PERICLES

(499-429 B.C.)

[Illustration: Pericles. [TN]]

Pericles, the greatest statesman of ancient Greece, was born of

distinguished parentage in the early part of the fifth century B.C. His

father was that Xanthippus who won the victory over the Persians at

Mycale, 479 B.C.; and by his mother, Agariste, the niece of the great

Athenian reformer, Cleisthenes, he was connected with the princely line

of Sicyon and the great house of the Alcmaeonidae. He received an

elaborate education, but of all his teachers the one whom he most

reverenced was the serene and humane philosopher, Anaxagoras. Pericles

was conspicuous all through his career for the singular dignity of his

manners, the Olympian grandeur of his eloquence, his "majestic

intelligence" in Plato's phrase, his sagacity, probity, and profound

Athenian patriotism. Both in voice and in appearance he was so like

Pisistratus, who had once overturned the Athenian republic and ruled as

a king, that for some time he was afraid to come forward in political

life. When he entered on public life Aristides had only recently died,

Themistocles was an exile, and Cimon was fighting the battles of his

country abroad. Although the family to which he belonged was good, it

did not rank among the first in either wealth or influence, yet so

transcendent were the abilities of Pericles that he rapidly rose to the

highest power in the state as the leader of the dominant democracy. The

sincerity of his attachment to the popular party has been questioned,

but without a shadow of evidence. At any rate, the measures which,

either personally or through his adherents, he brought forward and

caused to be passed, were always in favor of extending the privileges of

the poorer class of the citizens, and, if he diminished the spirit of

reverence for the ancient institutions of public life, he enlisted an

immense body of citizens on the side of law. He extended enormously, if

he did not originate, the practice of distributing gratuities among the

citizens for military service, for acting as dicast and in the Ecclesia

and the like, as well as for admission to the theatre--then really a

great school for manners and instruction. Pericles seems to have grasped

very clearly, and to have held as firmly, the modern radical idea, that

as the state is supported by the taxation of the body of the citizens,

it must govern with a view to general interests rather than to those of

a caste alone. About 463, Pericles, through the agency of his follower,

Ephialtes, struck a great blow at the influence of the oligarchy, by

causing the decree to be passed which deprived the Areopagus of its most

important political powers. Shortly after the democracy obtained another

triumph in the ostracism of Cimon (461). During the next few years the

political course pursued by Pericles is less clearly intelligible to us,

but it is safe to say that in general his attitude was hostile to the

desire for foreign conquest or territorial aggrandizement, so prevalent

among his ambitious fellow-citizens. Shortly after the battle of Tanagra

(457), in which he showed conspicuous courage, Pericles magnanimously

carried the measure for the recall of Cimon. His successful expeditions

to the Thracian Chersonese, and to Sinope on the Black Sea, together

with his colonies planted at Naxos, Andros, Oreus in Euboea, Brea in

Macedonia, and AEgina, as well as Thurii in Italy, and Amphipolis on the

Strymon, did much to extend and confirm the naval supremacy of Athens,

and afford a means of subsistence for her poorer citizens. But his

greatest project was to form, in concert with the other Hellenic states,

a grand Hellenic confederation in order to put an end to the mutually

destructive wars of kindred peoples, and to make Greece one mighty

nation, fit to front the outlying world. The idea was not less sagacious

than it was grand. Had it been accomplished, the semi-barbarous

Macedonians would have menaced the civilized Greeks in vain, and even

Rome at a later period, might perhaps have found the Adriatic, and not

the Euphrates, the limit of her empire. But the Spartan aristocrats were

utterly incapable of appreciating such exalted patriotism, or of

understanding the political necessity for it, and by their secret

intrigues the well-planned scheme was brought to nothing. Athens and

Sparta were already in that mood toward each other which rendered the

disaster of the Peloponnesian war inevitable. When the Spartans, in 448,

restored to the Delphians the guardianship of the temple and treasures

of Delphi, of which they had been deprived by the Phocians, the

Athenians immediately after marched an army thither and reinstated the

latter. Three years later an insurrection broke out in the tributary

Megara and Euboea, and the Spartans again appeared in the field as the

allies of the insurgents. The position of Athens was critical. Pericles

wisely declined to fight against all his enemies at once. A bribe of ten

talents sent the Spartans home, and the insurgents were then thoroughly

subdued. The thirty years' peace with Sparta (445) left him free to

carry out his schemes for the internal prosperity of Athens.

