History of the Peloponnesian War

but when the year was ended he came to the King and becme more influential with him than any of the Hellenes ever had been before, both because of the reputation he already enjoyed and of the hope which he kept suggesting to him that he would make all Hellas subject to him, but most of all in consequence of the insight he minifested, of which he gave repeated proofs.

I[cr indeed Themistocles was a man who had most convincingly demonstrated the strength of his natural sagacity, and was in the very highest degree worthy of admiration in that respect. For by native insight, not reinforced by earlier or later study,[*](i.e. without knowledge acquired either before or after the occasion for action had arisen.) he was beyond other men, with the briefest deliberation, both a shrewd judge of the immediate present and wise in forecasting what would happen in the most distant future. Moreover, he had the ability to expound to others the enterprises he had in hand, and on those which he had not yet essayed he could yet without fail pass competent judgment; and he could most clearly foresee the issue for better or worse that lay in the still dim future. To sum up all in a word, by force of native sagacity and because of the brief preparation he required, he proved himself the ablest of all men instantly to hit upon the right expedient.

He died a natural death, an illness taking him off, though some say that he put an end to his own life by poison[*](For the various accounts, see Cic. Brut. 11. 43; Plut. Them. 31; Diod. 11.58; Ar. Eq. 83.) when he realised it to be impossible to fulfil his promises to the King.

There is a monument to him at Magnesia in Asia, in the marketplace; for he was governor of this country, the King having given him, for bread, Magnesia, which brought in a revenue of fifty talents a year, for wine, Lampsacus, reputed to be the best wine country of all places at that time;

and Myus for meat. But his bones, his relations say, were fetched home by his own command and buried in Attica unknown to the Athenians; for it was not lawful to bury him there, as he had been banished for treason. Such was the end of Pausanias the Lacedaemonian and of Themistocles the Athenian, the most distinguished of the Hellenes of their time.

The Lacedaemonians[*](Taking up the narrative from Thuc. 1.126.) then had on the occasion of their first embassy directed the Athenians, and received a counter demand from them, to take such measures about the expulsion of the accursed. Later, however, they frequently repaired to Athens and bade them withdraw from Potidaea, and give Aegina its independence, and above all they declared in the plainest terms that they could avoid war only by rescinding the decree about the Megarians,[*](See Thuc. 1.67.4, and the references in Aristoph. Arch. 520-3 and Aristoph. Arch. 533 f. The date of the decree must have been near the outbreak of the war (432).) in which they were forbidden to use any of the ports in the Athenian empire or even the Athenian market.

But the Athenians would pay no heed to their other demands and declined to rescind the decree, charging the Megarians with encroachment upon the sacred land and the border-land not marked by boundaries,[*](The reference is, first, to the tillage of land dedicated to the Eleusinian goddesses; second, to land still in dispute between Athens and Megara, and therefore unmarked.) and also with harbouring runaway slaves.