Yale UP (2026) h/b 224pp £18.99 (ISBN 9780300256598)
The purpose of the ‘Ancient Lives’ series, to which this book belongs, is to ‘unfold’ biographies of leading figures so that readers will ‘know’ them ‘in fully human dimensions, complete with foibles and flaws, and will see that the issues they faced … have changed very little over the course of millennia.’ A not insignificant problem is, of course, the paucity of evidence from which we might reveal those fully human dimensions of a late-Archaic/early-Classical character such as Themistocles. Contemporary sources are few, and the biographer, Plutarch, to whom we must perforce resort, was writing more than half a millennium later with his own agenda (to use already ‘ancient lives’ as moral exempla).
Nonetheless, S. navigates the available evidence with skill, drawing from literature, inscriptions and archaeology to produce a persuasive picture of the man who, perhaps more than any other, shaped the history of not just Athens but the West for centuries to come. S. is particularly strong on context—his account of the interwar decade of 490 to 480 BC, and his description of the mining process at Laurion are especially compelling—and he paints a vivid picture of the edgy, ever-shifting political situation of Athens’ early democratic years, when the polis was under threat from not just Persia but nearby Aegina and even some soi-disant allies.
Themistocles’ life will be familiar to many readers: how he fought at Marathon; how he inspired Athenians to build their fleet; how he tricked first Persia’s Great King into giving battle in the Bay of Salamis and then the Spartans into giving Athens time to build her walls; how he fell from grace, was ostracised, and fled to Persia where he was fêted before choosing suicide rather than betray the Greeks. And there may be those who push back at some of S.’s conclusions. Quibbling about the emphasis on how Themistocles’ status as a nothos (the child of a citizen father and foreign mother—though S. concludes that ‘his mother may have been more Athenian than the later sources make out’) made him an outsider, some might point to two equally influential contemporaries, Cleisthenes and Cimon, who were similarly nothoi. Others might take issue with the way in which S. tends to brush aside reports of Themistocles’ financial shenanigans (‘This was not corruption in the modern sense—it was typical Athenian business practice to accept payment in return for favors.’). Others might question S.’s acceptance at face value of Spartan allegations of Themistocles’ involvement with Pausanias in a plot to betray Greece. These are, however, details, and many of those quibbling readers may already have made up their minds. In his lifetime, too, as evidence from ostraca makes clear, there were differing opinions about the man.
For those coming fresh to Themistocles, however, this is a vivid introduction to his life and times. Lively and insightful, it is well written and immensely readable, laying out the material with admirable clarity (albeit with one important slip, which should have been picked up by an editor: the name ‘Themistocles’ does not literally translate as ‘new fame’; instead that is the translation of ‘Neocles’, the name of Themistocles’ father). As for Themistocles himself, S. succeeds in conjuring a man of enormous drive, whose ego and ambition might lead him to propose schemes ‘lacking in empathy’, and whose tendency to put self before city led to his downfall. If it is still not entirely clear how someone whose father was ‘not one of the particularly distinguished men at Athens’ could rise so quickly that he held one of the highest offices of state at the earliest possible age, or why he was not elected general in the year following Salamis, this is the fault not of S. but of our sources.
With one map, one illustration, endnotes and an index, this book is to be recommended to any general reader, not to mention A level students, undergraduates and teachers, the libraries of whose institutions should all possess a copy. The reason is that this ancient life does indeed resonate today. As S. writes of his Themistocles: ‘This roller-coaster journey must have fed his sense of uncertainty about his status, his insecurity, and his constant search for individual fame, but it also gave him the abilities and resilience that made him a survivor, a man who was able to learn new ways of living within a very different world even in his final decade. For tenacity alone, he deserves our respect.’
David Stuttard