Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/230

 1 84 Outlines of European History Pericles shifted the treasury of the Delian League from Delos to Athens, an act which made the city more than ever the capi- tal of an Athenian Empire. The assassination of Xerxes and a consequent revolt against the Persians in Egypt had induced the Athenians to resume the conflict with Persia (459 b.c.)„ They therefore dispatched a fleet of two hundred ships against the Persians in Eg^-pt and had thus been fighting both Sparta and Persia for years. The entire Athenian fleet in Egypt was lost. Some Attic successes in Boeotia were followed by defeats in which the Athenians lost all that they had gained in the north. When peace was concluded (446 B.C.) all that Athens was able to retain was the Island of ^gina. It was agreed that the peace should continue for thirty years. Thus ended what is often called the First Peloponnesian War with the complete exhaustion of Athens as well as her enemies in the Pelopon- nesus. The Athenians then arranged a peace with Persia also, over forty years after Marathon. But the rivalry between Athens and Sparta for the leadership of the Greeks was still unsettled. The struggle was to be continued in another long and weary " Peloponnesian War." Before we proceed with the stor)^ of this fatal struggle we must glance briefly at the new and glorious Athens now growing up under the hand of Pericles. Section 30. Civilization of Imperial Athens in THE Age of Pericles Although the first fifteen years of the leadership of Pericles were encumbered with the Spartan and Persian wars, the higher life of Athens continued to unfold, and the next fifteen years brought to fruitage the tremendous and revolutionary experi- ences through which Greece and especially Athens had been passing for half a centur)^ The new vision of the glory of the State, discerned nowhere in the world before this age, caughi the imagination of poet and painter, of sculptor and architect,