Plutarch, a Greek writer of the first and second centuries AD, wrote Parallel Lives: paired biographies of Greeks and Romans. This life is Themistocles of Athens, set in the fifth century BC, when Persia threatened the city-states of what is now Greece. Plutarch pairs him with Camillus, a Roman who also saved his city and was not always loved for it.

Themistocles looked at a silver mine at Laurium and saw a navy. When the Athenians would have split the ore as cash, he talked them into ships. When the Persians under King Xerxes invaded, those ships became the wooden wall an oracle had promised. He drew the Persian fleet into the narrow waters at Salamis, near Athens, and wrecked it. Then Athens tired of him. Ostracism — exile by popular vote — sent him away. A Persian king took him in. He died in Magnesia, in western Turkey; some said he took poison rather than lead a war against Greece.