1. Why this case, and what it adds
The scriptural archetype examined in Paper 2 displays the phenomenon under a monarchy, where the fear that destroys the deliverer resides in a single sovereign and acts through his personal command. A reader might suppose that the phenomenon is therefore a disease of kingship, a hazard peculiar to regimes in which one man’s envy can become the policy of the state. The Athenian case refutes that supposition, and this is the first reason the suite takes it up early and at length. Athens, when it destroyed Themistocles, was not a tyranny. It was a democracy, governed by the votes of its assembled citizens, with institutions deliberately designed to prevent the concentration of power in any one man’s hands. The fear that drove out the architect of the city’s salvation was not the fear of a king for his throne but the fear of a citizen body for its equality, and the instrument of the destruction was not a royal spear but a popular vote and a public trial. The case therefore establishes a finding that the whole suite depends upon: the phenomenon is not confined to despotisms, and a regime need not be ruled by one fearful man for it to turn upon the deliverer whose prestige has grown too great. Where the monarchy fears the rival to the throne, the democracy fears the man who has risen above his fellow citizens, and the second fear is as capable of ingratitude as the first.
The second reason the case is valuable is that Athens gives the phenomenon its most explicit institutional form. The Athenian procedure of ostracism was a standing mechanism, written into the constitution, by which the citizens could exile for ten years any man whose prominence they judged dangerous, without any charge of wrongdoing and without trial. It was, in effect, the phenomenon formalized into law, a permanent civic instrument for removing the over-large, and its existence shows that the impulse to destroy the prominent was not in Athens an occasional fit of ingratitude but a recognized and regulated feature of the political order. To study the destruction of Themistocles is therefore to study the phenomenon at the one point in this suite where the regime had built the machinery of it in advance and stood ready to use it. The closing paper of the suite will argue that the phenomenon arises wherever a regime’s tolerance for a rival pole of prestige is exceeded; Athens shows a regime that had set that threshold by statute.
The third reason is the bitter completeness of the irony. Themistocles defeated the Persian empire and saved Greece from subjection to the Great King, and he ended his life as a governor in the service of that same king, drawing the revenue of Persian cities, having fled to the enemy he had defeated because the city he had saved had condemned him to death. No other case in the suite closes the circle so exactly, and the irony is not incidental decoration but evidence, for it shows how completely the persecution of the deliverer can drive him into the very position the persecution accused him of occupying.
2. The deliverance: the silver, the wooden walls, and the strait of Salamis
The first criterion of the phenomenon is demonstrable deliverance through military skill, and Themistocles satisfies it not by a single feat of arms but by the foresight, persuasion, and stratagem that made the deliverance possible at all. His deliverance of Athens and of Greece was the work of a mind rather than of a sword arm, and it began years before the Persian fleet appeared.
The foundation was the fleet itself, and the fleet was Themistocles’s creation against the inclination of his fellow citizens. When the silver mines at Laurium yielded an unexpected surplus, the Athenians were minded to distribute it among themselves, and Themistocles persuaded them instead to spend it on the building of two hundred triremes, ostensibly for the war against Aegina but, as the event proved, for the far greater struggle to come (Herodotus, ca. 430 BCE/1998, 7.144). This act of persuasion was the indispensable precondition of the later victory. Without the fleet there could have been no Salamis, and without Themistocles there would have been no fleet, for the natural impulse of the assembly was to take the money rather than to build the ships. The deliverance of Greece thus rested on a single man’s success in turning his city from immediate advantage toward distant peril, and the foresight that did so is the first measure of his skill.
The second element of the deliverance was the interpretation of the oracle, from which this paper takes half its title. When the Persian host advanced, the Athenians consulted the oracle at Delphi and received the dark counsel that the wooden wall alone should remain unconquered. The Athenians were divided over its meaning, some holding that it pointed to the ancient thorn hedge of the Acropolis, others that it meant the ships, and Themistocles carried the assembly to the second reading, arguing that the wooden wall was the fleet and that the city should be abandoned to the enemy while its people took to the sea (Herodotus, ca. 430 BCE/1998, 7.141–143). The decision to evacuate Athens and stake everything on the fleet was among the boldest in the history of any state, the deliberate surrender of the city itself in order to preserve the people and to fight on the one element where the enemy might be beaten. It was Themistocles who made the people willing to do it.
