ἱστορίαι Historiai
Plut. Themistocles 22 Themistocles, Plutarch; served verbatim
And at last, when even his fellow-citizens were led by their jealousy of his greatness to welcome such slanders against him, he was forced to allude to his own achievements when he addressed the Assembly, till he became tiresome thereby, and he once said to the malcontents: Why are ye vexed that the same men should often benefit you? He offended the multitude also by building the temple of Artemis, whom he surnamed Aristoboule, or Best Counsellor, intimating thus that it was he who had given the best counsel to the city and to the Hellenes. This temple he established near his house in Melite, where now the public officers cast out the bodies of those who have been put to death, and carry forth the garments and the nooses of those who have dispatched themselves by hanging. A portrait-statue of Themistocles stood in this temple of Aristoboule down to my time, from which he appears to have been a man not only of heroic spirit, but also of heroic presence. Well then, they visited him with ostracism, curtailing his dignity and pre-eminence, as they were wont to do in the case of all whom they thought to have oppressive power, and to be incommensurate with true democratic equality. For ostracism was not a penalty, but a way of pacifying and alleviating that jealousy which delights to humble the eminent, breathing out its malice into this disfranchisement.

The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.

← Plut. Themistocles 21 contents Plut. Themistocles 23 →

Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass

Themistocles, Plutarch — translated by Bernadotte Perrin, 1914–1926
Perseus Digital Library — Plutarch, Parallel Lives (Perrin translation) · Bernadotte Perrin, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press / William Heinemann, 1914–1926
license: public-domain (US: pre-1930 publication); Perseus digital edition CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution recorded in ops/corpus-staging/SOURCES.md