Plutarch: Lives of the noble Grecians and RomansPlutarch
PhilosophyPhilosophy
Plutarch: Lives of the noble Grecians and Romans
Plutarch
Greece -- Biography -- Early works to 1800; Rome -- Biography -- Early works to 1800
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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