The third and decisive element was the battle in the strait. The Greek fleet lay at Salamis, and the allies, fearing to be trapped, wished to withdraw to the Isthmus and fight in the open where the greater Persian numbers would tell. Themistocles, knowing that dispersal meant defeat and that the narrow strait would rob the Persians of their advantage in numbers, contrived to force the battle by sending a secret message to Xerxes that the Greeks intended to flee and might be caught and destroyed if the Persian fleet blocked the exits in the night (Herodotus, ca. 430 BCE/1998, 8.75). The Persians, deceived, surrounded the strait, and the Greeks, finding retreat closed, fought where Themistocles had meant them to fight, in the narrows where the Persian fleet could not deploy and turned upon itself in confusion. The victory was total, and it broke the back of the Persian invasion, for with his fleet shattered Xerxes withdrew, leaving an army that was defeated the next year at Plataea. Herodotus’s judgment is unequivocal, that if the Athenians had abandoned the sea the whole of Greece would have fallen, and that they, after the gods, were the saviors of Greece (Herodotus, ca. 430 BCE/1998, 7.139). Since the Athenian fleet was Themistocles’s fleet, fighting at the place and in the manner Themistocles had contrived, the deliverance of Greece is rightly laid to his account, and the first criterion of the phenomenon is satisfied in the fullest measure.
3. The reward of the deliverance
The narrative of the phenomenon requires that the deliverance be followed, after an interval, by the regime’s fear and the deliverer’s destruction, and in the Athenian case the interval is brief and the reversal sharp. For a short time after Salamis Themistocles enjoyed an honor without precedent. When the victorious commanders met at the Isthmus to vote on who had served best, each voted first for himself and second, almost to a man, for Themistocles, so that though no man would grant him the first prize, the general voice of the second prize declared him the foremost (Herodotus, ca. 430 BCE/1998, 8.123–124). When he went to Sparta, the Spartans honored him as they had honored no foreigner, giving him a crown and the finest chariot in the city and escorting him to their border with a guard of honor (Herodotus, ca. 430 BCE/1998, 8.124). His prestige stood at its height.
It was in this period that Themistocles performed his last great service to Athens and, in doing so, displayed the very quality that would make his fellow citizens fear him. After the war the Athenians began to rebuild their walls, and the Spartans, jealous of a fortified rival, sent to forbid it. Themistocles went to Sparta as ambassador and there spun out the negotiations with delays and evasions while the whole population of Athens, men, women, and children, raised the walls behind him, so that by the time the Spartans understood they had been deceived the walls stood too high to be challenged (Thucydides, ca. 400 BCE/1972, 1.89–93). He then fortified the Piraeus as the city’s harbor and naval base, fixing Athens’s future as a sea power. The stratagem secured Athens’s independence and its empire, but it also showed the city, and Sparta, and Themistocles’s own rivals, that here was a man whose cunning could deceive the most powerful state in Greece, who acted on his own judgment ahead of his instructions, and whose ascendancy over the city was nearly complete. The same gifts that had saved Greece now marked their possessor as a man too large for the equality the democracy was built to preserve.
4. The turn: ostracism as the institutionalized fear
The third criterion of the phenomenon, that the destruction be driven principally by fear of the figure’s prestige rather than by any real offense, is met in the Athenian case with a clarity that the institution of ostracism makes inescapable, for ostracism required no offense at all. It was a vote of exile imposed on a man not for what he had done but for what he had become. Each year the assembly was asked whether an ostracism should be held, and if it voted yes, the citizens gathered and wrote upon potsherds, the ostraka from which the procedure took its name and from which this paper takes the other half of its title, the name of the man each wished to see exiled; and if the total reached the quorum, the man whose name appeared most often was sent away for ten years, keeping his property and his citizenship but removed from the city and its affairs. The procedure was designed for precisely the situation Themistocles now embodied, the rise of a single citizen to a prominence the democracy feared, and it allowed the city to remove him without accusing him of any crime, because his prominence was itself the thing to be removed.
