THEMISTOCLES. 233

goras was intimate. They, therefore, might rather be credited, who report, that Themistocles was an admirer of Mnesiphilus the Phrearrhian, who was neither rhetori- cian nor natural philosopher, but a professor of that which was then called wisdom, consisting in a sort of poli- tical shrewdness and practical sagacity, which had begun and continued, almost like a sect of philosophy, from So- lon ; but those who came afterwards, and mixed it with pleadings and legal artifices, and transformed the practi- cal part of it into a mere art of speaking and an exercise of words, were generally called sophists. Themistocles resorted to Mnesiphilus when he had already embarked in politics. In the first essays of his youth he was not regular nor happily balanced ; he allowed himself to follow mere nat- ural character, which, without the control of reason and instruction, is apt to hurry, upon either side, into sudden and violent courses, and very often to break away and determine upon the worst ; as he afterwards owned him- self, saying, that the wildest colts make the best horses, if they only get properly trained and broken in. Bat those who upon this fasten stories of their own inven- tion, as of his being disowned by his father, and that his mother died for grief of her son's ill fame, certainly ca- lumniate him ; and there are others who relate, on the contrary, how that to deter him from public business, and to let him see how the vulgar behave themselves to- wards their leaders when they have at last no farther use of them, his father showed him the old galleys as they lay forsaken and cast about upon the sea-shore. Yet it is evident that his mind was early imbued with the keenest interest in public affairs, and the most passionate ambition for distinction. Eager from the first to obtain the highest place, he unhesitatingly accepted

the hatred of the most powerful and influential leaders in