Pericles

Plutarch · a new plain-English translation from the original language

Caesar once noticed that a number of rich foreigners visiting Rome went about hugging puppies and pet monkeys and lavishing affection on them, and he asked, so the story goes, whether the women of that country never had children of their own—a properly regal rebuke aimed at those who lavish on animals the fondness and tenderness that human beings deserve.

Is it not the case, then, since our soul by nature possesses a love of learning and a love of spectacle, that it makes sense to blame those who misuse this love on things heard and seen that are worth no attention at all, while neglecting the fine and beneficial? For sense-perception, which receives whatever it encounters passively through the impact of the stimulus, is perhaps compelled to observe everything that appears, whether useful or useless,

but the intellect, if a person is willing to use it, is by nature able to turn and change itself most readily toward whatever seems best; so one ought to pursue the finest things, so that the mind may not merely observe but also be nourished by observing. For just as a color suited to the eye, one that is bright and pleasant at once, revives and nourishes the sight, so the mind ought to be led toward sights that call it, through the pleasure they give, toward its own proper good. And these are found in the deeds that spring from virtue,

deeds which instill in those who study them a certain zeal and eagerness that leads to imitation—since with other things, admiration for what has been done is not immediately followed by an impulse to do it oneself. Often, indeed, the opposite happens: while delighting in the work, we despise its maker, as with perfumes and purple dyes—we take pleasure in these, yet consider the dyers and perfumers ignoble and vulgar.

For this reason Antisthenes spoke well when, hearing that Ismenias was an accomplished flute-player, he said, "But he's a worthless man—otherwise he wouldn't be so accomplished a flute-player." And Philip, when his son played the lyre charmingly and skillfully at some drinking party, said to him, "Aren't you ashamed to play so well?" A king, after all, does quite enough if he merely finds time to listen while others perform, and he pays sufficient tribute to the Muses just by watching as other men contend in such matters.

Working with one's own hands at menial things offers, against itself, the labor spent on useless matters as proof of indifference toward what is noble; and no young man of good natural gifts, upon seeing the Zeus at Pisa, ever desired to become Pheidias, or the Hera at Argos to become Polycleitus, nor did Anacreon or Philitas or Archilochus, however much he delighted in their poems, wish to become them.

For it is not necessary, if a work delights us as charming, that its maker should be worthy of our serious regard. Hence such things do not benefit those who view them, since no imitative zeal arises toward them, nor any impulse that stirs eagerness and drive toward becoming like them. But virtue, through actions, at once disposes us in such a way that we simultaneously admire the deeds and long to emulate those who did them.

For the goods that come from fortune, we love the possessing and enjoying of them; but the goods that come from virtue, we love the doing of them—and the former we wish to have from others, but the latter we wish, rather, that others should have from us. For the noble by itself moves one practically and at once implants a practical impulse, shaping the character of the viewer not through imitation but by furnishing, through the narrative of the deed, a deliberate choice.

It seemed good to us, then, to devote ourselves as well to the writing of Lives, and we have composed this book, the tenth, which sets out the life of Pericles alongside that of Fabius Maximus, the man who carried the war against Hannibal through to its conclusion—men alike in their other virtues, but especially in gentleness and justice, and in their ability to bear the ingratitude of their peoples and fellow officials, having proven most beneficial to their fatherlands. Whether we are aiming rightly at what is fitting, it is possible to judge from what is written.

Pericles belonged, by tribe, to the Acamantis, and by deme to Cholargos, and by house and family he was of the first rank on both sides. For Xanthippus, who defeated the king's generals at Mycale, married Agariste, granddaughter of Cleisthenes, who drove out the Peisistratids and nobly overthrew the tyranny, and established laws and set up a constitution most excellently blended for harmony and safety.

In a dream she saw herself bring forth a lion, and not many days afterward she bore Pericles, whose bodily form was in other respects faultless, but whose head was elongated and out of proportion. For this reason nearly all his portraits and statues show him wearing a helmet, since the artists apparently did not wish to expose him to ridicule. The Attic poets called him "squill-head," for the squill is sometimes also called a schinos.

Among the comic poets, Cratinus, in his Cheirons, says: "Faction and ancient-born Cronus, mingling with one another, beget a very great tyrant, whom the gods call the Head-Gatherer"; and elsewhere, in his play Nemesis: "Come here, Zeus who presides over guest-friendship and heads alike."

Teleclides says that at one time, at a loss over affairs, he sat in the city "heavy of head," and at another time, from that head of his—as from a couch fit for eleven—he raised up a great uproar all alone; and Eupolis, in his Demoi, inquiring about each of the demagogues who had come up from Hades, when Pericles was named last, says: "the very head of all those from below have you brought."

Most authorities hold that his music teacher was Damon—a name, they claim, whose opening syllable should be given a short vowel—though Aristotle states that Pythocleides was actually the one who instructed him in music. Damon, it seems, being a consummate sophist, took refuge under the name of music, concealing his cleverness from the many, but he associated with Pericles as a trainer and teacher of political matters, the way one attends an athlete.

Yet Damon did not escape notice for using the lyre as a screen, but was ostracized as a schemer of great designs and a friend of tyranny, and he furnished material for the comic poets. Plato, at any rate, has someone question him thus: "Tell me first, I beg you—for you, they say, like Cheiron, raised Pericles."

Pericles also studied under Zeno of Elea, who treated of nature, as Parmenides did, and had perfected a certain refutative faculty that, through cross-examination, brings one into perplexity, as Timon of Phlius also said of him in these words: "and the great, unwearied power of double-tongued Zeno, who finds fault with all things."

But the man who spent the most time with Pericles, and above all invested him with gravity and a spirit weightier than that of ordinary demagoguery, and altogether elevated and raised up the dignity of his character, was Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, called "Nous" (Mind) by the people of that era—either admiring the greatness and exceptional clarity of his understanding in natural philosophy, or because he was the first to set over the whole ordering of the universe, as its governing principle, not chance nor necessity, but Mind, pure and unmixed among all the other things that are commingled, separating out the like particles.

Pericles, marveling exceedingly at this man, and filling himself with the so-called study of celestial phenomena and lofty speculation, acquired not only, it seems, a proud disposition and elevated speech purged of vulgar and knavish buffoonery, but as well a facial gravity that resisted laughter altogether, an unhurried gait, and an arrangement of dress that was never disturbed by any passion while he spoke, an unruffled modulation of voice, and all such things that struck everyone with wonder.

Once, at any rate, when he was being reviled and abused all day long in the marketplace by one of the coarse and dissolute sort, he endured it in silence, attending meanwhile to some pressing business; and in the evening he went home composed, with the man following him and heaping every kind of abuse upon him.

As he was about to go indoors, it now being dark, he told one of his household slaves to fetch a torch and see the man safely to his own house. The poet Ion says that Pericles's manner in company was arrogant and somewhat conceited, and that much haughtiness and contempt for others was mixed in with his grandiose airs; and he praises the graceful, easy, and cultivated manner of Cimon in social dealings.

But as for Ion, let us grant him—since he demands that virtue, like a tragic production, must always have some satyric element too—his say; while as for those who called Pericles's dignity mere vainglory and pomposity, Zeno used to urge them to affect some such vainglory themselves, since the very pretense of noble things instills, unnoticed, a certain zeal and habituation to them.

Nor was this the only benefit Pericles derived from his association with Anaxagoras—he also seems to have become superior to superstition, that awe of celestial phenomena which afflicts those who are ignorant of their causes and are frenzied and troubled about divine matters through inexperience of them—an awe which rational understanding of nature dispels, replacing fearful and inflamed superstition with a secure piety accompanied by good hopes.

