Athens, and to proclaim his pardon of her persecution. Certain it is,
at least, that however honoured in Persia, he never perpetrated one
act against Greece; and that, if sullied by the suspicion of others,
his fame was untarnished by himself. He died, according to Plutarch,
in his sixty-fifth year, leaving many children, and transmitting his
name to a long posterity, who received from his memory the honours
they could not have acquired for themselves.

XII. The character of Themistocles has already in these pages
unfolded itself--profound, yet tortuous in policy--vast in conception
--subtle, patient, yet prompt in action; affable in manner, but
boastful, ostentatious, and disdaining to conceal his consciousness of
merit; not brilliant in accomplishment, yet master not more of the
Greek wiles than the Attic wit; sufficiently eloquent, but greater in
deeds than words, and penetrating, by an almost preternatural insight,
at once the characters of men and the sequences of events.
Incomparably the greatest of his own times, and certainly not
surpassed by those who came after him. Pisistratus, Cimon, Pericles,
Aristides himself, were of noble and privileged birth. Themistocles
was the first, and, except Demosthenes, the greatest of those who rose
from the ranks of the people, and he drew the people upward in his
rise. His fame was the creation of his genius only. "What other man"
(to paraphrase the unusual eloquence of Diodorus) "could in the same
time have placed Greece at the head of nations, Athens at the head of
Greece, himself at the head of Athens?--in the most illustrious age
the most illustrious man. Conducting to war the citizens of a state
in ruins, he defeated all the arms of Asia. He alone had the power to
unite the most discordant materials, and to render danger itself
salutary to his designs. Not more remarkable in war than peace--in
the one he saved the liberties of Greece, in the other he created the