EPILOGUE
He stands at the doorway of the throne room. He is poised to begin the next act in a life that already has enough drama for the most demanding muse. Themistocles is more than two thousand miles from home, but he has not seen home in years. First he was exiled from Athens in a season of political infighting. Then he was accused of treason and had to run for his life. He traveled from one end of the Greek world to the other; he begged, bribed, flirted, networked, tricked, threatened, befriended, and finally flattered his way to Persia. He has made the latest gamble in a life full of risks. Now it is time to see if it will pay off: Themistocles is about to meet the Great King. The date is probably early in the year 464 B.C. The place is the royal palace in the city of Susa, which, along with Persepolis, was a capital.
Themistocles had suffered the fate of many a politician in a democracy. The people like their leaders to rise high and to fall fast. The longer a successful politician stays on the scene, the more the public worries about what he wants. A man as cunning as Themistocles made people nervous, and it did not help to have him build a temple in Athens to Artemis of Good Advice, as if to trumpet his own genius. His political enemies were glad to unite against him, and in the late 470s he was ostracized. He lived in exile in Argos, a Spartan enemy in the Peloponnese. A few years later, Sparta claimed to find evidence that Themistocles was a Persian agent, and he fled Argos. After many adventures, he reached Susa.
With his round face and his coarse and fleshy features, Themistocles did not look like what the Persian king might have expected. How different he appeared from the statues brought back from Athens by the Persian army; those statues all had long, lean faces with tidy features. The Greek visitor who stood at the entrance to the royal audience hall looked more like a brute than a hero.
But the young king knew perfectly well who the Greek was. Artaxerxes had not been on the throne long, but he had been thoroughly briefed by his advisers. He had become king after the assassination in August 465 B.C. of his father, His Royal Majesty of Blessed Memory, Xerxes son of Darius, King of Kings. Xerxes was murdered in a court intrigue. And now, Artaxerxes, seated on his throne, was about to receive his father’s old foe. Of all the double-dealing Greeks who stank of the salt air of the Aegean Sea, none was more treacherous than Themistocles.
Artaxerxes surely knew it. Neither he nor his advisers was likely to have been fooled by the letter written to him by Themistocles, in which the Athenian claimed that he had saved Xerxes in 480 B.C. by talking the Greeks out of destroying the bridges over the Hellespont. At the sight of Themistocles, Artaxerxes might have wanted to get up and grab a spear from one of his bodyguards and run the rotten Athenian through. But then, he probably also knew that the old Greek would be full of precious secrets. And having Themistocles on the Persian payroll was a propaganda bonanza. And so young Artaxerxes received in the hall of the heir of Cyrus the Great the worst enemy that his beloved father had ever faced.
The Greeks might have been surprised to know it, but the Persians probably mourned Xerxes as a great man. During his reign, Xerxes was a builder who constructed the greatest of the royal palaces at the city of Persepolis. He was a warrior who crushed rebellions in Egypt and Babylon. And he was a strategist who might have been remembered in Persia not as the man who lost a war with Greece but, rather, as the king who rectified the western border. Xerxes understood, as others did not, that the forces of the empire were spread too thin. It was necessary to pull back the imperial borders in the West. But first, he taught the Greeks a lesson.
The Great King’s expedition to the land of the Greek barbarians truly represented one of the greatest achievements in history, or so the Persians might have thought. With the help of heaven, the King of Kings bridged the Hellespont. He gathered so many troops and ships that they darkened the horizon. After forcing every city in his path to offer him its hospitality, His Majesty crushed the Spartan army at Thermopylae and killed the evil king Leonidas. Then he took Athens, burned to the ground the temples of the false and lying gods, devastated the land, and sold into slavery all the inhabitants who had not fled. Having subjected to his will every land from Thrace to the Isthmus of Corinth, His Majesty imposed tribute and returned in the finest of form to Anatolia.
There were, of course, the usual errors made by the Great King’s slaves. The unfortunate Mardonius lost his life in an ambush by Greek barbarians when his army was withdrawing after its pacification campaign. And Artaxerxes had heard something about a skirmish of ships near some island called Salamis, in which the king of Sidon had been embarrassed by certain Greek captains. But after making a show of force, the Persian army had withdrawn behind secure borders.
In 477 B.C. Athens had created a new naval alliance of Greek city-states. It was formed on the island of Delos, located in the central part of the Aegean Sea and sacred to the god Apollo. Historians usually refer to the alliance as the Delian League. This alliance consisted of about 150 Greek city-states of the Aegean islands, Euboea and the northeastern coast of Greece, the Sea of Marmara, and the west coast of Anatolia. Athens held the rank of leader of the alliance. Many of these city-states had formerly been subjects of the Great King.
