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mistocles seated at his hearth, holding the young prince whom Phthia had placed in his hands. This, among the Molossians, was the most solemn form of supplication, more powerful than the olive branch among the Greeks. With this advantage, Themistocles addressed himself to the generosity of Admetus, disclosed the urgency of the danger that threatened his life, and argued the meanness of exacting an extreme revenge for a slight wrong from a fallen adversary. The king was touched or roused: he raised the suppliant with an assurance of protection, which he fulfilled, when the Athenian and Lacedæmonian commissioners dogged their prey to his house, by refusing to surrender his guest.

Plutarch, apparently following a writer of slight authority, says that Themistocles was here joined by his wife and children. The temper of the Athenians is indicated by the fact that the person to whom he was indebted for the assistance by which his family was restored to him was put to death for this friendly office at the prosecution of Cimon. If his family was already with him, he had the less inducement to quit the territories of Admetus. But it would seem that he never intended to fix his abode among the Molossians, and he had probably very early conceived the design of seeking his fortune at the court of Persia. He is said to have consulted the oracle of Dodona, perhaps less for a direction than for a pretext: the answer seemed to point to the Great King, and Admetus, practising the hospitality of the heroic ages, supplied his guest with the means of crossing over to the coast of the Ægean. At the Macedonian port of Pydna he found a merchant ship bound for Ionia, and embarked in it. A storm carried the vessel to the coast of Naxos, which happened at this juncture to be besieged by an Athenian fleet and army. To avoid the danger of an accidental discovery, Themistocles made himself known to the master of the ship, and worked upon his hopes by large promises, and upon his fears by threatening to denounce him as having knowingly sheltered an outlaw. The man consented to keep his secret, and as he desired, while detained by the weather on the coast of Naxos, prevented all the crew from going ashore. At length he arrived safely at Ephesus, where, not long afterward, he received that part of his property which his friends were able to withdraw from the grasp of the state at Athens, and that which he had left at Argos: perhaps it was here, also, that his family met him.

When Themistocles arrived in Asia, Xerxes was still on the throne, but not many months after he was assassinated by two of the great officers of his court, Artabanus, and the eunuch Spamitres. The conspirators charged Darius, his eldest son, with the murder, and persuaded Artaxerxes, the younger, instantly to avenge the imputed parricide by the execution of his brother. After this, Artabanus, who was the father of seven sons in the prime of life, waited

*

Ctesias and Justin, iii., 1, know only of two sons of

Xerxes. Diodorus (xi, 69) mentions a third, Hystases,

who was satrap of Bactria, and absent at the time of his father's murder. Ctesias speaks of an Artabanus who was satrap of Bactria at the time when the conspiracy against Artaxerxes was defeated. Did the assassin Artabanus pro

cure the murder of Hystaspes?

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only till matters should oe ripe for removing the young king, and establishing a new dynasty. He was afterward betrayed by a Persian nobleman to whom he revealed his design, and perished in the attempt to murder Artaxerxes. It appears to have been in the interval between the death of Xerxes and this event, while the traitor was at the height of his power, that Themistocles arrived at the Persian court. We do not venture to relate the adventures of his journey from the coast to the capital, with which later writers filled up the simple narrative of Thucydides. He found a Persian friend, who accompanied him, and whose presence was undoubtedly sufficient to protect him without the contrivance, by which he is said to have eluded the dangers of the road, of screening himself from view in a covered litter, and giving out that it contained a lady designed for the royal harem. This was probably a fiction of the same authors who related that a price of two hundred talents had been set upon his head by the Persian king, and that it was with difficulty he escaped the attempts aimed at his life for the reward. As little may we paint his first audience at court, which Plutarch has worked up into a romantic and theatrical scene, though the silence of Thucydides does not prove that Artaxerxes did not immediately gratify his curiosity or his pride with the sight of the extraordinary man who had sought refuge from the people he had saved in the land of the enemy whom he had so deeply humbled. It was, however, by a letter, presented, perhaps, by Artabanus through the mediation of his Persian friend, that Themistocles first made himself known to Artaxerxes in it he acknowledged the evils he had inflicted on the royal house in the defence of his country, but claimed the merit of having sent the timely warning by which Xerxes was enabled to effect his retreat from Salamis in safety, and of ha▼ing diverted the Greeks from the design of intercepting it. He ventured to add, that his persecution and exile were owing to his zeal for the interest of the king of Persia, and that he had the power of proving his attachment by still greater services; but he desired that a year might be allowed him to acquire the means of disclosing his plans in person. was granted, and he assiduously applied himself to study the language and manners of the country, with which he became sufficiently familiar to conciliate the favour of Artaxerxes by his conversation and address, no less than by the promises which he held out, and the prudence of which he gave proofs. If we may believe Plutarch, he even excited the jealousy of the Persian courtiers by the superior success with which he cultivated their arts: he was continually by the king's side at the chase and in the palace, and was admitted to the presence of the king's mother, who honoured him with especial marks of condescension: it seems that he thought it prudent to soothe the religious prejudices of the people by listening to the doctrines of the priests. He was at length sent wait for an opportunity of striking the blow by down to the maritime provinces, perhaps to which he was to raise the power of Persia upon the ruin of his country. In the mean while, a pension was conferred on him in the Oriental

