Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/118

 political one,—the Peloponnesian war; and he did not regard such matters as pertinent to it. The art and poetry of the day, the philosophy and the social life, were, in his view, merely decorations of the theatre in which the great drama of the war was being enacted. One thing, however, he allows us to see clearly,—viz. that the "Age of Pericles" is fitly so called. Even in his slight sketch, a central and commanding figure is brought before us. And it is significant that the famous Funeral Oration sums up all that Thucydides tells us as to the life of Periclean Athens. It is as if he felt that his own silence on that subject should be broken by no voice save that of Pericles.

Thus it comes to pass that, in regard to the age of Pericles, we have to rely mainly on two sources of information. On the one hand, we have the surviving monuments of its literature, and some fragments of its art. On the other hand, we have that description of its general tone and spirit which Thucydides has embodied in the Funeral Oration. But this description is only in general terms. To those who heard it, of course, its abstract statements were full of vivid meaning, suggesting a thousand familiar details of their daily life. We moderns, however, have to reconstruct that life as best we may, by piecing together scattered bits of evidence. The questions for us are,—What were the aims which Pericles set before him? By what means did he succeed in so impressing his own ideas upon his age that the period has ever since been distinctively