2.3
Thus it came about that, in after life, at entertainments of a so-called liberal and polite nature, when he was taunted by men of reputed culture, he was forced to defend himself rather rudely, saying that tuning the lyre and handling the harp were no accomplishments of his, but rather taking in hand a city that was small and inglorious and making it glorious and great. And yet Stesimbrotus says that Themistocles was a pupil of Anaxagoras, and a disciple of Melissus the physicist; but he is careless in his chronology. It was Pericles, a much younger man than Themistocles, whom Melissus opposed at the siege of Samos, 440 B.C. and with whom Anaxagoras was intimate.
2.4
Rather, then, might one side with those who say that Themistocles was a disciple of Mnesiphilus the Phrearrhian, a man who was neither a rhetorician nor one of the so-called physical philosophers, but a cultivator of what was then called sophia or wisdom, although it was really nothing more than cleverness in politics and practical sagacity. Mnesiphilus received this sophia, and handed it down, as though it were the doctrine of a sect, in unbroken tradition from Solon. His successors blended it with forensic arts, and shifted its application from public affairs to language, and were dubbed sophists. It was this man, then, to whom Themistocles resorted at the very beginning of his public life.
