Search Results

This chapter examines Thucydides' presentation of the pre-history and causes of the Peloponnesian War in his Book 1. It explores the interplay of various key-words in Thucydides' explanatory scheme (especially arche, diaphora, prophasis and aitia), and the ways in which the narrative of the Pentekontaetia (1.89-118) is moulded to support the analysis. Thucydides' methods owe something, and in some cases allude, to Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, and the Hippocratics. Punning and word-play, e.g. on arche as beginning and arche as empire or on Pausanias as ‘stopper’, are seen as important; so is the tracing of events back to Pausanias and Themistocles. The chapter finally discusses how far this may be seen as an ‘open’ text: not very, it argues.

This chapter addresses Herodotus' presentation of Themistocles' motives, taking as a test case the general's rhetoric and conduct at Andros (9.109-110) and after. It reconsiders the possibility of unreliable narratorial comments and the effect of these in eliciting reader response, particularly through the production of shifting perspectives. Herodotus' presentation recalls subsequent history and contemporary - late 5th-century - politics, for example in reflecting sophistic/democratic processes. While underlining the importance of original readers' contemporary experience in interpreting the Histories, the chapter brings out how the narrative in turn exposes the role played by later events in the retrospective fashioning of motivation. It again underlines the complexity of Herodotus' presentation and how it opens up different interpretative possibilities, highlighting the historian's broad intellectual and historiographical—rather than more narrowly political—concerns.

For more than a century Thucydides' eulogy on Themistocles has been interpreted as a classic revision of Herodotus, who allegedly defamed the victor of Salamis. This chapter shows that Thucydides, since he was covering other periods of Themistocles' life than Herodotus, simply did not have the opportunity decisively to refute his predecessor's portrait. For an understanding of Thucydides' treatment of Themistocles, it is necessary to discover his sources and to assess how much he has taken from them. Only then can a comparison be made between Thucydides' description of Themistocles and the description Herodotus formed, often enough by twisting his sources' biases around.

This chapter focuses on Xerxes's assassination in 465 B.C. at the hands of Artabanus, the commander of the royal bodyguard. Xerxes's authority at court had been weakened by his dalliance with his niece while events in the west had taken a turn for the worse. Since the Persian withdrawal from Greece in 479, Sparta and Athens both went their own ways. Sparta emerged as the leading land power in Greece and Athens rapidly achieved dominance of the seas. This chapter begins with an overview of the careers of Pausanias and Themistocles and goes on to discuss Xerxes's last Greek campaign. It then considers historians' accounts of how Xerxes was murdered by Artabanus or Artapanus, the son of Artasyras, a Hyrcanian and an important adviser of Xerxes.

This chapter examines the French academic painter Fernand Cormon's Les Vainqueurs de Salamine (1887). It shows how the Persian Wars chimed at this time with a mood of nationalist revanche and military reform. The War Minister General Boulanger enjoyed huge popularity, confronting Germany and passing measures to render the French army a citizen militia on ancient lines; Themistocles himself in the painting resembles Boulanger on his famous curvetting horse. It is little surprise that Cormon's contemporaries read the work as showing the Greeks as ‘people like us’, in their vulnerable bodily reality, their fervent patriotism, and in their supportive womenfolk. The Persian Wars theme here expresses through history painting the aspirations of ordinary members of a community at a critical turning point of world history.

The chapter's subject is Deinon, one of the most obscure authors from antiquity. It treats Plutarch's employment of Deinon in which the ascription is explicit or plausible. Plutarch uses Deinon mostly in the Artaxerxes, but also refers to his work in the Themistocles (27.1), Alexander (36.4) and De Iside et Osiride (31.363c). Plutarch's employment of Deinon or acquaintance with his text was more widespread than his use of Ctesias, and may have even spanned several periods of his writing. The chapter begins with an analysis of Plutarch's passages, and explores what we can learn about Deinon from these sections, proceeds to compare them with what can be said of Deinon and his work in general from other sources, and then presents some ideas on Plutarch's adaptation of Deinon's work.

This book concludes with a discussion of two digressions that Thucydides makes concerning Athens's past and their implications for his own freedom: the place of the supposed Athenian tyrant slayers in Thucydides's work and his digression on the Athenian statesman Themistocles. It first considers the question of Thucydides's approach to history in relation to that of his identity as an Athenian, with particular emphasis on his claim that he is a historian committed first and foremost to a “search for the truth.” It then discusses Thucydides's account of Aristogeiton and Harmodius and their plot against Athens's tyrant before turning to Themistocles. It also examines Thucydides's appreciation of Athenian democracy to the extent that it is a home for freedom and suggests that his evaluation of imperialism is as complex as his evaluation of democracy. Finally, it explains how Thucydides achieves his homecoming by his act of writing his history of the Peloponnesian War as “a possession for all time.”

This chapter focuses on the question of how Herodotus explains success. What inborn qualities guarantee success? What makes one Persian King more successful than another? The chapter considers Herodotus’ use of the adjectives agathos and chrestos/chresimos in his characterization of important players in the Greco-Persian wars, such as Themistocles and Xerxes, or the Athenians and Spartans collectively. Both adjectives are normally translated as ‘good’, but it appears that their semantics were divergent. Herodotus places them in opposition to show that success does not exclusively depend on courage in battle (= agathos), but also on less glorious aspects such as shrewdness in diplomacy, a good sense of timing, and a willingness to be serviceable rather than strive after honour (= chrestos/chresimos). In the Histories, few display an ideal mix of these qualities, and they often coincide only temporarily before succumbing to the principle of everlasting change.

