Themistocles Challenges

To a certain degree the characteristics of his youth, despite his own affirmation of ‘breaking and training’, beneficially prevail to adulthood. The roman biographer Cornelius Nepos ascertains that ‘The vices of his early youth were compensated by great virtues’. These same vices, his impulsive attitude in the public life, were responsible for the very virtuous achievements he is referring to. In fact these character traits foreshadow the decisions he would make years later in the Persian Wars. Comparatively, his impulsiveness matured into a cunning and uncontrollable determination in the face of authority. He was cleverly deceitful in the construction of a fleet of triremes, he was uncompromising against the Spartan commander Eurybiades at the first gathering at Corinth in 480 BC, and he was determined to get his own way in vital battles such as Salamis and Artemisium whether that required deceiving those authorities above him or not. Plutarch, Nepos, and Themistocles himself all refer to a degree of uncontrollable yet cunning determination that serves a great purpose in Greece’s victory over Persia.

His force further had innumerable archers. It was with this in mind that the Athenians made the “fateful” decision to train 40,000 men for 200 ships in 481BCE. This force was relatively inexperienced compared to the Persian contingent, which included skilled Phoenician sailors (D.S 11.18.1). The Persians had light, fast boarding ships compared to the Greeks who had stout, strongly built ramming ships (8.10,60). This would prove critical later at the crowded straits of Salamis in 480BCE. If it were not for this fleet, the “Persian conquest of Greece would have been assured.” (7.139). If Persia had control of the sea, defeat by land would quickly have followed due to the inability of the city-states to hold a united front. The halt in city-state squabbles and the creation of the Hellenic League was “no small achievement” and was to the great disadvantage of Xerxes. This clearly was a factor in the overall demise of the campaign. The construction of the Athenian fleet, advocated by Themistocles, was a precursor to this.

“Despite the many examples available from sources like Frémont, where Native people and travelers met on uncertain terms, negotiated, and ended up sharing and trading together peacefully, most emigrants seem to have been convinced that the worst stories of inhuman savagery were the only ones worth remembering in a crisis.” –Brendan Lindsay, Murder State, 108

The Role of Themistocles in the Greek Defeat of the Persians in 480 - 479 BC.

It is this arrogance and poor insight from the Persian leaders that added to a Greek victory.

The First Persian War took place at the Battle of the Marathon near Athens and it was known as one of the infamous battle between the Athenians and the Persians. In 501 B.C.E., a Greek tyrant named Aristogorus provoked the Persian rulers by instigating an uprising in Miletus and Ionia to revolt against the Persian Empire. In order to ward off the Persian Empire’s wrath, Aristogorus reached out to his compatriots on the mainland in Greece of Athens and Sparta. “Sparta refused, but Athens sent twenty ships-enough just to anger the Persians, but not to save Miletus.” Nevertheless, the Athenians conquered the Persian’s capital of Lydian in Sardis in order to steal the golds, but they accidentally ended up burning down the richest capital of Sardis.

There are times in history that something will happen and it will defy all logic. It was one of those times when a few Greek city/states joined together and defeated the invasion force of the massive Persian Empire. The Greeks were able to win the Greco-Persian War because of their naval victories over the Persians, a few key strategic victories on land, as well as the cause for which they were fighting. The naval victories were the most important contribution to the overall success against the Persians. The Persian fleet was protecting the land forces from being outflanked and after they were defeated the longer had that protection. While the Greeks had very few overall victories in battle they

This essay examines the evolution of the Athens strategy from the beginning to the end of The Peloponnesian War (431 to 404 BCE). The Strategy will be evaluated in the context of the relationship of ends, means, and ways by testing the suitability, acceptability, feasibility, and risk.

First of all, it is feasible to say that one of the most important reasons for the Athenian defeat was due to

Themistocles was aware that the only way to defeat the Persians was to cut of their naval power, so he devised a plan. He sent a slave to the Persians with a message that they were escaping, and the Persians sent ships to meet there escapees. The Athenian ships were prepared to face them. Their specialty in sea battles, along with the narrowness and swirls of the sea gave the Athenians an advantage. This strategy is what ultimately brought victory to the Greeks, as it left the Persians without a supply line and weakened their forces. The two events, the battle at Marathon and the battle at Salamis, showed that Athens was a great contributor to the war, both land and sea.

The battle between Sparta's well-built army and Athens's exemplary navy was like a battle between a bear and a shark. If the bear goes into the water, the shark wins. However, if the shark enters land, the bear will kill it. The Athenian general and military genius Pericles knew this. Therefore, he devised a strategy that was based on the strength of his navy and the Spartan inability to battle him on sea; he devised a strategy of attrition where they would sit at home, and outlast the enemy (Kagan 52). In his mind, if Athens disregarded the Spartan land attacks, and instead survived off sea trade from their allies, the enemy would be unable to cause much damage. He wanted to drain them out psychologically, to get them to surrender from attacking the Athenian Empire (Kagan 52). One of the most important steps in doing this was to connect Athens to its navy city and their port. They did this by building walls that connected them, later known as the Long Walls (Kagan 9). Back then, walls were almost impregnable to attacks, and were one of the best defenses in the ancient world. Therefore, the addition of the Long Walls made both Athens and the port extremely hard to crack; they were ready for any Spartan land attack that would come their way. When the war finally started and the Spartans did come, they found that their attacks were not going to work. Their strategy of totally crushing the Athenian Empire and fighting a battle of annihilation was countered by the

The battle of Thermopylae was the Greek’s first stand against the massive army of King Xerxes, and was the most influential battle of the entire war. Up to this point, the Persian army was seen as too massive and powerful to be stopped. The once warring city-states of Greece knew they couldn’t stand against the Persians alone, and knew in order to defend their homeland they would have to unite. A unity of command was agreed upon; King Leonidas of Sparta was chosen to lead the Greek forces. He was chosen to lead because of the unsurpassed warring abilities the Spartans were so well known for made him perfect for the objective of stopping the Persians.

“But we trust that the gods may grant us fortune as good as yours, since we are just men fighting against unjust, and that what we want in power will be made up by the alliance of the Lacedaemonians” (Thucydides 270). The Melians should have acted sensibly instead of being naïve and submit to the imperial power seeing that the odds were against them. The Athenians give them a choice, but they decided to act irrational and respond emotively. “They underestimated Athens’ military power, judging the issue by the clouded eye of volition rather than calculations based on security and followed the human tendency to back their desires with uncritical hope and use of sovereign reason only to reject what they find unpalatable” (Bosworth 36).

In early fifth century BC Greece, the Greeks consistently suffered from the threat of being conquered by the Persian Empire. Between the years 500-479 BC, the Greeks and the Persians fought two wars. Although the Persian power vastly surpassed the Greeks, the Greeks unexpectedly triumphed. In this Goliath versus David scenario, the Greeks as the underdog, defeated the Persians due to their heroic action, divine support, and Greek unity. The threat of the Persian Empire's expansion into Greece and the imminent possibility that they would lose their freedom and become subservient to the Persians, so horrified the Greeks that they united together and risked their lives in order to preserve the one thing they all shared in common, their

The Persians wanted to conquer the Greeks after the Greeks were allies to Aristogoras. Darius, the king of Persia, started to send agents to determine any potential allies in the Greek city-states. They found Argos and supplied the with men and money to get the job done. They failed as Spartans sliced and diced every soldier, as shown in the movie “300.” Spartans always came out on top due to their aggressive and “perfect” military. Athens had their entire fleet destroyed and were controlled by Sparta from there on