Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/199

 SECOND AND THIRD YEARS OF THE WAR. 177 Athenian character : he found it with its very marked positive characteristics and susceptibilities, among which, those which he chiefly brought out and improved were the best. The lust of expeditions against the Persians, which Kimon Avould have pushed into Egypt and Cyprus, he repressed, after it had accom- plished all which could be usefully aimed at : the ambition of Athens he moderated rather than encouraged : the democratical movement of Athens he regularized, and worked out into judicial institutions, which became one of the prominent features of Athenian life, and worked, in my judgment, with a very large balance of benefit to the national mind as well as to individual security, in spite of the many defects in their direct character as tribunals. But that point in which there was the greatest difference between Athens, as Perikles found it, and as he left it, is, unque* tionably, the pacific and intellectual development, rhetori' poetry, arts, philosophical research, and recreative variety. TV which if we add, great improvement in the cultivation of the Attic soil, extension of Athenian trade, attainment ami laborious maintenance of the maximum of maritime skill, af tested by the battles of Phormio, enlargement of the area of complete security by construction of the Long Walls, lastly, the clothing of Athens in her imperial mantle, by ornaments, archi- tectural and sculptural, we shall make out a case of genuine progress realized during the political life of Perikles, such as the evils imputed to him, far more imaginary than real, will go but it little way to alloy. How little, comparatively speaking, of the picture drawn by Perikles in his funeral harangue of 431 B.C. would have been correct, if the harangue had been delivered over those warriors who fell at Tanagra, twenty-seven years before ! It has been remarked by M. Boeckh, 1 that Perikles sacrificed the landed proprietors of Attica to the maritime interests and 1 Boeckh, Public Economy of Athens, b. iii, ch. xv, p. 399, Eng. Trans. Kut/en, in the second Beylage to his treatise, Perikles als Staatsmann (pp. 169-200), has collected and inserted a list of various characters of Perikles, from twenty different authors, English, Trench, and German. That of Wachsmuth is the best of the collection, though even he appears to think that Perikles is to blame for having introduced a set of institution! which none but himself could work well. VOL. TI. 8* 12CC.