Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/185

VI of the Athenian people in all grades of social life. For the change was perhaps the most far-reaching in all Athenian history. The tissue out of which the State had been created, — the clan village with its religious aristocracy, — was no longer to be essential to the State's vitality; it might survive, but its place was henceforth to be supplied by a new organisation, in which there would be no aristocratic centres to influence the people's will.

Thus finally delivered from oligarchic tutelage and faction, "united and penetrated with a single spirit," Athens was ready to face her greatest trial. The reasonableness of her leaders, and the strength which unity had given her, enabled her to act as the real champion of Hellas against the Persian invader; and the heroism of her successful defence, in which every citizen directly or indirectly took a part, at once made the completion of democracy certain, and spread throughout Greece the fame of democratic institutions. In the generation succeeding the Persian wars, the changes were brought about which produced the constitution of which I just now indicated the leading features. Aristides, another leader of the true Solonian type; Ephialtes, a man "with a reputation for incorruptibility and possessing a high public character"; and lastly Pericles, whose character and abilities are immortalised by the greatest of Greek historians, completed the work, and brought Athens to such a pitch of greatness that she roused the hatred and jealousy of the