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Don't take it literally: Themistocles and the case of the inedible victuals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

J. L. Marr
J. L. Marr
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Extract

There is a standard tradition in the ancient sources, which makes its first appearance at Thucydides 1.138.5, that, when Themistocles had fled into exile and been given the equivalent of political asylum by the Persian King Artaxerxes, he was ‘given’ the three Asiatic Greek cities of Magnesia, Myus and Lampsacus. There has been a fair amount of scholarly controversy over how the King could ‘give’ Themistocles Lampsacus, a city of great strategic importance on the Hellespont, which, by the mid-460s, was almost certainly within the ambit of the Delian League, i.e. no longer his to give. My concern in this paper is not with that political problem, but rather with a different, though related, issue – whether valid conclusions can be drawn from the Thucydides passage and the subsequent tradition for the social and economic history of these three cities in the classical period. I suggest that they cannot.

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , December 1994 , pp. 536 - 539
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1994

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References

1 Thucydides, 1.137.3, Plutarch, Themistocles 27.1.

2 See e.g. Frost, F. J., Plutarch's Themistocles (1980), pp. 220–3Google Scholar, Gomme, A. W., A Historical Commentary on Thucydides I, p. 292.Google Scholar

3 He had a house there, he issued a personal coinage there, he was buried in a splendid tomb there (Thuc. 1.138.4–5, Plutarch, Themistocles 31.2, 32.3, Hill, G. F., Sources for Greek History, C10 (a), p. 332Google Scholar = Podlecki, A. J., Life of Themistocles (1975), p. 176 plate 3a).Google Scholar

4 Cf. Homer, Odyssey 3.479–80 σῖτον κα οἶνον ἔθηκν | ψα τε, Plato, Gorgias 518b μν ἄρτονς … παρασκενζων, δ ψον, δ οἶνον. The sense of ψον seems to have changed, or rather expanded, between the time of Homer and that of Plato. Earlier it seems to mean ‘cooked flesh’ only, but by the later fifth century in Athens it can also mean a relish, often a fish-paste relish, or sometimes cooked fish. However, the traditional tripartite division itself, with bread as the first item in the list, does not seem to have changed.

5 E.g. Strabo, 13.1.12, Plutarch, Themistocles 29.7, Athenaeus 1.29f, schol. Aristophanes, Knights 84. Similarly Cornelius Nepos, Themistocles 10. 2–3, has ‘namque hanc urbem [Magnesia] ei rex donarat, his quidem verbis, quae ei panem praeberet – ex qua regione quinquaginta talenta quotannis redibant – Lampsacum autem, unde vinum sumeret, Myunta, ex qua obsonium haberet.’

6 Thus the Oxford Classical Dictionary (1970), s.v. Lampsacus, states: ‘It was assigned by Artaxerxes I to Themistocles whom it supplied with the wine for which it was famous’. Flacelière, R., Plutarch, Vie de Thémistocle (1972), p. 96Google Scholar, refers to Thucydides ‘qui précise que Magnésie du Méandre fournissait annuellement 50 talents de pain’ [my italics], and quotes Diodorus' remark about fishy Myus without comment, as does Gomme, HCT p. 445. Frost (1980), p. 222, refers to the possibility that Themistocles ‘enjoyed the wine revenues of Lampsacus’ – a sort of half-way house position. But it is hard to visualize how such an arrangement could have operated in practice. Sommerstein, A. H., Aristophanes, Wasps (1983), pp. 187–8Google Scholar, on Wasps 496–9, rightly takes the ‘bread’ of Magnesia as the traditional terminology of a metaphorical gift, and this interpretation is followed by James, Davidson in a wide-ranging article (CQ 43 [1993], 101–26, particularly 113–14)Google Scholar on the possible social and political connotations of opsophagia at Athens. I would argue that all three items of Thucydides' list are to be interpreted in this way.

7 See Head, B. V., A Guide to the Principal Coin Types of the Greeks (1965), IIA 17, p. 16Google Scholar, and IIIA 18–28, p. 33.

8 Catullus fr. 1 (Kroll, 1959); cf. Wiseman, T. P., Catullus and his World (1985), p. 257.Google Scholar

9 Lampsacus' assessed tribute in 454/3 was the high figure of 12 talents (ATL, pp. 216–441), and the beautiful gold coins of the fourth century indicate continued prosperity.

10 Hermippus fr. 77 (Kassel and Austin) = Athenaeus 1.29e–f. nd

11 So Frost (1980), p. 219.