Laudator Temporis Acti

Ostia, Museo Archeologico Ostiense, inv. 85: Peter Green (1924-2024), Xerxes at Salamis (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), p. 24 (note omitted):

The Ostia herm ... portrays a most striking personality, and one which exactly matches the impression conveyed by our other sources. An influential group of scholars and art-historians now maintains, rightly as I would hold, that this bust derives from an original portrait made towards the end of Themistocles' life, about 460 BC. Till recently it was taken as axiomatic that no true 'likenesses', in the modern sense, existed for almost another century. This view is now undergoing considerable revision and modification, for which the Themistocles bust itself is in no small part responsible. That big round head, simple planes recalling the early cubic conception, poised squarely above a thick, muscular, boxer's neck; the firm yet sensuous mouth, showing a faint ironic smile beneath those drooping moustaches; wiry crisp hair lying close against the skull — all tell an identical story. What we have here is the portrait of a born leader: as Gisela Richter wrote, 'a farseeing, fearless, but headstrong man, a saviour in time of stress, but perhaps difficult in time of peace'. There is, surely, nothing conventional or stylised about that broad forehead and bulldog jaw; they have an ineluctably Churchillian quality. Indeed, of all modern statesmen, Churchill is the one whose career parallels that of Themistocles in so many ways that coincidence will hardly suffice as an explanation. Both possessed the unpopular gift of being right when their more intellectual contemporaries were wrong. Both had a streak of that dazzling yet suspect histrionic genius which can transcend and transform a national emergency. Both were voted out of office with uncommon speed when the crisis they surmounted was over. Under Themistocles' leadership the Athenians, too, lived through their finest hour.