trial. Perhaps realising he had little hope of surviving this trial, Themistocles fled, first to Kerkyra, and thence to Admetus, king of Molossia. Themistocles's flight probably only served to convince his accusers of his guilt, and he was declared a traitor in Athens, his property to be confiscated. Both Diodorus and Plutarch considered that the charges were false, and made solely for the purposes of destroying Themistocles. The Spartans sent ambassadors to Admetus, threatening that the whole of Greece would go to war with the Molossians unless they surrendered Themistocles. Admetus, however, allowed Themistocles to escape, giving him a large sum of gold to aid him on his way. Themistocles then fled from Greece, apparently never to return, thus effectively bringing his political career to an end. Later life in the Achaemenid Empire, death, and descendants From Molossia, Themistocles apparently fled to Pydna, from where he took a ship for Asia Minor. This ship was blown off course by a storm, and ended up at Naxos, which an Athenian fleet was in the process of besieging. Desperate to avoid the legal authorities, Themistocles, who had been traveling under an assumed identity, revealed himself to the captain and said that if he did not reach safety he would tell the Athenians that he'd bribed the ship to take him. According to Thucydides, who wrote within living memory of the events, the ship eventually landed safely at Ephesus, where Themistocles disembarked. Plutarch has the ship docking at Cyme in Aeolia, and Diodorus has Themistocles making his way to Asia in an undefined manner. Diodorus and Plutarch next recount a similar tale, namely that Themistocles stayed briefly with an acquaintance (Lysitheides or Nicogenes) who was also acquainted with the Persian king, Artaxerxes I. Since there was a bounty on Themistocles's head, this acquaintance devised a plan to safely convey Themistocles to the Persian king in the type of covered wagon that the King's concubines travelled in. All three chroniclers agree that Themistocles's next move was to contact the Persian king; in Thucydides, this is by letter, while Plutarch and Diodorus have a face-to-face meeting with the king. The spirit is, however, the same in all three: Themistocles introduces himself to the king and seeks to enter his service: "I, Themistocles, am come to you, who did your house more harm than any of the Hellenes, when I was compelled to defend myself against