But this change was probably not apparent in the Athenian matrons

themselves, who remained for the most part in primitive seclusion; and

though, I think, it will be shown hereafter that modern writers have

greatly exaggerated both the want of mental culture and the degree of

domestic confinement to which the Athenian women [214] were subjected,

yet it is certain, at least, that they did not share the social

freedom or partake the intellectual accomplishments of their lords.

It was the new class of “Female Friends” or “Hetaerae,” a phrase ill

translated by the name of “courtesans” (from whom they were

indubitably but not to our notions very intelligibly, distinguished),

that exhibited the rarest union of female blandishment and masculine

culture. “The wife for our house and honour,” implies Demosthenes,

“the Hetaera for our solace and delight.” These extraordinary women,

all foreigners, and mostly Ionian, made the main phenomenon of

Athenian society. They were the only women with whom an enlightened

Greek could converse as equal to himself in education. While the law

denied them civil rights, usage lavished upon them at once admiration

and respect. By stealth, as it were, and in defiance of legislation,

they introduced into the ambitious and restless circles of Athens many

of the effects, pernicious or beneficial, which result from the

influence of educated women upon the manners and pursuits of men.

[215]

III. The alteration of social habits was not then sudden and

startling (such is never the case in the progress of national

manners), but, commencing with the graces of a polished tyranny,

ripened with the results of glorious but too profitable victories.

Perhaps the time in which the state of transition was most favourably

visible was just prior to the death of Cimon. It was not then so much

the over-refinement of a new and feebler generation, as the polish and

elegance which wealth, art, and emulation necessarily imparted to the

same brave warriors who exchanged posts with the Spartans at Plataea,

and sent out their children and old men to fight and conquer with

Myronides.

IV. A rapid glance over the events of the few years commemorated in

the last book of this history will suffice to show the eminence which

Athens had attained over the other states of Greece. She was the head

of the Ionian League--the mistress of the Grecian seas; with Sparta,

the sole rival that could cope with her armies and arrest her

ambition, she had obtained a peace; Corinth was humbled, Aegina

ruined, Megara had shrunk into her dependency and garrison. The

states of Boeotia had received their very constitution from the hands

of an Athenian general--the democracies planted by Athens served to

make liberty itself subservient to her will, and involved in her

safety. She had remedied the sterility of her own soil by securing

the rich pastures of the neighbouring Euboea. She had added the gold

of Thasos to the silver of Laurion, and established a footing in

Thessaly which was at once a fortress against the Asiatic arms and a

mart for Asiatic commerce. The fairest lands of the opposite coast--

the most powerful islands of the Grecian seas--contributed to her

treasury, or were almost legally subjected to her revenge. Her navy

was rapidly increasing in skill, in number, and renown; at home, the

recall of Cimon had conciliated domestic contentions, and the death of

Cimon dispirited for a while the foes to the established constitution.

In all Greece, Myronides was perhaps the ablest general--Pericles (now

rapidly rising to the sole administration of affairs [216]) was

undoubtedly the most highly educated, cautious, and commanding

statesman.

But a single act of successful daring had, more than all else,

contributed to the Athenian power. Even in the lifetime of Aristides

it had been proposed to transfer the common treasury from Delos to

Athens [217]. The motion failed--perhaps through the virtuous

opposition of Aristides himself. But when at the siege of Ithome the

feud between the Athenians and Spartans broke out, the fairest pretext

and the most favourable occasion conspired in favour of a measure so

seductive to the national ambition. Under pretence of saving the

treasury from the hazard of falling a prey to the Spartan rapacity or

need,--it was at once removed to Athens (B. C. 461 or 460) [218]; and

while the enfeebled power of Sparta, fully engrossed by the Messenian

war, forbade all resistance to the transfer from that the most

formidable quarter, the conquests of Naxos and the recent reduction of

Thasos seem to have intimidated the spirit, and for a time even to

have silenced the reproaches, of the tributary states themselves.

Thus, in actual possession of the tribute of her allies, Athens

acquired a new right to its collection and its management; and while

she devoted some of the treasures to the maintenance of her strength,

she began early to uphold the prerogative of appropriating a part to

the enhancement of her splendour. [219]

As this most important measure occurred at the very period when the

power of Cimon was weakened by the humiliating circumstances that

attended his expedition to Ithome, and by the vigorous and popular

measures of the opposition, so there seems every reason to believe

that it was principally advised and effected by Pericles, who appears

shortly afterward presiding over the administration of the finances.

[220]

Though the Athenian commerce had greatly increased, it was still

principally confined to the Thracian coasts and the Black Sea. The

desire of enterprises, too vast for a state whose power reverses might

suddenly destroy, was not yet indulged to excess; nor had the

turbulent spirits of the Piraeus yet poured in upon the various

barriers of the social state and the political constitution, the

rashness of sailors and the avarice of merchants. Agriculture, to

which all classes in Athens were addicted, raised a healthful

counteraction to the impetus given to trade. Nor was it till some

years afterward, when Pericles gathered all the citizens into the

town, and left no safety-valve to the ferment and vices of the Agora,

that the Athenian aristocracy gradually lost all patriotism and

manhood, and an energetic democracy was corrupted into a vehement

though educated mob. The spirit of faction, it is true, ran high, but

a third party, headed by Myronides and Tolmides, checked the excesses

of either extreme.

V. Thus, at home and abroad, time and fortune, the concurrence of

events, and the happy accident of great men, not only maintained the

present eminence of Athens, but promised, to ordinary foresight, a

long duration of her glory and her power. To deeper observers, the

picture might have presented dim but prophetic shadows. It was clear

that the command Athens had obtained was utterly disproportioned to

her natural resources--that her greatness was altogether artificial,

and rested partly upon moral rather than physical causes, and partly

upon the fears and the weakness of her neighbours. A steril soil, a

limited territory, a scanty population--all these--the drawbacks and

disadvantages of nature--the wonderful energy and confident daring of

a free state might conceal in prosperity; but the first calamity could

not fail to expose them to jealous and hostile eyes. The empire

delegated to the Athenians they must naturally desire to retain and to

increase; and there was every reason to forbode that their ambition

would soon exceed their capacities to sustain it. As the state became

accustomed to its power, it would learn to abuse it. Increasing

civilization, luxury, and art, brought with them new expenses, and

Athens had already been permitted to indulge with impunity the

dangerous passion of exacting tribute from her neighbours. Dependance

upon other resources than those of the native population has ever been

a main cause of the destruction of despotisms, and it cannot fail,

sooner or later, to be equally pernicious to the republics that trust

to it. The resources of taxation, confined to freemen and natives,

are almost incalculable; the resources of tribute, wrung from

foreigners and dependants, are sternly limited and terribly

precarious--they rot away the true spirit of industry in the people

that demand the impost--they implant ineradicable hatred in the states

that concede it.

VI. Two other causes of great deterioration to the national spirit

were also at work in Athens. One, as I have before hinted, was the

policy commenced by Cimon, of winning the populace by the bribes and

exhibitions of individual wealth. The wise Pisistratus had invented

penalties--Cimon offered encouragement--to idleness. When the poor

are once accustomed to believe they have a right to the generosity of

the rich, the first deadly inroad is made upon the energies of

independence and the sanctity of property. A yet more pernicious evil

in the social state of the Athenians was radical in their

constitution--it was their courts of justice. Proceeding upon a

theory that must have seemed specious and plausible to an

inexperienced and infant republic, Solon had laid it down as a

principle of his code, that as all men were interested in the

preservation of law, so all men might exert the privilege of the

plaintiff and accuser. As society grew more complicated, the door was

thus opened to every species of vexatious charge and frivolous

litigation. The common informer became a most harassing and powerful

personage, and made one of a fruitful and crowded profession; and in

the very capital of liberty there existed the worst species of

espionage. But justice was not thereby facilitated. The informer was

regarded with universal hatred and contempt; and it is easy to

perceive, from the writings of the great comic poet, that the

sympathies of the Athenian audience were as those of the English

public at this day, enlisted against the man who brought the

inquisition of the law to the hearth of his neighbour.

VII. Solon committed a yet more fatal and incurable error when he

carried the democratic principle into judicial tribunals. He

evidently considered that the very strength and life of his

constitution rested in the Heliaea--a court the numbers and nature of

which have been already described. Perhaps, at a time when the old

oligarchy was yet so formidable, it might have been difficult to

secure justice to the poorer classes while the judges were selected

from the wealthier. But justice to all classes became a yet more

capricious uncertainty when a court of law resembled a popular

hustings. [221]

If we intrust a wide political suffrage to the people, the people at

least hold no trust for others than themselves and their posterity--

they are not responsible to the public, for they are the public. But

in law, where there are two parties concerned, the plaintiff and

defendant, the judge should not only be incorruptible, but strictly

responsible. In Athens the people became the judge; and, in offences

punishable by fine, were the very party interested in procuring

condemnation; the numbers of the jury prevented all responsibility,

excused all abuses, and made them susceptible of the same shameless

excesses that characterize self-elected corporations--from which

appeal is idle, and over which public opinion exercises no control.

These numerous, ignorant, and passionate assemblies were liable at all

times to the heats of party, to the eloquence of individuals--to the

whims and caprices, the prejudices, the impatience, and the turbulence

which must ever be the characteristics of a multitude orally

addressed. It was evident, also, that from service in such a court,

the wealthy, the eminent, and the learned, with other occupation or

amusement, would soon seek to absent themselves. And the final blow

to the integrity and respectability of the popular judicature was

given at a later period by Pericles, when he instituted a salary, just

sufficient to tempt the poor and to be disdained by the affluent, to

every dicast or juryman in the ten ordinary courts [222]. Legal

science became not the profession of the erudite and the laborious

few, but the livelihood of the ignorant and idle multitude. The

canvassing--the cajoling--the bribery--that resulted from this, the

most vicious institution of the Athenian democracy--are but too

evident and melancholy tokens of the imperfection of human wisdom.

Life, property, and character were at the hazard of a popular

election. These evils must have been long in progressive operation;

but perhaps they were scarcely visible till the fatal innovation of

Pericles, and the flagrant excesses that ensued allowed the people

themselves to listen to the branding and terrible satire upon the

popular judicature, which is still preserved to us in the comedy of

Aristophanes.

At the same time, certain critics and historians have widely and

grossly erred in supposing that these courts of “the sovereign

multitude” were partial to the poor and hostile to the rich. All

testimony proves that the fact was lamentably the reverse. The

defendant was accustomed to engage the persons of rank or influence

whom he might number as his friends, to appear in court on his behalf.

And property was employed to procure at the bar of justice the

suffrages it could command at a political election. The greatest vice

of the democratic Heliaea was, that by a fine the wealthy could

purchase pardon--by interest the great could soften law. But the

chances were against the poor man. To him litigation was indeed

cheap, but justice dear. He had much the same inequality to struggle

against in a suit with a powerful antagonist, that he would have had

in contesting with him for an office in the administration. In all

trials resting on the voice of popular assemblies, it ever has been

and ever will be found, that, caeteris paribus, the aristocrat will

defeat the plebeian.

VIII. Meanwhile the progress of general education had been great and

remarkable. Music [223], from the earliest time, was an essential

part of instruction; and it had now become so common an acquirement,

that Aristotle [224] observes, that at the close of the Persian war

there was scarcely a single freeborn Athenian unacquainted with the

flute. The use of this instrument was afterward discontinued, and

indeed proscribed in the education of freemen, from the notion that it

was not an instrument capable of music sufficiently elevated and

intellectual [225]; yet it was only succeeded by melodies more

effeminate and luxurious. And Aristophanes enumerates the change from

the old national airs and measures among the worst symptoms of

Athenian degeneracy. Besides the musician, the tutor of the gymnasium

and the grammarian still made the nominal limit of scholastic

instruction. [226] But life itself had now become a school. The

passion for public intercourse and disputation, which the gardens and

the Agora, and exciting events, and free institutions, and the rise of

philosophy, and a serene and lovely climate, made the prevalent

characteristic of the matured Athenian, began to stir within the

young. And in the mean while the tardy invention of prose literature

worked its natural revolution in intellectual pursuits.

