Greene's Observance says Themistocles boasted and Athens got sick of him. Plutarch, printed seventy lines later in the same chapter, says it happened the other way round.
[Themistocles's] fellow citizens reached the point at which their jealousy made them listen to any slander at his expense, and so [he] was forced to remind the assembly of his achievements until they could bear this no longer. — Plutarch, The Life of Themistocles1
Against Greene's version: "his many honors and victories went to his head, and he too became arrogant and overbearing, constantly reminding the Athenians of his triumphs."2
⚠ Same behaviour. Opposite causal position.
⚠ Greene: boasting caused the resentment. Plutarch: the jealousy came first, produced a receptiveness to slander, and compelled the reminding. Forced to is Plutarch's phrase.
⚠ The behaviour Greene treats as the cause, the source treats as the response — and this is the second consecutive law in which Plutarch's marginal contradicts the chapter's use of his own material.
⚠ The quoted line is not a boast and the chapter's frame requires it to be one.
He once said to those who were complaining of him: "Why are you tired of receiving benefits so often from the same men?"1
⚠ It is a complaint about ingratitude, delivered to people already complaining about him. The grammar is defensive: it answers an accusation rather than making a claim.
⚠ And it names the thing that is actually happening, which is a kind of fatigue rather than a judgement. Tired of receiving benefits. Not ungrateful for, not dispute the value of — tired of.
⚠ The corpus should record the observation because it is more useful than either reading of the causation. A benefactor is a standing reminder of a debt, and a debt that recurs from the same source becomes tiresome independently of whether the benefits are real. ⚠ Which means the resentment does not require the benefactor to do anything wrong, and cannot be answered by doing more good.
⚠ Plutarch is not exculpating him, and that is what makes the account credible.
Besides this he gave offense to the people when he built the temple of Artemis, for not only did he style the goddess Artemis Aristoboule, or Artemis wisest in counsel—with the hint that it was he who had given the best counsel to the Athenians and the Greeks—but he chose a site for it near his own house at Melite.1
⚠ A temple to wisest in counsel, next to the house of the man who gave the counsel. That is self-aggrandisement and Plutarch reports it as such.
⚠ So the marginal contains both a defensive explanation and a genuine offence — ⚠ and Greene keeps the offence and drops the explanation.
⚠ The corpus should note that this is a more damaging omission than a simple contradiction would be. A source that only exonerated the subject could be dismissed as partisan. A source that convicts him on one count and explains him on another is doing exactly what a careful account does, and the chapter has taken the half that fits.
⚠ The passage's best content is a trap with no exit, and neither Plutarch nor Greene names it.
Once jealousy has made an assembly receptive to slander, the accusation in the air is he thinks he is better than us.
⚠ The only material defence available is to cite the record — the victories, the temples, the dangers fended off. ⚠ And citing the record is the offence. You cannot answer he thinks he is above us without producing evidence that you are.
⚠ Which is why forced to is exactly right. Themistocles was not choosing between a wise response and an unwise one. The wise response was silence, and silence is indistinguishable from having no answer.
⚠ The corpus should record this as the mechanism that makes eminence unsafe, and note where the chapter's own escape route is. Pericles survived "by maintaining close ties with the people" ⚠ — which works precisely because it is not a defence. It supplies the counter-evidence continuously, in advance, before there is an accusation to answer.
So at last the Athenians banished him. They made use of the ostracism to humble his great reputation and his authority, as indeed was their habit with any whose power they regarded as oppressive, or who had risen to an eminence which they considered out of keeping with the equality of a democracy.1
⚠ Not toxicity. Not stirring. Not dissension. Eminence out of keeping with the equality of a democracy.
⚠ And habit is Plutarch's word — he is describing standard practice, not an exceptional case.
⚠ Greene's chapter is built on the reading that ostracism removed "the chronically selfish," "the poisoner of goodwill." ⚠ The source printed inside it says the instrument was a leveller aimed at the distinguished, as a matter of routine.
