This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The victory at Salamis did not secure Themistocles' standing at Athens for long. Around 471 BCE, amid growing suspicion of his ambitions, he was ostracized and driven from the city he had done more than any other citizen to save. Ostracism alone did not end his troubles; he was afterward accused of complicity with Pausanias, the Spartan regent whose own dealings with Persia had left him disgraced, a charge that made Themistocles a wanted man in Greece rather than simply an exile from Athens.
He fled ultimately to the Persian court, the very power whose invasion his own strategy had defeated at Salamis. King Artaxerxes I granted him the governorship of Magnesia on the Maeander, a Persian territory in Ionia, where the man who had persuaded Athens to build the fleet that beat Persia lived out his final years as a Persian appointee. He died at Magnesia around 459 BCE.
How he died is not settled in the ancient sources. Plutarch, writing centuries afterward, gives the most dramatic version, suicide by poison, drunk rather than face fighting against the city that had exiled him. Other ancient accounts give ordinary illness instead. No contemporary source survives to settle which, if either, is accurate, and this record states the dispute rather than choosing between them, closing an account of Themistocles' final years that runs from the Athenian assembly he once dominated to a Persian governorship and a death no ancient writer could agree on.