moment in setting out on his errand. The ephors departed, all of them satisfied of his guilt and some of them with their minds made up to arrest him in the city. The rest were not so earnest in the matter; and as they approached Pausanias in the street, one of them contrived by a glance or sign to apprise him of his danger. Pausanias took refuge in the temple of Athênê of the Brazen House: but the magistrates took off the roof, walled up the doors, and then waited patiently until thirst and hunger should have done their work. As the end drew near, he was taken, still breathing, from the sanctuary. Their first intention was to hurl his body into the Kaiadas or chasm into which the bodies of criminals were cast: but they changed their mind and buried him not far from the sanctuary.

The determination with which Themistokles maintained the right of the Athenians to fortify their city had turned the admiration of the Spartans into hatred. He was accordingly accused by the Spartans of complicity in the schemes of Pausanias. The time, however, was not yet ripe for his conviction; and for the present he not only escaped but was more popular than ever. The next incident in his life is his ostracism (471 B.C.), which led him to take up his abode at Argos, where he was again charged by the Spartans with having shared the treasons of Pausanias. Themistokles fled, and after many adventures found his way to Ephesos. Journeying on thence into the interior, he sent to Artaxerxes, who had just succeeded his father Xerxes, a letter, it is said, thus worded, 'I, Themistokles, have come to thee, the man who has done most harm to thy house while he was compelled to resist thy father, but who also did him most good, by withholding the Greeks from destroying the bridge over the Hellespont while he was journeying from Attica to Asia: and now I am here, able to do thee much good but persecuted by the Greeks on the score of my goodwill to thee. I wish to tarry a year and then to talk to thee about mine errand.' The young king, we are told, at once granted his request; and when Themistokles went up to the court, he acquired over the monarch an influence far surpassing that which Demaratos had exercised over Xerxes. This influence rested, it is said, on the promise that he would make the Persian ruler monarch of all Hellas. After a time he returned to Asia Minor, where he lived in great magnificence, having the three cities, Magnesia, Lampsakos, and Myous, to supply him with bread, wine, and vegetables.

At Magnesia, so the story runs, he died (449 B.C.), either from disease or from a draught of bull's blood which he drank because he knew that he could not accomplish what he had undertaken to do for the king. His bones were brought away by his kinsmen and buried secretly in Attica: but the Magnesians asserted that they still lay in their market-place, in the splendid sepulchre which they exhibited as the tomb of Themistokles.

Thus at the outset we find ourselves dealing with a story open to grave suspicions; and this suspicion must be increased when we learn that, far from regarding him as a benefactor to the royal house, the Persian king had, according to another version of the tale, put a price of two hundred talents upon his head, and that when Themistokles reached Ionia, he found it impossible to get to Sousa except by availing himself of the offer of Lysitheides who, pretending that he was conveying to Sousa a stranger for the king's harem, brought thither in this strange disguise the conqueror of Salamis and the founder of the maritime empire of Athens.

Of these versions of the popular tradition the one is perhaps as trustworthy as the other. It is not enough to note merely that the vast wealth which Themistokles carried away with him into exile renders superfluous the bribes for which he pledged his services to the Persian despot. No judgement passed on his supposed conduct during his later years can have a claim on our consideration, which fails to survey his whole career. The circumstances which concentrate all the powers of a man on one especial purpose leave but little likelihood of a radical change in more advanced life; and for this fixity of purpose no man has been more remarkable than Themistokles. So mighty had been the impulse which he gave to Athenian enterprise, so completely had it strengthened the Athenian character, that his great rival gave his aid in the working of that maritime policy, the introduction of which he had opposed. In this business of his life he had displayed wonderful powers,-a rapidity of perception which gave to his maturest judgement the appearance of intuition,—a fertility of resource and a readiness in action which were more than equal to every emergency. He had kept those about him in some degree true to the common cause, when a blind and stupid terror seemed to make all possibility of union hopeless. Yet of this man we are asked to believe, not that he yielded to some

mean temptation,—not that he began his career in poverty and ended it in ill-gotten wealth,-not that he made use of his power sometimes to advance his own fortune and sometimes to thwart and oppress others; but that from the beginning he distinctly contemplated the prospect of destroying the house which he was building up, and of seeking a home in the palace of the king on whose power and hopes he was first to inflict a deadly blow. We are told that at the very time when by an unparalleled energy of character and singleness of purpose he was driving the allies into a battle which they dreaded, he was sending to the Persian king a message which might stand him in good stead when he should come as an exile to the court of Sousa; that he deceived his enemy to his ruin in order to win his favour against the time of trouble which he knew to be coming. We are asked further to believe that in the Persian palace he actually found the refuge which he had contemplated,-that his claim to favour was admitted without question,—that he pledged himself to inslave his country, and for twelve or fourteen years received the revenues of large towns to enable him to fulfil his word, and yet that he died, not having made a single effort to fulfil even a part of the promise which he had made to the Persian king.

