Themistocles

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.

Of his property, much was secretly abstracted for him by his friends and sent across the sea to Asia; but the sum total of that which was brought to light and confiscated amounted to one hundred talents, according to Theopompus,—Theophrastus says eighty,—and yet Themistocles did not possess the worth of three talents before he entered political life.