For to this seeming paragon of virtue belonged a potent and momentous discovery: that image, in a democracy, might take a statesman just as far as substance. Irrespective of his nickname, Aristeides was, in truth, no less proficient at political machination than Themistocles. Far from “avoiding the entanglements of faction, and cleaving to his own path,”30 as he pretended, he was in truth a networker of consummate ability. While Themistocles had been obliged to rely on obscure parvenus for his political education, for instance, Aristeides had aimed right for the very top, and made himself an intimate of Cleisthenes. Nor was his pose of rugged poverty any less a work of spin: he may not have been as keen on having his palm greased as Themistocles was, but then again, as the owner of a large estate at Phalerum and a close relation of some of the richest men in Athens, he hardly needed to be.
How, then, to explain Aristeides’ peculiar hold on the electorate? His opponents, pointing out that he was a demesman of Alopeke, a village just to the south of Athens, made much play of how it echoed “alopex”—the Greek word for a fox. But this was, perhaps, to push the charge of deceit against Aristeides too far. Hypocrisy, it might even be argued, was the very lifeblood of the democracy. To be sure, the city’s increasingly radical egalitarianism had done little to dim its traditions of snobbery. Aristeides, who mixed wealth with thrift, ambition with public service, the privileges of breeding with a resolve to trust the will of the people, offered to the Athenians a supremely comforting reassurance: that the ideals of their past might be squared with their new regime. Old certainties, he appeared to promise, sprung from the soil of Attica, as deeply rooted as the sacred olive tree that rose from the Acropolis, might still serve to guide the Athenian people through all the perils and insecurities that lay ahead. Set against the Just One’s reassuring hoplite virtues, it was hardly surprising that the flash and dazzle of Themistocles’ call to build a navy should have seemed to many as un-Athenian as the surge of the sea itself.
But this, perhaps, was to mistake the city’s destiny. High on the Acropolis, right next to Athena’s primal olive tree, could be found a cistern filled with salt water. Kneel down beside it and a citizen might hear from its depths “a sighing like that of waves when a south wind blows”; look at the rock, and he might see “a mark in the form of a trident,”31 branded there in the distant past by Poseidon, the god of the sea. Once, it was said, he and Athena had competed to be preeminent in the city; Poseidon, although bested by the goddess, had left behind the well as a mark of his continuing patronage, driven into the rock of the holiest shrine in Athens.32 Nor was the Acropolis the only site where the Athenians might ask the god for favors. At “holy Sunium, Athens’ headland,”33 which every ship had to round when leaving Attica for the open sea, a temple had recently been raised to Poseidon on the edge of the teetering cliff. Datis, commanding his horse transports on their desperate dash for Phalerum, would have seen its columns rising above him as he sailed his ponderous flotilla past the headland. Perhaps Poseidon, stirring the currents with the tip of his trident that fateful day, had slowed down the progress of the Persian ships as they strained for Athens? Certainly, there was no god likelier to favor Themistocles’ plans for saving his city from a second barbarian onslaught than the lord of the sea. Themistocles himself, since Sunium lay only eight miles south of his deme, would have found it an easy matter to travel to the headland, and maybe he often did. With the shadow of the sea god’s shrine on his back and the murmuring of the swell below him, there would certainly have been no better place to pray for a miracle.
And were one to materialize, the likeliest spot for it, as Themistocles would have known, lay within easy walking distance of Poseidon’s temple. The cliffs which formed the tip of the promontory did not extend far. North of Sunium stretched the bleak and blasted flatlands of Laurium, unrelieved by any of the breezes that kept the cape fresh. The air along this stretch of coast was baking and acrid, and filthy with poisonous fumes, yet thousands of people, women and children as well as men, lived here, their shacks clustered meanly around factory complexes. These were not citizens but slaves, unfortunates condemned to labor amid the dust and the pollution so that the democracy might be rich. As the pockmarked slopes which rose beyond the sea and the ceaseless din of picks bore witness, Laurium was an area so rich in silver that there were still fresh seams to be found in the rock, even though it had been mined since before the Trojan War. Over the previous couple of decades, the quarries had benefited from a substantial upgrade: stone tanks had been hollowed out of the rock face, for the washing of extracted ore, so that all extraneous elements, of which there were invariably plenty, might be sluiced away before smelting. This simple innovation had enabled the silver to be refined to an unprecedented degree of purity. It had also opened up a tantalizing prospect: a productive lode, if a new one could be found, would be more exploitable than any in Laurium’s history. It just needed a single, lucky strike. And that, in 483 BC, was exactly what was made.
“A fountain of silver, a storehouse of treasure buried within the earth.”34 So the seam appeared to the dazzled Athenians. What to do with this windfall? No sooner had Themistocles received news of it than he was up on his feet in the Assembly, demanding a fleet. His proposal was greeted with cries of outrage. Aristeides, his blend of conservatism and demagoguery as inimitable as ever, rose in immediate opposition. It was the custom, he pointed out smoothly, for bonanzas from the mines to be divided equally among the Athenian people: an appeal to the voters’ self-interest that managed to be both blatant and hedged about edifyingly by tradition. Themistocles, meeting it head on, chose not to scaremonger, nor even to mention the Persian threat at all. Rather, harping on an enemy far more immediate than the Great King, squatting as she did directly on the Athenians’ doorstep, he began “whipping up the voters’ dislike and jealousy of Aegina.”35 The Assembly, pulled in opposite ways by the rival temptations of avarice and jingoism, settled eventually on compromise. The profits from Laurium would be spent on warships, but only one hundred of them. Themistocles, who had been campaigning for double that number, refused to back down. So too did Aristeides. Neither man was able to force an advantage. Autumn turned to winter, and the democracy, riven by the dispute, found itself paralyzed. By January, when the Assembly met to vote on whether an ostracism should be held that year, the result was a foregone conclusion. The logjam had to be broken: either Themistocles or Aristeides would be going. The pottery shards, it was settled, would be brought out when winter turned to spring.
It may not have been framed as such, then, but the ostracism of 482 BC was, in effect, the first referendum in history. Perhaps the most fateful, too: for on its result would hang the future not only of Athens but of an independent Greece, and of much more besides. As the date appointed for the ostracism neared, the Athenians themselves appear dimly to have woken up to this. Rumors of the massive construction project on the Athos peninsula were by now hardening into menacing fact; and talk of the Great King’s preparations for war, whispered in horror-stricken tones, must surely have begun swirling through the anxious streets. That Themistocles’ enemies, even as they opposed giving the city a fleet, should still have hyped Aristeides as “the Just” appears increasingly to have grated on people’s nerves—as Aristeides himself would soon discover. Standing by the voting pens on the day of the ostracism, he was approached by an illiterate peasant who, failing to recognize the great man, handed him a pottery shard and asked him to write “Aristeides” on it. Nonplussed, Aristeides asked the peasant why. “‘Because,’” came the answer, “‘I am fed up with hearing him called the “Just” all the time.’ And Aristeides, when he heard this, did not reply, but merely took the shard, wrote his name on it, and then handed it back.”36 An inspiring story—and one that could have derived only from the Just One himself, of course. As such, it had the palpable whiff of damage limitation. Even as he watched the ostraka stacking up against him, Aristeides was looking to salvage something from the ruin. Perhaps he had even seen what was written on some of the shards: “Datis’ brother.” Certainly, once the result had been confirmed and it was announced that he would be heading into exile, Aristeides knew that, whatever else he was obliged to leave behind, he had to keep his reputation for honesty. The time might come when he would need it again. Ostracized Aristeides may have been; but even before he had left, he was preparing the ground for his return.