It is said that on one occasion a ram's head bearing a single horn was delivered to Pericles from his estate in the country, and Lampon the seer, observing how the horn rose thick and firm out of the center of the animal's brow, declared that since two rival powers then divided the city between them—the faction led by Thucydides and the faction led by Pericles—supreme control would pass to whichever of the two men the sign had been sent to; but Anaxagoras, having split open the skull, showed that the brain had not filled the base of the cranium but had shrunk together, pointed like an egg, away from the whole cavity toward that spot where the root of the horn had its origin.

And at that time it was Anaxagoras who was admired by those present, but a little later it was Lampon, once Thucydides had been overthrown and all the people's affairs had come evenly under Pericles's control. There was nothing, I think, to prevent both the natural philosopher and the seer from being correct, the one grasping well the cause, the other the outcome; for it belonged to the one to observe from what things it came about and how it was formed, and to the other to foretell to what end it came about and what it signified.

Those who say that discovering the cause is a way of doing away with the sign do not notice that, along with divine things, they are also doing away with man-made signals—the sounds of gongs, the lights of beacons, the shadows cast by sundials—each of which has been made, by some cause and construction, a sign of something. But this, perhaps, belongs to another discussion.

Pericles, when quite young, was very wary of the people. For he was thought to resemble Peisistratus the tyrant in appearance, and the very old men were struck by the resemblance—his voice being sweet, and his tongue quick and fluent in conversation. Since wealth and illustrious lineage were also his, along with friends of the greatest power, he feared being ostracized, and so took no part in political affairs, but in military campaigns he was a brave man and fond of danger.

But when Aristeides had died and Themistocles had been driven into exile, and Cimon's campaigns kept him occupied for the most part outside Greece, Pericles then gave himself over to the people, choosing the cause of the many and the poor over that of the wealthy and the few—contrary to his own nature, which was in no way inclined to popular favor. But,

it seems, fearing lest he fall under suspicion of aiming at tyranny, and seeing that Cimon was aristocratic in temper and especially beloved by the noble and good men, he won over the multitude, securing safety for himself and power against that man.

At once he also imposed a different arrangement upon his manner of living. In the city he was seen going by only one road, the one to the marketplace and the council chamber; and he gave up invitations to dinners and all such friendly familiarity and social intercourse, so that during the long years in which he was engaged in politics he went to dine with none of his friends, except that at the wedding of his cousin Euryptolemus he attended until the libations, then rose at once and left.

For sociability is apt to overcome all gravity, and dignity is hard to preserve amid familiarity; whereas of true virtue, the things that appear most plainly are the most beautiful, and nothing about good men is so admirable to outsiders as their daily life is to those who live with them. But Pericles, avoiding constant exposure to the people and their satiety with him, approached them, as it were, at intervals, not speaking on every matter nor always coming forward before the assembly, but offering himself, as Critolaus says, like the Salaminian trireme, for occasions of great need, while for the rest he managed affairs by sending forward his friends and other speakers.

One of these, they say, was Ephialtes, who overthrew the power of the Council of the Areopagus, pouring out for the citizens, in Plato's phrase, a great and unmixed draught of liberty, by which the people, growing wanton as a horse does, no longer, the comic poets say, "dared to obey the rein, but bit at Euboea and leapt upon the islands."

Yet to fit his manner of life and the greatness of his purpose, he fitted out for himself, as it were an instrument, a corresponding style of speech, and drew freely on Anaxagoras, tincturing his rhetoric, so to speak, with natural philosophy. For having acquired from natural philosophy that 'lofty-mindedness and all-accomplishing power,' as the divine Plato calls it, in addition to his natural gifts, and drawing out what was useful for the art of speaking, he far surpassed everyone.

For this reason, they say, he even got his epithet; though some think he was called 'Olympian' from the works with which he adorned the city, others from his power in politics and in his generalships; and it is not unlikely that these came together from the many qualities that belonged to the man, to produce the reputation.

The comedies of the poets of that time, however, which have let loose against him many sayings, some in earnest and some in jest, make clear that the surname arose chiefly on account of his speech, since they said that he 'thundered' and 'lightened' when he addressed the assembly, and 'carried a dread thunderbolt on his tongue.' There is also remembered a certain remark of Thucydides son of Melesias, made in jest, about the formidable power of Pericles.

For Thucydides was one of the fine and good men, and for the longest time opposed Pericles in politics; and once Archidamus, king of the Lacedaemonians, put a question to him — which of the two, himself or Pericles, was the better wrestler — he said, 'Whenever I throw him in wrestling, he argues that he has not fallen, and wins, and persuades the onlookers.' Yet Pericles himself was cautious about his speech, so that whenever he went up to the platform he prayed to the gods that no word unfitting to the matter at hand might fall from him unintentionally.

He has left nothing in writing except his decrees; and only a very few of his sayings are remembered: for instance, that he bade Aegina be removed as the eyesore of Piraeus, and that he said he already saw the war bearing down from the Peloponnese. And once, when Sophocles, who was serving as fellow general with him on a naval expedition, praised a beautiful boy, he said, 'Sophocles, a general must keep not only his hands clean, but his eyes as well.'

Stesimbrotus says that in praising those who had died at Samos, speaking from the platform, he said they had become immortal like the gods: for we do not see the gods themselves, but we infer them to be immortal from the honors they receive and the benefits they provide; and these same things, he said, belonged also to those who had died for their country.

Since Thucydides describes the constitution under Pericles as a kind of aristocracy — 'in name a democracy, but in fact rule by the first man' — while many others say that it was by him that the people were first led on to allotments of land, and theater-money, and distributions of pay, being badly habituated and becoming extravagant and undisciplined through the policies of that time instead of thrifty and self-sufficient, let the cause of this change be examined through the facts themselves. For at the beginning,

as has been said, in setting himself against the reputation of Cimon he courted the favor of the people; and being inferior in wealth and money, from which Cimon relieved the poor — providing a daily meal for any Athenian in need, clothing the elderly, and removing the fences of his lands so that whoever wished might gather the fruit — Pericles, being outdone by these popular measures, turned to the distribution of public funds, on the advice of Damonides of Oa, as Aristotle has recorded.

And quickly, having won over the multitude with payments for theater and jury service and other wages and public choruses, he used them against the Council of the Areopagus, of which he himself had no part, since he had been allotted neither archon, nor lawgiver, nor king, nor polemarch. For these offices had of old been filled by lot, and it was through them that those who were approved rose up into the Areopagus.

Wherefore Pericles, having grown all the stronger in the favor of the people, worked against the Council, so that most of its judicial powers were taken away through Ephialtes, and Cimon was ostracized as a friend of Sparta and hater of the people — a man inferior to none in wealth or birth, who had won splendid victories against the barbarian foe and enriched the city with plunder and treasure, as has been written in his own Life. Such was the extent of Pericles's sway over the populace.

Now ostracism had, by law, a fixed term of ten years for those banished; but in the meantime, when a large Lacedaemonian force invaded Tanagra and the Athenians at once took the field against it, Cimon came from his exile and took his place under arms among his tribesmen, wishing by his actions to clear himself of the charge of favoring Sparta, and shared the danger with his own countrymen; yet a group of Pericles's partisans joined forces and expelled him as a still-banished man.

For this reason it is thought that Pericles fought that battle with the utmost vigor and was the most conspicuous of all, sparing not his own body. And the friends of Cimon fell, all of them alike, whom Pericles had joined in accusing of favoring Sparta; and a terrible regret and longing for Cimon seized the Athenians, defeated as they were on the very borders of Attica and expecting a heavy war as the season of the year came round.

Perceiving this, Pericles did not hesitate to gratify the people, but himself wrote and proposed the decree recalling the man, and Cimon, on his return, made peace between the two cities. For the Lacedaemonians were kindly disposed toward him, just as they were hostile toward Pericles and the other popular leaders.

Some say, however, that the decree for Cimon's return was not proposed by Pericles until secret agreements had been made between them through Elpinice, Cimon's sister, whereby Cimon should sail out with two hundred ships and hold command abroad, subjugating the King's territory, while Pericles should retain power in the city.

