Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/37

Rh the rhetor Lysias, and the historian Herodotus, were both domiciliated there as citizens. The city was connected with Athens, yet seemingly only by a feeble tie; nor was it numbered among the tributary subject allies. From the circumstance that so large a proportion of the settlers at Thurii were not native Athenians, we may infer that there were not many of the latter at that time who were willing to put themselves so far out of connection with Athens, even though tempted by the prospect of lots of land in a fertile and promising territory. And Perikles was probably anxious that those poor citizens for whom emigration was desirable should become kleruchs in some of the islands or ports of the Ægean, where they would serve like the colonies of Rome as a sort of garrison for the insurance of the Athenian empire.

The fourteen years between the thirty years' truce and the breaking out of the Peloponnesian war, are a period of full maritime empire on the part of Athens, partially indeed resisted, but never with success. They are a period of peace with all cities extraneous to her own empire; and of splendid decorations to the city itself, from the genius of Pheidias and others, in sculpture as well as in architecture. Since the death of Kimon, Perikles had become more and more the first citizen in the commonwealth: his qualities told for more the longer they were known, and even the disastrous reverses which preceded the thirty years' truce had not overthrown him, since he had protested against that expedition of Tolmides into Boeotia out of which they first arose. But if the personal influence of Perikles had increased, the party opposed to him seems also to have become stronger and better organized than it had been before; and to have acquired a leader in many respects more effective than Kimon, Thucydides, son of Melêsias. The new chief was a near relative of Kimon, but of a character and talents more analogous to that of Periklês: a statesman and orator