being unused to labor. But a little while after, the friends and kinsmen
of the prisoners coming from Lydia and Phrygia, redeemed every one his
relations at a high ransom; so that by this means Cimon got so much
treasure that he maintained his whole fleet of galleys with the money
for four months; and yet there was some left to lay up in the treasury
at Athens.

Cimon now grew rich, and what he gained from the barbarians with honor,
he spent yet more honorably upon the citizens. For he pulled down all
the enclosures of his gardens and grounds, that strangers, and the needy
of his fellow-citizens, might gather of its fruits freely. At home, he
kept a table, plain, but sufficient for a considerable number, to which
any poor townsman had free access, and so might support himself without
labor, with his whole time left free for public duties. Aristotle
states, however, that this reception did not extend to all the
Athenians, but only to his own fellow townsmen, the Laciadae.* Besides
this, he always went attended by two or three young companions, very
well clad; and if he met with an elderly citizen in a poor habit, one
of these would change clothes with the decayed citizen, which was
looked upon as very nobly done. He enjoined them, likewise, to carry
a considerable quantity of coin about them, which they were to convey
silently into the hands of the better class of poor men, as they stood
by them in the market-place. This, Cratinus, the poet, speaks of in one
of his comedies, the Archilochi:--

For I, Metrobius too, the scrivener poor,
Of ease and comfort in my age secure,
By Greece's noblest son in life's decline,
Cimon, the generous-hearted, the divine,
Well-fed and feasted hoped till death to be,
Death which, alas! has taken him ere me.

Gorgias the Leontine gives him this character, that he got riches that
he might use them, and used them that he might get honor by them. And
Critias, one of the thirty tyrants, makes it, in his elegies, his wish
to have

The Scopads' wealth, and Cimon's nobleness,
And king Agesilaus's success.

Lichas, we know, became famous in Greece, only because on the days of
the sports, when the young boys ran naked, he used to entertain the
strangers that came to see these diversions. But Cimon's generosity
outdid all the old Athenian hospitality and good-nature. For though
it is the city's just boast that their forefathers taught the rest of
Greece