THEMISTOCLES AND ARISTIDES. By GEORGE GROTE.

[Athenian statesmen and soldiers, the first named born 514 B.C., died about 449; the second, surnamed “the Just,” died about 468 B.C., date of birth unknown. During the Persian invasions of Greece, Themistocles was the most brilliant figure among the Greek leaders; his genius was omnipresent, his resources boundless. He created the maritime supremacy of Athens, and through him the great victory of Salamis was won. His political ascendency was finally lost through the distrust created by his unscrupulous and facile character, and he died an exile in Persia, intriguing against his native land. Aristides, less brilliant than his rival, was famous for the stainless integrity and uprightness of his public life, and his name has passed into history as the symbol of unswerving truth and justice. He also contributed largely to the successful leadership of the Hellenic forces against their Asiatic invaders. References: Plutarch’s “Lives,” Grote’s “History of Greece,” Curtius’s “History of Greece.”]

Neither Themistocles nor Aristides could boast of a lineage of gods and heroes like the Æacid Miltiades;[3] both were of middling station and circumstances. Aristides, son of Lysimachus, was on both sides of pure Athenian blood. But the wife of Neocles, father of Themistocles, was a foreign woman of Thrace or Caria; and such an alliance is the less surprising since Themistocles must have been born in the time of the Peisistratids,[4] when the status of an Athenian citizen had not yet acquired its political value. There was a marked contrast between these two eminent men—those points which stood most conspicuous in one being comparatively deficient in the other.

In the description of Themistocles, which we have the advantage of finding briefly sketched by Thucydides, the circumstance most emphatically brought out is his immense force of spontaneous invention and apprehension, without any previous aid either from teaching or actual practice. The might of unassisted nature was never so strikingly exhibited as in him; he conceived the complications of a present embarrassment and divined the chances of a mysterious future with equal sagacity and equal quickness. The right expedient seemed to flash on his mind extempore, even in the most perplexing contingencies, without the least necessity for premeditation.

Nor was he less distinguished for daring and resource in action. When engaged on any joint affairs his superior competence marked him out as the leader for others to follow; and no business, however foreign to his experience, ever took him by surprise or came wholly amiss to him. Such is the remarkable picture which Thucydides draws of a countryman whose death nearly coincided in time with his own birth. The untutored readiness and universality of Themistocles probably formed in his mind a contrast to the more elaborate discipline and careful preliminary study with which the statesmen of his own day—and Pericles specially the greatest of them—approached the consideration and discussion of public affairs. Themistocles had received no teaching from philosophers, sophists, and rhetors, who were the instructors of well-born youth in the days of Thucydides, and whom Aristophanes, the contemporary of the latter, so unmercifully derides—treating such instruction as worse than nothing, and extolling in comparison with it the unlettered courage, the more gymnastic accomplishments of the victors at Marathon.

The general character given in Plutarch, though many of his anecdotes are both trifling and apocryphal, is quite consistent with the brief sketch just cited from Thucydides. Themistocles had an unbounded passion, not merely for glory—insomuch as the laurels of Miltiades acquired at Marathon deprived him of rest—but also for display of every kind. He was eager to vie with men richer than himself in showy exhibition—one great source, though not the only source of popularity at Athens; nor was he at all scrupulous in procuring the means of doing it. Besides being scrupulous in attendance on the ecclesia and dicastery, he knew most of the citizens by name, and was always ready for advice to them in their private affairs. Moreover, he possessed all the tactics of the expert party-man in conciliating political friends and in defeating personal enemies; and though in the early part of his life sincerely bent upon the upholding and aggrandizement of his country, and was on some most critical occasions of unspeakable value to it, yet on the whole his morality was as reckless as his intelligence was eminent.

He was grossly corrupt in the exercise of power and employing tortuous means, sometimes, indeed, for ends in themselves honorable and patriotic, but sometimes also merely for enriching himself. He ended a glorious life by years of deep disgrace, with the forfeiture of all Hellenic esteem and brotherhood—a rich man, an exile, a traitor, and a pensioner of the Great King, pledged to undo his own previous work of liberation accomplished at the victory of Salamis.

Of Aristides, unfortunately, we possess no description from the hand of Thucydides; yet his character is so simple and consistent that we may safely accept the brief but unqualified encomium of Herodotus and Plato, expanded as it is in the biography of Plutarch and Cornelius Nepos, however little the details of the latter can be trusted. Aristides was inferior to Themistocles in resource, quickness, flexibility, and power of coping with difficulties; but incomparably superior to him—as well as to other rivals and contemporaries—in integrity, public as well as private; inaccessible to pecuniary temptation as well as to other seductive influences, and deserving as well as enjoying the highest measure of personal confidence.

He is described as the peculiar friend of Clisthenes, the first founder of the democracy; as pursuing a straight and single-handed course in political life, with no solicitude for party-ties, and with little care either to conciliate friends or to offend enemies; as unflinching in the exposure of corrupt practices by whomsoever committed or upheld; as earning for himself the lofty surname of the Just, not less by his judicial decisions in the capacity of archon, than by his equity in private arbitrations, and even his candor in public dispute; and as manifesting throughout a long public life, full of tempting opportunities, an uprightness without a flaw and beyond all suspicion, recognized equally by his bitter contemporary the poet Timocreon, and by the allies of Athens, upon whom he first assessed the tribute.

Few of the leading men in any part of Greece were without some taint on their reputation, deserved or undeserved, in regard to pecuniary probity; but whoever became notoriously recognized as possessing this vital quality, acquired by means of it a firmer hold on the public esteem than even eminent talents could confer. Thucydides ranks conspicuous probity among the first of the many ascendant qualities possessed by Pericles; and Nicias, equal to him in this respect, though immeasurably inferior in every other, owed to it a still larger proportion of that exaggerated confidence which the Athenian people continued so long to repose in him.

The abilities of Aristides, though apparently adequate to every occasion on which he was engaged, and only inferior when we compare him with so remarkable a man as Thucydides, were put in the shade by this incorruptible probity, which procured for him, however, along with the general esteem, no inconsiderable amount of private enmity from jobbers, whom he exposed, and even some jealousy from persons who heard it proclaimed with offensive ostentation.

We are told that a rustic and unlettered citizen gave his ostracizing vote and expressed his dislike against Aristides on the simple ground that he was tired of hearing him always called the Just. Now the purity of the most honorable man will not bear to be so boastfully talked of, as if he were the only honorable man in the country; the less it is obtruded the more deeply and cordially will it be felt; and the story just alluded to, whether true or false, illustrates that natural reaction of feeling produced by absurd encomiasts or perhaps by insidious enemies under the mask of encomiasts, who trumpeted for Aristides as the Just man at Attica so as to wound the legitimate dignity of every one else.

Neither indiscreet friends nor artful enemies, however, could rob him of the lasting esteem of his countrymen, which he enjoyed with intervals of their displeasure to the end of his life. Though he was ostracized during a part of the period between the battles of Marathon and Salamis—at a time when the rivalry between him and Themistocles was so violent that both could not remain at Athens without peril—yet the dangers of Athens during the invasion of Xerxes brought him back before the ten years of exile were expired. His fortune, originally very moderate, was still further diminished during the course of his life, so that he died very poor, and the state was obliged to lend aid to his children.