Themistocles was born in about 425 B.C., and his father Neocles was one of the Lycomedi family. It has been argued plausibly that his mother was of Thracian or Carian descent. Hence he was regarded as illegitimate and used to go, as an ephebe, to the gymnasium at Cynosarges. After the Ionian revolt Themistocles proposed that the harbour be transferred from Phalerum to the Piraeus and then fortified. After the battle of Marathon, in 490 B.C., Themistocles was not convinced that the Persian threat had been staved off. He thus used the income form a new silver lode from the Laurium mines to have the Athenian fleet built. He found that the aristocrats were counter to this plan of his, being unwilling for political rights to be granted to the thetes and the metics who would man the ships. It was perhaps in the context of this confrontation that he provoked the ostracism of Aristides and Xanthippus. He had been elected general of the Athenians during the invasion of 480 B.C. and upon the evacuation of Athens insisted to the Peloponnesians that battle should be given at Salamis. On the eve of battle he sent his slave Sicinus to inform the Persian admiral that the Hellene fleet was ready to abandon the strait. The Persians blocked the ways through, giving the Hellenes no choice but to give battle on the spot. After the Hellenes' victory, he sent a new message to Xerxes (so tradition has it) in order to spur the latter to flight: that the Hellenes intended to destroy the Hellespont bridges so as to cut him off in Hellas. This attitude of his has engendered the suspicion that he perhaps medized. After the end of the war he advised the Athenians to wall their city. But because Sparta was opposed to this prospect, he travelled in person to Sparta for the negotiations, after having previously left the Athenians instructions to build the walls in his absence. The ruse was successful; but its consequence was that Themistocles was persona non grata at Sparta. In 471 B.C. the aristocrats managed to get him ostracized. He took refuge in Argos, and then from there in Asia Minor, after he was condemned to death in absentia, at the instigation of the Spartans, for complicity with Pausanias. Artaxerxes king of the Persians granted him three cities - Magnesia-on-the-Maeander, Lampsacus and Myus - as a reward for the "help" he had given his father. He died at Magnesia in 459 B.C. But according to Plutarch it was suicide, after Artaxerxes required him to take part in a campaign against the Hellenes.