Around the year 472 or 471 the Athenians ostracized Themistocles (Plutarch, ca. 100 CE/1960, “Themistocles,” 22). No charge accompanied the vote, because none was needed; the man who had saved the city was sent into exile not as a wrongdoer but as a danger, his very greatness the ground of his removal. Plutarch records that the Athenians grew weary of his constant reminders of his own services and of the eminence those services had given him, and that the procedure was used, as it had been used against others, to humble a prestige that had grown too high (Plutarch, ca. 100 CE/1960, “Themistocles,” 22). This is the phenomenon in the form the democracy gave it. The monarchy of Saul feared a rival to the throne; the democracy of Athens feared a man who had risen above his fellows, and it had built into its constitution the means of striking such a man down without the inconvenience of proving him guilty of anything. The ostracism is the destruction of a deliverer for the offense of having delivered too greatly, and the absence of any charge is not a mitigation but the very signature of the phenomenon, for it shows that the city itself understood that what it was punishing was not a crime but an eminence.
5. The destruction completed: the charge of medism, the flight, and the Persian court
Ostracism was exile but not death, and had the matter ended there Themistocles would belong with Scipio among the deliverers ruined but not killed. It did not end there. While he lived in exile at Argos, the Spartans, who had their own reasons to be rid of him, pressed upon Athens the charge that Themistocles had been complicit in the treasonous dealings of the Spartan regent Pausanias with Persia, and the Athenians, willing to believe it of a man they had already cast out, sent officers to arrest him and bring him to stand trial on a capital charge of medism, the betrayal of Greece to the Persian enemy (Thucydides, ca. 400 BCE/1972, 1.135).
The historian is bound to ask, as Paper 1 required, whether this charge was true, for if Themistocles had in fact turned traitor then his condemnation would fall under the boundary case of the suppression of real treason and outside the phenomenon. The honest answer is that the charge of conspiracy with Pausanias cannot be established and was very likely false, and that the order of events tells against it. The ostracism came first, and the ostracism was for no crime at all but for prominence; the treason charge came after, when the man was already broken and exiled and embittered, and rested on association with Pausanias rather than on any proven act of Themistocles himself. The decisive consideration is that his flight to Persia, the act that seemed to all the world to confirm the charge of medism, was the consequence of the persecution rather than its cause. Hunted across Greece with a death sentence upon him, having found no safe refuge among his own people, Themistocles fled at last to the one power that would protect him from Athens, and that power was Persia. The city’s persecution drove him into the arms of the enemy and thereby manufactured, after the fact, the appearance of the very treason it had charged. This is a pattern the suite will meet again, the regime’s destruction of the deliverer producing the proof that seems to justify it, and it shows why the criterion of motive must look behind the charge to the sequence of events. The operative cause of Themistocles’s destruction was not treason but the fear that had already ostracized him; the treason charge was the instrument by which exile was converted into a sentence of death.
The flight itself was an odyssey of a man with nowhere to turn. Pursued by both Athenians and Spartans, Themistocles fled from Argos to Corcyra, and finding no safety there to the court of Admetus king of the Molossians, who though Themistocles’s personal enemy honored the suppliant who clasped his hearth and refused to give him up (Thucydides, ca. 400 BCE/1972, 1.136–137). From there he crossed at last into Asia and made his way to the Persian court, now ruled by Artaxerxes the son of that Xerxes whose fleet Themistocles had destroyed at Salamis. The Great King, far from punishing the man who had defeated his father, received him with honor and granted him the revenues of cities, Magnesia for his bread, Lampsacus for his wine, and Myus for his meat, so that the destroyer of Persia at sea ended his life as a Persian governor living on Persian revenue (Thucydides, ca. 400 BCE/1972, 1.138). He died there a few years later, around 459, and Thucydides reports that he died of sickness, though a tradition that Plutarch preserves held that he took his own life by drinking bull’s blood rather than make war upon the Greeks at the king’s command (Plutarch, ca. 100 CE/1960, “Themistocles,” 31). Whichever account is true, the manner of the end completes the phenomenon: the man who saved Greece died in the service of Greece’s enemy because Greece had condemned him to death, and his bones, by his own wish, were said to have been carried home in secret to the land that had cast him out (Thucydides, ca. 400 BCE/1972, 1.138).
