new time. By a liberal admission of new citizens, and by
subdividing the tribes and redistributing them on a new
principle, and thus breaking up many inveterate local and
narrow influences, it did as much violence to sectional pre-
judices as had been done to the rights of property by the
seisachtheia of Solon, to which measure the innovations of
Cleisthenes acted as an appropriate complement. The ex-
ample so confirmed was destined to be followed again, and
have the further support of Aristides, though he had first
to overcome the general inclination in Athens to think that
a change which had cost so great an effort was necessarily
final, and could be so maintained. It was in the interval
between Marathon and Salamis that Themistocles entered
public life. He was younger than Aristides, and yet we are
not on that account obliged to set aside as impossible the
tradition that their rivalry began in a Greek competition
for the regards of a beautiful Ceian youth Stesilaus, to which
Solon himself at an earlier ¹ date might have been a party.
Themistocles, son of Neocles, was destitute of the advantages
both of fortune and family, at least of more than just suffi-
cient to give him an opening to a public career. Confident
in energy and resource, ready and incisive of speech, he
measured the scope of his genius against the foreseen con-
tingencies of a coming period, and dared to set his ambition
on a glory that should match even the trophy of Miltiades,
by which he was haunted sleeping and awake.

Politicians of this stamp, who labour under such initial
disadvantages, are apt, whatever may be their ultimate or
fundamental patriotism, not to be over-scrupulous as to the
persons or things which they attack in their resolve to let
the world know early what men it has to reckon with and
will have to find employment for. It was in the face of the
opposition of Miltiades himself that Themistocles carried his

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