home to take advantage of these errors, not so much in Aristides, whose honest opposition was untinged by personal or factious animosity, as in the Alcmaonidæ, and in Cimon, son of Miltiades, who at this time was in the commencement of his long, and brilliant, and virtuous career. To them the democratical tenor of his policy and his personal superiority were alike distasteful; and they had influence enough to procure his banishment by ostracism for five years. This took place in the year 471 B.C. During this period, Pausanias, king of Sparta, was convicted of having engaged in a treasonable correspondence with the Persian monarch, and put to death; and the Lacedæmonians asserted that they had proof of Themistocles being concerned in the plot, and required that the same punishinent might be inflicted upon him. Plutarch says that he flatly refused to join in the treason of Pausanias, but that he preserved the secret. His accusers required that he should be brought to trial, not in his own country, but before some general council of the Greek states, probably the council of Amphictyons, and they had sufficient influence with the party now in power at Athens to obtain their concurrence. Messengers were sent with authority to apprehend him, wherever they should find him. He fled first to the island of Corcyra, to which he had formerly been a benefactor. But the Corcyræans, alleging that they durst not keep him, conveyed him over to the continent of Epirus, and there being continually pursued, he was driven at last, like Coriolanus, to take shelter with an ancient enemy, Admetus, king of the Molossians. That prince being absent, he awaited his return seated before the domestic altar, holding in his arms his infant son: such being esteemed the most sacred and binding method of supplication among the Molossians. Admetus was

touched, and, while he was able, gave the fugitive a secure retreat; but the Athenian and Lacedæmonian commissioners tracked his steps, and though his protector refused to give him up, he was obliged to fly. He now crossed the continent to Pydna, a seaport of Macedonia, and finding there a ship bound for lonia, he embarked, and was carried by stress of weather among the Athenian fleet then besieging Naxos. Fearing to be recognised, he called the master aside, told him who he was, and why he fled, and declared that if he were taken, he would charge him with having been bribed to favour his escape. To avoid this, it was only requisite to confine the sailors closely to the ship until the weather served them to begone. The master consented, and instead of landing at night, as was usual with Grecian mariners, they lay a day and night tempest-tossed at sea; and at length arrived safely at Ephesus. Themistocles now reaped the benefit of his double dealing. He kept himself concealed however at first, because the Persians had set a price of two hundred talents upon his head, until he received an answer to the following letter, which he wrote to Artaxerxes, son of Xerxes, who had newly succeeded to his father's throne. 'Í Themistocles am coming to thee, who of all the Grecians, as long as I was forced to resist thy father that invaded me, have done your house the most damage; yet the benefits I did him were more after once I with safety, he with danger, was to make retreat. And both a good turn is already due to me (writing here how he had forewarned him of the Grecians' departure out of Salamis, and ascribing the not breaking of the bridge falsely to himself), and I now come prepared

This fixes the date of these events to 460. Clinton.

to do thee great services, being persecuted by the Grecians for thy friendship's sake. But I desire to have a year's respite, that I may declare unto thee the cause of my coming myself. '

The king, as is reported, wondered at his design, and commanded him to do as he said. In this time of respite he learned as much as he could of the language and fashions of the place, and a year after, coming to the court, he was great with the king, more than ever had been any Grecian before; both for his former estimation, and the hope that he gave of bringing Greece into subjection, but especially in the proof that he had given of his wisdom. For Themistocles was a man in whom most truly was manifested the strength of natural judgment, wherein he had something worthy of admiration, different from other men. For by his natural prudence, without the help of instruction either before or after, he was both best able to form an opinion on the spur of the moment with least deliberation, and the best diviner of the issue of matters fo come. Of those things he was engaged in, he could give a good account, and what he was unpractised in, he was not to seek how to judge of conveniently. Also he foresaw, no man better, what was best or worse in any case that was doubtful. And, to say all in few words, this man, by the natural goodness of his wit, and quickness of deliberation, was the ablest of all men to tell what was fit to be done on a sudden. But falling sick he ended his life: some say he died voluntarily by poison, because he thought himself unable to perform what he had promised to the king. His monument is in Magnesia in Asia, in the market-place for he had the government of that country, the king having bestowed upon him Magnesia, which yielded him fifty talents yearly for his bread, and Lampsacus for

his wine (for this city was then thought to have store of wine), and Myus for his meat. His bones are

said by his kinsman to have been brought home by his own appointment, and buried in Attica, unknown to the Athenians: for it was not lawful to bury one there that had fled for treason. These were the ends of Pausanias the Lacedæmonian, and Themistocles the Athenian, the most famous men of all the GreIcians of their time."*

'Such were the ends of the two most famous men of Greece in their time.' That of Pausanias moves little compassion: he was a weak and vicious man, raised to an undeserved celebrity by hereditary rank, and by the mighty events with which the age was pregnant. He was a traitor, and he perished as such, worthy of pity only for the lingering torment of his death. Much more touching is the fate of Themistocles, driven on an unjust accusation, as we believe, from place to place, and at last forced to seek shelter from those to whom he had done the deepest harm, and thus apparently to justify those accusations which alone had reduced him to so unworthy a step. Melancholy we must needs call the close of his life in spite of all the splendour that surrounded it for who can believe that to such a man wealth and luxury could compensate for exile, for the loss of all share and interest in the greatness which he had himself founded, and was now compelled to surrender into the guidance of unfriendly hands. The anecdote relating to his burial furnishes a touching illustration of the nature of his feelings at the close of life, and is itself almost sufficient to refute the charge of treason. Men seek not so fondly to be restored even in death to their native land, when they have deliberately resolved on subjecting it to the miseries of conquest

by a foreign, in Grecian language, a barbarian race. That he had so far temporised with Pausanias, as to give the Spartans plausible ground for their accusation is probable, and consistent with the tortuous policy which, unfortunately for his glory in honest men's eyes, he always pursued. But to believe that he seriously laboured to establish that dominion which it was his boast to have overthrown; to pull down the fabric of Athenian greatness which his own hand had raised, and with which his glory was indissolubly connected; this would require the most cogent proofs, in place of which we have nothing but a bare report. We may derive a valuable moral from comparing the close of his life with that of Aristides. The latter, after a life spent in the highest commands, with unbounded opportunities for amassing wealth, died in poverty. Themistocles's property, when he entered on public life, was valued at three talents; when he fled to Persia his effects were confiscated to the value of eighty or one hundred talents, and yet it is said that his friends saved the greater part, and remitted them into Asia to him. Yet who dare avow that he would choose the wealth and fate of Themistocles in preference to the honourable poverty of Aristides; who, that is not entirely devoted to wealth, could even feel such a preference? True it is that the

crooked course of Themistocles procured a brilliant reception in the Persian court, when all other countries were closed against him: but it is also true that a more disinterested and open life would have obviated the necessity of seeking a foreign refuge. The rancour of party spirit might then have exiled him for a time as it exiled Aristides, but it could have done no more. All Greece would have exclaimed in mingled anger and contempt against him who should have dared to connect the name of Aristides with a charge