The steps by which he rose to the commanding position which he occupied in later life cannot be traced with certainty. According to Plutarch, Pericles, whose fortune did not allow him to imitate the profuse hospitality by which Cimon endeared himself to the people, sought to outbid him by a lavish distribution of the public moneys among the poorer classes; this device was suggested to him by Damonides, says Plutarch on the authority of Aristotle. We may doubt the motive alleged by Plutarch, but we cannot doubt the fact that Pericles did extend, if not originate, the practice of distributing large sums among the citizens either as gratuities or as payment for services rendered,—a practice which afterwards attained most mischievous proportions. According to Plato {Gorgias, 515 E), it was a common saying that Pericles, by the system of payments which he introduced, had corrupted the Athenians, rendering them idle, cowardly, talkative, and avaricious. It was Pericles who introduced the payment of jurymen, and, as there were 6000 of them told off annually for duty, of whom a great part sat daily, the disbursement from the treasury was great, while the poor and idle were encouraged to live at the public expense. But the payment for attendance on the public assembly or parliament (of which all citizens of mature age were members), though probably suggested by the payment of the jurymen, was not introduced by Pericles, and indeed does not seem to have existed during his lifetime. It was he who instituted the payment of the citizens for military service, —a measure but for which the Athenians would probably not have prolonged the Peloponnesian War as they did, and in particular would not have been so ready to embark on the fatal Sicilian expedition. There was more justification, perhaps, for the practice, originated by Pericles, of supplying the poorer citizens from the public treasury with the price of admission to the theatre. For in an age when the study of the poets formed a chief element of education, and when the great dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were being put on the stage in all their freshness, such a measure may almost be regarded as a state provision for the education of the citizens. It was part of the policy of Pericles at once to educate and delight the people by numerous and splendid festivals, processions, and shows. But the good was mixed with seeds of evil, which took root and spread, till, in the days of Demosthenes, the money which should have been spent in fighting the enemies of Athens was squandered in spectacles and pageants. The Spectacular Fund or Theori-kon has been called the cancer of Athens. Vast sums were further spent by Pericles in adorning the city with those buildings which even in their ruins are the wonder of the world. Amongst these were the Parthenon, or Temple of the Virgin (Athene), and the Erechtheum, both on the Acropolis, the former completed iu 438, the latter left unfinished at Pericles’s death; the magnificent Propylaea or vestibule to the Acropolis, built 437-432; and the Odeum or music-hall, on the south-eastern slope of the Acropolis, completed before 444. The musical contests instituted by Pericles, and for which he himself laid down the rules and acted as judge, took place in the Odeum. Many artists and architects were entrusted with the execution of these great works, but under the direction of the master-mind of Phidias, sculptor, architect, painter,— the Michelangelo of antiquity. But Pericles fortified as well as beautified Athens. It had been the policy of Themistocles to make her primarily a naval and commercial power, and to do so he strengthened the marine, and gave to the city as far as possible the advantages of an insular situation by means of fortifications, which rendered both it and its port (the Piraeus) impregnable on the land side. By thus basing the Athenian state on commerce instead of, like Solon, on agriculture, he at the same time transferred the political predominance to the democratic or progressive party, which is as naturally recruited from a commercial as a conservative or aristocratic party is from an agricultural population. This policy was fully accepted and carried out by Pericles. It was in his time and probably by his advice that the Long Walls were built, which, connecting Athens with Piraeus, converted the capital and its seaport into one vast fortress. Further, in order to train the Athenians in seamanship, he kept a fleet of sixty ships at sea eight months out of every year. The expenses entailed by these great schemes were chiefly defrayed by the annual tribute, which the confederates of Athens originally furnished for the purpose of waging war against Persia, but which Athens, as head of the league, subsequently applied to her own purposes. If, as seems probable, the transference of the treasury of the league from Delos to Athens, which sealed the conversion of the Athenian headship into an empire, took place between 460 and 454, the step was probably suggested or supported by Pericles, and at all events he managed the fund after its transference. But, though the diversion of the fund from its original purpose probably did not begin with Pericles, yet, once established, he maintained it unwaveringly. The Athenians, he held, fulfilled the trust committed to them by defending their allies against all comers, and the tribute (increased during his administration from 460 to 600 talents annually) was their wages, which it was their right and privilege to expend in works which by employing labour and stimulating commerce were a present benefit, and by their beauty would be “a joy for ever.” That Athens ruled by force, that her empire was in fact a tyranny, he fully admitted, but he justified that tyranny by the high and glorious ends which it subserved.