IX. It has been before observed, that in Greece, as elsewhere, the

first successor of the poet was the philosopher, and that the oral

lecturer preceded the prose writer. With written prose HISTORY

commenced. Having found a mode of transmitting that species of

knowledge which could not, like rhythmical tales or sententious

problems, be accurately preserved by the memory alone, it was natural

that a present age should desire to record and transmit the past--

chtaema es aei--an everlasting heirloom to the future.

To a semi-barbarous nation history is little more than poetry. The

subjects to which it would be naturally devoted are the legends of

religion--the deeds of ancestral demigods--the triumphs of successful

war. In recording these themes of national interest, the poet is the

first historian. As philosophy--or rather the spirit of conjecture,

which is the primitive and creative breath of philosophy--becomes

prevalent, the old credulity directs the new research to the

investigation of subjects which the poets have not sufficiently

explained, but which, from their remote and religious antiquity, are

mysteriously attractive to a reverent and inquisitive population, with

whom long descent is yet the most flattering proof of superiority.

Thus genealogies, and accounts of the origin of states and deities,

made the first subjects of history, and inspired the Argive Acusilaus

[227], and, as far as we can plausibly conjecture, the Milesian

Cadmus.

X. The Dorians--a people who never desired to disturb tradition,

unwilling carefully to investigate, precisely because they

superstitiously venerated, the past, little inquisitive as to the

manners or the chronicles of alien tribes, satisfied, in a word, with

themselves, and incurious as to others--were not a race to whom

history became a want. Ionia--the subtle, the innovating, the

anxious, and the restless--nurse of the arts, which the mother country

ultimately reared, boasts in Cadmus the Milesian the first writer of

history and of prose [228]; Samos, the birthplace of Pythagoras,

produced Eugeon, placed by Dionysius at the head of the early

historians; and Mitylene claimed Hellanicus, who seems to have formed

a more ambitious design than his predecessors. He wrote a history of

the ancient kings of the earth, and an account of the founders of the

most celebrated cities in each kingdom [229]. During the early and

crude attempts of these and other writers, stern events contributed to

rear from tedious research and fruitless conjecture the true genius of

history; for it is as a people begin to struggle for rights, to

comprehend political relations, to contend with neighbours abroad, and

to wrestle with obnoxious institutions at home, that they desire to

secure the sanction of antiquity, to trace back to some illustrious

origin the rights they demand, and to stimulate hourly exertions by a

reference to departed fame. Then do mythologies, and genealogies, and

geographical definitions, and the traditions that concern kings and

heroes, ripen into chronicles that commemorate the convulsions or the

progress of a nation.

During the stormy period which saw the invasion of Xerxes (B. C. 480),

when everything that could shed lustre upon the past incited to

present struggles, flourished Pherecydes. He is sometimes called of

Leria, which seems his birthplace--sometimes of Athens, where he

resided thirty years, and to which state his history refers. Although

his work was principally mythological, it opened the way to sound

historical composition, inasmuch as it included references to later

times--to existent struggles--the descent of Miltiades--the Scythian

expedition of Darius. Subsequently, Xanthus, a Lydian, composed a

work on his own country (B. C. 463), of which some extracts remain,

and from which Herodotus did not disdain to borrow.

XI. It was nearly a century after the invention of prose and of

historical composition, and with the guides and examples of, many

writers not uncelebrated in their day before his emulation, that

Herodotus first made known to the Grecian public, and, according to

all probable evidence, at the Olympic Games, a portion of that work

which drew forth the tears of Thucydides, and furnishes the

imperishable model of picturesque and faithful narrative. This

happened in a brilliant period of Athenian history; it was in the same

year as the battle of Oenophyta, when Athens gave laws and

constitutions to Boeotia, and the recall of Cimon established for

herself both liberty and order. The youth of Herodotus was passed

while the glory of the Persian war yet lingered over Greece, and while

with the ascendency of Athens commenced a new era of civilization.

His genius drew the vital breath from an atmosphere of poetry. The

desire of wild adventure still existed, and the romantic expedition of

the Athenians into Egypt had served to strengthen the connexion

between the Greeks and that imposing and interesting land. The rise

of the Greek drama with Aeschylus probably contributed to give effect,

colour, and vigour to the style of Herodotus. And something almost of

the art of the contemporaneous Sophocles may be traced in the easy

skill of his narratives, and the magic yet tranquil energy of his

descriptions.

XII. Though Dorian by ancient descent, it was at Halicarnassus, in

Caria, a city of Asia Minor, that Herodotus was born; nor does his

style, nor do his views, indicate that he derived from the origin of

his family any of the Dorian peculiarities. His parents were

distinguished alike by birth and fortune. Early in life those

internal commotions, to which all the Grecian towns were subjected,

and which crushed for a time the liberties of his native city, drove

him from Halicarnassus: and, suffering from tyranny, he became

inspired by that enthusiasm for freedom which burns throughout his

immortal work. During his exile he travelled through Greece, Thrace,

and Macedonia--through Scythia, Asia, and Egypt. Thus he collected

the materials of his work, which is, in fact, a book of travels

narrated historically. If we do not reject the story that he read a

portion of his work at the Olympian Games, when Thucydides, one of his

listeners, was yet a boy, and if we suppose the latter to have been

about fifteen, this anecdote is calculated [230] to bear the date of

Olym. 81, B. C. 456, when Herodotus was twenty-eight.

The chief residence of Herodotus was at Samos, until a revolution

broke out in Halicarnassus. The people conspired against their tyrant

Lygdamis. Herodotus repaired to his native city, took a prominent

part in the conspiracy, and finally succeeded in restoring the popular

government. He was not, however, long left to enjoy the liberties he

had assisted to acquire for his fellow-citizens: some intrigue of the

counter-party drove him a second time into exile. Repairing to

Athens, he read the continuation of his history at the festival of the

Panathenaea (B. C. 446). It was received with the most rapturous

applause; and we are told that the people solemnly conferred upon the

man who had immortalized their achievements against the Mede the gift

of ten talents. The disposition of this remarkable man, like that of

all travellers, inclined to enterprise and adventure. His early

wanderings, his later vicissitudes, seem to have confirmed a

temperament originally restless and inquisitive. Accordingly, in his

forty-first year, he joined the Athenian emigrators that in the south

of Italy established a colony at Thurium (B. C. 443).

VIII. At Thurium Herodotus apparently passed the remainder of his

life, though whether his tomb was built there or in Athens is a matter

of dispute. These particulars of his life, not uninteresting in

themselves, tend greatly to illustrate the character of his writings.

Their charm consists in the earnestness of a man who describes

countries as an eyewitness, and events as one accustomed to

participate in them. The life, the raciness, the vigour of an

adventurer and a wanderer glow in every page. He has none of the

refining disquisitions that are born of the closet. He paints history

rather than descants on it; he throws the colourings of a mind,

unconsciously poetic, over all he describes. Now a soldier--now a

priest--now a patriot--he is always a poet, if rarely a philosopher.

He narrates like a witness, unlike Thucydides, who sums up like a

judge. No writer ever made so beautiful an application of

superstitions to truths. His very credulities have a philosophy of

their own; and modern historians have acted unwisely in disdaining the

occasional repetition even of his fables. For if his truths record

the events, his fables paint the manners and the opinions of the time;

and the last fill up the history, of which events are only the

skeleton.

To account for his frequent use of dialogue and his dramatic effects

of narrative, we must remember the tribunal to which the work of

Herodotus was subjected. Every author, unconsciously to himself,

consults the tastes of those he addresses. No small coterie of

scholars, no scrupulous and critical inquirers, made the ordeal

Herodotus underwent. His chronicles were not dissertations to be

coldly pondered over and skeptically conned: they were read aloud at

solemn festivals to listening thousands; they were to arrest the

curiosity--to amuse the impatience--to stir the wonder of a lively and

motley crowd. Thus the historian imbibed naturally the spirit of the

taleteller. And he was driven to embellish his history with the

romantic legend--the awful superstition--the gossip anecdote--which

yet characterize the stories of the popular and oral fictionist, in

the bazars of the Mussulman, or on the seasands of Sicily. Still it

has been rightly said that a judicious reader is not easily led astray

by Herodotus in important particulars. His descriptions of

localities, of manners and customs, are singularly correct; and modern

travellers can yet trace the vestiges of his fidelity. As the

historian, therefore, was in some measure an orator, so his skill was

to be manifest in the arts which keep alive the attention of an

audience. Hence Herodotus continually aims at the picturesque; he

gives us the very words of his actors, and narrates the secrets of

impenetrable palaces with as much simplicity and earnestness as if he

had been placed behind the arras. [231]

That it was impossible for the wandering Halicarnassian to know what

Gyges said to Candaules, or Artabanus to Xerxes, has, perhaps, been

too confidently asserted. Heeren reminds us, that both by Jewish and

Grecian writers there is frequent mention of the scribes or

secretaries who constantly attended the person of the Persian monarch

--on occasion of festivals [232], of public reviews [233], and even in

the tumult of battle; and, with the idolatrous respect in which

despotism was held, noted down the words that fell from the royal lip.

The ingenious German then proceeds to show that this custom was common

to all the Asiatic nations. Thus were formed the chronicles or

archives of the Persians; and by reference to these minute and

detailed documents, Herodotus was enabled to record conversations and

anecdotes, and preserve to us the memoirs of a court. And though this

conjecture must be received with caution, and, to many passages

unconnected with Persia or the East, cannot be applied, it is

sufficiently plausible, in some very important parts of the history,

not to be altogether dismissed with contempt.

But it is for another reason that I have occasionally admitted the

dialogues of Herodotus, as well as the superstitious anecdotes current

at the day. The truth of history consists not only in the relation of

events, but in preserving the character of the people, and depicting

the manners of the time. Facts, if too nakedly told, may be very

different from truths, in the impression they convey; and the spirit

of Grecian history is lost if we do not feel the Greeks themselves

constantly before us. Thus when, as in Herodotus, the agents of

events converse, every word reported may not have been spoken; but

what we lose in accuracy of details we more than gain by the fidelity

of the whole. We acquire a lively and accurate impression of the

general character--of the thoughts, and the manners, and the men of

the age and the land. It is so also with legends, sparingly used, and

of which the nature is discernible from fact by the most superficial

gaze; we more sensibly feel that it was the Greeks who were engaged at

Marathon when we read of the dream of Hippias or the apparition of

Theseus. Finally, an historian of Greece will, almost without an

effort, convey to the reader a sense of the mighty change, from an age

of poetical heroes to an age of practical statesmen, if we suffer

Herodotus to be his model in the narrative of the Persian war, and

allow the more profound and less imaginative Thucydides to colour the

pictures of the Peloponnesian.

XIV. The period now entered upon is also remarkable for the fertile

and rapid development of one branch of intellectual cultivation in

which the Greeks were pre-eminently illustrious. In history, Rome was

the rival of Greece; in philosophy, Rome was never more than her

credulous and reverend scholar.

We have seen the dawn of philosophy with Thales; Miletus, his

birthplace, bore his immediate successors. Anaximander, his younger

contemporary [234], is said, with Pherecydes, to have been the first

philosopher who availed himself of the invention of writing. His

services have not been sufficiently appreciated--like those of most

men who form the first steps in the progress between the originator

and the perfector. He seems boldly to have differed from his master,

Thales, in the very root of his system. He rejected the original

element of water or humidity, and supposed the great primary essence

and origin of creation to be in that EVERYTHING or NOTHING which he

called THE INFINITE, and which we might perhaps render as “The Chaos;”

[235] that of this vast element, the parts are changed--the whole

immutable, and all things arise from and return unto that universal

source [236]. He pursued his researches into physics, and attempted

to account for the thunder, the lightning, and the winds. His

conjectures are usually shrewd and keen; and sometimes, as in his

assertion, “that the moon shone in light borrowed from the sun,” may

deserve a higher praise. Both Anaximander and Pherecydes concurred in

the principles of their doctrines, but the latter seems to have more

distinctly asserted the immortality of the soul. [237]

Anaximenes, also of Miletus, was the friend and follower of

Anaximander (B. C. 548). He seems, however, to have deserted the

abstract philosophical dogmas of his tutor, and to have resumed the

analogical system commenced by Thales--like that philosopher, he

founded axioms upon observations, bold and acute, but partial and

contracted. He maintained that air was the primitive element. In

this theory he united the Zeus, or ether, of Pherecydes, and the

Infinite of Anaximander, for he held the air to be God in itself, and

infinite in its nature.

