Timocreon

However, he is remembered particularly for his bitter clashes with Themistocles and Simonides over the issue of his medizing (siding with the Persian invaders), for which he had been banished from his home around the time of the Greek victory at the Battle of Salamis.

[2][3] An epitaph for him, appearing in the Palatine Anthology, was credited to his rival, Simonides: "After much drinking, much eating and much slandering, I, Timocreon of Rhodes, rest here.

According to these accounts, Themistocles, the hero of the Battle of Salamis, gave up the pursuit of the retreating Persians to extort money from Greek island states in the Aegean, without the knowledge of his fellow commanders.

It is possible that Timocreon was on Andros at this time[5] and he paid Themistocles three talents of silver to restore him to his home town in Rhodes, from which he had been exiled for medizing.

Themistocles took the money but reneged on the agreement and, even though bonds of hospitality between them required good faith, he accepted a bribe from someone else in a new deal that excluded Timocreon.

Themistocles hosted a banquet in an attempt to curry favour with his colleagues but won nothing by it since each of the commanders subsequently voted himself the most deserving of the prize (Histories 8.123-4).

He made good his promise the next day and, after overwhelming all the Persians who were game enough to fight him, he commenced punching the air, just to show that "he had all those blows left if anyone wanted to take him on.

One was a Cyprian fable about doves escaping from a sacrificial fire only to fall into another fire later on (demonstrating that wrong-doers eventually get their just deserts), and the other was a Carian fable about a fisherman who espies an octopus in the winter sea and wonders whether or not to dive after it, since this is a choice between his children starving or himself freezing to death (i.e. you're damned if you do and damned if you don't).

ψεύσταν, ἄδικον, προδόταν, ὃς Τιμοκρέοντα ξεῖνον ἐόντα ἀργυρίοισι κοβαλικοῖσι πεισθεὶς οὐ κατᾶγεν πάτρίδ᾽ Ἰαλυσόν εἰσω, λαβὼν δὲ τρί᾽ ἀργυρίου τάλαντ᾽ ἔβα πλέων εἰς ὄλεθρον,

Well now, if you praise Pausanias and you, sir, Xanthippus, and you Leotychides, I commend Aristides as the very best man to have come from holy Athens, for Themistocles was hated by Leto

Gorged with silver, he made an absurd Isthmian innkeeper, serving cold meat: the guests ate up and prayed that Themistocles would go unnoticed.

[25] The couplet is listed among the "metrical curiosities" of the Palatine Anthology (its form is a hexameter followed by a trochaic tetrameter) and it might be Timocreon's reply to Simonides' 'epitaph',[26] as translated in the introduction of this article.