Persia required its subjects to pay tribute. Athens did the same thing. To be effective, the Delian League needed to have a strong fleet, and naval power was expensive. So with the exception of a few member states, who contributed warships or men, all of the members of the Delian League paid tribute to Athens. The Greek city-states substituted one imperial power for another.
From its very founding, the Delian League committed itself to expansion. Not only did its members promise to defend Greece against any new attack by Persia, they also swore to attack the lands of the Great King in order to avenge the damage done to Greece by Xerxes in 480 B.C. and to acquire booty.
The Delian League was created and grew at Persia’s expense, but the Persians might have taken it in stride. They might have seen things like this: just because the Persian imperial treasury had liquidated the cost of maintaining tyrants in Greek cities like Samos and Miletus, which now belonged to the Delian League, a certain amount of nonsense had been bruited about as to the liberation of the Ionians. The Greeks might babble on, but the Persian satrap of Ionia still sat in Sardis. Persian horsemen continued to ride the rich river valleys of Anatolia that run inland from the Aegean Sea. Some Greek cities on the Anatolian coast still paid the Great King’s annual tribute; what difference did it make if some of them also paid out protection money to the Athenians?
Meanwhile, the strategy of His Late Majesty, may his name be blessed, had worked beautifully. The Greek barbarians had been left to do what they did best: kill each other. Athens was building up a naval empire in the Aegean Sea, while the Spartans fumed and plotted a war against the rising power of Athens before it became too late.
Artaxerxes could not know it, but the Persian Empire would last another 150 years after Salamis. There would be no more expansion, but after the losses to Athens of the 470s and 460s, the Persians would manage to hold on to their empire, with only the occasional rebellion to suppress here and there. The Delian League lasted just seventy-five years. After it disappeared in 404 B.C., the Great King used a combination of diplomacy and bribery to keep the Greeks divided and off guard. Only the rise of a new power, Macedonia, led by its kings Philip and Alexander, finally brought down the Persian Empire in 330 B.C.
Meanwhile, the Persians could have smiled knowingly at the saying that imitation is the sincerest sort of flattery. No sooner was the Delian League founded than it began to look a lot like the Persian Empire. Athenian allies rose in revolt as Persian allies had done in the past. Athenian generals sailed out with fleets to fight rebels, whom they then executed or enslaved just as the Persians had tried to do to Athenians at Salamis. Athenian politicians began to put on imperial airs, writing memos not about their “allies” but “the cities Athens controls.” Athenian consumers developed a taste for Persian clothes and Persian art—but that only made sense, because imperial powers are naturally attracted to each other.
Within two generations of creating one of the world’s first democracies, Athens had achieved the remarkable feat of also creating the world’s first imperial democracy. At home, Athens stood for freedom and equality. Abroad, Athens did not hesitate to use any means necessary in order to enforce the authority of the league that it led. After making a heroic stand against Xerxes in the name of freedom, Athens had discovered that in order to maintain its freedom, it would have to make difficult compromises abroad.
Salamis, it has been said, was a great battle because, without that victory, the world would have been deprived of the glory that was Greece. But that underestimates the resiliency and the drive of Greek civilization.
If the Greeks had lost at Salamis, Xerxes would have gone on to conquer the Peloponnese. Themistocles and the surviving Athenians would have fled to southern Italy. And there, they might well have recovered. Just as mainland Greece saved Ionia in 480B.C.and afterward, so Greek Italy might have saved mainland Greece. Athens in exile might have roused the western Greeks to arms against the invader. Together, they might eventually have sailed back to Greece and driven out the barbarian with blood and iron.
Or perhaps the exiles would have stayed in southern Italy. They might have thrived there. So even if the Greeks had lost at Salamis, the ancient Greeks might well have gone on to create classical civilization—in exile in Italy. But they would not have invented imperial democracy.
Defeat at Salamis would not have deprived the world of Greece’s glory but of its guile and greed. Salamis offered Athens the first taste of the temptation that it could not resist. Thanks to Salamis, Athens was free and Greece would be enslaved. Democracy was saved and the Athenian empire was born.
And it was precisely the contradiction of democracy and empire that made Athens so exciting for a century and more after Salamis. Athens failed to live up to its ideal of freedom, and failure generated critics. They included historians like Herodotus and Thucydides and poets like Sophocles and Euripides and Aristophanes. And they included the most cutting critic of them all: Socrates. And Socrates led to Plato, Aristotle, and the Western tradition of political philosophy. That tradition, the debate over democracy and its discontents, is the true legacy of Salamis, and the final reason it might just have been the greatest battle of the ancient world—and certainly its greatest naval battle.
