Plutarch: Lives of the noble Grecians and Romans
of those of the island of Andros, he told them that he had brought with
him two goddesses, Persuasion and Force; and they answered him that they
had also two great goddesses, which prohibited them from giving him any
money, Poverty and Impossibility. Timocreon, the Rhodian poet,
reprehends him somewhat bitterly for being wrought upon by money to let
some who were banished return, while abandoning himself, who was his
guest and friend. The verses are these:--
Pausanias you may praise, and Xanthippus he be for,
For Leutychidas, a third; Aristides, I proclaim,
From the sacred Athens came,
The one true man of all; for Themistocles Latona doth abhor
The liar, traitor, cheat, who, to gain his filthy pay,
Timocreon, his friend, neglected to restore
To his native Rhodian shore;
Three silver talents took, and departed (curses with him) on his way,
Restoring people here, expelling there, and killing here,
Filling evermore his purse: and at the Isthmus gave a treat,
To be laughed at, of cold meat,
Which they ate, and prayed the gods some one else might give the feast
another year.
But after the sentence and banishment of Themistocles, Timocreon reviles
him yet more immoderately and wildly in a poem which begins thus:--
Unto all the Greeks repair
O Muse, and tell these verses there,
As is fitting and is fair.
The story is, that it was put to the question whether Timocreon should
be banished for siding with the Persians, and Themistocles gave his vote
against him. So when Themistocles was accused of intriguing with the
Medes, Timocreon made these lines upon him:--
So now Timocreon, indeed, is not the sole friend of the Mede,
There are some knaves besides; nor is it only mine that fails,
But other foxes have lost tails. --
When the citizens of Athens began to listen willingly to those who
traduced and reproached him, he was forced, with somewhat obnoxious
frequency, to put them in mind of the great services he had performed,
and ask those who were offended with him whether they were weary with
receiving benefits often from the same person, so rendering himself more
odious. And he yet more provoked the people by building a temple to
Diana with the epithet of Aristobule, or Diana of Best Counsel;
intimating thereby, that he had given the best counsel, not only to the
Athenians, but to all Greece. He built this temple near his own house,
in the district called Melite, where now the public officers carry out
the bodies of such as are executed, and throw the halters and clothes of
those that are strangled or otherwise put to death. There is to this
day a small figure of Themistocles in the temple of Diana of Best
Counsel, which represents him to be a person, not only of a noble mind,
but also of a most heroic aspect. At length the Athenians banished him,
making use of the ostracism to humble his eminence and authority, as
they ordinarily did with all whom they thought too powerful, or, by
their greatness, disproportionable to the equality thought requisite in
a popular government. For the ostracism was instituted, not so much to
punish the offender, as to mitigate and pacify the violence of the
envious, who delighted to humble eminent men, and who, by fixing this
disgrace upon them, might vent some part of their rancor.
Themistocles being banished from Athens, while he stayed at Argos the
detection of Pausanias happened, which gave such advantage to his
enemies, that Leobotes of Agraule, son of Alcmaeon, indicted him of
treason, the Spartans supporting him in the accusation.
When Pausanias went about this treasonable design, he concealed it at
first from Themistocles, though he were his intimate friend; but when he
saw him expelled out of the commonwealth, and how impatiently he took
his banishment, he ventured to communicate it to him, and desired his
assistance, showing him the king of Persia's letters, and exasperating
him against the Greeks, as a villainous, ungrateful people. However,
Themistocles immediately rejected the proposals of Pausanias, and wholly
refused to be a party in the enterprise, though he never revealed his
communications, nor disclosed the conspiracy to any man, either hoping
that Pausanias would desist from his intentions, or expecting that so
inconsiderate an attempt after such chimerical objects would be
discovered by other means.
After that Pausanias was put to death, letters and writings being found
concerning this matter, which rendered Themistocles suspected, the
Lacedaemonians were clamorous against him, and his enemies among the
Athenians accused him; when, being absent from Athens, he made his
defense by letters, especially against the points that had been
previously alleged against him. In answer to the malicious detractions
of his enemies, he merely wrote to the citizens, urging that he who was
always ambitious to govern, and not of a character or a disposition to
serve, would never sell himself and his country into slavery to a
barbarous and hostile nation.