Cimon was now dead and was succeeded in the leadership of the

aristocratic party by Thucydides, son of Melesias, who in 444 B.C. made

a strong effort to overthrow the supremacy of Pericles by attacking him

in the popular assembly for squandering the public money on buildings

and in festivals and amusements. Thucydides made an effective speech;

but Pericles immediately rose and offered to execute the buildings at

his own expense, if the citizens would allow him to put his own name

upon them instead of theirs. The sarcasm was successful. Thucydides was

ostracized, and to the end of his life, Pericles reigned the undisputed

master of the public policy of Athens. During the rest of his career

"there was," says the historian Thucydides, "in name a democracy, but in

reality a government in the hands of the first man." And the Athens of

his day was the home of AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Anaxagoras,

Zeno, Protagoras, Socrates, as well as Myron and Phidias; while there

flourished at the same time, but elsewhere in Greece, Herodotus,

Hippocrates, Pindar, Empedocles, and Democritus. The centre of this

splendid group was Pericles, of whom the truthful pen of Thucydides

records that he never did anything unworthy of his high position, that

he did not flatter the people or oppress his adversaries, and that with

all his unlimited command of the public purse, he was personally

incorruptible.

Soon after this the Samian war broke out, in which Pericles gained high

renown as a naval commander. This war originated in a quarrel between

Miletus and the island of Samos, in which Athens was led to take part

with the former. The Samians, after an obstinate struggle, were beaten,

and a peace was concluded (439). The position in which Athens then stood

toward many of the Greek states was peculiar. Since the time of the

Persian invasion, she had been the leader of the confederacy formed to

resist the attacks of the powerful enemy, and the guardian of the

confederate treasury kept in the isle of Delos. Pericles caused the

treasury to be removed to Athens, and commuting the contingents of the

allies for money, enormously increased the contributions to the

patriotic fund, Athens herself undertaking to protect the confederacy.

The grand charge against Pericles is that he applied the money thus

obtained to other purposes than those for which it was designed; that,

in short, he adorned and enriched Athens with the spoils of the allied

states. To his mind Hellas was subordinate to Athens, and he confounded

the splendor of the dominant city with the splendor of Greece, in a

manner possible to a man of poetic imagination, hardly to a man of the

highest honor. His enemies, who dared not attack himself, struck at him

in the persons of his friends. Phidias was flung into prison for the

impiety of introducing portraits of himself and Pericles into the battle

of the Amazons depicted on the shield of the goddess Athena in the

Parthenon; the brilliant Aspasia, the famous mistress of Pericles, was

arraigned on a charge of impiety, and only acquitted through the

eloquence of Pericles on her behalf; while the aged Anaxagoras was

driven from the city.

It is unnecessary to give a detailed account of all that Pericles did to

make his native city the most glorious in the ancient world. Greek

architecture and sculpture under his patronage reached perfection. To

him Athens owed the Parthenon, the Erechtheum, left unfinished at his

death, the Propylaea, the Odeum, and numberless other public and sacred

edifices; he also liberally encouraged music and the drama; and during

his life, industry and commerce were in so flourishing a condition that

prosperity was universal in Attica.

At length, in 431, the long foreseen and inevitable Peloponnesian war

broke out between Athens and Sparta. The plan of Pericles was for Athens

to adopt a defensive attitude, to defend the city itself, leaving Attica

to be ravaged by the enemy, but to cripple the power of Sparta by

harassing its coasts. The story of the war must be told elsewhere; here

it is enough to say that the result was unfavorable to Athens for

reasons for which Pericles was only in small part to blame. He trusted

in the ultimate success of Athens, both from her superior wealth and

from her possessing the command of the sea, but he had not calculated

upon the deterioration in her citizens' spirit, nor upon the robust

courage of the Boeotian and Spartan infantry. Nor was his advice to keep

behind the city walls rather than face the enemy in the field, best

calculated to arouse the Athenians' courage. The plague ravaged the city

in 430, and in the autumn of the following year, Pericles died after a

lingering fever. His two sons had been carried off by the plague, he had

been harassed by a charge of peculation brought by Cleon, and the actual

infliction of a fine by the dicastery, while he had been without office

from July, 430, to July, 429, but before the last he recovered his hold

over the Ecclesia, and was gratified in the closing days of his life by

its legitimation of his and Aspasia's son.

As a statesman his greatest fault was a failure to foresee that personal

government is ultimately ruinous to a nation. He taught the people to

follow a leader, but he could not perpetuate a descent of leaders like

himself. Hence we cannot wonder, when days of trouble broke over Athens,

how that men spoke bitterly of Pericles and all his glory. Yet he was a

lofty-minded statesman, inspired by noble aspirations, and his heart

was full of a noble love for the city and her citizens. Plutarch tells

the story that, as he lay dying and apparently unconscious, his friends

around his bed were passing in review the great achievements of his

life, and the nine trophies which he had erected at different times for

so many victories. The dying patriot quietly interrupted with the

characteristic sentence: "What you praise in my life belongs partly to

good fortune, and is, at best, common to me with many generals. But that

of which I am proudest, you have left unnoticed--no Athenian has ever

put on mourning through any act of mine."