XV. While these wild but ingenious speculators conducted the career

of that philosophy called the Ionian, to the later time of the serene

and lofty spiritualism of Anaxagoras, two new schools arose, both

founded by Ionians, but distinguished by separate names--the Eleatic

and the Italic. The first was founded by Xenophanes of Colophon, in

Elea, a town in western Italy. Migrating to an alien shore,

colonization seems to have produced in philosophy the same results

which it produced in politics: it emancipated the reason from all

previous prejudice and prescriptive shackles. Xenophanes was the

first thinker who openly assailed the popular faith (B. C. 538). He

divested the Great Deity of the human attributes which human vanity,

assimilating God to man, had bestowed upon him. The divinity of

Xenophanes is that of modern philosophy--eternal, unalterable, and

alone: graven images cannot represent his form. His attributes are--

ALL HEARING, ALL SIGHT, and ALL THOUGHT.

To the Eleatic school, founded by Xenophanes, belong Parmenides,

Melissus the Samian, Zeno, and Heraclitus of Ephesus. All these were

thinkers remarkable for courage and subtlety. The main metaphysical

doctrines of this school approach, in many respects, to those that

have been familiar to modern speculators. Their predecessors argued,

as the basis of their system, from experience of the outward world,

and the evidence of the senses; the Eleatic school, on the contrary,

commenced their system from the reality of ideas, and thence argued on

the reality of external objects; experience with them was but a show

and an appearance; knowledge was not in things without, but in the

mind; they were the founders of idealism. With respect to the Deity,

they imagined the whole universe filled with it--God was ALL IN ALL.

Such, though each philosopher varied the system in detail, were the

main metaphysical dogmas of the Eleatic school. Its masters were

high-wrought, subtle, and religious thinkers; but their doctrines were

based upon a theory that necessarily led to parodox and mysticism; and

finally conduced to the most dangerous of all the ancient sects--that

of the sophists.

We may here observe, that the spirit of poetry long continued to

breathe in the forms of philosophy. Even Anaximander, and his

immediate followers in the Ionic school, while writing in prose,

appear, from a few fragments left to us, to have had much recourse to

poetical expression, and often convey a dogma by an image; while, in

the Eleatic school, Xenophanes and Parmenides adopted the form itself

of verse, as the medium for communicating their theories; and Zeno,

perhaps from the new example of the drama, first introduced into

philosophical dispute that fashion of dialogue which afterward gave to

the sternest and loftiest thought the animation and life of dramatic

pictures.

XVI. But even before the Eleatic school arose, the most remarkable

and ambitious of all the earlier reasoners, the arch uniter of actual

politics with enthusiastic reveries--the hero of a thousand legends--a

demigod in his ends and an impostor in his means--Pythagoras of Samos

--conceived and partially executed the vast design of establishing a

speculative wisdom and an occult religion as the keystone of political

institutions.

So mysterious is everything relating to Pythagoras, so mingled with

the grossest fables and the wildest superstitions, that he seems

scarcely to belong to the age of history, or to the advanced and

practical Ionia. The date of his birth--his very parentage, are

matters of dispute and doubt. Accounts concur in considering his

father not a native of Samos; and it seems a probable supposition that

he was of Lemnian or Pelasgic origin. Pythagoras travelled early into

Egypt and the East, and the system most plausibly ascribed to him

betrays something of oriental mystery and priestcraft in its peculiar

doctrines, and much more of those alien elements in its pervading and

general spirit. The notion of uniting a state with religion is

especially Eastern, and essentially anti-Hellenic. Returning to

Samos, he is said to have found the able Polycrates in the tyranny of

the government, and to have quitted his birthplace in disgust. If,

then, he had already conceived his political designs, it is clear that

they could never have been executed under a jealous and acute tyrant;

for, in the first place, radical innovations are never so effectually

opposed as in governments concentrated in the hands of a single man;

and, secondly, the very pith and core of the system of Pythagoras

consisted in the establishment of an oligarchic aristocracy--a

constitution most hated and most persecuted by the Grecian tyrants.

The philosopher migrated into Italy. He had already, in all

probability, made himself renowned in Greece. For it was then a

distinction to have travelled into Egypt, the seat of mysterious and

venerated learning; and philosophy, like other novelties, appears to

have passed into fashion even with the multitude. Not only all the

traditions respecting this extraordinary man, but the certain fact of

the mighty effect that, in his single person, he afterward wrought in

Italy, prove him also to have possessed that nameless art of making a

personal impression upon mankind, and creating individual enthusiasm,

which is necessary to those who obtain a moral command, and are the

founders of sects and institutions. It is so much in conformity with

the manners of the time and the objects of Pythagoras to believe that

he diligently explored the ancient, religions and political systems of

Greece, from which he had long been a stranger, that we cannot reject

the traditions (however disfigured with fable) that he visited Delos,

and affected to receive instructions from the pious ministrants of

Delphi. [238]

At Olympia, where he could not fail to be received with curiosity and

distinction, the future lawgiver is said to have assumed the title of

philosopher, the first who claimed the name. For the rest, we must

yield our faith to all probable accounts, both of his own earnest

preparations for his design, and of the high repute he acquired in

Greece, that may tend to lessen the miracle of the success that

awaited him in the cities of the west.

XVII. Pythagoras (B. C. 540-510) arrived in Italy during the reign of

Tarquinius Superbus, according to the testimony of Cicero and Aulus

Gellius [239], and fixed his residence in Croton, a city in the Bay of

Tarentum, colonized by Greeks of the Achaean tribe [240]. If we may

lend a partial credit to the extravagant fables of later disciples,

endeavouring to extract from florid superaddition some original germe

of simple truth, it would seem that he first appeared in the character

of a teacher of youth [241]; and, as was not unusual in those times,

soon rose from the preceptor to the legislator. Dissensions in the

city favoured his objects. The senate (consisting of a thousand

members, doubtless of a different race from the body of the people;

the first the posterity of the settlers, the last the native

population) availed itself of the arrival and influence of an eloquent

and renowned philosopher. He lent himself to the consolidation of

aristocracies, and was equally inimical to democracy and tyranny. But

his policy was that of no vulgar ambition; he refused, at least for a

time, ostensible power and office, and was contented with instituting

an organized and formidable society--not wholly dissimilar to that

mighty order founded by Loyola in times comparatively recent. The

disciples admitted into this society underwent examination and

probation; it was through degrees that they passed into its higher

honours, and were admitted into its deepest secrets. Religion made

the basis of the fraternity--but religion connected with human ends of

advancement and power. He selected the three hundred who, at Croton,

formed his order, from the noblest families, and they were professedly

reared to know themselves, that so they might be fitted to command the

world. It was not long before this society, of which Pythagoras was

the head, appears to have supplanted the ancient senate and obtained

the legislative administration. In this institution, Pythagoras

stands alone--no other founder of Greek philosophy resembles him. By

all accounts, he also differed from the other sages of his time in his

estimate of the importance of women. He is said to have lectured to

and taught them. His wife was herself a philosopher, and fifteen

disciples of the softer sex rank among the prominent ornaments of his

school. An order based upon so profound a knowledge of all that can

fascinate or cheat mankind, could not fail to secure a temporary

power. His influence was unbounded in Croton--it extended to other

Italian cities--it amended or overturned political constitutions; and

had Pythagoras possessed a more coarse and personal ambition, he

might, perhaps, have founded a mighty dynasty, and enriched our social

annals with the results of a new experiment. But his was the

ambition, not of a hero, but a sage. He wished rather to establish a

system than to exalt himself; his immediate followers saw not all the

consequences that might be derived from the fraternity he founded: and

the political designs of his gorgeous and august philosophy, only for

a while successful, left behind them but the mummeries of an impotent

freemasonry and the enthusiastic ceremonies of half-witted ascetics.

XVIII. It was when this power, so mystic and so revolutionary, had,

by the means of branch societies, established itself throughout a

considerable portion of Italy, that a general feeling of alarm and

suspicion broke out against the sage and his sectarians. The

anti-Pythagorean risings, according to Porphyry, were sufficiently

numerous and active to be remembered for long generations afterward.

Many of the sage’s friends are said to have perished, and it is doubtful

whether Pythagoras himself fell a victim to the rage of his enemies, or

died a fugitive among his disciples at Metapontum. Nor was it until

nearly the whole of Lower Italy was torn by convulsions, and Greece

herself drawn into the contest, as pacificator and arbiter, that the

ferment was allayed--the Pythagorean institutions were abolished, and

the timocratic democracies [242] of the Achaeans rose upon the ruins of

those intellectual but ungenial oligarchies.

XIX. Pythagoras committed a fatal error when, in his attempt to

revolutionize society, he had recourse to aristocracies for his

agents. Revolutions, especially those influenced by religion, can

never be worked out but by popular emotions. It was from this error

of judgment that he enlisted the people against him--for, by the

account of Neanthes, related by Porphyry [243], and, indeed, from all

other testimony, it is clearly evident that to popular, not party

commotion, his fall must be ascribed. It is no less clear that, after

his death, while his philosophical sect remained, his political code

crumbled away. The only seeds sown by philosophers, which spring up

into great states, are those that, whether for good or evil, are

planted in the hearts of the many.

XX. The purely intellectual additions made by Pythagoras to human

wisdom seem to have been vast and permanent. By probable testimony,

he added largely to mathematical science; and his discoveries in

arithmetic, astronomy, music, and geometry, constitute an era in the

history of the mind. His metaphysical and moral speculations are not

to be separated from the additions or corruptions of his disciples.

But we must at least suppose that Pythagoras established the main

proposition of the occult properties of NUMBERS, which were held to be

the principles of all things. According to this theory, unity is the

abstract principle of all perfection, and the ten elementary numbers

contain the elements of the perfect system of nature. By numbers the

origin and the substance of all things could be explained [244].

Numbers make the mystery of earth and heaven--of the gods themselves.

And this part of his system, which long continued to fool mankind, was

a sort of monstrous junction between arithmetic and magic--the most

certain of sciences with the most fantastic of chimeras. The

Pythagoreans supposed the sun, or central fire, to be the seat of

Jupiter and the principle of life. The stars were divine. Men, and

even animals, were held to have within them a portion of the celestial

nature. The soul, emanating from the celestial fire [245]--can

combine with any form of matter, and is compelled to pass through

various bodies. Adopting the Egyptian doctrine of transmigration, the

Pythagoreans coupled it with the notion of future punishment or

reward.

Much of the doctrinal morality of Pythagoras is admirable; but it is

vitiated by the ceremonial quackery connected with it. Humanity to

all things--gentleness--friendship--love--and, above all the rest,

SELF-COMMAND--form the principal recommendations of his mild and

patriarchal ethics. But, perhaps, from his desire to establish a

political fraternity--perhaps from his doubt of the capacity of

mankind to embrace Truth unadorned, enamoured only of her own beauty--

these doctrines were united with an austere and frivolous ascetism.

And virtue was but to be attained by graduating through the secret and

rigid ceremonies of academical imposture. His disciples soon pushed

the dogmas of their master into an extravagance at once dangerous and

grotesque; and what the sage designed but for symbols of a truth were

cultivated to the prejudice of the truth itself. The influence of

Pythagoras became corrupt and pernicious in proportion as the original

tenets became more and more adulterated or obscure, and served, in

succeeding ages, to invest with the sanctity of a great name the most

visionary chimeras and the most mischievous wanderings of perverted

speculation. But, looking to the man himself--his discoveries--his

designs--his genius--his marvellous accomplishments--we cannot but

consider him as one of the most astonishing persons the world ever

produced; and, if in part a mountebank and an impostor, no one,

perhaps, ever deluded others with motives more pure--from an ambition

more disinterested and benevolent.