In the years after Salamis, Athens headed down the road of democracy and empire. Meanwhile, the steady stream of Greek political exiles to the Great King’s court did not stop flowing. And now—to return to the scene at Susa in 464 B.C.—Artaxerxes son of Xerxes an Achaemenid the King of Kings was about to pick the finest fruit of all.
The Great King motioned for the Greek stranger to enter. Themistocles advanced. They say that Greeks were too proud and freedom-loving to bow down to the ground before the Great King as all his subjects did. We do not know how Themistocles behaved on the occasion, but afterward gossip claimed that he prostrated himself without hesitation.
That night, the story goes, Artaxerxes called out three times in his sleep: “I have Themistocles the Athenian!”
Themistocles’ audience with Artaxerxes was a success. The Athenian asked for and received a year to learn the Persian language and Persian customs. When he returned to see the Great King again, he impressed Artaxerxes as a man of genius. The king made Themistocles governor of the Ionian city of Magnesia, located inland in the rich valley of the Meander River. Magnesia was to provide Themistocles “his bread,” and he was also given control of the nearby city of Myos “for his meat” and of the city of Lampsacus on the Hellespont “for his wine,” the Lampsacus region being famous for its wines. Themistocles’ family had joined him in exile, and in Magnesia his female relatives served as priestesses of the temple of Artemis.
And so the strategist of victory over the Persian fleet at Salamis, the battle that began the transfer of the Aegean Sea from Persian to Greek control; the founder of the Athenian navy and the visionary who turned his native city from a second-rate land power into a maritime giant; the man who had humiliated Xerxes and smashed his sea power—this man now crossed the Aegean Sea to live out his life in comfortable exile with his family, an administrator in the Persian provinces and a vassal of Xerxes’ son, the Great King Artaxerxes I.
Themistocles died in Magnesia in 459 B.C. Egypt had risen in revolt from Persia again, and Athens had sent ships to the Nile to help the rebels. Legend says that Themistocles poisoned himself rather than follow the Great King’s order to make war on Athens. But he probably died of natural causes. A monument to Themistocles was put up in the marketplace of Magnesia. Meanwhile, his family followed his last wish by secretly bringing his bones home and reburying them in Athenian soil. Or so it was said. Certainly, Athenian law forbade the burial in Attica of a traitor, as Themistocles had been judged. But there were probably many Athenians in 459 B.C. who would have been happy to honor their old commander with a good Greek grave at home.
Themistocles was not the only veteran of Salamis to see his life take unexpected turns after the battle. Consider the Greek side first, beginning with Athenians. In 480 B.C., Themistocles’ old rival Aristides still had his finest hour ahead. In August 479 Aristides commanded Athens’s infantry at the battle of Plataea, thereby going down in history as one of Greece’s saviors. Not long afterward, Aristides helped Themistocles trick the Spartans while Athens surrounded itself with a defensive wall. In 477, Aristides made the first assessment of tribute for the members of the Delian League. But little money stuck to his fingers, because when he died around 468, he died a poor man. He was buried at Phaleron, a fitting reminder of the night when Aristides helped tip the balance against the Persian fleet that was moored there. His son, Lysimachus, was a famous failure; his grandson, also named Aristides, probably died in active service during the Peloponnesian War.
Aeschylus went on after 480 B.C. to great glory as a dramatist. In addition to the plays The Persians in 472 and Seven Against Thebes in 467, he offered his classic trilogy Oresteia in 458. Afterward he visited Greek Sicily, where he died and was buried in the city of Gela in 456. Two of his sons also became dramatists.
After his victory in the battle of Mycale in 479 B.C., the Athenian general Xanthippus sailed to the Hellespont to lay siege to the city of Sestus. Sestus sits on the European side of the Hellespont, opposite the city of Abydos: the twin cities command the crossing of the strait. In fact, Sestus was the first European city entered by Xerxes when he crossed the Hellespont in 480 B.C. After a months-long siege, Sestus fell to Xanthippus and his men in the spring of 478.
Xanthippus died not long afterward (the precise year is not known), but he left behind a very ambitious son: Pericles. A teenage refugee in 480 B.C., Pericles eventually became first man in Athens. But first he had to defeat a rival. Cimon, the clever young conservative who hung up his horse bridle before Salamis, dominated Athenian politics in the 460s. He won big victories in the East against Persia. But Pericles managed to discredit Cimon and replace him.
