Holland’s research is impressively thorough and unobtrusively annotated, but he has Periander, the tyrant of Corinth, demonstrating to an apprentice despot how to stay in power by taking him to a cornfield and lopping off the tallest stalks. In fact (assuming Holland’s properly venerated source, Herodotus, is factual), it was Periander himself who was taught this trick by Thrasybulus, tyrant of Miletus.
More crucially, Holland sees Themis- tocles as at once a patriotic strategist and a man who, fearing that Salamis may go the other way, makes secret overtures to stay in the Great King’s good books. Granted, the sly comings and goings of the Greek’s emissary, Sicinnus, to the Great King’s camp could be interpreted two ways; but Holland omits a possibly decisive detail: before the battle, Themistocles is said by some (admittedly contested) sources to have offered three captive Persian noblemen as sacrifices to the Greek gods whose Athenian temples Xerxes had just burned. Was that the act of a two-faced operator who had booked a secret single ticket to Persia if things went wrong?
True, Themistocles, when ostracised by his ungrateful countrymen, did later go and run the province of Magnesia for Xerxes’ successor, but that was several twists and years down the line from Salamis. One more petty point: Halicar- nassus didn’t become the ‘metropolis’ of Caria until Mausolus moved his capital from Mylasa in the fourth century. None of which should put anyone off a text that students would be very, very lucky to have listed among their set books.
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