It was thought too that Elpinice had earlier made Pericles gentler toward Cimon, back when Cimon stood trial with his very life at stake. Pericles, in fact, numbered among the accusers whom the people had put forward; and when Elpinice came to him and begged him, he smiled and said, 'Elpinice, you are an old woman, an old woman, to be managing such matters.' Nonetheless he rose to speak only once, to discharge the duty of his appointment, and did the least harm of the accusers to Cimon before withdrawing.

How then could one trust Idomeneus, who accuses Pericles of having treacherously murdered the popular leader Ephialtes, who had become his friend and shared his political purpose, out of jealousy and envy of his reputation? This charge, gathered up from I know not where, he has flung at the man like gall — a man not perhaps entirely blameless in every respect, but of noble spirit and an ambitious soul, in which no passion so savage and brutish takes root.

Ephialtes, then, being formidable to the oligarchic party, and implacable in his audits and prosecutions of those who wronged the people, his enemies plotted against him and had him secretly killed through Aristodicus of Tanagra, as Aristotle has stated. Cimon died in Cyprus while serving as general.

The aristocrats, seeing that Pericles had already become the greatest of the citizens even before this, but wishing nevertheless that there should be someone in the city to set against him and blunt his power, so that it might not be altogether a monarchy, set up in opposition to him Thucydides of Alopece, a discreet man and kinsman by marriage of Cimon, who, though less warlike than Cimon,

was more a man of the assembly and of politics, staying at home in the city and grappling with Pericles at the speaker's platform, and quickly brought the constitution into a state of rivalry. For he did not allow the men called the 'fine and good' to be scattered and mixed in among the people as before, their standing obscured by the multitude; but separating them out and bringing together in one body the strength of all of them, made it, once concentrated, tip the scale as it were.

For from the beginning there was a kind of hidden double seam, as it were in iron, indicating an underlying difference between the popular and the aristocratic policies; and the rivalry and ambition of these two men, cutting the deepest incision into the city, caused one part to be called the People and the other the Few.

For this reason Pericles at that time, above all, loosened the reins to the people and conducted his politics to please them, always contriving that there be some festival spectacle, or banquet, or procession in the city, 'schooling the city with pleasures not without art,' and sending out sixty triremes each year, in which many of the citizens sailed for eight months on pay, practicing and at the same time learning seamanship.

In addition to this he sent a thousand settlers to the Chersonese, five hundred to Naxos, half that number to Andros, a thousand to Thrace to settle among the Bisaltae, and others to Italy when Sybaris was being colonized, which they renamed Thurii. And he did this to relieve the city of an idle and, through leisure, meddlesome crowd, to remedy the poverty of the people, and to plant among the allies a fear and a garrison against their attempting any revolution.

But that which brought the greatest pleasure and adornment to Athens, and the greatest astonishment to all other people, and which alone bears witness for Greece that her fabled power and ancient wealth were no falsehood — this, the construction of the votive offerings, was above all the political measure of Pericles that his enemies begrudged and slandered in the assemblies, crying out that the people were disgraced and ill spoken of for having removed the common funds of the Greeks from Delos to themselves,

and that the most respectable of the excuses left to him against his accusers — that out of fear of the barbarians he had removed the treasure from there and was guarding the common funds in a secure place — this excuse Pericles had done away with; and that Greece seemed to be grievously and openly insulted and tyrannized over, seeing that with the funds which she was compelled to contribute for the war, we were gilding and adorning our city like some vain woman, hanging it about with costly stones and statues and thousand-talent temples.

Pericles, then, taught the people that they owed the allies no account of the money, so long as they carried on the war on their behalf and kept off the barbarians, since the allies furnished neither horse, nor ship, nor hoplite, but money only — and money, once given, ceases to belong to the giver and becomes the property of the recipient, provided the recipient furnishes what was paid for;

and that since the city was sufficiently furnished with what was necessary for the war, it was right to turn its abundance to those works which, once completed, would bring it everlasting glory, and which, while being made, would provide it with ready prosperity, since all kinds of activity and varied demands, arising and stirring every craft and moving every hand, made almost the whole city a wage-earner, at once adorning and nourishing itself from its own resources.

For to those of military age and strength the campaigns furnished the means of livelihood from the public funds; but wishing that the unorganized and manual-laboring crowd should neither be without a share of the public payments nor receive them for doing nothing and being idle, he brought forward and set before the people great projects of construction and designs of works involving many crafts and requiring long time, so that the ones remaining in the city could, on equal footing with the men who sailed, stood garrison, and served under arms, find reason to draw benefit and a share from the public funds.

Stone, bronze, ivory, gold, ebony, and cypress timber served as the materials employed, together with the trades that shaped and crafted them — carpenters, molders, bronze-workers, stonecutters, dyers, workers in gold and ivory, painters, embroiderers, engravers — and those who transported and conveyed these materials, merchants and sailors and pilots by sea,

and by land wagon-builders, teamsters, drivers, rope-makers, weavers of linen, leather-workers, road-builders, and miners; and each craft, like a general with his own army, had its own organized crowd of hired laborers and common workmen, becoming an instrument and body of service; so that the demands of these works distributed and scattered prosperity into, one might say, every age and condition.

As the works rose up, magnificent in scale, inimitable in form and grace, the craftsmen vying with one another to surpass their own artistry in beauty of workmanship, what was most astonishing of all was the speed. For things each one of which men thought would scarcely reach completion after passing through many successive generations, all of these were brought to completion within the flourishing prime of a single administration.

And yet they say that once, when Agatharchus the painter boasted of painting figures quickly and with ease, Zeuxis, hearing it, said, 'But I do it in a long time.' For readiness and speed in producing a work do not lend it lasting weight nor precision of beauty; but the time laid out beforehand in labor for its creation pays back its strength in the preservation of what has been made.

This is why Pericles' works are admired all the more, having come into being in a short time yet lasting so long. For each of them was straightaway ancient in its beauty even then, but in its vigor it is fresh even now and newly made, as though some ever-blooming freshness kept their appearance untouched by time, as if an ever-green breath and an ageless soul had been mixed into the works.

Phidias oversaw everything and was superintendent of all of it for him, although the works had great architects and craftsmen. For the hundred-foot Parthenon was built by Callicrates and Ictinus, while the hall of initiation at Eleusis was begun by Coroebus, who set up the columns on the floor and joined them to their architraves; but after his death, it was Metagenes of Xypete who added the entablature and set the columns above it.

and Xenocles of Cholargus set the lantern atop the sanctuary. As for the Long Wall, about which Socrates says he himself heard Pericles bringing forward the proposal, Callicrates undertook its construction as contractor. Cratinus mocks the work as being brought to completion slowly: 'Long since,' he says, 'Pericles pushes it forward with words, but does not so much as move it with deeds.' The Odeum, in its interior arrangement having many seats and many columns, and in its roofing sloping down on all sides from a single peak, is said to have been made as an image and imitation of the Persian King's tent, this too being under the direction of Pericles.

This is why Cratinus again, in the Thracian Women, jests at his expense: 'Here comes the squill-headed Zeus, wearing the Odeum on his skull, since now the ostracism is past.' Pericles, eager for honor, at that time first decreed that a musical contest be held at the Panathenaea, and he himself, having been chosen master of the games, laid down how the competitors should play the pipe, or sing, or play the cithara. And both then and ever afterward people watched the musical contests in the Odeum.

The Propylaea of the Acropolis was completed in five years under the architect Mnesicles, and a marvelous chance that occurred during the construction showed that the goddess was not standing apart from the work but was joining in and helping to bring it to completion.

For the most energetic and eager of the craftsmen slipped and fell from a height, and lay in a bad way, given up by the physicians. Pericles was despondent over it, until the goddess visited him in a dream and laid out a remedy, which he then used to heal the man swiftly and without difficulty. For this reason he dedicated the bronze image of Athena Hygieia atop the Acropolis, next to the altar that, so it is said, had already been standing there beforehand.