XXI. Upon the Athenians the effect of these various philosophers was

already marked and influential. From the time of Solon there had

existed in Athens a kind of school of political philosophy [246]. But

it was not a school of refining dogmas or systematic ethics; it was

too much connected with daily and practical life to foster to any

great extent the abstract contemplations and recondite theories of

metaphysical discoveries. Mnesiphilus, the most eminent of these

immediate successors of Solon, was the instructor of Themistocles, the

very antipodes of rhetoricians and refiners. But now a new age of

philosophy was at hand. Already the Eleatic sages, Zeno and

Parmenides, had travelled to Athens, and there proclaimed their

doctrines, and Zeno numbered among his listeners and disciples the

youthful Pericles. But a far more sensible influence was exercised by

Anaxagoras of the Ionian school. For thirty years, viz., from B. C.

480 to B. C. 450, during that eventful and stirring period intervening

between the battle of Thermopylae and the commencement of the five

years’ truce with Sparta, followed by the death of Cimon (B. C. 449),

this eminent and most accomplished reasoner resided in Athens [247].

His doctrines were those most cherished by Pericles, who ranked the

philosopher among his intimate friends. After an absence of some

years, he again returned to Athens; and we shall then find him

subjected to a prosecution in which religious prejudice was stimulated

by party feud. More addicted to physics than to metaphysical

research, he alarmed the national superstition by explaining on

physical principles the formation even of the celestial bodies.

According to him, the sun itself--that centre of divine perfection

with the Pythagoreans--was ejected from the earth and heated into fire

by rapid motion. He maintained that the proper study of man was the

contemplation of nature and the heavens [248]: and he refined the

Author of the universe into an intellectual principle (Nous), which

went to the root of the material causes mostly favoured by his

predecessors and contemporaries. He admitted the existence of matter,

but INTELLIGENCE was the animating and prevailing principle, creating

symmetry from chaos, imposing limit and law on all things, and

inspiring life, and sensation, and perception. His predecessors in

the Ionian school, who left the universe full of gods, had not openly

attacked the popular mythology. But the assertion of One

Intelligence, and the reduction of all else to material and physical

causes, could not but have breathed a spirit wholly inimical to the

numerous and active deities of Hellenic worship. Party feeling

against his friend and patron Pericles ultimately drew the general

suspicion into a focus; and Anaxagoras was compelled to quit Athens,

and passed the remainder of his days at Lampsacus. But his influence

survived his exile. His pupil Archelaus was the first _native

Athenian_ who taught philosophy at Athens (B. C. 450), and from him we

date the foundation of those brilliant and imperishable schools which

secured to Athens an intellectual empire long after her political

independence had died away [249]. Archelaus himself (as was the usual

custom of the earlier sages) departed widely from the tenets of his

master. He supposed that two discordant principles, fire and water,

had, by their operation, drawn all things from chaos into order, and

his metaphysics were those of unalloyed materialism. At this period,

too, or a little later, began slowly to arise in Athens the sect of

the Sophists, concerning whom so much has been written and so little

is known. But as the effects of their lessons were not for some time

widely apparent, it will be more in the order of this history to defer

to a later era an examination of the doctrines of that perverted but

not wholly pernicious school.

XXII. Enough has been now said to convey to the reader a general

notion of the prodigious rise which, in the most serene of

intellectual departments, had been made in Greece, from the appearance

of Solon to the lectures of Archelaus, who was the master of Socrates.

With the Athenians philosophy was not a thing apart from the

occupations of life and the events of history--it was not the monopoly

of a few studious minds, but was cultivated as a fashion by the young

and the well-born, the statesman, the poet, the man of pleasure, the

votary of ambition [250]. It was inseparably interwoven with their

manners, their pursuits, their glory, their decay. The history of

Athens includes in itself the history of the human mind. Science and

art--erudition and genius--all conspired--no less than the trophies of

Miltiades, the ambition of Alcibiades--the jealousy of Sparta--to the

causes of the rise and fall of Athens. And even that satire on

themselves, to which, in the immortal lampoons of Aristophanes, the

Athenian populace listened, exhibits a people whom, whatever their

errors, the world never can see again--with whom philosophy was a

pastime--with whom the Agora itself was an academe--whose coarsest

exhibitions of buffoonery and caricature sparkle with a wit, or expand

into a poetry, which attest the cultivation of the audience no less

than the genius of the author; a people, in a word, whom the stagirite

unconsciously individualized when he laid down a general proposition,

which nowhere else can be received as a truism--that the common people

are the most exquisite judges of whatever in art is graceful,

harmonious, or sublime.

BOOK V.

FROM THE DEATH OF CIMON, B. C. 449, TO THE DEATH OF PERICLES, IN THE

THIRD YEAR OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR, B. C. 429.

CHAPTER I.

Thucydides chosen by the Aristocratic Party to oppose Pericles.--His

Policy.--Munificence of Pericles.--Sacred War.--Battle of Coronea.--

Revolt of Euboea and Megara.--Invasion and Retreat of the

Peloponnesians.--Reduction of Euboea.--Punishment of Histiaea--A

Thirty Years’ Truce concluded with the Peloponnesians.--Ostracism of

Thucydides.

I. On the death of Cimon (B. C. 449) the aristocratic party in Athens

felt that the position of their antagonists and the temper of the

times required a leader of abilities widely distinct from those which

had characterized the son of Miltiades. Instead of a skilful and

enterprising general, often absent from the city on dazzling but

distant expeditions, it was necessary to raise up a chief who could

contend for their enfeebled and disputed privileges at home, and meet

the formidable Pericles, with no unequal advantages of civil

experience and oratorical talent, in the lists of the popular

assembly, or in the stratagems of political intrigue. Accordingly

their choice fell neither on Myronides nor Tolmides, but on one who,

though not highly celebrated for military exploits, was deemed

superior to Cimon, whether as a practical statesman or a popular

orator. Thucydides, their new champion, united with natural gifts

whatever advantage might result from the memory of Cimon; and his

connexion with that distinguished warrior, to whom he was

brother-in-law, served to keep together the various partisans of the

faction, and retain to the eupatrids something of the respect and

enthusiasm which the services of Cimon could not fail to command, even

among the democracy. The policy embraced by Thucydides was perhaps the

best which the state of affairs would permit; but it was one which was

fraught with much danger. Hitherto the eupatrids and the people, though

ever in dispute, had not been absolutely and totally divided; the

struggles of either faction being headed by nobles, scarcely permitted

to the democracy the perilous advantage of the cry--that the people were

on one side, and the nobles on the other. But Thucydides, seeking to

render his party as strong, as compact, and as united as possible,

brought the main bulk of the eupatrids to act together in one body. The

means by which he pursued and attained this object are not very clearly

narrated; but it was probably by the formation of a political club--a

species of social combination, which afterward became very common to all

classes in Athens. The first effect of this policy favoured the

aristocracy, and the energy and union they displayed restored for a

while the equilibrium of parties; but the aristocratic influence, thus

made clear and open, and brought into avowed hostility with the popular

cause, the city was rent in two, and the community were plainly invited

to regard the nobles as their foes [251]. Pericles, thus more and more

thrown upon the democracy, became identified with their interests, and

he sought, no less by taste than policy, to prove to the populace that

they had grown up into a wealthy and splendid nation, that could

dispense with the bounty, the shows, and the exhibitions of individual

nobles. He lavished the superfluous treasures of the state upon public

festivals, stately processions, and theatrical pageants. As if desirous

of elevating the commons to be themselves a nobility, all by which he

appealed to their favour served to refine their taste and to inspire the

meanest Athenian with a sense of the Athenian grandeur. It was said by

his enemies, and the old tale has been credulously repeated, that his

own private fortune not allowing him to vie with the wealthy nobles whom

he opposed, it was to supply his deficiencies from the public stock that

he directed some part of the national wealth to the encouragement of the

national arts and the display of the national magnificence. But it is

more than probable that it was rather from principle than personal

ambition that Pericles desired to discountenance and eclipse the

interested bribes to public favour with which Cimon and others had

sought to corrupt the populace. Nor was Pericles without the means or

the spirit to devote his private fortune to proper objects of

generosity. “It was his wealth and his prudence,” says Plutarch, when,

blaming the improvidence of Anaxagoras, “that enabled him to relieve the

distressed.” What he spent in charity he might perhaps have spent more

profitably in display, had he not conceived that charity was the

province of the citizen, magnificence the privilege of the state. It

was in perfect consonance with the philosophy that now began to spread

throughout Greece, and with which the mind of this great political

artist was so deeply imbued, to consider that the graces ennobled the

city they adorned, and that the glory of a state was intimately

connected with the polish of the people.

II. While, at home, the divisions of the state were progressing to

that point in which the struggle between the opposing leaders must

finally terminate in the ordeal of the ostracism--abroad, new causes

of hostility broke out between the Athenians and the Spartans. The

sacred city of Delphi formed a part of the Phocian station; but, from

a remote period, its citizens appear to have exercised the independent

right of managing to affairs of the temple [252], and to have elected

their own superintendents of the oracle and the treasures. In Delphi

yet lingered the trace of the Dorian institutions and the Dorian

blood, but the primitive valour and hardy virtues of the ancestral

tribe had long since mouldered away. The promiscuous intercourse of

strangers, the contaminating influence of unrelaxing imposture and

priestcraft--above all, the wealth of the city, from which the natives

drew subsistence, and even luxury, without labour [253], contributed

to enfeeble and corrupt the national character. Unable to defend

themselves by their own exertions against any enemy, the Delphians

relied on the passive protection afforded by the superstitious

reverence of their neighbours, or on the firm alliance that existed

between themselves and the great Spartan representatives of their

common Dorian race. The Athenian government could not but deem it

desirable to wrest from the Delphians the charge over the oracle and

the temple, since that charge might at any time be rendered

subservient to the Spartan cause; and accordingly they appear to have

connived at a bold attempt of the Phocians, who were now their allies.

These hardier neighbours of the sacred city claimed and forcibly

seized the right of superintendence of the temple. The Spartans,

alarmed and aroused, despatched an armed force to Delphi, and restored

their former privileges to the citizens. They piously gave to their

excursion the name of the Sacred War. Delphi formally renounced the

Phocian league, declared itself an independent state, and even defined

the boundaries between its own and the Phocian domains. Sparta was

rewarded for its aid by the privilege of precedence in consulting the

oracle, and this decree the Spartans inscribed on a brazen wolf in the

sacred city. The Athenians no longer now acted through others--they

recognised all the advantage of securing to their friends and wresting

from their foes the management of an oracle, on whose voice depended

fortune in war and prosperity in peace. Scarce had the Spartans

withdrawn, than an Athenian force, headed by Pericles, who is said to

have been freed by Anaxagoras from superstitious prejudices, entered

the city, and restored the temple to the Phocians. The same image

which had recorded the privilege of the Spartans now bore an

inscription which awarded the right of precedence to the Athenians.

The good fortune of this expedition was soon reversed.

