Themistocles

In the case of Themistocles, his family was too obscure to further his reputation. His father was Neocles,—no very conspicuous man at Athens,—a Phrearrhian by deme, of the tribe Leontis; and on his mother’s side he was an alien, as her epitaph testifies:—

Abrotonon was I, and a woman of Thrace, yet I brought forth That great light of the Greeks,—know! ’twas Themistocles.

Phanias, however, writes that the mother of Themistocles was not a Thracian, but a Carian woman, and that her name was not Abrotonon, but Euterpe. And Neanthes actually adds the name of her city in Caria,—Halicarnassus. It was for the reason given, and because the aliens were wont to frequent Cynosarges,—this is a place outside the gates, a gymnasium of Heracles; for he too was not a legitimate god, but had something alien about him, from the fact that his mother was a mortal,—that Themistocles sought to induce certain well-born youths to go out to Cynosarges and exercise with him; and by his success in this bit of cunning he is thought to have removed the distinction between aliens and legitimates. However, it is clear that he was connected with the family of the Lycomidae, for he caused the chapel shrine at Phlya, which belonged to the Lycomidae, and had been burned by the Barbarians, to be restored at his own costs and adorned with frescoes, as Simonides has stated.