When we look close into the case, we find that the Spartans merely spoke of the proofs which had satisfied them of the complicity of Themistokles in the treason of Pausanias. We are not told that they exhibited these proofs to the Athenians, or that they could be exhibited; and if the genuineness of the letter intrusted to the Argilian slave be granted, this only proves the spuriousness of the previous letters, in which Pausanias expressed his desire to marry the daughter of Xerxes, and shows still more clearly that the letter of Themistokles placed in the hands of Thucydides is a forgery. In short, there is nothing in the case of Pausanias which will help us to any conclusion in that of Themistokles.

Nor do the charges of bribery brought against him furnish much presumption of his guilt. Beyond the sums which he is said to have bestowed on the Spartan and Corinthian leaders, we are not told that he made any use of the money given to him by the Euboians, although we might well suppose that a bribe would have turned the scale in more than one emergency. In these instances the corruption lay with the recipients of the

bribe, not with Themistokles, who never swerved in his purpose; and the other charges brought against him of extorting money for his private use from the Egean islanders might be fairly set aside as unproven, if not as false. With his messages to Xerxes before and after the battle of Salamis we may deal not less summarily. If the first was sent, it was superfluous except as a device for hastening on a battle which Xerxes had no intention of declining or perhaps even of delaying. The second would have been regarded by the despot as a stupid and malicious trick.

In short, wherever we turn, we are met by inconsistent or contradictory statements, by shadowy inferences or unwarranted assumptions. We may take the two letters in which Pausanias and Themistokles respectively make their overtures to the great king. The former may have been too presuming and boastful to be altogether agreeable to an Eastern monarch; but it was at least free from the falsehoods which formed the substance of the letter of Themistokles. The plea that the instinct of self-preservation alone had led him to resist and repel the invasion of Xerxes must to his son Artaxerxes, who could not be altogether ignorant of the phenomena of Medism, have appeared not less ridiculous than false. The boast that as soon as he could safely do so he had compensated his injuries with greater benefits must have seemed an extravagant and wanton lie. More than any other man he had toiled to destroy the Persian fleets and armies, and even to ruin the Persian empire by raising up against it the most formidable confederacy which it had ever encountered. For any good service done by him to the Persians we shall assuredly look in vain. It is useless to go further. Some sort of agreement may have been made by him with Artaxerxes, although the fact is to the last degree unlikely. It is enough to know that in any case no definite results followed, and we may therefore safely infer that it pledged him to no direct enterprise against the freedom of Athens or of Hellas. We are thus brought to the conclusion that from first to last Themistokles well deserved the warm affection which his countrymen generally felt for him during his life, and with which they honoured his memory after his death; that his ostracism was due to the exertions of the oligarchic party, stimulated by the menaces or the bribes of the Spartans ; that the order for his arrest which made him fly from Argos

was in like manner the result of Spartan intrigues acting on the animosity felt towards him by his personal enemies; that in his absence these enemies strung together those slanders which would be most readily propagated by the oligarchic factions in every city; and that these reports were in the course of thirty or forty years worked into the shape of the traditional narrative preserved to us by Thucydides.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE GROWTH OF THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE.

A PERIOD of less then half a century separates the close of the struggle with Persia from that disastrous strife between the two foremost states of Hellas which prepared the way first for Makedonian and then for Roman conquest. At the beginning of that period the Persian garrisons still remained in towns along the Thrakian coasts, and Persian fleets still threatened to renew the contest by sea. When some twenty years later Artaxerxes is represented as giving three Hellenic cities to Themistokles, the story becomes suspicious and even incredible because it attributes to him the absolute ownership of a large territory in which at best he could have possessed only a few military strongholds. A few years later than the battle of Mykale he retained probably not a single post in that long and beautiful strip of land which had formed the brightest jewel in the crown of the Lydian kings. The events which led to these results were shaped by circumstances which could not have been anticipated; and of the course of these events we have unfortunately a singularly bare and meagre record. It is not that the history of this most important time has been lost, but that it never was written. We learn, however, from Thucydides that the confederacy of Delos was at first an association of independent states whose representatives met in the synod on a footing of perfect equality; that when Europe was at length fairly rid of the barbarians a change became manifest in the attitude of Athens towards the other members of the confederation; that at first all contributed ships and men for the common service, either with or without further contributions in

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