ene was
said to have given them had shot out a long branch from the stump, and
now it was growing well, to their great joy and encouragement. Everyone
began building up his own house; and Themistocles, Aristides, and the
other statesmen prepared to build strong walls round the city, though the
Spartans sent messengers to persuade them that it was of no use to have
any fortified cities outside the Peloponnesus; but they knew this was
only because the Spartans wanted to be masters of Greece, and would not
attend to them. Athens stood about three miles from the coast, and in
the port there had hitherto been a village called Piraeus, and
Themistocles persuaded the citizens to make this as strong as possible,
with a wall of solid stone round it. These were grand days at Athens.
They had noble architects and sculptors; and AEschylus was writing the
grandest of his tragedies--especially one about the despair of the
Persian women--but only fragments of most of them have come down to our
time.

In 375 Aristides died, greatly honoured, though he was so poor that he
did not leave enough to pay his funeral expenses; but a monument was
raised to him by the State, and there is only one Athenian name as pure
and noble as his.

The two other men who shared with him the honours of the defeat of the
Persians met with very different fates, and by their own fault. When
Pausanias went back to Sparta, he found his life there too stern and full
of restraint, after what he had been used to in his campaign. He tried
to break down the power of the Ephors, and obtain something more like
royalty for the kings, and this he hoped to do by the help of Persia. He
used to meet the messenger of this traitorous correspondence in the
temple of Neptune, in the promontory of Taenarus. Some of the Ephors
were warned, hid themselves there, and heard his treason from his own
lips. They sent to arrest him as soon as he came back to Sparta; but he
took refuge in the temple of Pallas, whence he could not be dragged.
However, the Spartans were determined to have justice on him. They
walled up the temple, so that he could neither escape nor have food
brought to him; indeed it is said that, in horror at his treason, his
mother brought the first stone. When he was at the point of death he was
taken out, that the sanctuary might not be polluted, and he died just as
he was carried out. The Spartans buried him close to the temple, and
gave Pallas two statue