6. The wider Athenian pattern: Miltiades and Phocion
The destruction of Themistocles was not an isolated act of ingratitude but an instance of a settled Athenian disposition, and the case is strengthened by setting beside it two others, one before and one long after, which show the same democracy turning upon the men who had served it best. The pattern across the three establishes that what befell Themistocles was characteristic of the regime rather than peculiar to his person.
Before Themistocles there was Miltiades, the victor of Marathon. In 490 the Persians landed at Marathon, and it was Miltiades whose generalship won the battle that turned them back and saved Athens from the first invasion, a deliverance as decisive in its day as Salamis was in its (Herodotus, ca. 430 BCE/1998, 6.109–117). The next year Miltiades led an expedition against the island of Paros which failed, and he returned wounded; and the Athenians, forgetting Marathon, prosecuted him for the failure, condemned him, and fined him fifty talents, a sum he could not pay (Herodotus, ca. 430 BCE/1998, 6.136). His wound mortified, and he died in prison, or under the shadow of the unpaid fine, his son Cimon discharging the debt after his death. The case differs from the strict phenomenon in that the prosecution attached to a real failure at Paros and so verges on the boundary case of scapegoating; but the speed and severity with which the city turned upon the man who had saved it at Marathon, the readiness to destroy for one failure the deliverer of the recent past, shows the same disposition that would ostracize Themistocles after Salamis, and Herodotus presents it as the city’s ingratitude rather than as justice.
After Themistocles, generations later, there was Phocion, called the Good for his uprightness, who was elected general by the Athenians forty-five times across a long life and served the city with a probity that none could impugn (Plutarch, ca. 100 CE/1960, “Phocion,” 8). In the troubled years after the death of Alexander, amid the struggles of his successors, the restored democracy turned upon Phocion, accused him of betraying the Piraeus to the enemy, and condemned the aged general to death by hemlock, a death the assembly decreed in a tumult of passion (Plutarch, ca. 100 CE/1960, “Phocion,” 34–36). Plutarch records that the Athenians soon repented, put to death the man who had brought the accusation, and gave Phocion a public burial and a statue, the customary penitence of a city that destroys its servants in fear and grieves for them afterward (Plutarch, ca. 100 CE/1960, “Phocion,” 37–38). The death of Phocion, like the hemlock the same democracy had given to Socrates, shows that the Athenian readiness to destroy its eminent men endured across centuries and was not the failing of a single generation.
It is worth observing, to keep the analysis honest, that the Athenian disposition was not invariable in its outcome, for some men whom the city ostracized it afterward recalled and honored. Aristides, surnamed the Just, was ostracized in his rivalry with Themistocles and yet was recalled before Salamis, served the city again, and died revered; Cimon, ostracized in his turn, was likewise recalled. These recoveries do not weaken the case but clarify it. The phenomenon does not require that every prominent man be destroyed but that the regime possess the disposition and the means to destroy the prominent when its fear is roused, and the standing institution of ostracism shows that Athens possessed both. That some were recalled shows only that the fear was not always pressed to its lethal end; that Themistocles, Miltiades, and Phocion were not recalled shows that often it was.
7. The phenomenon analyzed: the four concepts in the Athenian case
The four analytical concepts laid out in Paper 1 are all present in the destruction of Themistocles, and tracing them confirms that the Athenian case is an instance of the same structure that governs the rest of the suite.
The convertibility of capability into threat appears in the very gifts that won Salamis. The cunning that deceived Xerxes into the strait, the boldness that abandoned the city to save the people, the persuasion that built the fleet against the assembly’s will, were all powers that, once the Persian danger had passed, presented themselves to the democracy as the powers of a man who could deceive, persuade, and dominate his own city as readily as he had deceived the enemy. The deception of Sparta over the walls, admired as statecraft, was also a demonstration that Themistocles would act on his own judgment ahead of his instructions and could outwit any authority, and a citizen body devoted to equality could not contemplate without alarm a man of such capacity rising permanently above it. The skill that saved the city became the skill the city feared.
Prestige as a rival source of legitimacy appears in the unique honors Themistocles received and in the weariness those honors bred. In a democracy the legitimate source of authority is the collective will of the citizens, and a single man whose personal glory eclipses that will is, by his mere existence, a competitor to the principle of the regime. Plutarch’s report that the Athenians grew tired of Themistocles’s reminders of his services names exactly this, for the services were a standing claim to a deference the democracy was not willing to grant any individual (Plutarch, ca. 100 CE/1960, “Themistocles,” 22). The prestige of the savior was a pole of loyalty that the city’s equality could not absorb, and ostracism was the means of dispersing it.