Phidias was working on the gold statue of the goddess, and he is inscribed on the stele as its maker, but almost everything was in his charge, and, as we have said, it was through being on close terms with Pericles that he came to oversee all the craftsmen. From this arose envy directed at Phidias and slanderous talk aimed at Pericles, the accusation being that Phidias, using the works as a cover, was procuring freeborn women who came to visit Pericles.

The comic poets, seizing upon this story, poured out a great deal of licentious abuse about it, dragging in even the spouse of Menippus, a man who counted as a friend of Pericles and who served beneath him as his second-in-command, and also the bird-rearing of Pyrilampes, who, being a companion of Pericles, was accused of giving peacocks to the women with whom Pericles kept company.

And why should one wonder at men who lead scurrilous lives and who pour out their slanders against their betters as offerings to the evil spirit of popular envy, seeing that even Stesimbrotus of Thasos dared to bring forth a terrible and fabulous impiety against Pericles concerning his own son's wife?

So it seems altogether difficult and hard to hunt down the truth by historical inquiry, when those born later have the passage of time standing in the way of their knowledge of events, while the record of deeds and lives contemporary with them is corrupted and twisted away from the truth, partly by envy and ill will, partly by the desire to please and flatter.

When the orators around Thucydides cried out against Pericles as squandering the money and destroying the revenues, he asked the people in the assembly whether they thought a great deal had been spent. When they said a very great deal indeed, he said, 'Then let it not have been spent by you, but by me, and I will make the inscription on the dedications my own, in my own name.'

When Pericles had said this, whether they marveled at his greatness of spirit or were rivaling him in ambition for the glory of the works, they shouted out, bidding him to spend from the public funds and to furnish everything, sparing nothing. In the end, entering into a contest with Thucydides over the ostracism and risking the danger, he cast that man out and dissolved the faction arrayed against him.

So then, once the opposition had been altogether dissolved and the city had become, as it were, level and entirely one, he drew unto himself Athens and all the affairs of the Athenians that depended on her — tribute, armies, triremes, islands, and the sea, and much power that came through the Greeks, and much also through the barbarians, and a supremacy fortified by subject nations, by friendships with kings, and by alliances with rulers —

he became a changed man, no longer as pliant toward the people as before, nor ready to yield and give way to their desires as though to the gusts of the multitude; instead, in place of that relaxed and somewhat softened style of popular leadership, like a flowery and gentle melody, he tightened it into an aristocratic and kingly form of governance, and applied it toward what was best, straight and unbending,

and for the most part he led the people, willing, by persuading and instructing them, but there were times when, tightening the reins and pressing hard on them though they were quite displeased, he brought them by force to what was expedient — in this exactly like a physician dealing with a complex and long illness, at one time bringing harmless pleasures, at another biting remedies and healing medicines, as the occasion required.

For since, as is natural, passions of every kind grow up in a mob possessing so great a power, he alone was fitted by nature to manage each of them fittingly, and above all, by pressing upon their overconfidence and relieving and consoling their despondency by means of hopes and fears as though by rudders, he showed that rhetoric is, in Plato's phrase, a guidance of souls, and that its greatest task is the method concerning characters and passions, which are like certain pitches and notes of the soul requiring a very harmonious touch and striking.

This was owed not to mere skill in speaking but, as Thucydides tells us, to the standing his life had earned and the confidence people placed in him, since he had shown himself conspicuously most incorruptible and superior to money — he who, having made the city great instead of merely large, and most wealthy, and having become in power superior to many kings and tyrants, some of whom even appointed him guardian for their own sons, did not make his own estate a single drachma greater than what his father had left him.

And yet Thucydides clearly sets forth his power, while the comic poets darkly hint at it, calling his companions the 'new Pisistratids' and bidding him himself swear an oath that he would not become a tyrant, on the ground that his preeminence was disproportionate to democracy and too heavy a weight upon it.

Telecleides says that the Athenians handed over to him the tributes of the cities and the cities themselves, some to bind, others to loose; stone walls, some to build, others afterward to tear down again; treaties, power, might, peace, wealth, and prosperity. And this was not a time of opportunity, nor the peak and grace of a state flourishing in its prime, but rather forty years during which he held first place among the likes of Ephialtes, Leocrates, Myronides, Cimon, Tolmides, and Thucydides,

and after the downfall of Thucydides and his ostracism, having acquired for not less than fifteen years a continuous and single rule and dominion in the annual generalships, he kept himself unconquered by money, although he was not altogether idle when it came to money-making; rather, to keep the wealth he had rightfully inherited from his father from slipping away through carelessness, and yet without it eating up his time and energy while other business demanded his attention, he organized it under a scheme of management he judged to be both the simplest and the most precise.

For he used to sell all the year's produce together in a lump sum, and then would buy each of his household's necessities from the market and manage his livelihood and daily needs in this way. As a result he was not agreeable to his grown sons, nor a lavish provider to the women of the household, but they found fault with this day-to-day and most exactly reckoned expenditure, in which nothing flowed abundantly, as would be fitting in a great house with plentiful resources, but every outlay and every receipt proceeded by number and measure.

The one who managed all this exactness of his was a single household servant, Evangelus, who, more than anyone else, was naturally suited, or had been trained by Pericles, for such management. Now this was out of tune with the wisdom of Anaxagoras, if indeed that man actually left his own house and let his land lie idle and given over to grazing sheep, out of his enthusiasm and greatness of soul,

yet, I think, a philosopher living in contemplation and a man engaged in public affairs do not follow the same rule; rather, the one, needing no instrument and no external material, moves his mind toward what is noble, while for the other, who mixes his virtue into the service of human needs, wealth may become a part not only of the necessities but even of the noble things, as indeed it was for Pericles, who helped many of the poor with it.

And indeed they say that Anaxagoras himself, while Pericles was occupied with affairs, lay neglected, already old, covered up, starving himself to death; and when word of it reached Pericles, he was thrown into alarm, rushed straight to Anaxagoras, and pleaded with him using every kind of appeal, lamenting not for him but for himself, if he should lose such a counselor for his statesmanship. Then Anaxagoras uncovered himself and said to him, 'Pericles, even those who have need of a lamp pour oil into it.'

When the Lacedaemonians began to be vexed at the growth of the Athenians, Pericles, urging the people on to think even more greatly of themselves and to deem themselves worthy of great undertakings, wrote a decree that all Greeks, wherever they dwelt, in Europe or in Asia, both small city and great, should be called upon to send delegates to a gathering at Athens, there to take counsel about the Hellenic shrines the barbarians had reduced to ashes, and concerning the sacrifices which were owed on behalf of Greece, vowed to the gods when they were fighting against the barbarians, and concerning the sea, so that all might sail without fear and maintain the peace.

For this purpose twenty men, each over fifty years of age, were sent out; of whom five went to summon the Ionian and Dorian communities of Asia, together with the island-dwellers out to Rhodes and Lesbos; another five traveled to the districts of the Hellespont and Thrace as far as Byzantium; and five besides these were dispatched to Boeotia, Phocis, and the Peloponnese, and from there, through the Locrians, to the neighboring mainland as far as Acarnania and Ambracia;

while the rest journeyed through Euboea to the Oetaeans, the Malian Gulf, the Achaeans of Phthiotis, and the Thessalians, urging them to attend and join the discussions on securing peace and the shared good of the Greek world. But nothing was accomplished, and the cities did not come together, the Lacedaemonians having opposed it, as is said, the attempt having first been thwarted in the Peloponnese. I have set this down, then, to show his high purpose and greatness of mind.

In his generalships he was most esteemed for his caution, neither willingly engaging in a battle involving much uncertainty and danger, nor emulating and imitating those generals who, by taking risks, had met with brilliant fortune and been admired as great; and he was always saying to the citizens that, so far as it depended on him, they would remain immortal for all time.

