Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/174

 152 HISTORY OF GREECE. at a time when Athens was as yet erect and at her maximum for though her real power was, doabtless, much diminished, com- pared with the period before the thirty years' truce, yet the great edifices and works of art, achieved since then, tended to compen- sate that loss, in so far as the sense of greatness was concerned; and no one, either citissn or enemy, considered Athens as having at all declined. It was delivered at the commencement of the great struggle with the Peloponnesian confederacy, the coming hardships of which Perikles never disguised either to himself or to his fellow-citizens, though he fully counted upon eventual suc- cess. Attica had been already invaded ; it was no longer " the unwasted territory," as Euripides had designated it in his tragedy Medea, 1 represented three or four months before the march of Archidamus, and a picture of Athens in her social glory was well calculated both to rouse the pride and nerve the courage of those individuals citizens, who had been compelled once, and would be compelled again and again, to abandon their country- residence and fields for a thin tent or confined hole in the city. 3 1 Euripides, Medea, 824. lep&e %upae uxop-dqTov T', etc. 2 The remarks of Dionysius Halikarnn^sus, tending to show that the number of dead buried on this occasion was so small, and the actions in which they had been slain so insignificant, as to be unworthy of so elabor- ate an harangue as this of Perikles, and finding fault with Thucydides on that ground, are by no means well-founded or justifiable. He treat! Thucydides like a dramatic writer putting a speech into the mouth of one of his characters, and he considers that the occasion chosen for this speech was unworthy. But though this assumption would be correct with regard to many ancient historians, and to Dionysius himself in his Roman history, it is not correct with reference to Thucydides. The speech of Perikles was a real speech, heard, reproduced, and doubtless dressed up, by Thucydides : if therefore more is said than the number of the dead or the magnitude of the occasion warranted, this is the fault of Perikles, and not of Thucydides. Dionysins says that there were many other occasions throughout the war much more worthy of an elaborate funeral harangue, especially the dis- astrous loss of the Sicilian army. But Thucydides could not have heard any of them, after his exile in the eighth year of the Avar : and we may well presume that none of them would bear any comparison with this of Peri- kles. Nor does Dionysius at all appreciate the full circumstances of this first year of the war, which, when completely felt, will be found to ren der the splendid and copious harangue of the great statesman eminently seasonable. See Dionys. II de Thucyd. Judic. pp. 849-851.