Themistocles

and who, since he had once asked some favour of the Athenians and had been insultingly refused it by Themistocles, then at the height of his political influence, was angry with him ever after, and made it plain that he would take vengeance on him if he caught him. But in the desperate fortune of that time Themistocles was more afraid of kindred and recent jealousy than of an anger that was of long standing and royal, and promptly cast himself upon the king’s mercy, making himself the suppliant of Admetus in a way quite peculiar and extraordinary.

That is to say, he took the young son of the king in his arms and threw himself down at the hearth; a form of supplication which the Molossians regarded as most sacred, and as almost the only one that might not be refused. Some, it is true, say that it was Phthia, the wife of the king, who suggested this form of supplication to Themistocles, and that she seated her son on the hearth with him; and certain others that Admetus himself, in order that he might give a religious sanction to the necessity that was upon him of not surrendering the man, arranged beforehand and solemnly rehearsed with him the supplication scene.

Thither his wife and children were privily removed from Athens and sent to him by Epicrates of the deme Acharnae, who, for this deed, was afterwards convicted by Cimon and put to death, as Stesimbrotus relates. Then, somehow or other, Stesimbrotus forgets this, or makes Themistocles forget it, and says he sailed to Sicily and demanded from Hiero the tyrant the hand of his daughter in marriage, promising as an incentive that he would make the Hellenes subject to his sway; but that Hiero repulsed him, and so he set sail for Asia.

But it is not likely that this was so. For Theophrastus, in his work On Royalty, tells how, when Hiero sent horses to compete at Olympia, and set up a sort of booth there with very costly decorations, Themistocles made a speech among the assembled Hellenes, urging them to tear down the booth of the tyrant and prevent his horses from competing.

And Thucydides[*](Thuc. 1.137) says that he made his way across the country to the sea, and set sail from Pydna, no one of the passengers knowing who he was until, when the vessel had been carried by a storm to Naxos, to which the Athenians at that time were laying siege,[*]( About 469 B.C.) he was terrified, and disclosed himself to the master and the captain of the ship, and partly by entreaties, partly by threats, actually declaring that he would denounce and vilify them to the Athenians as having taken him on board at the start in no ignorance but under bribes,—in this way compelled them to sail by and make the coast of Asia.