Seeing that Tolmides son of Tolmaeus, on account of his previous successes and the special honor he received from his military exploits, was preparing, at an inopportune moment, to invade Boeotia, and had persuaded the best and most ambitious of the men of military age to campaign as volunteers, a thousand strong apart from the rest of the force, Pericles tried to hold him back and to warn him in the assembly, saying the memorable words that, even if he would not obey Pericles, he would not go wrong in waiting for time, the wisest counselor of all.

At the time, then, this saying won him only moderate approval; but a few days later, when it was reported that Tolmides himself had been killed, defeated in battle near Coronea, and that many good citizens had died with him, this brought Pericles great glory along with goodwill, as a man of prudence and love for his fellow citizens.

Of his generalships, the one concerning the Chersonese was most beloved of all, as it proved salvation for the Greeks living there; for not only did he strengthen the cities in manpower by bringing a thousand Athenian settlers, but he also girded the neck of land with fortifications and defenses from sea to sea, walling off the incursions of the Thracians who lay all around the Chersonese,

and he brought to an end a long, grinding war in which the whole country had been embroiled the entire time, mixed in as it was with neighboring barbarians and thick with bands of raiders bordering and living among them; and he won admiration and renown among people abroad by circumnavigating the Peloponnese, launching a hundred triremes from Pegae, in Megarian territory.

For he did not merely ravage much of the coastline, just as Tolmides had once done, but also pushed a considerable distance inland from the shore with the hoplites from his ships, driving the rest into their walls in fear of his approach, and at Nemea, when the Sicyonians stood their ground and joined battle, he routed them decisively and set up a trophy.

Then, taking on soldiers from Achaea, which was friendly to him, he carried them across on his triremes to the opposite mainland, and sailing along the Achelous he overran Acarnania, and shut the Oeniadae up inside their walls, and after cutting up and ravaging their land he sailed off for home, having shown himself terrifying to the enemy but safe and effective for his own citizens — for not even by chance did any mishap befall the men on campaign.

Sailing into the Pontus with a large and splendidly equipped fleet, he arranged matters favorably for the Greek cities there in whatever they needed and treated them with kindness, while to the surrounding barbarian peoples and their kings and rulers he displayed the greatness of his power, and the freedom and boldness with which the Athenians sailed wherever they wished and had made the whole sea their own; and to the people of Sinope he left thirteen ships under Lamachus, along with soldiers, against Timesileos the tyrant.

When this man and his associates had been driven out, he moved that six hundred Athenian volunteers sail to Sinope and settle there together with the Sinopeans, dividing among themselves the houses and land which the tyrants had previously held. In everything else, though, he did not yield to the impulses of the citizens, nor did he get swept along by the strength and good fortune that had so lifted them up, when they wanted to lay hold of Egypt again and to stir up the territories of the Persian king's realm near the sea.

And many were already gripped by that ill-starred, unlucky passion for Sicily as well, which the orators around Alcibiades later fanned into flame. There were some, too, for whom Tyrrhenia and Carthage were a dream not beyond hope, given the size of the power already at their disposal and the favorable run of their affairs.

But Pericles held back this venture and cut short their meddling ambition, and he turned most of the city's power toward guarding and securing what they already had, reckoning it no small feat merely to restrain the Lacedaemonians and, in general, to stand against them — as he showed on many other occasions and especially in what was done in the so-called Sacred War.

For when the Lacedaemonians campaigned to Delphi, which the Phocians then held, and gave the sanctuary back to the Delphians, as soon as they had withdrawn Pericles marched out again and brought the Phocians back in. And whereas the Lacedaemonians had had the right of first consultation which the Delphians granted them engraved on the forehead of the bronze wolf, Pericles, having obtained the same right of first consultation for the Athenians, had it cut into the same wolf's right flank.

That he was right to keep the power of the Athenians concentrated within Greece was borne out by events. For first the Euboeans revolted, and he crossed over against them with a force. Then immediately word came that the Megarians had turned hostile and that an enemy army was on the borders of Attica, led by Plistoanax, king of the Lacedaemonians.

So Pericles again brought his forces back quickly from Euboea to face the war in Attica; and he did not dare join battle against the numerous and good hoplites who challenged him, but seeing that Plistoanax was quite young and relied most of all on Cleandridas among his advisors — a man the ephors had assigned to accompany him as overseer and counselor on account of his youth — he made a secret attempt on this man, and quickly corrupting him with money he persuaded him to lead the Peloponnesians out of Attica.

When the army had withdrawn and dispersed to their cities, the Lacedaemonians, taking it hard, fined the king a sum of money which, being unable to pay, he removed himself from Lacedaemon; and against Cleandridas, who fled, they pronounced sentence of death. This man was the father of Gylippus, who defeated the Athenians in Sicily. It seems that nature had, as it were, fastened onto him a hereditary disease of love of money, by which he too was caught disgracefully in the midst of honorable deeds and was driven out of Sparta. These matters we have set out in the Life of Lysander.

When Pericles, in his accounting for his generalship, entered an expenditure of ten talents as spent 'for necessary purposes,' the people accepted it without prying into it or examining the secret. Some have recorded — among them the philosopher Theophrastus — that every year ten talents went from Pericles to Sparta, with which he courted all the men in power there and averted war, not buying peace but time, in which he intended, once he had prepared at leisure, to wage war the better.

So he turned again against the rebels, and crossing over into Euboea with fifty ships and five thousand hoplites, he brought the cities into submission. And of the Chalcidians he expelled those called the Hippobotae, who were distinguished by wealth and reputation, and the Histiaeans he removed entirely from their territory and settled Athenians there in their place — showing this group alone no mercy, since it was they who had seized an Attic vessel and slain its crew.

After this, once a thirty-year truce had been struck between Athens and Lacedaemon, he proposed a vote for the expedition against Samos, charging the Samians with disobedience for refusing an order to end their war with Miletus. Since it is thought that he acted against the Samians as a favor to Aspasia, this would be the best moment to raise the question about this woman — what skill or power she possessed that was so great that she gained mastery over the foremost men in public life, and gave the philosophers no small or trivial occasion to discuss her. That she was Milesian by birth,

the daughter of Axiochus, is agreed. They say that she, in emulation of a certain Thargelia among the Ionian women of old, set her sights on the most powerful men. For Thargelia too, being fair in form and possessed of charm along with cleverness, lived with a great many of the Greeks, and made all who came near her partisans of the Persian king, and through them sowed in the cities, since they were the most powerful and greatest men, the seeds of pro-Persian sympathies.

As for Aspasia, some say she was courted by Pericles as a woman wise in political matters; for Socrates too would sometimes visit her with his companions, and those close to her would bring their wives to hear her, even though she presided over an occupation neither respectable nor dignified, but kept young girls who worked as courtesans.

Aeschines states that Lysicles, a dealer in sheep of lowly and unremarkable stock, rose to prominence among the Athenians by consorting with Aspasia after Pericles' death. And in Plato's Menexenus, even though the opening is written in a playful spirit, this much of historical fact is present, that the woman had a reputation for associating with many Athenians on matters of rhetoric.

It appears, nonetheless, that Pericles' attachment to Aspasia was rather of an erotic kind. For he had a wife who was related to him by birth, but who had previously been married to Hipponicus, by whom she bore the wealthy Callias; she also bore to Pericles Xanthippus and Paralus. Then, since their life together was not agreeable to them, he gave her away, with her consent, to another man, and he himself took Aspasia and cherished her exceedingly.