The rise of Pericles to power, though it cannot be followed step by step, has an obvious and sufficient explanation in his combined wisdom and eloquence. Plato traces his eloquence largely to the influence of Anaxagoras; intercourse with that philosopher (he says) filled the mind of Pericles with lofty speculations and a true conception of the nature of intelligence, and hence his oratory possessed the intellectual grandeur and artistic finish characteristic of the highest eloquence (Phaedrus, 270 A). The range and compass of his rhetoric were wonderful, extending from the most winning persuasion to the most overwhelming denunciation. The comic poets of the day, in general very unfriendly to him, speak with admiration of his oratory: “greatest of Grecian tongues,” says Cratinus; “persuasion sat on his lips, such was his charm,” and “he alone of the orators left his sting in his hearers,” says Eupolis; “he lightened, he thundered,” says Aristophanes. His speeches were prepared with conscientious care; before rising to speak he used to pray that no inappropriate word might fall from his lips. He left no written speeches, but the few sayings of his which have come down to us reveal a passionate imagination such as breathes in the fragments of Sappho. Thus, in speaking of those who had died in war, he said that the youth had perished from the city like the spring from the year. He called the hostile island of Aegina “the eye-sore of the Piraeus,” and declared that he saw Avar “lowering from Peloponnesus.” Three of his speeches have been reported by Thucydides, who may have heard them, but, though their substance may be correctly recorded, in passing through the medium of the historian’s dispassionate mind they have been shorn of the orator’s imaginative glow, and in their cold iron logic are hardly to be distinguished from the other speeches in Thucydides. An exception to this is the speech which Thucydides reports as having been delivered by Pericles over the slain in the first year of the Peloponnesian War. This speech stands quite apart from the others; and as well in particular touches (e.g., the saying that “the grave of great men is the world” ) as in its whole tenor we catch the ring of a great orator, such as Thucydides with all his genius was not. It is probably a fairly close report of the speech actually delivered by Pericles.

The first public appearance of Pericles of which we have record probably fell about 463. When Cimon, on his return from the expedition to Thasos, was tried on the utterly improbable charge of having been bribed by the Macedonian king to betray the interests of Athens, Pericles was appointed by the people to assist in conducting the prosecution; but, more perhaps from a conviction of the innocence of the accused than, as was said, in compliance with the entreaties of Cimon’s sister Elpinice, he did not press the charge, and Cimon was acquitted. Not long afterwards Pericles struck a blow at the conservative party by attacking the Areopagus, a council composed of life-members who had worthily discharged the duties of archon. The nature of the functions of the Areopagus at this period is but little known; it seems to have had a general supervision over the magistrates, the popular assembly, and the citizens, and to have exercised this supervision in an eminently conservative spirit. It sat also as a court for the trial of certain crimes, especially murder. Pericles seems to have deprived it of nearly all its functions, except its jurisdiction in cases of murder. The poet Aeschylus composed his Euménides in vindication of the ancient privileges of the Areopagus. Though Pericles was the real author of the attack on the Areopagus, the measure was nominally carried by Ephialtes. It was, indeed, part of Pericles’s policy to keep in the background, and to act as far as possible through agents, reserving himself for great occasions. Ephialtes, a friend of Pericles, and a patriot of inflexible integrity, paid dearly for the distinction; he fell by the hand of an assassin employed by the oligarchical party,—an event the more striking from the rarity of political assassinations in Greek history. The popular party seems to have immediately followed up its victory over the Areopagus by procuring the ostracism of Cimon, which strengthened the hands of Pericles by removing his most influential opponent (461). Pericles took part in the battle of Tanagra (457) and bore himself with desperate bravery. After the battle Cimon was recalled from banishment, and it was Pericles who proposed and carried the decree for his recall. In 454 Pericles led an Athenian squadron from the port of Pegae on the Corinthian Gulf, landed at Sicyon, and defeated the inhabitants who ventured to oppose him; then, taking with him a body of Achaeans, he crossed to Acarnania, and besieged the town of Oeniadae, but had to return home without capturing it. Not long afterwards Pericles conducted a successful expedition to the Thracian Chersonese, where he not only strengthened the Greek cities by the addition of 1000 Athenian colonists, but also protected them against the incursions of the barbarians by fortifying the isthmus from sea to sea. This was only one of Pericles’s many measures for extending and strengthening the naval empire of Athens. Colonies were established by him at various times in Naxos, Andros, Oreus in Eubaea (in 446), Brea in Macedonia (about 443), and Aegina (in 431). They served the double purpose of establishing the Athenian power in distant parts and of relieving the pressure of population at Athens by providing the poorer citizens with lands. Somewhat different were the famous colonies established under Pericles’s influence at Thurii in Italy, on the site of the ancient Sybaris (in 443), and at Amphipolis on the Strymon (in 437), for, though planted under the conduct of Athens, they were not exclusively Athenian colonies, other Greeks being allowed, and even invited, to take part in them. This was especially true of Thurii, which was in a manner a national Greek colony, and never stood in a relation of subjection to Athens. On one occasion (some time apparently between 454 and 449)

Pericles sailed at the head of a splendid armament to the Black Sea, where he helped and encouraged the Greek cities and overawed the barbarians. At Sinope he left a force of ships and men under the gallant Lamachus, to co-operate with the inhabitants against the tyrant Timesi-leus, and on the expulsion of the tyrant and his party he carried a decree for the despatch of 600 Athenian colonists to Sinope, to occupy the lands vacated by the exiles. But, with the sober wisdom which characterized him, Pericles never allowed his plans to exceed the bounds of the possible; he was no political dreamer like Alcibiades, to be dazzled with the vision of a universal Athenian empire in Greece, Italy, and Africa, such as floated before the minds of many in that and the following generations. The disastrous expedition which the Athenians sent to Egypt, to support the rebel Inarus against Persia (460-455), received no countenance from Pericles.

