Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/155

 BEGINNING OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR. 133 well as of an excited public. But no manifestations, however violent, could disturb either the judgment or the firmness of Perikles. He listened, unmoved, to all the declarations made against him, and resolutely refused to convene any public assem- bly, or any meeting invested with an authorized character, under the present irritated temper of the citizens. 1 It appears that he, as general, or rather the board of ten generals, among whom he was one, must have been invested constitutionally with the power, not only of calling the ekklesia when they thought fit, but also of preventing it from meeting, 2 and of postponing even those regular meetings which commonly took place at fixed times, four times in the prytany. No assembly, accordingly, took place, and the violent exasperation of the people was thus prevented from realizing itself in any rash public resolution. That Perikles should have held firm against this raging force, is but one among the many honorable points in his political character ; but it is far less wonderful than the fact, that his refusal to call the ekklesia was efficacious to prevent the ekklesia from being held. The entire body of Athenians were now assembled within the walls, and if he refused to convoke the ekklesia, they might easily have met in the Pnyx, without him ; for which it would not have been difficult at such a juncture to provide plausible justification. The inviolable respect which the Athenian people manifested on this occasion for the forms of their democratical constitution assisted doubtless by their long-established esteem for Perikles, yet opposed to an excitement alike intense and pervading, and to a demand apparently reasonable, in so far as regarded the calling of an assembly for discussion, is one of the most memorable incidents in their history. While Perikles thus decidedly forbade any general march out for battle, he sought to provide as much employment as possible for the compressed eagerness of the citizens. The cavalry were 1 Thucyd. ii, 22. 8 See Schumann, De Comitiis, c. iv, p. 62. The prytanes (i. c. the fifty senators belonging to that tribe whose turn it was to preside at the time), as well as the strategi, had the right of convoking the ekklesia: see Thucyd. IA -, 118, in which passage, however, they are represented as convoking it in conjunction with the stratfigi : probably a discretion on <lw point came gradually to be understood as vested in the latter.