The asymmetry between the irreplaceable individual and the self-preserving institution appears in the shift of value that followed the war. While Persia threatened, Themistocles’s unmatched capability was the city’s salvation and his prominence was tolerated as its price. Once the threat receded, his capability lost its value to the institution while the threat his prominence posed to the city’s equality remained, and the democracy, whose first commitment was to the preservation of its own constitutional balance, resolved the asymmetry by removing him. The same calculus that the suite finds in the monarchies operates here in the register of the democracy, the institution protecting its defining principle, equality, against the individual whose greatness endangered it.
The use of legal and constitutional form to legitimate the destruction appears twice and in two registers. The ostracism was the constitutional form, a regular vote of the citizens that clothed the removal of the deliverer in the legitimacy of due procedure and required no charge to be proved. The subsequent trial for medism was the legal form, a capital prosecution that converted exile into a death sentence under the appearance of a treason case. The democracy did not exile and condemn Themistocles by naked decree of fear; it did so through the potsherd and the tribunal, the vote and the indictment, and the recourse to these forms shows the same impulse the suite finds throughout, the need of the regime to present its fear as justice and to affirm that it acted by law rather than by dread.
8. The Athenian variant and the standard of the suite
Read against the scriptural archetype established in Paper 2, the Athenian case confirms the phenomenon’s structure while displaying its democratic variant. In both, a genuine deliverer is destroyed by the regime he saved, out of fear of the prestige the deliverance created, through forms that present the destruction as something other than what it is. The difference lies in where the fear resides and how it acts. In Saul the fear is personal, the dread of one king for a rival to his throne, and it acts through the king’s spear and the king’s command. In Athens the fear is collective, the dread of a citizen body for a man who has risen above the equality the regime exists to maintain, and it acts through the vote of the assembly and the verdict of the court. The monarchy fears the man who might be king; the democracy fears the man who has become, in glory if not in title, more than a citizen. The two fears are species of one genus, and the suite reads them together.
The Athenian case also confirms, in advance, the self-defeating character of the phenomenon that the closing paper will argue. Athens did not, like Saul’s kingdom, fall immediately to the enemy after driving out its deliverer, for the danger from Persia had been broken at Salamis itself; but the city forfeited the counsel and capacity of the man who had built its sea power and secured its walls, and it set a precedent, repeated in Miltiades and Phocion, of destroying the very men whose judgment the city would need in its later crises. The democracy that gave hemlock to its best general and to its wisest citizen, and exile and death to the savior of Greece, weakened over time its own capacity to be served well, for it taught its ablest men that the reward of great service was the potsherd, the indictment, and the cup. The closing paper returns to this cost; the present case establishes that the Athenian democracy, no less than the monarchy of Saul, paid it.
The completeness of the Athenian irony makes the case a fitting early station in the suite. Themistocles saved Greece from Persia and died a Persian governor; he abandoned his own city to the enemy in order to preserve its people, and was abandoned by that people in his turn; he deceived the Great King at Salamis and lived out his last years on the Great King’s bounty. The man who interpreted the wooden wall as the salvation of Athens was driven from Athens by the shard of exile, and the deliverer of the city ended where the enemy had been. In him the fear that Scripture names, the fear of man that becomes a snare, took the form of a city’s fear of its own greatest citizen, and the snare it set caught not the deliverer alone but the city’s own honor, which never afterward stood quite clean of the charge of having repaid its salvation with exile and a sentence of death.
References
Frost, F. J. (1980). Plutarch’s Themistocles: A historical commentary. Princeton University Press.
Herodotus. (1998). The histories (R. Waterfield, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published ca. 430 BCE)
Plutarch. (1960). The rise and fall of Athens: Nine Greek lives (I. Scott-Kilvert, Trans.). Penguin Books. (Original work published ca. 100 CE)
Thucydides. (1972). History of the Peloponnesian War (R. Warner, Trans.; M. I. Finley, Intro.). Penguin Books. (Original work published ca. 400 BCE)