Notwithstanding this, the people, being persuaded by his accusers, sent
officers to take him and bring him away to be tried before a council of
the Greeks, but, having timely notice of it, he passed over into the
island of Corcyra, where the state was under obligations to him; for
being chosen as arbitrator in a difference between them and the
Corinthians, he decided the controversy by ordering the Corinthians to
pay down twenty talents, and declaring the town and island of Leucas a
joint colony from both cities. From thence he fled into Epirus, and,
the Athenians and Lacedaemonians still pursuing him, he threw himself
upon chances of safety that seemed all but desperate. For he fled for
refuge to Admetus, king of the Molossians, who had formerly made some
request to the Athenians, when Themistocles was in the height of his
authority, and had been disdainfully used and insulted by him, and had
let it appear plain enough, that could he lay hold of him, he would take
his revenge. Yet in this misfortune, Themistocles, fearing the recent
hatred of his neighbors and fellow-citizens more than the old
displeasure of the king, put himself at his mercy, and became a humble
suppliant to Admetus, after a peculiar manner, different from the custom
of other countries. For taking the king's son, who was then a child, in
his arms, he laid himself down at his hearth, this being the most sacred
and only manner of supplication, among the Molossians, which was not to
be refused. And some say that his wife, Phthia, intimated to
Themistocles this way of petitioning, and placed her young son with him
before the hearth; others, that king Admetus, that he might be under a
religious obligation not to deliver him up to his pursuers, prepared and
enacted with him a sort of stage-play to this effect. At this time,
Epicrates of Acharnae privately conveyed his wife and children out of
Athens, and sent them hither, for which afterwards Cimon condemned him
and put him to death, as Stesimbrotus reports, and yet somehow, either
forgetting this himself, or making Themistocles to be little mindful of
it, says presently that he sailed into Sicily, and desired in marriage
the daughter of Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse, promising to bring the Greeks
under his power; and, on Hiero refusing him, departed thence into Asia;
but this is not probable.
For Theophrastus writes, in his work on Monarchy, that when Hiero sent
race-horses to the Olympian games, and erected a pavilion sumptuously
furnished, Themistocles made an oration to the Greeks, inciting them to
pull down the tyrant's tent, and not to suffer his horses to run.
Thucydides says, that, passing over land to the Aegaean Sea, he took
ship at Pydna in the bay of Therme, not being known to any one in the
ship, till, being terrified to see the vessel driven by the winds near
to Naxos, which was then besieged by the Athenians, he made himself
known to the master and pilot, and, partly entreating them, partly
threatening that if they went on shore he would accuse them, and make
the Athenians to believe that they did not take him in out of ignorance,
but that he had corrupted them with money from the beginning, he
compelled them to bear off and stand out to sea, and sail forward
towards the coast of Asia.
A great part of his estate was privately conveyed away by his friends,
and sent after him by sea into Asia; besides which there was discovered
and confiscated to the value of fourscore talents, as Theophrastus
writes, Theopompus says a hundred; though Themistocles was never worth
three talents before he was concerned in public affairs.
When he arrived at Cyme, and understood that all along the coast there
were many laid wait for him, and particularly Ergoteles and Pythodorus
(for the game was worth the hunting for such as were thankful to make
money by any means, the king of Persia having offered by public
proclamation two hundred talents to him that should take him), he fled
to Aegae, a small city of the Aeolians, where no one knew him but only
his host Nicogenes, who was the richest man in Aeolia, and well known to
the great men of Inner Asia. While Themistocles lay hid for some days
in his house, one night, after a sacrifice and supper ensuing, Olbius,
the attendant upon Nicogenes's children, fell into a sort of frenzy and
fit of inspiration, and cried out in verse,--
Night shall speak, and night instruct thee,
By the voice of night conduct thee.
After this, Themistocles, going to bed, dreamed that he saw a snake coil
itself up upon his belly, and so creep to his neck; then, as soon as it
touched his face, it turned into an eagle, which spread its wings over
him, and took him up and flew away with him a great distance; then there
appeared a herald's golden wand, and upon this at last it set him down
securely, after infinite terror and disturbance.
His departure was effected by Nicogenes by the following artifice; the
barbarous nations, and amongst them the Persians especially, are
extremely jealous, severe, and suspicious about their women, not only
their wives, but also their bought slaves and concubines, whom they keep
so strictly that no one ever sees them abroad; they spend their lives
shut up within doors, and, when they take a journey, are carried in
close tents, curtained in on all sides, and set upon a wagon. Such a
traveling carriage being prepared for Themistocles, they hid him in it,
and carried him on his journeys and told those whom they met or spoke
with upon the road that they were conveying a young Greek woman out of
Ionia to a nobleman at court.
Thucydides and Charon of Lampsacus say that Xerxes was dead, and that
Themistocles had an interview with his son; but Ephorus, Dinon,
Clitarchus, Heraclides, and many others, write that he came to Xerxes.
The chronological tables better agree with the account of Thucydides,
and yet neither can their statements be said to be quite set at rest.
When Themistocles was come to the critical point, he applied himself
first to Artabanus, commander of a thousand men, telling him that he was
a Greek, and desired to speak with the king about important affairs
concerning which the king was extremely solicitous. Artabanus answered
him, "O stranger, the laws of men are different, and one thing is
honorable to one man, and to others another; but it is honorable for all
to honor and observe their own laws. It is the habit of the Greeks, we
are told, to honor, above all things, liberty and equality; but amongst
our many excellent laws, we account this the most excellent, to honor
the king, and to worship him, as the image of the great preserver of the
universe; if, then, you shall consent to our laws, and fall down before
the king and worship him, you may both see him and speak to him; but if