Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/558

 532 PERICLES guided the destinies of Athens alone ; in the words of the historian Thucydides, the government was in name a de mocracy, but in fact it was the rule of the first citizen. The unparalleled ascendency which he wielded so long over the fickle people is one of the best proofs of his extraor dinary genius. He owed it entirely to his personal character, and he used it for the wisest and purest purposes. He was neither a vulgar demagogue to truckle to the passions and caprices of the mob, nor a vulgar despot to cow it by a hireling soldiery ; he was a citizen among citizens, who obeyed him because they trusted him, because they knew that in his hands the honour and interests of Athens were safe. The period during which he ruled Athens was the happiest and greatest in her history, as it was one of the greatest ages of the world. Other ages have had their bright particular stars ; the age of Pericles is the Milky Way of great men. In his lifetime there lived and worked at Athens the poets yEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Cratinus, Crates, the philosophers Anaxagoras, Zeno, Pro tagoras, Socrates, the astronomer Meton, the painter Poly- gnotus, and the sculptors Myron and Phidias. Contem porary with these, though not resident at Athens, were Herodotus, the father of history ; Hippocrates, the father of medicine ; Pindar, &quot; the Theban eagle &quot; ; the sculptor Polyclitus ; and the philosophers Empedocles and Demo- critus, the latter joint author with Leucippus of the atomic theory. When Pericles died other stars were rising or soon to rise above the horizon, the historians Thucydides and Xenophon, the poets Eupolis and Aristophanes, the orators Lysias and Isocrates, and the gifted but unscru pulous Alcibiades. Plato was born shortly before or after the death of Pericles. Of this brilliant circle Pericles was the centre. His generous and richly-endowed nature responded to all that was beautiful and noble not only in literature and art but in life, and it is with justice that the age of Pericles has received its name from the man in whom, more than in any other, all the various lines of Greek culture met and were harmonized. In this perfect harmony and completeness of nature, and in the classic calm which was the fruit of it, Pericles is the type of the ideal spirit, not of his own age only, but of antiquity. It seems to have been shortly after the ostracism of Thucydides that Pericles conceived the plan of summon ing a general congress of all the Greek states to be held at Athens. Its objects were the restoration of the temples which the Persians had destroyed, the fulfilment of the vows made during the war, and the establishment of a general peace and the security of the sea. Invitations were sent to the Greeks of Asia, the islands from Lesbos to Rhodes, the Hellespont, Thrace, Byzantium, Boeotia, Phocis, Peloponnesus, Locris, Acarnania, Ambracia, and Thessaly. The aim of Pericles seems to have been to draw the bonds of union closer between the Greeks and to form a national federation. The beneficent project was defeated by the short-sighted opposition of the Spartans. But, if in this scheme Pericles rose above the petty jealousies of Greek politics, another of his measures proves that he shared the Greek prejudices as to birth. At an early period of his career (apparently about 460) he enacted, or perhaps only revived, 1 a law confining the rights of Athenian citizenship to persons both of whose parents were Athenian citizens. In the year 444, on the occasion of a scrutiny of the list of citizens, nearly 5000 persons claiming to be citizens were proved to be aliens under this law, and were ruthlessly sold into slavery. The period of the thirty years peace was not one of uninterrupted tranquillity for Athens. In 440 a war broke out between the island of Samos (a leading member 1 See Schoniaim s Antiquities of Greece, p. 357, Eng. tr. ; Hermann s Staatsalterthiimer, 118. of the Athenian confederacy) and Miletus. Athens sided with Miletus ; Pericles sailed to Samos with an Athenian squadron, and established a democracy in place of the previous oligarchy. After his departure, however, some of the exiled oligarchs, in league with Pissuthnes, satrap of Sardis, collected troops and, crossing over to Samos, overpowered the popular party and revolted from Athens. In this revolt they were joined by Byzantium. The situa tion was critical ; the example set by Samos and Byzantium might be followed by the other confederates. Pericles discerned the danger and met it promptly. He led a squadron of sixty ships against Samos ; and, after detach ing some vessels to summon reinforcements from Chios and Lesbos, and others to look out for the Phoenician fleet which the Persians were expected to send to the help of Samos, he gave battle with forty-four ships to the Samian fleet of seventy sail and defeated it. Having received reinforcements of sixty-five ships, he landed in Samos and laid siege to the capital. But, when he sailed with sixty ships to meet the Phoenician vessels which were reported to be near, the Samians sallied out with their vessels, defeated the besiegers, and remained masters of the sea for fourteen days. On his return, however, they were again blockaded, and were compelled to surrender, nine months after the outbreak of the war (spring of 439). Though Pericles enjoyed the confidence of the people as a whole, his policy and opinions could not fail to rouse the dislike and suspicions of many, and in the last years of his life his enemies combined to assail him. Two points in particular were singled out for attack, his administration of the public moneys and his religious opinions. With regard to the former there must always be a certain number of persons who will not believe that others can resist and despise a temptation which to themselves would be irresistible ; with regard to the latter, the suspicion that Pericles held heretical views on the national reli gion was doubtless well grounded. At first, however, his enemies did not venture to impeach himself, but struck at him in the persons of his friends. In 432 2 Phidias was accused of having appropriated some of the gold destined for the adornment of the statue of Athene in the Par thenon. But by the prudent advice of Pericles the golden ornaments had been so attached that they could be taken off and weighed, and when Pericles challenged the accusers to have recourse to this test the accusation fell to the ground. More dangerous, for more true, was the charge against Phidias of having introduced portraits of himself and Pericles into the battle of the Amazons, depicted on the shield of the goddess : the sculptor appeared as a bald old man lifting a stone, while Pericles was represented as fighting an Amazon, his face partly concealed by his raised spear. To the pious Athenians this seemed a desecration of the temple, and accordingly Phidias was clapped into gaol. Whether he died there or at Elis is uncertain. 3 Even more deeply was Pericles wounded by the accusation levelled at the woman he loved. This was the famous Aspasia, a native of Miletus, whose talents won for her general admiration at Athens. Pericles divorced his wife, a lady of good birth who had borne him two sons, Xan- thippus and Paralus, but with whom he was unhappy, and attached himself to Aspasia. With her he lived on terms of devoted affection to the end of his life, though, as she Avas a foreigner, their union was not a legal marriage. She enjoyed a high reputation as a teacher of rhetoric, and - A scholiast on Ari.stoph., Pax, 605, places the condemnation of Phidias seven years before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, or in 438 (according to Palmer s correction) ; see Miiller ad L, in Frag. Hist. Or., v. p. 18. 3 Different views of the fate of Phidias are taken by scholars. See PHIDIAS.