Phanias, however, says that the mother of Themistokles was a Carian, not a Thracian, and that her name was not Abrotonon but Euterpe.  Manthes even tells us that she came from the city of Halikarnassus in Caria.  All base-born Athenians were made to assemble at Kynosarges, a gymnasium outside the walls sacred to Herakles, who was regarded as base born among the gods because his mother was a mortal; and Themistokles induced several youths of noble birth to come to Kynosarges with him and join in the wrestling there, an ingenious device for destroying the exclusive privileges of birth.  But, for all that, he evidently was of the blood of Lykomedes; for when the barbarians burned down the temple of the Initiation at Phlya, which belonged to the whole race of the descendants of Lykomedes, it was restored by Themistokles, as we are told by Simonides.

II.  He is agreed by all to have been a child of vigorous impulses, naturally clever, and inclined to take an interest in important affairs and questions of statesmanship.  During his holidays and times of leisure he did not play and trifle as other children do, but was always found arranging some speech by himself and thinking it over.  The speech was always an attack on, or a defence of, some one of his playfellows.  His schoolmaster was wont to say, “You will be nothing petty, my boy; you will be either a very good or a very bad man.”

In his learning, he cared nothing for the exercises intended to form the character, and mere showy accomplishments and graces, but eagerly applied himself to all real knowledge, trusting to his natural gifts to enable him to master what was thought to be too abstruse for his time of life.  In consequence of this, when in society he was ridiculed by those who thought themselves well mannered and well educated, he was obliged to make the somewhat vulgar retort that he could not tune a lute or play upon the harp, but he could make a small and obscure state great and glorious.

In spite of all this, Stesimbrotus says that Themistokles was a pupil of Anaxagoras, and attended the lectures of Melissus the physicist; but here he is wrong as to dates.  Melissus was the general who was opposed to Perikles, a much younger man than Themistokles, when he was besieging Samos, and Anaxagoras was one of Perikles’s friends.  One is more inclined to believe those who tell us that Themistokles was a follower and admirer of Mnesiphilus of Phrearri, who was neither an orator nor a natural philosopher, but a man who had deeply studied what went by the name of wisdom, but was really political sharp practice and expedients of statesmanship, which he had, as it were, inherited as a legacy from Solon.  Those who in later times mixed up this science with forensic devices, and used it, not to deal with the facts of politics, but the abstract ideas of speculative philosophy, were named Sophists.  Themistokles used to converse with this man when he had already begun his political