Themistocles

Hellas will be destroyed by bad planning.

When the Lacedaemonians had thus spoken, the Athenians, by the advice of Themistocles, answered that they would send ambassadors to them concerning what they spoke of;

and indeed, when a certain person promised to teach him the art of memory, then newly being introduced, he is said to have replied that he would rather learn to forget — because, I suppose, whatever he had heard or seen clung fast in his memory.

Themistocles, indeed, when Simonides or someone else promised him an art of memory, said, 'I would rather one of forgetting;

Themistocles used to walk by night in public, because he could not take sleep, and to those who asked he answered that he was roused from sleep by the trophies of Miltiades.

Now history tells us that Themistocles bade his countrymen get on with the building and detain anyone who came from Sparta, while he went off himself on an embassy to the Lacedaemonians;

But the retort of Themistocles comes in pat here, who, when a man from the little island of Seriphus grew abusive and told him that he owed his fame not to himself but to the city from which he came, replied that neither would he himself ever have made a name if he had been born in Seriphus nor the other if he had been an Athenian.