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 it was no longer easy to acquiesce in the routine of ancestral usage; there was a desire for an enlargement of the mental horizon, an eagerness to enter new fields of endeavour, corresponding to the new consciousness of power. Thus, especially in minds of the higher order, a welcome was prepared for intellectual novelties. It is significant that the Ionian Anaxagoras, the foremost speculative thinker of the time, chose Athens as the most congenial abode that he could find. We note also how eagerly Athens received from Sicily the new art of Rhetoric, and from Ionia the practical culture brought by the so-called Sophists.

This sympathy with innovation, and on the other hand a newly reinforced conservatism, were the forces which divided Athens at the moment when Pericles entered public life. His father, Xanthippus, belonged to the old nobility of Attica, the Eupatridae. His mother, Agariste, was a member of a family who belonged to the younger nobility, the Alcmaeonidae, and had latterly been identified with the popular party; Agaristè was a niece of the great reformer Cleisthenes. Thus, while the maternal descent of Pericles would recommend him to the party of progress, his lineage on the father's side was a claim to the respect of their opponents. In his character, from youth onwards, one of the strongest traits seems to have been an unceasing desire of knowledge; he sought knowledge, however, not as Goethe did—to whom, in some aspects, he might be compared—with a view merely to