Aristides

There are also strong proofs of his reasonableness to be seen in his treatment of Themistocles. This man he had found to be his foe during almost all his public service, and it was through this man that he was ostracized; but when Themistocles was in the same plight, and was under accusation before the city, Aristides remembered no evil; nay, though Alcmeon and Cimon and many others denounced and persecuted the man, Aristides alone did and said no meanness, nor did he take any advantage of his enemy’s misfortune, just as formerly he did not grudge him his prosperity.

As touching the death of Aristides, some say he died in Pontus, on an expedition in the public service; others at Athens, of old age, honored and admired by his countrymen. But Craterus the Macedonian tells something like this about the death of the man. After the exile of Themistocles, he says, the people waxed wanton, as it were, and produced a great crop of sycophants, who hounded down the noblest and most influential men, and subjected them to the malice of the multitude, now exalted with its prosperity and power.

Among these he says that Aristides also was convicted of bribery, on prosecution of Diophantus of the deme Amphitrope, for having taken money from the Ionians when he was regulating the tributes; and, further, that being unable to pay the judgment, which was fifty minas, he sailed away and died somewhere in Ionia. But Craterus furnishes no documentary proof of this,—no judgment of the court, no degree of indictment,—although he is wont to record such things with all due fullness, and to adduce his authorities.

All the rest, as I may venture to say,—all who rehearse the shortcomings of the people in dealing with their leaders,—compile and descant upon the exile of Themistocles, the imprisonment of Miltiades, the fine of Pericles, the death of Paches in the court room,—he slew himself on the rostrum when he saw that he was convicted,—and many such a case, and they put into the list the ostracism of Aristides, but of such a condemnation as this for bribery they make no mention whatsoever.

Moreover, his tomb is pointed out at Phalerum, and they say the city constructed it for him, since he did not leave even enough to pay for his funeral. And they tell how his daughters were married from the prytaneium at the public cost, the city bestowing the dowry for the marriage and voting outright three thousand drachmas to each daughter, while to Lysimachus his son, the people gave one hundred minas in silver, as many acres of vineyard land, and besides this a pension of four drachmas per diem,

—all in a bill which was brought in by Alcibiades. And further, Lysimachus left a daughter, Polycrite, according to Callisthenes, and the people voted for her a public maintenance, in the style of their Olympic victors. Again, Demetrius the Phalerean, Hieronymus the Rhodian, Aristoxenus the Musician, and Aristotle (provided the book On Nobility of Birth is to be ranked among the genuine works of Aristotle) relate that Myrto, the granddaughter of Aristides, lived in wedlock with Socrates the Sage. He had another woman to wife, but took this one up because her poverty kept her a widow, and she lacked the necessaries of life.

To these, however, Panaetius, in his work on Socrates, has made sufficient reply. And the Phalerean says, in his Socrates, that he remembers a grandson of Aristides, Lysimachus, a very poor man, who made his own living by means of a sort of dream-interpreting tablet, his seat being near the so-called Iaccheium. To this man’s mother and to her sister, Demetrius persuaded the people to give, by formal decree, a pension of three obols per diem; though afterwards, in his capacity of sole legislator, he himself, as he says, assigned a drachma instead of three obols to each of the women.