III. When the Athenians, after the battle of Oenophyta, had

established in the Boeotian cities democratic forms of government, the

principal members of the defeated oligarchy, either from choice or by

compulsion, betook themselves to exile. These malecontents, aided, no

doubt, by partisans who did not share their banishment, now seized

upon Chaeronea, Orchomenus, and some other Boeotian towns. The

Athenians, who had valued themselves on restoring liberty to Boeotia,

and, for the first time since the Persian war, had honoured with

burial at the public expense those who fell under Myronides, could not

regard this attempt at counterrevolution with indifference. Policy

aided their love of liberty; for it must never be forgotten that the

change from democratic to oligarchic government in the Grecian states

was the formal exchange of the Athenian for the Spartan alliance. Yet

Pericles, who ever unwillingly resorted to war, and the most

remarkable attribute of whose character was a profound and calculating

caution, opposed the proposition of sending an armed force into

Boeotia. His objections were twofold--he considered the time

unseasonable, and he was averse to hazard upon an issue not

immediately important to Athens the flower of her Hoplites, or

heavy-armed soldiery, of whom a thousand had offered their services in

the enterprise. Nevertheless, the counsel of Tolmides, who was eager

for the war, and flushed with past successes, prevailed. “If,” said

Pericles, “you regard not my experience, wait, at least, for the advice

of TIME, that best of counsellors.” The saying was forgotten in the

popular enthusiasm it opposed--it afterward attained the veneration of a

prophecy. [254]

IV. Aided by some allied troops, and especially by his thousand

volunteers, Tolmides swept into Boeotia--reduced Chaeronea--garrisoned

the captured town, and was returning homeward, when, in the territory

of Coronea, he suddenly fell in with a hostile ambush [255], composed

of the exiled bands of Orchomenus, of Opuntian Locrians, and the

partisans of the oligarchies of Euboea. Battle ensued--the Athenians

received a signal and memorable defeat (B. C. 447); many were made

prisoners, many slaughtered: the pride and youth of the Athenian

Hoplites were left on the field; the brave and wealthy Clinias (father

to the yet more renowned Alcibiades), and Tolmides himself, were

slain. But the disaster of defeat was nothing in comparison with its

consequences. To recover their prisoners, the Athenian government

were compelled to enter into a treaty with the hostile oligarchies and

withdraw their forces from Boeotia. On their departure, the old

oligarchies everywhere replaced the friendly democracies, and the

nearest neighbours of Athens were again her foes. Nor was this change

confined to Boeotia. In Locris and Phocis the popular party fell with

the fortunes of Coronea--the exiled oligarchies were re-established--

and when we next read of these states, they are the allies of Sparta.

At home, the results of the day of Coronea were yet more important.

By the slaughter of so many of the Hoplites, the aristocratic party in

Athens were greatly weakened, while the neglected remonstrances and

fears of Pericles, now remembered, secured to him a respect and

confidence which soon served to turn the balance against his

competitor Thucydides.

V. The first defeat of the proud mistress of the Grecian sea was a

signal for the revolt of disaffected dependants. The Isle of Euboea,

the pasturages of which were now necessary to the Athenians,

encouraged by the success that at Coronea had attended the arms of the

Euboean exiles, shook off the Athenian yoke (B. C. 445). In the same

year expired the five years truce with Sparta, and that state

forthwith prepared to avenge its humiliation at Delphi. Pericles

seems once more to have been called into official power--he was not

now supine in action. At the head of a sufficient force he crossed

the channel, and landed in Euboea. Scarce had he gained the island,

when he heard that Megara had revolted--that the Megarians, joined by

partisans from Sicyon, Epidaurus, and Corinth, had put to the sword

the Athenian garrison, save a few who had ensconced themselves in

Nisaea, and that an army of the Peloponnesian confederates was

preparing to march to Attica. On receiving these tidings, Pericles

re-embarked his forces and returned home. Soon appeared the

Peloponnesian forces, commanded by the young Pleistoanax, king of

Sparta, who, being yet a minor, was placed under the guardianship of

Cleandridas; the lands by the western frontier of Attica, some of the

most fertile of that territory, were devastated, and the enemy

penetrated to Eleusis and Thria. But not a blow was struck--they

committed the aggression and departed. On their return to Sparta,

Pleistoanax and Cleandridas were accused of having been bribed to

betray the honour or abandon the revenge of Sparta. Cleandridas fled

the prosecution, and was condemned to death in his exile. Pleistoanax

also quitted the country, and took refuge in Arcadia, in the sanctuary

of Mount Lycaeum. The suspicions of the Spartans appear to have been

too well founded, and Pericles, on passing his accounts that year, is

stated to have put down ten talents [256] as devoted to a certain use

--an item which the assembly assented to in conscious and sagacious

silence. This formidable enemy retired, Pericles once more entered

Euboea, and reduced the isle (B. C. 445). In Chalcis he is said by

Plutarch to have expelled the opulent landowners, who, no doubt,

formed the oligarchic chiefs of the revolt, and colonized Histiaea

with Athenians, driving out at least the greater part of the native

population [257]. For the latter severity was given one of the

strongest apologies that the stern justice of war can plead for its

harshest sentences--the Histiaeans had captured an Athenian vessel and

murdered the crew. The rest of the island was admitted to conditions,

by which the amount of tribute was somewhat oppressively increased.

[258]

VI. The inglorious result of the Peloponnesian expedition into Attica

naturally tended to make the Spartans desirous of peace upon

honourable terms, while the remembrance of dangers, eluded rather than

crushed, could not fail to dispose the Athenian government to

conciliate a foe from whom much was to be apprehended and little

gained. Negotiations were commenced and completed (B. C. 445). The

Athenians surrendered some of the most valuable fruits of their

victories in their hold on the Peloponnesus. They gave up their claim

on Nisaea and Pegae--they renounced the footing they had established

in Troezene--they abandoned alliance or interference with Achaia, over

which their influence had extended to a degree that might reasonably

alarm the Spartans, since they had obtained the power to raise troops

in that province, and Achaean auxiliaries had served under Pericles at

the siege of Oeniadae [259]. Such were the conditions upon which a

truce of thirty years was based [260]. The articles were ostensibly

unfavourable to Athens. Boeotia was gone--Locris, Phocis, an internal

revolution (the result of Coronea) had torn from their alliance. The

citizens of Delphi must have regained the command of their oracle,

since henceforth its sacred voice was in favour of the Spartans.

Megara was lost--and now all the holds on the Peloponnesus were

surrendered. These reverses, rapid and signal, might have taught the

Athenians how precarious is ever the military eminence of small

states. But the treaty with Sparta, if disadvantageous, was not

dishonourable. It was founded upon one broad principle, without

which, indeed, all peace would have been a mockery--viz., that the

Athenians should not interfere with the affairs of the Peloponnesus.

This principle acknowledged, the surrender of advantages or conquests

that were incompatible with it was but a necessary detail. As

Pericles was at this time in office [261], and as he had struggled

against an armed interference with the Boeotian towns, so it is

probable that he followed out his own policy in surrendering all right

to interfere with the Peloponnesian states. Only by peace with Sparta

could he accomplish his vast designs for the greatness of Athens--

designs which rested not upon her land forces, but upon her confirming

and consolidating her empire of the sea; and we shall shortly find, in

our consideration of her revenues, additional reasons for approving a

peace essential to her stability.

VII. Scarce was the truce effected ere the struggle between

Thucydides and Pericles approached its crisis. The friends of the

former never omitted an occasion to charge Pericles with having too

lavishly squandered the public funds upon the new buildings which

adorned the city. This charge of extravagance, ever an accusation

sure to be attentively received by a popular assembly, made a sensible

impression. “If you think,” said Pericles to the great tribunal

before which he urged his defence, “that I have expended too much,

charge the sums to my account, not yours--but on this condition, let

the edifices be inscribed with my name, not that of the Athenian

people.” This mode of defence, though perhaps but an oratorical

hyperbole [262], conveyed a rebuke which the Athenians were an

audience calculated to answer but in one way--they dismissed the

accusation, and applauded the extravagance.

VIII. Accusations against public men, when unsuccessful, are the

fairest stepping-stones in their career. Thucydides failed against

Pericles. The death of Tolmides--the defeat of Coronea--the slaughter

of the Hoplites--weakened the aristocratic party; the democracy and

the democratic administration seized the occasion for a decisive

effort. Thucydides was summoned to the ostracism, and his banishment

freed Pericles from his only rival for the supreme administration of

the Athenian empire.

CHAPTER II.

Causes of the Power of Pericles.--Judicial Courts of the dependant

Allies transferred to Athens.--Sketch of the Athenian Revenues.--

Public Buildings the Work of the People rather than of Pericles.--

Vices and Greatness of Athens had the same Sources.--Principle of

Payment characterizes the Policy of the Period.--It is the Policy of

Civilization.--Colonization, Cleruchia.

I. In the age of Pericles (B. C. 444) there is that which seems to

excite, in order to disappoint, curiosity. We are fully impressed

with the brilliant variety of his gifts--with the influence he

exercised over his times. He stands in the midst of great and

immortal names, at the close of a heroic, and yet in the sudden

meridian of a civilized age. And scarcely does he recede from our

gaze, ere all the evils which only his genius could keep aloof, gather

and close around the city which it was the object of his life not less

to adorn as for festival than to crown as for command. It is almost

as if, with Pericles, her very youth departed from Athens. Yet so

scanty are our details and historical materials, that the life of this

surprising man is rather illustrated by the general light of the times

than by the blaze of his own genius. His military achievements are

not dazzling. No relics, save a few bold expressions, remain of the

eloquence which awed or soothed, excited or restrained, the most

difficult audience in the world. It is partly by analyzing the works

of his contemporaries--partly by noting the rise of the whole people--

and partly by bringing together and moulding into a whole the

scattered masses of his ambitious and thoughtful policy, that we alone

can gauge and measure the proportions of the master-spirit of the

time. The age of Pericles is the sole historian of Pericles.

This statesman was now at that period of life when public men are

usually most esteemed--when, still in the vigour of manhood, they have

acquired the dignity and experience of years, outlived the earlier

prejudices and jealousies they excited, and see themselves surrounded

by a new generation, among whom rivals must be less common than

disciples and admirers. Step by step, through a long and consistent

career, he had ascended to his present eminence, so that his rise did

not startle from its suddenness; while his birth, his services, and

his genius presented a combination of claims to power that his enemies

could not despise, and that justified the enthusiasm of his friends.

His public character was unsullied; of the general belief in his

integrity there is the highest evidence [263]; and even the few

slanders afterward raised against him--such as that of entering into

one war to gratify the resentment of Aspasia, and into another to

divert attention from his financial accounts, are libels so

unsupported by any credible authority, and so absurd in themselves,

that they are but a proof how few were the points on which calumny

could assail him.

II. The obvious mode to account for the moral power of a man in any

particular time, is to consider his own character, and to ascertain

how far it is suited to command the age in which he lived and the

people whom he ruled. No Athenian, perhaps, ever possessed so many

qualities as Pericles for obtaining wide and lasting influence over

the various classes of his countrymen. By his attention to maritime

affairs, he won the sailors, now the most difficult part of the

population to humour or control; his encouragement to commerce secured

the merchants and conciliated the alien settlers; while the stupendous

works of art, everywhere carried on, necessarily obtained the favour

of the mighty crowd of artificers and mechanics whom they served to

employ. Nor was it only to the practical interests, but to all the

more refined, yet scarce less powerful sympathies of his countrymen,

that his character appealed for support. Philosophy, with all

parties, all factions, was becoming an appetite and passion. Pericles

was rather the friend than the patron of philosophers. The increasing

refinement of the Athenians--the vast influx of wealth that poured

into the treasury from the spoils of Persia and the tributes of

dependant cities, awoke the desire of art; and the graceful intellect

of Pericles at once indulged and directed the desire, by advancing

every species of art to its perfection. The freedom of democracy--the

cultivation of the drama (which is the oratory of poetry)--the rise of

prose literature--created the necessity of popular eloquence--and with

Pericles the Athenian eloquence was born. Thus his power was derived

from a hundred sources: whether from the grosser interests--the mental

sympathies--the vanity--ambition--reason--or imagination of the

people. And in examining the character of Pericles, and noting its

harmony with his age, the admiration we bestow on himself must be

shared by his countrymen. He obtained a greater influence than

Pisistratus, but it rested solely on the free-will of the Athenians--

it was unsupported by armed force--it was subject to the laws--it

might any day be dissolved; and influence of this description is only

obtained, in free states, by men who are in themselves the likeness

and representative of the vast majority of the democracy they wield.

