For there, with the dual realizations that any bulwark the Ionians might have given them was surely doomed, and that the far-seeing and pitiless eye of the King of Kings would soon be fixed unblinkingly on their city, the Athenians were panicking, too. The ebullient self-confidence that had swept the democracy to its first intoxicating victories was already fading fast. Defeat in Ionia was not the only bloody nose that the Athenians had recently been given. For a whole decade now, they had found themselves embroiled in a bothersome war with the small but tormentingly energetic island of Aegina, a nest, as the Athenians saw it, of pirates and scavengers, and one that stood infuriatingly only fifteen miles south of Salamis, in the heart of the Saronic Gulf—directly astride their shipping lanes. Guided in her policy as she was by landowners, instinctive lubbers with their roots in the soil, Athens had never thought to build herself a navy. Nor, despite the relentless buzzing of Aeginetan privateers, did she think to do so now. Who, after all, was going to stump up the cash? Not the poor, self-evidently; and certainly not the rich, who took it for granted that they should stand and fight with shield and spear on dry land, as men of their background, men who could afford decent armor, had always done. Yet this disdain for seapower, although it certainly helped to preserve the hoplite class from the indignity of having to grunt and sweat at an oar, did not contribute greatly to the war effort against Aegina. Indeed, such was the Athenians’ impotence against enemy raids that they were forced, on one occasion, to watch helplessly as their whole harbor went up in flames. True, the wide bay of Phalerum was not easily defended; nor were the Aeginetan pirates in any position to challenge Athens by land; but the fact that the war was a nuisance rather than a terminal menace in no way diminished the democracy’s sudden sense of drift. One question, in particular, could hardly fail to trouble the voters. If they found it impossible to defeat a tiny pinprick of an island just off their coast, what hope would they have against the righteous fury of a superpower?
As the storm clouds of seeming Persian invincibility loomed ever darker over Ionia, so strange shadows from the past returned to haunt Athens, too. In the summer of 496 BC, the Athenian people elected as their head of state a man whose very name appeared to hint at an imminent climbdown from liberty. Hipparchus was not merely the son of a prominent Pisistratid minister, but had even married his sister to Hippias, the exiled tyrant. The ideal candidate, perhaps, to open channels to his brother-in-law, negotiate favorable terms with Artaphernes, and secure a pardon for the burning of Sardis from the Great King. In the event, the democracy stood firm: despite all the continuing bad news from the Ionian front, Hipparchus served out his year of office without engaging in active collaboration. Yet the temptations of surrender, which the peace party naturally preferred to term realism, continued to gnaw away. Rumors of treachery—of “medizing”—swirled through the city; and inevitably, as they had done for a century, the darkest suspicions of all attached themselves to those champion opportunists, the Alcmaeonids. Cleisthenes may have been the patron of democracy, but few doubted that his clan, given sufficient incentive, would opt to sell it out. That nothing was ever proved against them served only to fuel the democracy’s paranoia. The Great King’s gold was surely flowing somewhere, somehow, into Athens. If not to an Alcmaeonid, then to somebody else. Politician kept suspicious eye on politician, tracked the news from Ionia with growing foreboding, and maneuvered for advantage.
To the Eupatrids, of course, this was an old game. Appeasement came naturally to them. As in Ionia, so in Athens, the aristocracy had long affected a faddish Orientalism. The notion that they should risk the obliteration of their city rather than arrive at an accommodation with the all-powerful King of Kings was hardly one that they could be expected to embrace. Enthusiasts for the new political order, realizing this and marking the pall of black smoke that hung over Ionia, came increasingly to mistrust the old elite and to doubt their loyalties. Admittedly, not all Eupatrids could necessarily be regarded as collaborators in waiting: Miltiades, for instance, grandest of the grand though he was, had been an active freedom-fighter in the Chersonese since the very start of the Ionians’ great revolt. But even he ruled his fiefdom as a tyrant: not much of a recommendation to those in Athens growing nervous for their democracy.
Where, then, could they look for leadership? Perhaps to a new generation of politician, and a new breed. One not unsettled by the talk of people power, as the scions of the great families were, but inspired by it instead. Revolution, so alarming to the Eupatrid elite, appeared to promise rare opportunities to talented citizens on the make. Barely a decade into the life of the democracy, for instance, a young man by the name of Themistocles could credibly set his eyes on the supreme office in Athens, the archonship, despite coming from a family with no obvious political pedigree at all. Though of aristocratic birth, his father had never shown the slightest interest in holding public office; his mother—horror of horrors—was not even Athenian-born. In an earlier and more chauvinistic age, a misfortune of this order would have been sufficient to deny Themistocles his citizenship altogether; only Cleisthenes’ reforms and the need to pad out the ten tribes with a full complement of able bodies had ensured a change to the law. As a result, Themistocles’ sense of loyalty toward the new order was of a peculiarly personal nature—and left him hankering after public office rather as a man in a delirium might crave a cure. Themistocles had recognized, with the instinctive cynicism that would always mark his love affair with celebrity, that in a state run by the people there could be only one certain gauge of fame. “How can you rate me,” he would ask his friends, “when I have not yet made anyone jealous?”18 The horizons opened up by the new order glimmered before him as a kind of agony.
In 494 BC, this brilliant and ambitious young man celebrated his thirtieth birthday—and became old enough, after years of waiting, to stand for election to the archonship. The following year, he resolved, he would have a go at it—and do so, furthermore, with a good chance of success. He might have been inexperienced in public life and of obscure background, but he nevertheless had all the makings of a star. Bull-necked, crop-haired, solid of body and face, Themistocles had the appearance, so posterity would judge, “of a true hero”:19 one indomitable, indestructible, packed with strength. Yet he was simultaneously, in his intelligence, the very opposite of muscle-bound: the workings of his mind, infinitely mobile and serpentine, would ultimately become a thing of wonder to his fellow citizens—and of alarm. Not a dark art required of the politician under the Athenians’ new form of government but Themistocles showed himself its master: he could infight, he could network, he could spin. Above all, and most crucially, he knew how to make himself visible. Rather than live out on the family estates, for instance, he chose to settle instead downwind of the Ceramicus, near the “Hangman’s Gate,” where the bodies of executed criminals and suicides were dumped: an insalubrious address, to be sure, but also—and here was the attraction for Themistocles— within walking distance of the Agora. Concerned not to have the great and the good put off visiting this ill-omened spot, he began inviting celebrated musicians to rehearse inside his home; keen to make friends and influence people, he set up as an attorney, the first candidate ever in a democracy to rehearse for public life by practicing the law. Above all, naturally affable and gregarious as he was, he wooed the poor; and they, not used to being courted, duly loved him back. Touring the taverns, the markets, the docks, canvassing where no politician had ever thought to canvass before, making sure never to forget a single voter’s name, Themistocles had set his eyes on a radically new constituency.