⚠ The corpus should hold both without resolving them, and note which one the chapter's own examples support. Aristides "The Just," Themistocles of Salamis, Damon who "excelled above all other Athenians." ⚠ Three for three on eminence.
🚩 Plutarch, The Life of Themistocles, c. A.D. 46–120 — named work, named author, dated. ⚠ The chapter's better-sourced tier again, and the Observance it contradicts names no source at all.
🚩 ⚠ Plutarch is writing five centuries after the events and is a moralist by design. The Lives are constructed to yield character lessons, and "their jealousy made them listen to any slander" is itself a causal claim about a crowd's inner state, made at that distance. [PLAUSIBLE — needs corroboration].
🚩 ⚠ And the bracketed insertions are editorial. [Themistocles's] and [he] supply the subject — which means the passage as printed has been fitted to the chapter, and the corpus cannot see what surrounded it.
⚠ The two causal orders make different predictions and the chapter contains the test.
Greene's order — boasting produces resentment — predicts that a distinguished person who does not boast is safe.
Plutarch's order — jealousy produces slander, which compels self-defence — predicts that a distinguished person is targeted regardless, and that the boasting appears afterwards as a symptom.
⚠ Aristides is the discriminating case and he is in the same Observance.
He was ostracised for "making such a show of his righteousness" and for an "omnipresence in Athenian politics" that became obnoxious — ⚠ and the specific complaint recorded is that "the citizens grew tired of hearing him called 'The Just.'"
⚠ That is not something Aristides did. It is something other people said about him, and he was exiled for the frequency with which they said it.
⚠ Which supports Plutarch's order and not Greene's. The trigger was the ambient level of praise, not the recipient's conduct — and no behaviour of Aristides' could have reduced it, since he was not the one producing it.
⚠ The corpus should record the finding at the right strength. *Two of the chapter's three ostracism cases are better explained by the jealousy-first reading; the third (Damon's "insulting manner toward the commoners") fits either.* ⚠ That is a pattern in a small sample, not a law — but it is the chapter's own sample, and it points away from the chapter's own reading.
Do not build the temple next to your house. ⚠ Themistocles's actual offence was not the reminding; it was a permanent, public, physical monument to his own judgement, sited where he lived. The reversible signals are survivable and the irreversible ones are not.
Supply the counter-evidence before you need it. ⚠ The defence against he thinks he is above us cannot be mounted once the accusation exists, because mounting it confirms it. Pericles' close ties with the people were not a response to anything — they were a standing condition, maintained when nothing was happening.
Watch the ambient praise, not your own conduct. ⚠ Aristides was exiled partly for how often other people called him The Just. The dangerous quantity is how much you are being talked about admiringly by third parties, which you do not control and can only dilute — by crediting others, by being less quotable, by being present in ordinary contexts where nobody is praising anyone.
⚠ And recognise the double bind when you are in it. If any accurate account of your record would function as evidence for the charge against you, then no factual defence is available and reaching for one makes it worse. What remains is time, third parties who will say it for you, and the visible ordinariness that Pericles maintained — none of which can be started after the accusation lands.
Strongest evidence. A named work by a named author, containing a defensive explanation, a genuine offence, a quoted line and an explicit statement of the institution's criterion. ⚠ A source that both convicts and explains its subject is doing what a careful account does.
Tension — the causation is reversed between the marginal and the Observance. ⚠ Second consecutive law in which Plutarch contradicts the chapter's use of his own material. Preserved, not resolved.
Tension — the chapter keeps the offence and drops the explanation.
🚩 [POPULAR SOURCE] as transmitted. 🚩 [PLAUSIBLE — needs corroboration] — Plutarch writes five centuries later and is a moralist by design; "their jealousy made them listen to any slander" is a claim about a crowd's inner state at that distance. 🚩 The bracketed subjects are editorial; the surrounding context is not visible.
