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Let’s talk about Plutarch! He’s a dude from Boetia who ended up being made an honorary citizen of Athens, which does not happen just every day, after being all sorts of impressive in his academic and literary pursuits. He died during the reign of Hadrian, in 120 C.E., which should give you some idea of just how far removed he is from Thucydides (and Herodotus) in the time that he’s writing. So it’s good to remember that in his biography of Themistocles, while he overall had access to more and better sources than we do today, he wasn’t exactly writing about a contemporary. He was writing about 580 years after the man’s death; it’d be the equivalent of a modern author writing a biography on Joan of Arc.
He wrote his Lives as a series of 24 sets, each pairing up some famous Greek with a famous Roman; the set would go over the first man’s life, then the second, and then write a comparison between the two. Themistocles and his pair-up, Camillus, we still have, but the actual text comparing the two has been lost. But who cares? We’re here for Themistocles!
It’s worth remembering that Plutarch was writing, at least by modern standards, historical fiction. He put a lot of effort into having an engaging style, and trying to prove a point about whatever he thought a person’s real character/morality was. So while he (presumably) tried for historical accuracy, he wasn’t writing with a focus on getting the facts across: it’s made explicit even in the introduction to my text that Plutarch didn’t consider himself a historian.
All that said, he had better sources than we do; he names more than twenty separate authors explicitly as sources, and we’ve got the relevant passages for maybe seven of those guys. So even taken as an unhistorical account, it’s probably the closest to accurate that we’re going to get. And it’s not like Herodotus and Thucydides didn’t have their biases there, either: compare Herodotus, trying to point out how Themistocles was stealing ideas or motivated by money, to Thucydides, who spends a paragraph on how gosh-darn clever Themistocles was.
Anyway, let's have a short section of Plutarch, since I've rambled on about the dude for so long.
( Quick, readers! To the Plutarchmobile! )
He wrote his Lives as a series of 24 sets, each pairing up some famous Greek with a famous Roman; the set would go over the first man’s life, then the second, and then write a comparison between the two. Themistocles and his pair-up, Camillus, we still have, but the actual text comparing the two has been lost. But who cares? We’re here for Themistocles!
It’s worth remembering that Plutarch was writing, at least by modern standards, historical fiction. He put a lot of effort into having an engaging style, and trying to prove a point about whatever he thought a person’s real character/morality was. So while he (presumably) tried for historical accuracy, he wasn’t writing with a focus on getting the facts across: it’s made explicit even in the introduction to my text that Plutarch didn’t consider himself a historian.
All that said, he had better sources than we do; he names more than twenty separate authors explicitly as sources, and we’ve got the relevant passages for maybe seven of those guys. So even taken as an unhistorical account, it’s probably the closest to accurate that we’re going to get. And it’s not like Herodotus and Thucydides didn’t have their biases there, either: compare Herodotus, trying to point out how Themistocles was stealing ideas or motivated by money, to Thucydides, who spends a paragraph on how gosh-darn clever Themistocles was.
Anyway, let's have a short section of Plutarch, since I've rambled on about the dude for so long.
( Quick, readers! To the Plutarchmobile! )