For indeed, as they say, going out and coming in from the marketplace he greeted her each day with a kiss. In the comedies she is addressed as the new Omphale, and Deianira, and again as Hera. Cratinus outright calls her a concubine in these lines: 'Hera-as-concubine bears him Aspasia, offspring of shameless lust, a dog-eyed mistress.' [Cratinus, Cheirones] And it is thought that he also fathered his illegitimate son by her, about whom Eupolis in his Demes has him asking: 'Is my bastard alive?' [Eupolis, Demes] And Myronides answering: 'He would long ago have been a man, if not for his dread of the whore's disgrace.' [Eupolis, Demes]

To such a pitch of fame did Aspasia rise, it is said, that even Cyrus, who made war on the king for the leadership of the Persians, gave the name Aspasia to the woman most beloved of him among his concubines, who had before been called Milto. She was Phocaean by birth, the daughter of Hermotimus; and when Cyrus fell in the battle, she was led away to the king and gained very great influence there. These things, coming to mind as I was writing, it would perhaps have been inhuman to push aside and pass over.

It is above all for Aspasia's sake, on behalf of the Milesians, that they blame Pericles for bringing the vote for war against the Samians. For the two cities were at war over Priene, and the Samians, having the upper hand, when the Athenians ordered them to stop and to submit to arbitration before them, would not obey. So Pericles sailed out and put down the existing oligarchy in Samos, and taking fifty hostages from the leading men and an equal number of children, sent them to Lemnos.

And yet it is said that each of the hostages, on his own account, offered him a talent, as did many others who did not want democracy set up in the city. Further, Pissuthnes the Persian, who had some goodwill toward the Samians, sent him ten thousand gold pieces, asking that he spare the city. Pericles, however, took none of this, but dealt with the Samians just as he had determined, and after establishing a democracy he sailed back to Athens.

But they revolted at once, since Pissuthnes had stolen their hostages away for them and made all other preparations for war. So Pericles again sailed out against them, who were neither quiet nor cowering, but had resolved quite eagerly to contest the sea. A hard-fought sea battle took place near the island called Tragia, and Pericles won brilliantly, defeating seventy ships with forty-four, of which twenty were troop transports.

Along with the victory, gaining control of the harbor as well through pursuit, he laid siege to the Samians, who still had some courage left to sally out and fight before their wall. But once a second and larger fleet had arrived from Athens, hemming the Samians in on every side, Pericles led sixty triremes out onto the wider sea beyond — as most say, wishing to meet and fight it out, as far off as possible, against Phoenician ships that were coming to help the Samians; but as Stesimbrotus says, setting out for Cyprus — which does not seem plausible.

Whichever of these purposes he was acting on, he seems to have erred. For once he had sailed off, Melissus son of Ithagenes, a philosopher then serving as general of Samos, scorning the small number of the ships or the inexperience of the generals, persuaded the citizens to attack the Athenians. A battle took place and the Samians won, capturing many of their men and destroying many ships, and they gained command of the sea and laid in supplies for the war which they had not had before.

Aristotle says that Pericles himself was earlier defeated in a sea battle by Melissus. The Samians, in return for the outrage, branded their Athenian prisoners on the forehead with an owl; for the Athenians had also branded them with the samaina. The samaina is a ship with a snub, pig-snouted prow, but hollower and more bulging in the belly, so that it can both cross the open sea and sail swiftly.

It was so named because it first appeared at Samos, built there by the tyrant Polycrates. Some say that Aristophanes' riddle refers to these brand-marks: 'The Samian people are, as it were, a people of many letters.' [Aristophanes, Babylonians]

When Pericles learned, then, of the disaster to his camp, he came quickly to its aid, and when Melissus drew up against him he defeated and routed the enemy, and at once began to wall them in, wishing to overcome and subdue the city by expense and time rather than by the wounds and dangers of his citizens.

But since it was hard to restrain the Athenians, who chafed at the delay and were eager to fight, he divided the whole force into eight parts and had them draw lots, and whichever group drew the white bean was given leave to relax and enjoy a feast while the rest continued fighting. That is why, they say, those who find themselves in some state of enjoyment call that a 'white day,' after the white bean.

Ephorus says that Pericles also made use of siege engines, marvelling at their novelty, with Artemon the engineer present — a man who, being lame and carried about on a litter to wherever the works were most pressing, was called 'Periphoretus' ('the carried-about'). This, however, Heraclides of Pontus refutes by the poems of Anacreon, in which the 'carried-about' Artemon is named many generations before the Samian war and these events.

For he says that this Artemon was a man luxurious in his way of life and timid and cowardly toward danger, who mostly sat at home, with a bronze shield held over his head by two servants so that nothing might fall on him from above, and that if he were forced to go out, he was carried along close to the ground on a hanging couch, and was for this reason called 'the carried-about.'

In the ninth month the Samians gave up the fight, and Pericles dismantled their fortifications, seized their fleet, and levied against them a heavy fine, part of which they paid at once, while for the remainder a date was fixed for payment and hostages were handed over. Duris the Samian turns the episode into a tragedy, charging the Athenians and Pericles with a savagery—a savagery that none of the three, Thucydides, Ephorus, or Aristotle, set down.

It does not even seem true that he brought the trierarchs and marines of the Samians down into the marketplace of Miletus, bound them to boards for ten days, and then, when they were already in a wretched state, ordered them killed by having their heads crushed with clubs, and then had their bodies thrown out unburied.

Duris, who is not accustomed to keep his narrative within the bounds of truth even where he has no personal stake in the matter, seems here to have exaggerated the misfortunes of his homeland in order to slander the Athenians. Pericles, after subduing Samos, returned to Athens, gave the war dead a splendid funeral, and delivered the customary oration over their graves, which won him great admiration.

As he came down from the platform, the other women greeted him and crowned him with wreaths and ribbons, as though he were a victorious athlete, but Elpinice came up close to him and said, "These are marvelous deeds, Pericles, and worthy of wreaths—you who have destroyed for us many good citizens, not fighting Phoenicians or Medes, as my brother Cimon did, but overthrowing a city that is our ally and our kin."

As Elpinice said this, Pericles is said to have smiled quietly and replied to her with the line of Archilochus: "You would not, being an old woman, anoint yourself with perfume." Ion says that Pericles thought marvelously and greatly of himself for having conquered the Samians, since Agamemnon took ten years to capture a foreign city, while he himself in nine months had taken the first and most powerful of the Ionians.

And the claim was not unjust, for the war really did involve great uncertainty and grave danger, since, as Thucydides says, the city of the Samians came within the barest margin of stripping the Athenians of their mastery of the sea.

After this, when the Peloponnesian War was already swelling up, and the Corcyraeans were being warred upon by the Corinthians, Pericles persuaded the people to send them help and to win over to their side an island possessed of a strong naval power, since war with the Peloponnesians was all but certain to break out before long.

When the people voted the assistance, he sent out only ten ships, with Lacedaemonius, the son of Cimon, in command—as though insulting him, for there was great goodwill and friendship between the house of Cimon and the Lacedaemonians. So it seems that the small squadron was assigned and Lacedaemonius was dispatched over his own objection, so that if nothing great or notable were achieved while he held command, he would be all the more open to slander for favoring Sparta.

And in general he continued to disparage the sons of Cimon, as though they were not even genuine in their names, but foreign and alien, because one of Cimon's sons was named Lacedaemonius, another Thessalus, and another Eleius; and all were said to have been born of an Arcadian mother. So Pericles, being badly spoken of on account of these ten triremes, since he had given only slight help to those who needed it and a great pretext to his accusers, sent out afterward yet more ships to Corcyra, which arrived after the battle.

While the Corinthians were angry and were denouncing the Athenians at Sparta, the Megarians joined them, charging that they were being excluded and turned away from all the markets and harbors under Athenian sway, in violation of the shared rights and the oaths the Greeks had sworn to one another. The Aeginetans too, believing themselves mistreated and suffering violence, complained secretly to the Lacedaemonians, not daring to accuse the Athenians openly. Meanwhile Potidaea also, a city subject to Athens but a colony of Corinth, revolted and was besieged, which hastened the war still further.

Nevertheless, even though delegations were sent to Athens, and Archidamus, king of the Lacedaemonians, worked to resolve most of the complaints and calm the allies, it does not seem likely that war would have come upon the Athenians on account of the other charges alone, had they been persuaded to rescind the Megarian decree and be reconciled with them. Therefore, since it was Pericles above all who opposed this, and who incited the people to persist in their quarrel with the Megarians, he alone bore the blame for the war.