The first of three chapters examining Athens’ golden-age legacy considers a problem in 300: Rise of an Empire (2014): given the franchise’s vehement Laconophilia (love of Sparta), this sequel to 300 struggles to acknowledge Athens’ indispensable contribution to theallied Greek victory against the invading Persian army. If the Athenians can claim credit for both Greek victory over Persia and the invention of social institutions and cultural production that flourished in the subsequent decades—the basis for the “golden age of Greece” at the root of “Western civilization”—what remains for the Spartans? As Easton elucidates, 300: Rise of an Empire invalidates Athens’ material grandeur by fetishizing the city’s historical destruction during the Persian Wars, including through the a historical fall of the “Athena the Defender” statue on the world-famous Acropolis. At the same time, the themes of the Parthenon’s famous sculptural program(the contest between Athena and Poseidon; heroes battling hybrid monsters, including centaurs and Amazons; and the birth of Athena) haunt the film’s presentation of conflicts between the Greeks, represented by the Athenian general Themistocles and Leonidas’ Spartan widow Queen Gorgo, and the Persians, represented by the Great King Xerxes and especially the adopted Greek-turned-Persian Artemisia.

This chapter discusses differences and similarities between ancient and modern epistolary narratives, comparing Richardson's Pamela, Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, Laclos’ Les Liaisons dangereuses and Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Documents in the Case with the collections of letters attributed to Plato, Themistocles, Chion and Euripides. Striking differences emerge: the ancient examples are much shorter, their protagonists are famous historical individuals, they show a prominent apologetic element, and they not all chronologically arranged. The ancient examples contain only letters, and never present an editor, although ancient literature had ‘discovered texts'. Both ancient and modern examples are deeply interested in the psychology of characters and their motivation, in the power but also the dangers of communication in letters, and in epistolarity itself. Understanding the Greek epistolary collections requires looking beyond the modern epistolary novel, especially to ancient biography and apologetic literature such as the Socratic works of Plato and Xenophon.

discusses a point that has been implicit earlier: a heroic figure, or even an adult male, can express remorse only with difficulty because part of the construction of adulthood in antiquity involves a high degree of consistency. So any deviation can be construed as failure by one’s enemies. Through discussion of the lives of Themistocles, Demosthenes, Cicero, and Alcibiades, the chapter explores the different strategies Plutarch employs to mitigate against what he sees as a character flaw.

This chapter examines accounts of Themistocles from favour, his ostracism, and exile. It presents the hypothesis that it was the news of the Persian decision to renew the struggle which set the scene both for the exiling of Themistocles and for the ruin of Pausanias.

This chapter makes two contributions to our understanding of Polybius’ representation of the Athenian democracy. First, it shows that Polybius’ negative general portrayal of Athens in his political analysis in Book 6 is frequently at odds with his apparent admiration of the Athenians as reflected in his accounts of Athenian diplomacy in the historical narrative. Second, and more importantly, the paper contextualizes the characterization of the Athenian politeia in Book 6 within Polybius’ generally negative depictions of radical democratic states (ochlocracy, in Polybius’ terms). Here it is necessary to note the political meaning of the term ‘democracy’ in the mid-second century BCE, in order to understand how Polybius can condemn the Athenian politeia while praising the qualities of δημοκρατία‎.

Chapter 7 offers a brief look ahead to the afterlife of the panhellenic tradition invented by Philip and Alexander the Great, demonstrating that the self-interested propaganda of the Macedonian kings soon became the dominant narrative of the Persian War in the early hellenistic period. The city-states that had actually participated in the war did maintain their local traditions, but those traditions now evolved within a larger hellenistic world that eagerly adopted the new panhellenic tradition, whose broader lines allowed easier access to this valuable piece of commemorative property. This chapter considers commemorations undertaken by Antigonus I, Demetrius I, Philip V, Attalus I, Philopoemen, the Aetolians, and the Rhodians, as well as a series of Persian-War recollections associated with the Chremonidean War.

This chapter compares Thucydides’ truest πρόφασις‎ for the Peloponnesian War with the logic of Sparta’s greatest πρόφασις‎ for it. Thucydides first recreates a third Corinthian speech, which reveals the general Peloponnesian necessity for war. He then depicts a series of embassies Sparta uses to drum up the greatest πρόφασις‎ for it, involving an exchange of curses—i.e. the honor of the gods—which Thucydides intentionally narrates in a Herodotean style. The narrative transitions into paired treatment of Pausanias and Themistocles, both of whom fell afoul of their cities, and which reveals further differences between Athens and Sparta. It maintains that Thucydides in fact furnishes two accounts of first principles, one Athenian and one Spartan, which lead to different explanations for the war. Sparta’s greatest πρόφασις‎ echoes the embellishment of the poets whom Thucydides critiques in the Archaeology, while Pericles’ first speech, which ends book one, articulates the characteristic “Athenian” response to Sparta’s demands.