From 460 to 430 B.C., Pericles would lead Athens to its Golden Age. It was under Pericles that the city completed its democratic revolution. It was under Pericles as well that the Delian League became the greatest maritime empire that the Mediterranean had ever known. With the tribute collected from that empire, Pericles funded the greatest building project in Greek history: Athens rebuilt the temples on the Acropolis that Xerxes’ men had destroyed in September 480. Forty-two years later, in 438 B.C., the centerpiece of that rebuilding program was dedicated—the most famous building of ancient Greece: the Parthenon.
Sicinnus, the slave of Themistocles, presumably lived out his days comfortably as a citizen of the small city-state of Thespiae in central Greece. Thespiae lies to the west of Thebes, in a fertile valley in the foothills of Mount Helicon, known in legend as the home of the Muses. In its heroic days in 480 B.C., Thespiae stood up to Xerxes and was destroyed. But the city that was rebuilt after the war had time to devote to its favorite deity, Eros, the god of love. Sicinnus, we may imagine, enjoyed life as a Thespian, telling stories about his fateful meetings with the Great King.
In the Peloponnese, Adimantus of Corinth passed on his grudge against Athens to the next generation. His son Aristeas, a charismatic military commander, led a Corinthian force of so-called volunteers in an undeclared conflict with Athens in 432 B.C. When the Peloponnesian War formally broke out soon afterward, Aristeas went on a military mission to the Great King, whose aid he wanted to enlist against Athens. But Aristeas was captured en route and executed by the Athenian state in 430 B.C.
It is unclear whether Phayllos ever made it home again to Croton, but his memory lived on. After conquering the Persian army at the battle of Gaugamela in northern Iraq in 330 B.C. Alexander the Great sent a portion of the booty to far-off Croton, in recognition of Phayllos’s contribution to victory at Salamis.
Some of the other principals in the battle of Salamis leave no trace in the historical record after 480 B.C. Eurybiades of Sparta, for instance, commander of the Greek fleet, is not heard of again, nor is the hardy Aeginetan marine Pytheas of Aegina, nor the proud Aeginetan captain Polycritus, nor the Athenian ace Aminias of Pallene. On the Persian side, Tetramnestus, king of Sidon, is not attested after Salamis. The eunuch Hermotimus disappears after 480 into the winding corridors of the palaces at Persepolis and Susa.
Mardonius, the chief war hawk of Xerxes’ expedition, died on the battlefield at Plataea in 479 B.C. One of his daggers ended up in Athens, on the Acropolis, as part of the Athenian share of enemy booty, a total take amounting to five hundred talents, which represented three million days’ wages at the time. Mardonius’s dagger weighed five and a half pounds. Apparently it was made of pure gold.
Xerxes’ brother and Artaxerxes’ uncle Achaemenes was still alive in 464 B.C. He was governor of Egypt (at Salamis, he had commanded the Egyptian squadron). He would die fighting an Egyptian rebellion in 459.
An anecdote survives that Xerxes rewarded Demaratus of Sparta for having told him the hard truth about the enemy’s strength: he let him name the reward of his choice. Demaratus is supposed to have asked to enter the city of Sardis, the pride of Anatolia, riding in a chariot and wearing the tiara, the privilege of royalty. In other words, Demaratus asked to be recognized again as a king, and with a Near Eastern splendor unheard of in Sparta. Whether or not there is any truth in this story, it is certain that Demaratus and his descendants continued to flourish in the Persian Empire. Darius had given the Spartan exile land and the governorship of three Anatolian cities not far from Troy: Halisarna, Teuthrania, and Pergamum. And his descendants would weather every storm to maintain their grip on these cities for two centuries, until after the death of Alexander the Great.
No details survive of Artemisia’s activities after 480 B.C. We do not know how or when she died. But the dynasty that she had worked so hard to promote during Xerxes’ expedition was still alive and well a generation later. Sometime around 460 or 450 B.C., her son or nephew Lygdamis ruled as king of Halicarnassus, as an inscription of that date shows. His position was a tribute to his survival skills. Up and down the west coast of Anatolia in the 470s and 460s B.C., the Athenian navy drove out the Persians and the rulers who supported them. One by one the kings, princes, and tyrants fell, except, that is, for a few supple rulers who managed to switch allegiances as easily as a hunter might switch arrows. Lygdamis of Halicarnassus was one of the success stories.
If Herodotus had managed to have his way, Lygdamis would have been a failure. As a young man in Halicarnassus, the future historian joined a rebellion against the ruling house. But the rebellion failed and Herodotus went into exile—and the rest is history.