Even the aristocratic party that had so long opposed him appear, with

the fall of Thucydides, to have relaxed their hostilities. In fact,

they had less to resent in Pericles than in any previous leader of the

democracy. He was not, like Themistocles, a daring upstart, vying

with, and eclipsing their pretensions. He was of their own order.

His name was not rendered odious to them by party proscriptions or the

memory of actual sufferings. He himself had recalled their idol

Cimon--and in the measures that had humbled the Areopagus, so

discreetly had he played his part, or so fortunately subordinate had

been his co-operation, that the wrath of the aristocrats had fallen

only on Ephialtes. After the ostracism of Thucydides, “he became,”

says Plutarch [264], “a new man--no longer so subservient to the

multitude--and the government assumed an aristocratical, or rather

monarchical, form.” But these expressions in Plutarch are not to be

literally received. The laws remained equally democratic--the agora

equally strong--Pericles was equally subjected to the popular control;

but having now acquired the confidence of the people, he was enabled

more easily to direct them, or, as Thucydides luminously observes,

“Not having obtained his authority unworthily, he was not compelled to

flatter or to sooth the popular humours, but, when occasion required,

he could even venture vehemently to contradict them.” [265] The cause

which the historian assigns to the effect is one that deserves to be

carefully noted by ambitious statesmen--because the authority of

Pericles was worthily acquired, the people often suffered it to be

even unpopularly exercised. On the other hand, this far-seeing and

prudent statesman was, no doubt, sufficiently aware of the dangers to

which the commonwealth was exposed, if the discontents of the great

aristocratic faction were not in some degree conciliated, to induce

his wise and sober patriotism, if not actually to seek the favour of

his opponents, at least cautiously to shun all idle attempts to

revenge past hostilities or feed the sources of future irritation. He

owed much to the singular moderation and evenness of his temper; and

his debt to Anaxagoras must have been indeed great, if the lessons of

that preacher of those cardinal virtues of the intellect, serenity and

order, had assisted to form the rarest of all unions--a genius the

most fervid, with passions the best regulated.

III. It was about this time, too, in all probability, that Pericles

was enabled to consummate the policy he had always adopted with

respect to the tributary allies. We have seen that the treasury had

been removed from Delos to Athens; it was now resolved to make Athens

also the seat and centre of the judicial authority. The subject

allies were compelled, if not on minor, at least on all important

cases, to resort to Athenian courts of law for justice [266]. And

thus Athens became, as it were, the metropolis of the allies. A more

profound and sagacious mode of quickly establishing her empire it was

impossible for ingenuity to conceive; but as it was based upon an

oppression that must have been daily and intolerably felt--that every

affair of life must have called into irritating action, so, with the

establishment of the empire was simultaneously planted an inevitable

cause of its decay. For though power is rarely attained without

injustice, the injustice, if continued, is the never-failing principle

of its corruption. And, in order to endure, authority must hasten to

divest itself of all the more odious attributes of conquest.

IV. As a practical statesman, one principal point of view in which we

must regard Pericles is in his capacity of a financier. By English

historians his policy and pretensions in this department have not been

sufficiently considered; yet, undoubtedly, they made one of the most

prominent features of his public character in the eyes of his

countrymen. He is the first minister in Athens who undertook the

scientific management of the national revenues, and partly from his

scrupulous integrity, partly from his careful wisdom, and partly from

a fortunate concurrence of circumstances, the Athenian revenues, even

when the tribute was doubled, were never more prosperously

administered. The first great source of the revenue was from the

tributes of the confederate cities [267]. These, rated at four

hundred and sixty talents in the time of Aristides, had increased to

six hundred in the time of Pericles; but there is no evidence to prove

that the increased sum was unfairly raised, or that fresh exactions

were levied, save in rare cases [268], on the original subscribers to

the league. The increase of a hundred and forty talents is to be

accounted for partly by the quota of different confederacies acquired

since the time of Aristides, partly by the exemption from military or

maritime service, voluntarily if unwisely purchased, during the

administration of Cimon, by the states themselves. So far as tribute

was a sign of dependance and inferiority, the impost was a hardship;

but for this they who paid it are to be blamed rather than those who

received. Its practical burden on each state, at this period,

appears, in most cases, to have been incredibly light; and a very

trifling degree of research will prove how absurdly exaggerated have

been the invectives of ignorant or inconsiderate men, whether in

ancient or modern times, on the extortions of the Athenians, and the

impoverishment of their allies. Aristophanes [269] attributes to the

empire of Athens a thousand tributary cities: the number is doubtless

a poetical license; yet, when we remember the extent of territory

which the league comprehended, and how crowded with cities were all

the coasts and islands of Greece, we should probably fall short of the

number of tributary cities if we estimated it at six hundred; so that

the tribute would not in the time of Pericles average above a talent,

or 241l. 13s. 4d. [270] English money, for each city! Even when in a

time of urgent demand on the resources of the state [271], Cythera

fell into the hands of the Athenians [272], the tribute of that island

was assessed but at four talents. And we find, by inscriptions still

extant, that some places were rated only at two thousand, and even one

thousand drachmas. [273]

Finally, if the assessment by Aristides, of four hundred and sixty

talents, was such as to give universal satisfaction from its equity

and moderation, the additional hundred and forty talents in the time

of Pericles could not have been an excessive increase, when we

consider how much the league had extended, how many states had

exchanged the service for the tribute, and how considerable was the

large diffusion of wealth throughout the greater part of Greece, the

continued influx of gold [274], and the consequent fall in value of

the precious metals.

V. It was not, then, the amount of the tribute which made its

hardship, nor can the Athenian government be blamed for having

continued, a claim voluntarily conceded to them. The original object

of the tribute was the maintenance of a league against the barbarians

--the Athenians were constituted the heads of the league and the

guardians of the tribute; some states refused service and offered

money--their own offers were accepted; other states refused both--it

was not more the interest than the duty of Athens to maintain, even by

arms, the condition of the league--so far is her policy justifiable.

But she erred when she reduced allies to dependants--she erred when

she transferred the treasury from the central Delos to her own state--

she erred yet more when she appropriated a portion of these treasures

to her own purposes. But these vices of Athens are the vices of all

eminent states, monarchic or republican--for they are the vices of the

powerful. “It was,” say the Athenian ambassadors in Thucydides, with

honest candour and profound truth--“it was from the nature of the

thing itself that we were at first compelled to advance our empire to

what it is--chiefly through fear--next for honour--and, lastly, for

interest; and then it seemed no longer safe for us to venture to let

go the reins of government, for the revolters would have gone over to

you” (viz., to the Spartans) [275]. Thus does the universal lesson of

history teach us that it is the tendency of power, in what hands

soever it be placed, to widen its limits, to increase its vigour, in

proportion as the counteracting force resigns the security for its

administration, or the remedy for its abuse.

VI. Pericles had not scrupled, from the date of the transfer of the

treasury to Athens, to devote a considerable proportion of the general

tribute to public buildings and sacred exhibitions--purposes purely

Athenian. But he did so openly--he sought no evasion or disguise--he

maintained in the face of Greece that the Athenians were not

responsible to the allies for these contributions; that it was the

Athenians who had resisted and defended the barbarians, while many of

the confederate states had supplied neither ships nor soldiers; that

Athens was now the head of a mighty league; and that, to increase her

glory, to cement her power, was a duty she owed no less to the allies

than to herself. Arguments to which armies, and not orators, could

alone reply. [276]

The principal other sources whence the Athenian revenue was derived,

it may be desirable here to state as briefly and as clearly as the

nature of the subject will allow. By those who would search more

deeply, the long and elaborate statistics of Boeckh must be carefully

explored. Those sources of revenue were--

1st. Rents from corporate estates--such as pastures, forests, rivers,

salt-works, houses, theatres, etc., and mines, let for terms of years,

or on heritable leases.

2dly. Tolls, export and import duties, probably paid only by

strangers, and amounting to two per cent., a market excise, and the

twentieth part of all exports and imports levied in the dependant

allied cities--the last a considerable item.

3dly. Tithes, levied only on lands held in usufruct, as estates

belonging to temples.

4thly. A protection tax [277], paid by the settlers, or Metoeci,

common to most of the Greek states, but peculiarly productive in

Athens from the number of strangers that her trade, her festivals, and

her renown attracted. The policy of Pericles could not fail to

increase this source of revenue.

5thly. A slave tax of three obols per head. [278]

Most of these taxes appear to have been farmed out.

6thly. Judicial fees and fines. As we have seen that the allies in

most important trials were compelled to seek justice in Athens, this,

in the time of Pericles, was a profitable source of income. But it

was one, the extent of which necessarily depended upon peace.

Fines were of many classes, but not, at least in this period, of very

great value to the state. Sometimes (as in all private accusations)

the fine fell to the plaintiff, sometimes a considerable proportion

enriched the treasury of the tutelary goddess. The task of assessing

the fines was odious, and negligently performed by the authorities,

while it was easy for those interested to render a false account of

their property.

Lastly. The state received the aid of annual contributions, or what

were termed liturgies, from individuals for particular services.

The ordinary liturgies were, 1st. The Choregia, or duty of furnishing

the chorus for the plays--tragic, comic, and satirical--of

remunerating the leader of the singers and musicians--of maintaining

the latter while trained--of supplying the dresses, the golden crowns

and masks, and, indeed, the general decorations and equipments of the

theatre. He on whom this burdensome honour fell was called Choregus;

his name, and that of his tribe, was recorded on the tripod which

commemorated the victory of the successful poet, whose performances

were exhibited. [279]

2dly. The Gymnasiarchy, or charge of providing for the expense of the

torch-race, celebrated in honour of the gods of fire, and some other

sacred games. In later times the gymnasiarchy comprised the

superintendence of the training schools, and the cost of ornamenting

the arena.

3dly. The Architheoria, or task of maintaining the embassy to sacred

games and festivals.

And, 4thly, the Hestiasis, or feasting of the tribes, a costly

obligation incurred by some wealthy member of each tribe for

entertaining the whole of the tribe at public, but not very luxurious,

banquets. This last expense did not often occur. The hestiasis was

intended for sacred objects, connected with the rites of hospitality,

and served to confirm the friendly intercourse between the members of

the tribe.

These three ordinary liturgies had all a religious character; they

were compulsory on those possessed of property not less than three

talents--they were discharged in turn by the tribes, except when

volunteered by individuals.

VII. The expenses incurred for the defence or wants of the state were

not regular, but extraordinary liturgies--such as the TRIERARCHY, or

equipment of ships, which entailed also the obligation of personal

service on those by whom the triremes were fitted out. Personal

service was indeed the characteristic of all liturgies, a

property-tax, which was not yet invented, alone excepted; and this,

though bearing the name, has not the features, of a liturgy. Of the

extraordinary liturgies, the trierarchy was the most important. It

was of very early origin. Boeckh observes [280] that it was mentioned

in the time of Hippias. At the period of which we treat each vessel

had one trierarch. The vessel was given to the trierarch, sometimes

ready equipped; he also received the public money for certain

expenses; others fell on himself [281]. Occasionally, but rarely, an

ambitious or patriotic trierarch defrayed the whole cost; but in any

case he rendered strict account of the expenses incurred. The cost of

a whole trierarchy was not less than forty minas, nor more than a

talent.

VIII. Two liturgies could not be demanded simultaneously from any

individual, nor was he liable to any one more often than every other

year. He who served the trierarchies was exempted from all other

contributions. Orphans were exempted till the year after they had

obtained their majority, and a similar exemption was, in a very few

instances, the reward of eminent public services. The nine archons

were also exempted from the trierarchies.

