his refusal to give up Themistokles to his pursuers, himself arranged the scene with him.  After this, Epikrates, of the township of Acharnai, managed to convey his wife and children out of Athens to join him, for which, we are told by Stesimbrotus, Kimon subsequently had him condemned and executed.  But, singularly enough, afterwards Stesimbrotus either forgets his wife and children, or makes Themistokles forget them, when he says that he sailed to Sicily and demanded the daughter of the despot Hiero in marriage, promising that he would make all Greece obey him.  As Hiero rejected his proposals, he then went to Asia.

XXV.  Now it is not probable that this ever took place.  Theophrastus, in his treatise on monarchy, relates that when Hiero sent race-horses to Olympia and pitched a costly tent there, Themistokles said to the assembled Greeks that they ought to destroy the despot’s tent, and not permit his horses to run.  Thucydides too informs us that he crossed to the Aegean sea, and set sail from Pydna, none of his fellow-travellers knowing who he was until the ship was driven by contrary winds to Naxos, which was then being besieged by the Athenians.  Then he became alarmed, and told the captain and the pilot who he was, and, partly by entreaties, partly by threats that he would denounce them to the Athenians, and say that they well knew who he was, but were carrying him out of the country for a bribe, he prevailed on them to hold on their course to the coast of Asia.

Of his property, much was concealed by his friends and sent over to him in Asia; but what was confiscated to the public treasury amounted, according to Theopompus, to a hundred talents, and according to Theophrastus to eighty, albeit Themistokles, before his entrance into political life, did not possess property worth three talents.

XXVI.  When he sailed to Kyme, he found that many of the inhabitants of the Ionic coast were watching for an opportunity to capture him, especially Ergoteles and Pythodorus (for indeed, to men who cared not how they made their money, he would have been a rich prize, as the Persian king had offered a reward of two hundred talents for him), he fled to Aegae, a little Aeolian city, where he was known by no one except his friend Nikogenes, the richest of all the Aeolians, who was well known to the Persians of the interior.  In this man’s house he lay concealed for some days.  Here, after the feast which followed a sacrifice, Olbius, who took charge of Nikogenes’s children, fell into a kind of inspired frenzy, and spoke the following verse: 

“Night shall speak and give thee counsel, night shall give thee victory.”  After this Themistokles dreamed a dream.  He thought that a snake was coiling itself upon his belly and crawling up towards his throat.  As soon as it reached his throat, it became an eagle and flapped its wings, lifted him up, and carried him a long distance, until he saw a golden herald’s staff.  The eagle set him