Open questions. ⚠ Was the temple cause or symptom? On Plutarch's own order it should be a symptom too — a man under attack asserting his standing — and Plutarch reports it as an independent offence. ⚠ And does the double bind have any documented exit? Pericles' answer is prevention, not escape, and the chapter contains no case of anyone recovering once the accusation had formed.
⚠ Plutarch appears in Laws 41 and 42, in both margins, contradicting the chapter both times. At Law 41 he supplies the motive Greene removed and the timing Greene reversed; here he reverses the causation. ⚠ And at Law 41 he was the uncredited source of the Observance's own anecdotes. Three distinct uses across two chapters, and in none of them does the main text engage with what he says.
⚠ Aristides and Themistocles cross both chapters too. In Law 41 their removals are the vacancy Pericles waited for; in Law 42 they are the troublemakers ostracism existed to remove. ⚠ Same men, adjacent chapters, opposite roles, one author quoted in both margins.
⚠ The corpus should now record read the margins first as an established working rule for this book — fourth consecutive law in which the fully-sourced marginal carries the stronger version of the chapter's own argument.
Psychology — the congratulations that arrive a beat too late. Envy Triggers describes the promotion nobody congratulated you for: the coldness comes not from everyone, but from the people in your exact field, doing your exact kind of work, at roughly your level — and it arrives as a delay and a careful phrasing rather than as hostility.
Their jealousy made them listen to any slander at his expense.
The insight neither produces alone: ⚠ Plutarch attributes the receptiveness to jealousy and leaves it as a moral fact; the envy literature makes it predictable and targeted. Envy is not general resentment of the successful — it is specific to comparable others, ⚠ which explains a feature of ostracism the chapter never accounts for: why the instrument was aimed at the eminent by an assembly of ordinary citizens. On a pure-envy reading the danger should have come from Themistocles' peers, not from the demos — and the corpus should record that Plutarch's sentence quietly says exactly that: the slander came from somewhere and the assembly only listened. ⚠ Which relocates the mechanism. The jealousy that supplies the material is rival-generated and narrow; the jealousy that supplies the votes is diffuse and merely receptive. ⚠ Two different populations doing two different things, and a defence aimed at the wrong one fails — Themistocles addressed the assembly, and the assembly was not the author.
Behavioural mechanics — the ninety seconds you want and cannot have. Never Apologize, Never Explain opens on the sentence forming in your mouth after something has gone wrong in front of people: it is a good sentence, it is true, it explains the constraint and the missing information and the reasonable call — and ninety seconds will make the room understand.
He was forced to remind the assembly of his achievements until they could bear this no longer.
What the pairing produces: ⚠ the two passages describe the same trap from opposite ends and together they specify it. The explanation frame is about a failure you are tempted to account for; Themistocles' bind is about a success he is required to account for — ⚠ and the identical mechanism operates: the true statement, delivered in your own defence, changes what the room is thinking about from the event to you. Every accurate word he said made him more the subject. ⚠ Which gives the general rule a cleaner boundary than either page has alone: the prohibition is not on explaining, it is on being your own witness. The record is admissible; it is inadmissible from your mouth. ⚠ And that identifies the only functional version of the defence, which is what Pericles was doing and what Themistocles had no supply of — other people who will say it for you, cultivated long before the accusation exists. The corpus should record it as the practical form: a reputation you have to assert is already lost, and the asset is not the record but the third parties who hold it.
Sharpest implication. ⚠ Plutarch reverses Greene's causation — jealousy first, then slander, then a man forced to cite his record. The behaviour Greene treats as the cause, the source treats as the response. ⚠ And the trap has no exit: you cannot answer he thinks he is above us without producing evidence that you are. ⚠ Aristides was exiled partly for how often other people called him The Just — the trigger was ambient praise he did not produce and could not reduce. ⚠ The criterion, stated as habit: eminence out of keeping with the equality of a democracy — and the chapter's own three cases are three for three on eminence.
Generative questions.