IX. The moral defects of liturgies were the defects of a noble

theory, which almost always terminates in practical abuses. Their

principle was that of making it an honour to contribute to the public

splendour or the national wants. Hence, in the earlier times, an

emulation among the rich to purchase favour by a liberal, but often

calculating and interested ostentation; hence, among the poor,

actuated by an equal ambition, was created so great a necessity for

riches as the means to power [282], that the mode by which they were

to be acquired was often overlooked. What the theory designed as the

munificence of patriotism, became in practice but a showy engine of

corruption; and men vied with each other in the choregia or the

trierarchy, not so much for the sake of service done to the state, as

in the hope of influence acquired over the people. I may also

observe, that in a merely fiscal point of view, the principle of

liturgies was radically wrong; that principle went to tax the few

instead of the many; its operation was therefore not more unequal in

its assessments than it was unproductive to the state in proportion to

its burden on individuals.

X. The various duties were farmed--a pernicious plan of finance

common to most of the Greek states. The farmers gave sureties, and

punctuality was rigorously exacted from them, on penalty of

imprisonment, the doubling of the debt, the confiscation of their

properties, the compulsory hold upon their sureties.

XI. Such were the main sources of the Athenian revenue.

Opportunities will occur to fill up the brief outline and amplify each

detail. This sketch is now presented to the reader as comprising a

knowledge necessary to a clear insight into the policy of Pericles. A

rapid glance over the preceding pages will suffice to show that it was

on a rigid avoidance of all unnecessary war--above all, of distant and

perilous enterprises, that the revenue of Athens rested. Her

commercial duties--her tax on settlers--the harvest of judicial fees,

obtained from the dependant allies--the chief profits from the mines--

all rested upon the maintenance of peace: even the foreign tribute,

the most productive of the Athenian resources, might fail at once, if

the Athenian arms should sustain a single reverse, as indeed it did

after the fatal battle of Aegospotamos [283]. This it was which might

have shown to the great finance minister that peace with the

Peloponnesus could scarce be too dearly purchased [284]. The

surrender of a few towns and fortresses was nothing in comparison with

the arrest and paralysis of all the springs of her wealth, which would

be the necessary result of a long war upon her own soil. For this

reason Pericles strenuously checked all the wild schemes of the

Athenians for extended empire. Yet dazzled with the glories of Cimon,

some entertained the hopes of recovering Egypt, some agitated the

invasion of the Persian coasts; the fair and fatal Sicily already

aroused the cupidity and ambition of others; and the vain enthusiasts

of the Agora even dreamed of making that island the base and centre of

a new and vast dominion, including Carthage on one hand and Etruria on

the other [285]. Such schemes it was the great object of Pericles to

oppose. He was not less ambitious for the greatness of Athens than

the most daring of these visionaries; but he better understood on what

foundations it should be built. His objects were to strengthen the

possessions already acquired, to confine the Athenian energies within

the frontiers of Greece, and to curb, as might better be done by peace

than war, the Peloponnesian forces to their own rocky barriers. The

means by which he sought to attain these objects were, 1st, by a

maritime force; 2dly, by that inert and silent power which springs as

it were from the moral dignity and renown of a nation; whatever, in

this latter respect, could make Athens illustrious, made Athens

formidable.

XII. Then rapidly progressed those glorious fabrics which seemed, as

Plutarch gracefully expresses it, endowed with the bloom of a

perennial youth. Still the houses of private citizens remained simple

and unadorned; still were the streets narrow and irregular; and even

centuries afterward, a stranger entering Athens would not at first

have recognised the claims of the mistress of Grecian art. But to the

homeliness of her common thoroughfares and private mansions, the

magnificence of her public edifices now made a dazzling contrast. The

Acropolis, that towered above the homes and thoroughfares of men--a

spot too sacred for human habitation--became, to use a proverbial

phrase, “a city of the gods.” The citizen was everywhere to be

reminded of the majesty of the STATE--his patriotism was to be

increased by the pride in her beauty--his taste to be elevated by the

spectacle of her splendour. Thus flocked to Athens all who throughout

Greece were eminent in art. Sculptors and architects vied with each

other in adorning the young empress of the seas [286]; then rose the

masterpieces of Phidias, of Callicrates, of Mnesicles [287], which

even, either in their broken remains, or in the feeble copies of

imitators less inspired, still command so intense a wonder, and

furnish models so immortal. And if, so to speak, their bones and

relics excite our awe and envy, as testifying of a lovelier and

grander race, which the deluge of time has swept away, what, in that

day, must have been their brilliant effect--unmutilated in their fair

proportions--fresh in all their lineaments and hues? For their beauty

was not limited to the symmetry of arch and column, nor their

materials confined to the marbles of Pentelicus and Paros. Even the

exterior of the temples glowed with the richest harmony of colours,

and was decorated with the purest gold; an atmosphere peculiarly

favourable both to the display and the preservation of art, permitted

to external pediments and friezes all the minuteness of ornament--all

the brilliancy of colours; such as in the interior of Italian churches

may yet be seen--vitiated, in the last, by a gaudy and barbarous

taste. Nor did the Athenians spare any cost upon the works that were,

like the tombs and tripods of their heroes, to be the monuments of a

nation to distant ages, and to transmit the most irrefragable proof

“that the power of ancient Greece was not an idle legend.” [288] The

whole democracy were animated with the passion of Pericles; and when

Phidias recommended marble as a cheaper material than ivory for the

great statue of Minerva, it was for that reason that ivory was

preferred by the unanimous voice of the assembly. Thus, whether it

were extravagance or magnificence, the blame in one case, the

admiration in another, rests not more with the minister than the

populace. It was, indeed, the great characteristic of those works,

that they were entirely the creations of the people: without the

people, Pericles could not have built a temple or engaged a sculptor.

The miracles of that day resulted from the enthusiasm of a population

yet young--full of the first ardour for the beautiful--dedicating to

the state, as to a mistress, the trophies, honourably won or the

treasures injuriously extorted--and uniting the resources of a nation

with the energy of an individual, because the toil, the cost, were

borne by those who succeeded to the enjoyment and arrogated the glory.

XIII. It was from two sources that Athens derived her chief political

vices; 1st, Her empire of the seas and her exactions from her allies;

2dly, an unchecked, unmitigated democratic action, void of the two

vents known in all modern commonwealths--the press, and a

representative, instead of a popular, assembly. But from these

sources she now drew all her greatness also, moral and intellectual.

Before the Persian war, and even scarcely before the time of Cimon,

Athens cannot be said to have eclipsed her neighbours in the arts and

sciences. She became the centre and capital of the most polished

communities of Greece, and she drew into a focus all the Grecian

intellect; she obtained from her dependants the wealth to administer

the arts, which universal traffic and intercourse taught her to

appreciate; and thus the Odeon, and the Parthenon, and the Propylaea

arose! During the same administration, the fortifications were

completed, and a third wall, parallel [289] and near to that uniting

Piraeus with Athens, consummated the works of Themistocles and Cimon,

and preserved the communication between the twofold city, even should

the outer walls fall into the hands of an enemy.

But honour and wealth alone would not have sufficed for the universal

emulation, the universal devotion to all that could adorn or exalt the

nation. It was the innovations of Aristides and Ephialtes that

breathed into that abstract and cold formality, THE STATE, the breath

and vigour of a pervading people, and made the meanest citizen

struggle for Athens with that zeal with which an ambitious statesman

struggles for himself [290]. These two causes united reveal to us the

true secret why Athens obtained a pre-eminence in intellectual

grandeur over the rest of Greece. Had Corinth obtained the command of

the seas and the treasury of Delos--had Corinth established abroad a

power equally arbitrary and extensive, and at home a democracy equally

broad and pure--Corinth might have had her Pericles and Demosthenes,

her Phidias, her Sophocles, her Aristophanes, her Plato--and posterity

might not have allowed the claim of Athens to be the Hellas Hellados,

“the Greece of Greece.”

XIV. But the increase of wealth bounded not its effects to these

magnificent works of art--they poured into and pervaded the whole

domestic policy of Athens. We must recollect, that as the greatness

of the state was that of the democracy, so its treasures were the

property of the free population. It was the people who were rich; and

according to all the notions of political economy in that day, the

people desired practically to enjoy their own opulence. Thus was

introduced the principal of payment for service, and thus was

sanctioned and legalized the right of a common admission to

spectacles, the principal cost of which was defrayed from common

property. That such innovations would be the necessary and

unavoidable result of an overflowing treasury in a state thus

democratic is so obvious, that nothing can be more absurd than to lay

the blame of the change upon Pericles. He only yielded to, and

regulated the irresistible current of the general wish. And we may

also observe, that most of those innovations, which were ultimately

injurious to Athens, rested upon the acknowledged maxims of modern

civilization; some were rather erroneous from details than principles;

others, from the want of harmony between the new principles and the

old constitution to which then were applied. Each of the elements

might be healthful--amalgamated, they produced a poison.

XV. It is, for instance, an axiom in modern politics that judges

should receive a salary [291]. During the administration of Pericles,

this principle was applied to the dicasts in the popular courts of

judicature. It seems probable that the vast accession of law business

which ensued from the transfer of the courts in the allied states to

the Athenian tribunal was the cause of this enactment. Lawsuits

became so common, that it was impossible, without salaries, that the

citizens could abandon their own business for that of others. Payment

was, therefore, both equitable and unavoidable, and, doubtless, it

would have seemed to the Athenians, as now to us, the best means, not

only of securing the attention, but of strengthening the integrity, of

the judges or the jurors. The principle of salaries was, therefore,

right, but its results were evil, when applied to the peculiar

constitution of the courts. The salary was small--the judges

numerous, and mostly of the humblest class--the consequences I have

before shown [292]. Had the salaries been high and the number of the

judges small, the means of a good judicature would have been attained.

But, then, according to the notions, not only of the Athenians, but of

all the Hellenic democracies, the democracy itself, of which the

popular courts were deemed the constitutional bulwark and the vital

essence, would have been at an end. In this error, therefore, however

fatal it might be, neither Pericles nor the Athenians, but the

theories of the age, are to be blamed [293]. It is also a maxim

formerly acted upon in England, to which many political philosophers

now incline, and which is yet adopted in the practice of a great and

enlightened portion of the world, that the members of the legislative

assembly should receive salaries. This principle was now applied in

Athens [294]. But there the people themselves were the legislative

assembly, and thus a principle, perhaps sound in itself, became

vitiated to the absurdity of the people as sovereign paying the people

as legislative. Yet even this might have been necessary to the

preservation of the constitution, as meetings became numerous and

business complicated; for if the people had not been tempted and even

driven to assemble in large masses, the business of the state would

have been jobbed away by active minorities, and the life of a

democracy been lost [295]. The payment was first one obolus--

afterward increased to three. Nor must we suppose, as the ignorance

or effrontery of certain modern historians has strangely asserted,

that in the new system of payments the people were munificent only to

themselves. The senate was paid--the public advocates and orators

were paid--so were the ambassadors, the inspectors of the youths in

the trading schools, the nomothetae or law-commissioners, the

physicians, the singers, even the poets; all the servants of the

different officers received salaries. And now, as is the inevitable

consequence of that civilization in a commercial society which

multiplies and strongly demarcates the divisions of labour, the safety

of the state no longer rested solely upon the unpurchased arms and

hearts of its citizens--but not only were the Athenians themselves who

served as soldiers paid, but foreign mercenaries were engaged--a

measure in consonance with the characteristic policy of Pericles,

which was especially frugal of the lives of the citizens. But

peculiar to the Athenians of all the Grecian states was the humane and

beautiful provision for the poor, commenced under Solon or

Pisistratus. At this happy and brilliant period few were in need of

it--war and disaster, while they increased the number of the

destitute, widened the charity of the state.

