiefly so that the Athenians could actually return home and begin to reconstruct Athens.

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