nd you deprive me of the last refuge of life itself."

IX. Admetus, much affected, bade him rise, and assured him of
protection. The pursuers arrived; but, faithful to the guest who had
sought his hearth, after a form peculiarly solemn among the
Molossians, Admetus refused to give him up, and despatched him,
guarded, to the sea-town of Pydna, over an arduous and difficult
mountain-road. The sea-town gained, he took ship, disguised and
unknown to all the passengers, in a trading vessel bound to Ionia. A
storm arose--the vessel was driven from its course, and impelled right
towards the Athenian fleet, that then under Cimon, his bitterest foe,
lay before the Isle of Naxos (B. C. 466).

Prompt and bold in his expedients, Themistocles took aside the master
of the vessel--discovered himself; threatened, if betrayed, to inform
against the master as one bribed to favour his escape; promised, if
preserved, everlasting gratitude; and urged that the preservation was
possible, if no one during the voyage were permitted, on any pretext,
to quit the vessel.

The master of the vessel was won--kept out at sea a day and a night to
windward of the fleet, and landed Themistocles in safety at Ephesus.

In the mean while the friends of Themistocles had not been inactive in
Athens. On the supposed discovery of his treason, such of his
property as could fall into the hands of the government was, as usual
in such offences, confiscated to the public use; the amount was
variously estimated at eighty and a hundred talents [164]. But the
greater part of his wealth--some from Athens, some from Argos--was
secretly conveyed to him at Ephesus [165]. One faithful friend
procured the escape of his wife and children from Athens to the court
of Admetus, for which offence of affection, a single historian,
Stesimbrotus (whose statement even the credulous Plutarch questions,
and proves to be contradictory with another assertion of the same
author), has recorded that he was condemned to death by Cimon. It is
not upon such dubious chronicles that we can suffer so great a stain
on the character of a man singularly humane. [166]

X. As we have now for ever lost sight of Themistocles on the stage of
Athenian politics, the present is the most fitting opportunity to
conclude the history of his wild and adventurous career.

Persecuted by the Spartans, abandoned by his countrymen, excluded from
the whole of Greece, no refuge remained to the man who had