They say that when an embassy came to Athens from Sparta about this matter, and Pericles put forward some law that forbade the taking down of the tablet on which the decree happened to be written, one of the envoys, Polyalces, said, "Well then, do not take it down, but just turn the tablet around—there is no law forbidding that." Though the remark seemed clever, Pericles yielded no more for it.

It seems, then, that he also nursed some private grievance against the Megarians; yet the charge he laid openly and officially against them was that they were trespassing on the sacred Orgas, and on this ground he put forward a motion calling for an envoy to be dispatched both to them and to the Lacedaemonians, laying the accusation against Megara.

This decree, then, shows a reasonable and humane justification on Pericles's part; but once the envoy who had been sent, Anthemocritus, was believed to have perished at Megarian hands, Charinus put forward a motion aimed at them, calling for a relentless enmity admitting no herald between the two peoples, and decreeing that death await any Megarian caught within Attic soil, and that the generals, in swearing their ancestral oath, swear also to invade Megarian land twice each year, and that Anthemocritus receive burial near the gate to Thria, the gate now known as the Dipylon.

The Megarians, denying the murder of Anthemocritus, turn the blame onto Aspasia and Pericles, using these notorious and popular verses from the Acharnians: "Some young men, drunk on cottabus, go to Megara and steal the whore Simaetha; then the Megarians, stung with pain, in turn steal away two of Aspasia's whores."

How the war began, then, is not easy to determine; but as to why the decree was not rescinded, everyone alike lays the blame on Pericles. Yet some claim he held his ground from magnanimity and sound judgment about the best policy, taking the demand as a probe of concession and reckoning that yielding would amount to admitting weakness; others hold instead that it was a certain stubbornness and combativeness, a wish to flaunt his strength, that made him treat the Lacedaemonians with disdain. But of all the accusations leveled at him, the harshest,

though it has the most witnesses, is told in something like this way. Phidias the sculptor had undertaken the contract for the statue, as has been said, and having become a friend of Pericles and gained the greatest influence with him, he acquired enemies of his own out of envy; and those testing the people, to see what sort of judge it would be in Pericles' case, persuaded a certain Menon, one of Phidias's assistants, to sit as a suppliant in the marketplace, asking for immunity in exchange for informing against and accusing Phidias.

When the people admitted the man and a prosecution took place in the assembly, no theft was proven; for Phidias, on Pericles' advice, had from the very beginning worked and fitted the gold onto the statue in such a way that it was entirely possible to remove it and weigh it, which is exactly what Pericles then ordered the accusers to do.

But the fame of his works burdened Phidias with envy, especially because in fashioning the battle against the Amazons on the shield he had worked in his own likeness as an old bald man lifting a stone with both hands, and had also set in a very beautiful image of Pericles fighting an Amazon. The pose of the hand, holding a spear up in front of Pericles' face, was cleverly made as if to conceal the resemblance, which nonetheless showed on either side.

Phidias, then, was taken off to confinement, where he perished of sickness—or, as some tell it, of poison administered by Pericles's enemies to cast blame on him. To Menon the informer, on Glycon's proposal, the people granted immunity from taxes, and ordered the generals to see to the man's safety.

About this time Aspasia was brought to trial for impiety, prosecuted by Hermippus the comic poet, who further accused her of receiving free women into her house for Pericles' sake. And Diopeithes proposed a decree that those who did not believe in the gods, or who taught doctrines about the heavens, be liable to public impeachment, directing suspicion at Pericles through Anaxagoras.

As the people received and welcomed these slanders, a decree was then passed, on the proposal of Dracontides, that the accounts of the money handled by Pericles be deposited with the Prytanes, and that the jurors cast their votes taken from the altar in the city, deciding the case there. Hagnon struck this clause from the motion and proposed in its place that the matter go to trial before a panel of fifteen hundred jurors, whatever name one gave the charge, whether theft, bribery, or malfeasance.

Aspasia, then, he begged off, shedding many tears on her behalf, as Aeschines says, quite contrary to the dignity of a trial, and entreating the jurors; but out of concern for Anaxagoras, he arranged for his departure from the city. And since he had stumbled with the people over the affair of Phidias, fearing the courts, he fanned into flame the war that was smoldering and impending, hoping to scatter the accusations and to humble the envy against him, by giving over the city, in matters of great import and danger, to himself alone because of his standing and power. These, then, are said to be the reasons why he would not let the people yield to the Lacedaemonians; but the truth is unclear.

The Lacedaemonians, knowing that if he were overthrown they would find the Athenians far more pliable in every respect, instructed the Athenians to expel the pollution stemming from Cylon, an affair in which the maternal line of Pericles's family bore a share of guilt, as Thucydides recorded. But the attempt turned out the opposite of what its senders intended: instead of suspicion and slander, Pericles gained still greater trust and honor among the citizens, since it was plain that his enemies hated and feared him most of all.

For this reason, before Archidamus had even brought the Peloponnesians into Attica, Pericles told the Athenians in advance that should Archidamus, in laying waste to everything else, leave his estate untouched on account of their bond of guest-friendship, thereby handing his enemies material for slander, he would surrender both his land and his farm buildings to the state.

So the Lacedaemonians invaded Attica with a great army along with their allies, under the command of King Archidamus. And ravaging the countryside, they advanced to Acharnae and encamped there, expecting that the Athenians would not endure it, but out of anger and pride would come out to fight them.

But to Pericles it seemed a fearful thing to join battle for the city itself against sixty thousand Peloponnesian and Boeotian hoplites (for so many were those who made the first invasion); and he calmed those who wished to fight and were chafing at what was happening, saying that trees, when cut and lopped, grow back quickly, but when men are destroyed, it is not easy to come by the like again.

He did not convene the people in assembly, fearing he would be forced against his own judgment—but just as a ship's helmsman, when a wind comes down upon them at sea, having set everything in order and drawn taut the rigging, employs his skill, disregarding the tears and pleas of seasick and frightened passengers—in the same way he, once the city gates were closed and every post made secure with garrisons, trusted his own reckoning and paid scant attention to those who cried out against him in their irritation.

And yet a great many friends besieged him with pleading, while a great many enemies assailed him with menaces and denunciations, and choruses sang songs and mockeries to his shame, insulting his generalship as unmanly and as abandoning affairs to the enemy. And Cleon too was already fastening onto him, making his way toward popular leadership through the citizens' anger against him,

as these anapests of Hermippus show: "King of satyrs, why will you not take up the spear, but instead give forth terrible speeches about the war, while the soul of Teles lurks within you? And though you gnash a dagger sharpened on a hard whetstone, you are bitten by fiery Cleon."

Yet by none of these things was Pericles moved, but bearing the disgrace and the hostility gently and in silence, and dispatching a fleet numbering one hundred vessels against the Peloponnese, he himself stayed behind rather than sail with it, keeping the city firmly under his own control until the Peloponnesians withdrew. And to reconcile the populace, who nonetheless chafed under the burdens of war, he eased their hardship with grants of money and proposed handing out parcels of land: for having driven out all the Aeginetans, he divided their island among the Athenians by lot. There was also some comfort to be had from what the enemy themselves suffered.

For those sailing around the Peloponnese ravaged much territory, villages, and small towns, and Pericles himself, invading by land into the Megarid, laid it all waste. And from this it was clear that although the Peloponnesians were doing much harm to the Athenians by land and suffering much from them by sea, the war would not have dragged on so far, and would soon have collapsed, exactly as Pericles had foretold from the outset, had some divine power not set itself against human reckoning.