When Cimon died in 449 the aristocratical party sought to counterbalance the power of Pericles by putting forward Thucydides, son of Melesias, as the new head of the party. He seems to have been an honest patriot, but, as the event proved, he was no match for Pericles. The Sacred War in 448 showed once more that Pericles knew how to defend the interests of Athens. The Phocians, under the protection of Athens, had wrested the control of the Delphic oracle from their enemies the Delphians. The latter were friendly to Sparta, and accordingly the Spartans marched into Phocis and restored the oracle to the Delphians. When they had departed, Pericles, at the head of an Athenian force, placed the oracle once more in the hands of the Phocians. As the seat of the great oracle, Delphi was to ancient Greece much what Rome was to mediaeval Europe, and the friendship of the god, or of his priests, was no small political advantage. When the Athenians despatched a small force under Tolmides to crush a rising in Baeotia, they did so in spite of the warnings of Pericles. These warnings were soon justified by the unfortunate battle of Coronea (447), which deprived Athens at a blow of the continental dominion she had acquired a few years before by the battle of Oenophyta (456). The island of Eubaea now revolted from Athens, and hardly had Pericles crossed over with an army to reduce it when word came that the Megarians had massacred the Athenian garrison, and, in league with Corinth, Sicyon, and Epidaurus, were up in arms, while a Peloponnesian army under King Plistoanax was on the point of invading Attica. Pericles recrossed in haste to Attica. The Peloponnesians returned home, having advanced no farther than Eleusis and Thria. It was said that Pericles had bribed Cleandridas; certain it is that both Cleandridas and Plistoanax were charged at Sparta with having misconducted the expedition and were found guilty. Having saved Attica, Pericles returned to Eubaea, reduced it to subjection, expelled the Histiaeans, and settled the Athenian colony of Oreus (446) on their lands. The thirty years’ peace, concluded soon afterwards (445) with Sparta, was probably in large measure the work of Pericles. The Athenians had evacuated Baeotia immediately after the battle of Coronea, and by the terms of the peace they now renounced their other continental possessions,—Achaea, Traezen, Nisaea, and Pegae. The peace left Pericles at liberty to develop his schemes for promoting the internal welfare of Athens, and for making it the centre of the intellectual and artistic life of Greece. But first he had to settle accounts with his political rival Thucydides; the struggle was soon decided by the ostracism of the latter in 444. Thenceforward to the end of his life Pericles guided the destinies of Athens alone; in the words of the historian Thucydides, the government was in name a democracy, but in fact it was the rule of the first citizen. The unparalleled ascendency which he wielded so long over the fickle people is one of the best proofs of his extraordinary genius. He owed it entirely to his personal character, and he used it for the wisest and purest purposes. He was neither a vulgar demagogue to truckle to the passions and caprices of the mob, nor a vulgar despot to cow it by a hireling soldiery; he was a citizen among citizens, who obeyed him because they trusted him, because they knew that in his hands the honour and interests of Athens were safe. The period during which he ruled Athens was the happiest and greatest in her history, as it was one of the greatest ages of the world. Other ages have had their bright particular stars; the age of Pericles is the Milky Way of great men. In his lifetime there lived and worked at Athens the poets Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Cratinus, Crates, the philosophers Anaxagoras, Zeno, Protagoras, Socrates, the astronomer Meton, the painter Polygnotus, and the sculptors Myron and Phidias. Contemporary with these, though not resident at Athens, were Herodotus, the father of history; Hippocrates, the father of medicine; Pindar, “the Theban eagle”; the sculptor Polyclitus; and the philosophers Empedocles and Democritus, the latter joint author with...