Not that ambition was his only motivation. While nothing that Themistocles did was ever entirely divorced from self-interest, he had seen in the poor not merely voters but the future saving of his city. A startling notion to his peers; “yet it was the genius of Themistocles that he could gaze far into the future, and penetrate there every possibility, both for evil and for good.”20 More clearly than any of his elders, the tyro politician recognized that the best chance for his city’s survival lay not on dry land but on the sea—and that any warship would depend for power upon the massed muscle
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