But as it was, first the plague-borne destruction fell upon them and consumed the flower of their youth and strength; and being afflicted in body by it, and utterly savage in spirit, they turned against Pericles, and, like patients deranged by their disease against their physician or their father, they set about wronging him, persuaded by his enemies that the disease was produced by the crowding of the country populace into the city,

in the season of summer, when so many were forced to live crammed together in small dwellings and stifling huts, in a confined and idle mode of life instead of the pure and open one they had before — and that the one to blame for it all was the very man who, on account of the war, had funneled the country crowd inside the walls and then made no use of so many people for anything, but let them be shut up like cattle to infect one another with disease, providing them no change or relief.

Wishing to remedy these things, and also to trouble the enemy somewhat, he manned a hundred and fifty ships, and having embarked many good hoplites and cavalrymen, he was about to put to sea, having given the citizens great hope and the enemy no less fear from such a display of strength. Yet once the crews were in place and Pericles himself had boarded his personal trireme, the sun chanced to be eclipsed, darkness came over everything, and all were seized with dread, taking it for an ominous portent.

Pericles, then, seeing that his helmsman was thoroughly afraid and at a loss, held up his cloak before the man's eyes, and having covered them, asked him whether he thought this anything terrible, or a sign of anything terrible. When he said no, Pericles said, "What, then, is that different from this, except that something greater than the cloak has caused the darkening?" This story, at any rate, is told in the schools of the philosophers.

Having sailed out, then, Pericles seems to have accomplished nothing else worthy of such a preparation; and though he besieged sacred Epidaurus, giving hope that it would be captured, he failed because of the disease. For it came upon them and destroyed not only his own men but also those who in any way came into contact with the army. Because of this the Athenians, being harshly disposed toward him, he tried to console and encourage.

He did not, however, dissolve their anger, nor did he change their minds, until they had taken the ballots against him into their own hands and, becoming masters of the matter, stripped him of his generalship and fined him money — the amount of which some write as the least, fifteen talents, and others as the greatest, fifty. As prosecutor in the case was recorded, according to Idomeneus, Cleon; according to Theophrastus, Simmias; while Heraclides of Pontus has named Lacratidas.

The public anger, then, was soon to cease, the people having discharged their wrath upon him all at once, like the sting of a goad; but his personal circumstances had grown grim, for the plague had carried off a good number of his close companions, and dissension had for a long time troubled his household. His eldest lawful son, Xanthippus, a spendthrift by nature who had married an expensive young woman — she was Tisander's daughter, Tisander being the son of Epilycus — chafed under the meager, thrifty allowance his father doled out bit by bit.

So he sent to one of his father's friends and got money, claiming Pericles had ordered it. When the friend later asked for it back, Pericles actually brought suit against him over it; and the young man Xanthippus, being harshly affected by this, reviled his father, first bringing up for mockery his father's occupations at home and the discussions he used to hold with the sophists.

For instance, when a certain pentathlete had struck Epitimus of Pharsalus with a javelin unintentionally and killed him, Pericles had spent a whole day with Protagoras disputing whether, by the most correct reasoning, the javelin, or the one who threw it, or the officials in charge of the games ought to be held responsible for the mishap. In addition, Stesimbrotus says that the slander concerning his wife was spread among the people by Xanthippus, and that in general an incurable estrangement remained between the young man and his father right up to his death; for Xanthippus died of the plague.

Pericles also lost his sister at that time, and the greater part of his relatives and friends, those most useful to him in politics. Yet he did not give up nor betray the resolve and greatness of his spirit under these misfortunes; he was not even seen weeping or performing funeral rites or standing at the tomb of any of his kin — until, indeed, he lost the remaining one of his legitimate sons, Paralus.

Bent low by this blow, he tried to hold firm to his character and to preserve his greatness of soul; but as he set a wreath upon the corpse, he was overcome by his feeling at the sight, so that he broke into weeping and poured out a flood of tears — something he had never done at any other time in the rest of his life.

When the city was trying out the other generals and orators for the conduct of the war, and none appeared to have weight equal to the balance or dignity sufficient to warrant so great a command, the people longed for him and called him to the platform and to the generalship; and though he lay at home despondent and mourning, Alcibiades together with his other friends talked him into stepping forward again.

When the people had apologized to him for their thoughtlessness, he took up public affairs again, and having been chosen general, he asked that the law concerning children of mixed birth be repealed — the very law he himself had earlier introduced — so that, with no successor at all, the name and family should not disappear altogether.

The circumstances of the law were as follows. Pericles, at the height of his political power long before this, and having legitimate sons, as has been said, had proposed a law that only those born of two Athenian parents should be Athenians. Later, when the king of the Egyptians sent a gift of forty thousand measures of grain to the people to be distributed among the citizens, many lawsuits arose against those of mixed birth on the strength of that law, which until then had gone unnoticed and been overlooked, and many also fell victim to false accusations.

In the end, those who were convicted and sold as slaves numbered a little under five thousand, while those who remained in the citizen body and were judged to be Athenians were found, upon scrutiny, to number fourteen thousand and forty.

It was a strange thing, then, that the law which had prevailed against so many should now be repealed by the very man who had written it; but the present misfortune of Pericles concerning his household, as though he were paying some penalty for his former arrogance and pride, moved the Athenians to pity, and thinking that he had suffered a deserved reversal and stood in need of human sympathy, they allowed him to enroll the illegitimate son in the phratry-registers, giving him his own name. This same son, who afterward defeated the Peloponnesians in the naval battle off Arginusae, was later executed by the citizenry together with his co-commanders.

At that time the plague seems to have taken hold of Pericles not with a sharp and violent seizure, as with others, but with a sluggish disease which, dragging on through varied changes, wore down his body slowly and gradually undermined the vigor of his spirit.

Theophrastus, at any rate, in his Ethics, in discussing whether characters change with fortune and, being moved by the sufferings of the body, depart from virtue, records that Pericles, while sick, displayed to a visiting friend a charm the women of the house had tied about his neck, as if to say that he was in a very bad way indeed, if he put up with even this piece of folly.

When he was now near death, the best of the citizens who were sitting around him, and those of his friends who survived, spoke of his virtue and his power, how great it had been, and reckoned up his deeds and the number of his trophies; for there were nine which he had set up, as general and victor, on behalf of the city.

They said these things to one another as though he no longer understood, but had lost consciousness; yet he had in fact been attending to everything, and speaking out among them, he said he was surprised that they praised and remembered these things, which belong also to fortune and have already happened to many generals, while they did not mention the finest and greatest thing. "For no living Athenian," he said, "ever put on a black cloak because of me."

The man is, then, admirable not only for the fairness and gentleness which he maintained amid many affairs and great enmities, but also for the loftiness of spirit which made him consider it the best of his achievements that, from such great power, he never gratified either envy or anger, nor treated any enemy as beyond redemption.

And it seems to me that this alone made that youthful and pompous appellation free of offense and fitting — that a character so benevolent and a life so pure and undefiled amid such power should be called "Olympian," just as we hold the race of the gods to be, by nature, the cause of good things and not the cause of evils, and fit to rule and reign over what exists — not as the poets confuse us, caught in their own myth-making by the most ignorant opinions,

naming as a secure, unmoved abode the region reputed to be where the gods reside, using neither winds nor clouds, but shone upon evenly for all time by a gentle upper air and the purest light — as befitting most such a mode of life for the blessed and immortal — while representing the gods themselves as full of turmoil, hostility, and anger, and other passions unbecoming even to men of sense. But these matters, perhaps, will seem to belong to another treatise.

As for Pericles, events soon produced in the Athenians a swift and clear sense of longing for him. For even those who, while he lived, resented his power as overshadowing them, as soon as he was out of the way, tried other orators and demagogues, and confessed that there had never been a man of more moderate bearing in his dignity and more august in

his mildness of manner. That power of his, once so envied, once called monarchy and tyranny, now looked, in hindsight, like a protective rampart shielding the constitution, so vast was the corruption and the sheer glut of wickedness weighing upon public affairs, which he, by keeping it weak and low, had hidden away and prevented from becoming incurable while in power.

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