“Though ye may sing Pausanias or Xanthippus in your lays,
    Or Leotychides, ’tis Aristeides whom I praise,
    The best of men as yet produced by holy Athens’ State,
    Since thus upon Themistokles has fall’n Latona’s hate: 
    That liar and that traitor base, who for a bribe unclean,
    Refused to reinstate a man who his own guest had been. 
    His friend too, in his native Ialysus, but who took
    Three silver talents with him, and his friend forsook. 
    Bad luck go with the fellow, who unjustly some restores
    From exile, while some others he had banished from our shores,
    And some he puts to death; and sits among us gorged with pelf. 
    He kept an ample table at the Isthmian games himself,
    And gave to every guest that came full plenty of cold meat,
    The which they with a prayer did each and every of them eat,
    But their prayer was ‘Next year be there no Themistokles to meet.’”

And after the exile and condemnation of Themistokles, Timokreon wrote much more abusively about him in a song which begins,

    “Muse, far away,
    Sound this my lay,
    For it both meet and right is.”

It is said that Timokreon was exiled from home for having dealings with the Persians, and that Themistokles confirmed his sentence.  When, then, Themistokles was charged with intriguing with the Persians, Timokreon wrote upon him,

    “Timokreon is not the only Greek
    That turned a traitor, Persian gold to seek;
    I’m not the only fox without a tail,
    But others put their honour up for sale.”

XXII.  As the Athenians, through his unpopularity, eagerly listened to any story to his discredit, he was obliged to weary them by constantly repeating the tale of his own exploits to them.  In answer to those who were angry with him, he would ask, “Are you weary of always receiving benefits from the same hand?” He also vexed the people by building the Temple of Artemis of Good Counsel, as he called her, hinting that he had taken good counsel for the Greeks.  This temple he placed close to his own house in Melite, at the place where at the present day the public executioner casts out the bodies of executed criminals, and the clothes and ropes of men who have hanged themselves.  Even in our own times a small statue of Themistokles used to stand in the Temple of Artemis of Good Counsel; and he seems to have been a hero not only in mind, but in appearance.  The Athenians made use of ostracism to banish him, in order to reduce his extravagant pretensions, as they always were wont to do in the case of men whom they thought over powerful and unfit for living in the equality of a democracy.  For ostracism implied no censure, but was intended as a vent for envious feelings, which were satisfied by seeing the object of their hatred thus humbled.