The man to whom Athens owed so much died an exile in a foreign land; but, if tradition may be trusted, his bones were afterwards brought and laid, with singular felicity, beside the sea at the foot of the frowning walls of that great fortress which formed his noblest monument. The exact spot has been described by an ancient writer. “At the great harbour of Piraeus,” says Plutarch, quoting Diodorus the Periegete, “a sort of elbow juts out from the headland of Alcimus; and when you have rounded this elbow, on the inner side, where the sea is somewhat calm, there is a large basement of masonry, and the altar-like structure on it is the grave of Themistocles. And Diodorus imagines that the comic poet Plato bears him out in the following passage: 'Fair lies thy tomb For it will speak to merchants everywhere; It will behold the seamen sailing out and in, And mark the contests of the ships.'” Tradition places the site of the tomb on the shore of the Acte peninsula, near the modern lighthouse, some way to the south of the entrance to the great harbour. Here a small square space has been levelled in the rock; and its outer margin has been cut and smoothed as if to form the bed of a wall. Within this area are three graves, and just outside it, on the side away from the sea, is a large sepulchre hewn in the rock. It has been suggested that when the square space was enclosed by its wall, and the interior was filled up with rubble, it may have been the “altar-like structure” described by Diodorus the Periegete, and that the rock-hewn tomb behind it, and sheltered by it from the surf and spray of the neighbouring sea, may have been what antiquity was fain to regard as the grave of Themistocles.