XVI. Thus, then, that general system of payment which grew up under

Pericles, and produced many abuses under his successors, was, after

all, but the necessary result of the increased civilization and

opulence of the period. Nor can we wonder that the humbler or the

middle orders, who, from their common stock, lavished generosity upon

genius [296], and alone, of all contemporaneous states, gave relief to

want--who maintained the children of all who died in war--who awarded

remunerations for every service, should have deemed it no grasping

exaction to require for their own attendance on offices forced on them

by the constitution a compensation for the desertion of their private

affairs, little exceeding that which was conferred upon the very

paupers of the state. [297]

XVII. But there was another abuse which sprang out of the wealth of

the people, and that love for spectacles and exhibitions which was

natural to the lively Ionic imagination, and could not but increase as

leisure and refinement became boons extended to the bulk of the

population--an abuse trifling in itself--fatal in the precedent it

set. While the theatre was of wood, free admissions were found to

produce too vast a concourse for the stability of the building; and

once, indeed, the seats gave way. It was, therefore, long before the

present period, deemed advisable to limit the number of the audience

by a small payment of two obols for each seat; and this continued

after a stately edifice of stone replaced the wooden temple of the

earlier drama.

But as riches flowed into the treasury, and as the drama became more

and more the most splendid and popular of the national exhibitions, it

seemed but just to return to the ancient mode of gratuitous

admissions. It was found, however, convenient, partly, perhaps, for

greater order and for the better allotment of the seats--partly, also,

for the payment of several expenses which fell not on the state, but

individuals--and partly, no doubt, to preserve the distinctions

between the citizens and the strangers, to maintain the prices, but to

allow to those whose names were enrolled in the book of the citizens

the admittance money from the public treasury. This fund was called

the THEORICON. But the example once set, Theorica were extended to

other festivals besides those of the drama [298], and finally, under

the plausible and popular pretext of admitting the poorer classes to

those national or religious festivals, from which, as forming the bulk

of the nation, it was against the theory of the constitution to

exclude them, paved the way to lavish distributions of the public

money, which at once tended to exhaust the wealth of the state, and to

render effeminate and frivolous the spirit of the people. But these

abuses were not yet visible: on the contrary, under Pericles, the

results of the Theoricon were highly favourable to the manners and

genius of the people. Art was thus rendered the universal right, and

while refinement of taste became diffused, the patriotism of the

citizens was increased by the consciousness that they were the common

and legitimate arbiters of all which augmented the splendour and

renown of Athens.

Thus, in fact, the after evils that resulted from the more popular

part of the internal policy of Pericles, it was impossible to foresee;

they originated not in a single statement, but in the very nature of

civilization. And as in despotisms, a coarse and sensual luxury, once

established, rots away the vigour and manhood of a conquering people,

so in this intellectual republic it was the luxury of the intellect

which gradually enervated the great spirit of the victor race of

Marathon and Salamis, and called up generations of eloquent talkers

and philosophical dreamers from the earlier age of active freemen,

restless adventurers, and hardy warriors. The spirit of poetry, or

the pampered indulgence of certain faculties to the prejudice of

others, produced in a whole people what it never fails to produce in

the individual: it unfitted them just as they grew up into a manhood

exposed to severer struggles than their youth had undergone--for the

stern and practical demands of life; and suffered the love of the

beautiful to subjugate or soften away the common knowledge of the

useful. Genius itself became a disease, and poetry assisted towards

the euthanasia of the Athenians.

XVIII. As all the measures of Pericles were directed towards

consolidating the Athenian empire, so under his administration was not

omitted the politic expedient of colonization. Of late years, states

having become confirmed and tribes settled, the Grecian migrations

were far less frequent than of old; and one principal cause of

colonization, in the violent feud of parties, and the expulsion of a

considerable number of citizens, arose from the disasters of infant

communities, and was no longer in force under the free but strong

government of Athens. As with the liberties fell the commerce of

Miletus and Ionia, so also another principal source of the old

colonization became comparatively languid and inert. But now, under

the name of Cleruchi [299], a new description of colonists arose--

colonists by whom the mother country not only draughted off a

redundant population, or rid herself of restless adventurers, but

struck the roots of her empire in the various places that came under

her control. In the classic as in the feudal age, conquest gave the

right to the lands of the conquered country. Thus had arisen, and

thus still existed, upon the plundered lands of Laconia, the

commonwealth of Sparta--thus were maintained the wealthy and luxurious

nobles of Thessaly--and thus, in fine, were created all the ancient

Dorian oligarchies. After the return of the Heraclidae, this mode of

consummating conquest fell into disuse, not from any moral conviction

of its injustice, but because the wars between the various states

rarely terminated in victories so complete as to permit the seizure of

the land and the subjugation of the inhabitants. And it must be ever

remembered, that the old Grecian tribes made war to procure a

settlement, and not to increase dominion. The smallness of their

population rendered human life too valuable to risk its waste in the

expeditions that characterized the ambition of the leaders of oriental

hordes. But previous to the Persian wars, the fertile meadows of

Euboea presented to the Athenians a temptation it could scarcely be

expected that victorious neighbours would have the abstinence to

forego; and we have seen that they bestowed the lands of the

Hippobotae on Athenian settlers. These colonists evacuated their

possessions during the Persian war: the Hippobotae returned, and seem

to have held quiet, but probably tributary, possession of their

ancient estates, until after the recent retreat of the Peloponnesians.

Pericles defeated and displaced them; their lands fell once more to

Athenian colonists; and the north of Euboea was protected and

garrisoned by the erection of Oreus, a new town that supplanted the

old Histiaea. Territories in Scyros, Lemnos, and Imbros had been also

bestowed on Athenian settlers during the earlier successes of the

Athenian arms--and the precedent thus set, examples became more

numerous, under the profound and systematic policy of Pericles. This

mode of colonization, besides the ordinary advantages of all

colonization, proffered two peculiar to itself. In the first place,

it supplied the deficiency of land, which was one of the main

inconveniences of Attica, and rewarded the meritorious or appeased the

avaricious citizens, with estates which it did not impoverish the

mother country to grant. 2dly. It secured the conquests of the state

by planting garrisons which it cost little to maintain [300]. Thus

were despatched by Pericles a thousand men to the valuable possessions

in the Chersonese, two hundred and fifty to Andros, five hundred to

Naxos, a thousand to Thrace. At another period, the date of which is

uncertain, but probably shortly subsequent to the truce with the

Peloponnesians, a large fleet, commanded by Pericles, swept the

Euxine, in order to awe and impress the various states and nations

along the adjacent coasts, whether Greek or barbarian, with the

display of the Athenian power; and the city of Sinope, being at that

time divided with contentions for and against its tyrant Timesilaus,

the republican party applied to the head of the Greek democracies for

aid. Lamachus, a warrior to whose gallant name, afterward

distinguished in the Peloponnesian war, Aristophanes has accorded the

equal honour of his ridicule and his praise, was intrusted with

thirteen galleys and a competent force for the expulsion of the tyrant

and his adherents. The object effected, the new government of Sinope

rewarded six hundred Athenians with the freedom of the city and the

estates of the defeated faction.

While thus Athens fixed her footing on remoter lands, gradually her

grasp extended over the more near and necessary demesnes of Euboea,

until the lands of more than two thirds of that island were in the

possession of Athenians [301]. At a later period, new opportunities

gave rise to new cleruchiae. [302]

XIX. Besides these cleruchiae, in the second year of the supreme

administration of Pericles a colony, properly so called, was

established in Western Italy--interesting alike from the great names

of its early adventurers, the beauty of its site, and from the

circumstance of its being, besides that at Amphipolis, the only pure

and legitimate colony [303], in contradistinction to the cleruchiae,

founded by Athens, since her ancient migrations to Ionia and the

Cyclades. Two centuries before, some Achaeans, mingled with

Troezenians, had established, in the fertile garden of Magna Graecia,

the state of Sybaris. Placed between two rivers, the Crathis and the

Sybaris--possessing extraordinary advantages of site and climate, this

celebrated colony rose with unparalleled rapidity to eminence in war

and luxury in peace. So great were its population and resources, that

it is said by Diodorus to have brought at one time three hundred

thousand men into the field--an army which doubled that which all

Greece could assemble at Plataea! The exaggeration is evident; but it

still attests the belief of a populousness and power which must have

rested upon no fabulous foundation. The state of Sybaris had

prospered for a time by the adoption of a principle which is ever apt

to force civilization to premature development, and not unfrequently

to end in the destruction of national character and internal

stability--viz., it opened its arms to strangers of every tribe and

class. Thronged by mercantile adventurers, its trade, like that of

Agrigentum, doubtless derived its sources from the oil and wine which

it poured into the harbours of Africa and Gaul. As with individuals,

so with states, wealth easily obtained is prodigally spent, and the

effeminate and voluptuous ostentation of Sybaris passed into a proverb

more enduring than her prosperity. Her greatness, acquired by a

tempered and active democracy, received a mortal blow by the

usurpation of a tyrant named Telys, who, in 510 B. C., expelled five

hundred of the principal citizens. Croton received the exiles, a war

broke out, and in the same year, or shortly afterward, the

Crotoniates, under Milo, defeated the Sybarites with prodigious

slaughter, and the city was abandoned to pillage, and left desolate

and ruined. Those who survived fled to Laos and Scidrus. Fifty-eight

years afterward, aided by some Thessalians, the exiled Sybarites again

sought possession of their former settlement, but were speedily

expelled by the Crotoniates. It was now that they applied to Sparta

and Athens for assistance. The former state had neither population to

spare, nor commerce to strengthen, nor ambition to gratify, and

rejected the overtures of the Sybarite envoys. But a different

success awaited the exiles at Athens. Their proposition, timed in a

period when it was acceptable to the Athenian policy (B. C. 443), was

enforced by Pericles. Adventurers from all parts of Greece, but

invited especially from the Peloponnesus, swelled the miscellaneous

band: eminent among the rest were Lysias, afterward so celebrated as a

rhetorician [304], and Herodotus, the historian.

As in the political code of Greece the religious character of the

people made a prevailing principle, so in colonization the deity of

the parent state transplanted his worship with his votaries, and the

relation between the new and the old country was expressed and

perpetuated by the touching symbol of taking fire from the Prytaneum

of the native city. A renowned diviner, named Lampon [305], whose

sacred pretensions did not preserve him from the ridicule of the comic

poets [306], accompanied the emigrants (B. C. 440), and an oracle

dictated the site of the new colony near the ancient city, and by the

fountain of Thurium. The Sybarites, with the common vanity of men

whose ancestors have been greater than themselves, increased their

pretensions in proportion as they lost their power; they affected

superiority over their companions, by whose swords alone they again

existed as a people; claimed the exclusive monopoly of the principal

offices of government, and the first choice of lands; and were finally

cut off by the very allies whose aid they had sought, and whose

resentment they provoked. New adventurers from Greece replaced the

Sybarites, and the colonists of Thurium, divided into ten tribes

(four, the representatives of the united Ionians, Euboeans, Islanders,

and Athenians; three of the Peloponnesians; and three of the settlers

from Northern Greece)--retained peaceable possession of their

delightful territory, and harmonized their motley numbers by the

adoption of the enlightened laws and tranquil institutions of

Charondas. Such was the home of Herodotus, the historian.

CHAPTER III.

Revision of the Census.--Samian War.--Sketch of the Rise and Progress

of the Athenian Comedy to the Time of Aristophanes.

I. In proportion as it had become matter of honourable pride and

lucrative advantage to be a citizen of Athens, it was natural that the

laws defining and limiting the freedom of the city should increase in

strictness. Even before the time of Themistocles, those only were

considered legitimate [307] who, on either side, derived parentage

from Athenian citizens. But though illegitimate, they were not

therefore deprived of the rights of citizenship; nor had the stain

upon his birth been a serious obstacle to the career of Themistocles

himself. Under Pericles, the law became more severe, and a decree was

passed (apparently in the earlier period of his rising power), which

excluded from the freedom of the city those whose parents were not

both Athenian. In the very year in which he attained the supreme

administration of affairs, occasion for enforcing the law occurred:

Psammetichus, the pretender to the Egyptian throne, sent a present of

corn to the Athenian people (B. C. 444); the claimants for a share in

the gift underwent the ordeal of scrutiny as to their titles to

citizenship, and no less than five thousand persons were convicted of

having fraudulently foisted themselves into rights which were now

tantamount to property; they were disfranchised [308]; and the whole

list of the free citizens was reduced to little more than fourteen

thousand. [309]