Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/192

 170 HISTORY OF GREECE. that he was persuaded to present himself again at the publi< assembly, and resume the direction of affairs. The regret of the> people was formally expressed to him for the recent sentence, perhaps, indeed, the fine may have been repaid to him, or some evasion of it permitted, saving the forms of law, 1 in the present temper of the city ; which was farther displayed towards him by the grant of a remarkable exemption from a law of his own original proposition. He had himself, some years before, been the author of that law, whereby the citizenship of Athens was restricted to persons born both of Athenian fathers and Athenian mothers, under which restriction several thousand persons, illegi- timate on the mother's side, are said to have been deprived of the citizenship, on occasion of a public distribution of corn. Invidious as it appeared to grant, to Perikles singly, an exemption from a law which had been strictly enforced against so many others, the people were now moved not less by compassion than by anxiety to redress their own previous severity. Without a legitimate heir, the house of Perikles, one branch of the great Alkmoeonid gens by his mother's side, would be left deserted, and the conti- nuity of the family sacred rites would be broken, a misfortune painfully felt by every Athenian family, as calculated to wrong all the deceased members, and provoke their posthumous dis- pleasure towards the city. Accordingly, permission was granted to Perikles to legitimize, and to inscribe in his own gens and phratry his natural son by Aspasia, who bore his own name. 9 It was thus that Perikles was reinstated in his post of stra tegus, as well as in his ascendency over the public counsels, seemingly about August or September, 430 B.C. He lived about one year longer, and seems to have maintained his influ- ence as long as his health permitted. Yet we hear nothing of him after this moment, and he fell a victim, not to the violent symptoms of the epidemic, but to a slow and wearing fever, 3 1 See Plutarch, Demosthen. c. 27, about the manner of bringing about such an evasion of a fine : compare also the letter of M. Boeckh, in Meineke, Fragment. Comic. Graecor. ad Fragra. Eupolid. ii. 527. 3 Plutarch (Perik. c. 38) treats the slow disorder under wilich he suffered as one of the forms of the epidemic : but this can hardly be correct, when we read the very marked character of the latter, as described by Thucydides.
 * Plutarch, Perikles, c. 37.