His request

form; three flourishing towns were assigned for his maintenance, of which Magnesia was to provide him with bread, Myus with viands, and Lampsacus with the growth of her celebrated vineyards. He fixed his residence at Magnesia, in the vale of the Mæander, where the royal grant invested him with a kind of princely rank. There death overtook him, hastened, as it was commonly supposed, by his consciousness of being unable to perform the promises he had made to the king. Thucydides, however, evidently did not believe the story that he put an end to his own life by poison. That fear of disappointing the Persian king should have urged him to such an act is, indeed, scarcely credible. Yet we can easily conceive that the man who had been kept awake by the trophies of Miltiades must have felt some bitter pangs when he heard of the rising glory of Cimon. Though his character was not so strong as his mind, it was great enough to be above the wretched satisfaction implied in one of Plutarch's anecdotes, that, amid the splendour of his luxurious table, he one day exclaimed, "How much we should have lost, my children, if we had not been ruined." It must have been with a different feeling that he desired his bones to be privately conveyed to Attica, though the uncertainty which hangs over so many actions of his life extends to the fate of his remains. A splendid monument was raised to him in the public place at Magnesia; but a tomb was also pointed out by the seaside within the port of Piræus, which was generally believed to contain his bones. His descendants continued to enjoy some peculiar privileges at Magnesia in the time of Plutarch; but neither they nor his posterity at Athens ever revived the lustre of his name

FROM

CHAPTER XVII.

THE COMMENCEMENT OF THE ATHENIAN MARITIME ASCENDENCY TO THE THIRTY YEARS' TRUCE BETWEEN ATHENS AND SPARTA.

THOUGH the issue of the Persian invasion had not broken, nor even dangerously shaken the power of Persia, it had relieved the European Greeks and the islanders of the Egean from all apprehension of another attack on their freedom from the same quarter. Most of the states now united with Athens would have been satisfied with this security, and had no wish to act on the offensive against the vanquished enemy. But Athens saw a vast field open to her ambition in the East; the situation of the Asiatic Greeks afforded a fair pretext for the continuance of hostilities, and many of her leading statesmen were desirous of giving this direction to the restless spirit of their countrymen. Foremost among these was Cimon, son of Miltiades. In his youth he gave little promise of the abilities or of the character which he afterward displayed, and seemed to have inherited the limited capacity of his grandfather, who had incurred a nickname expressive of extreme simplicity, rather than his father's genius. His propensity to pleasure was thought to be so sting as to divert his attention from

• Ο Κοάλεμος.

business, and drew on him the satire of the comic poets; and in his early youth he is said to have neglected the ordinary accomplishments of an Athenian gentlemen. If, however, this was the case, he would seem, from an anecdote reported by Plutarch on the authority of a contemporary, to have supplied this deficiency at a later period; but he was not gifted with the promptness and volubility which commonly distinguished his countrymen, and never shone as an orator. It was probably his consciousness of this defect that determined him to devote himself to a career which kept him mostly away from Athens, and to abandon the popular assembly to his rivals. At his father's death, he seems to have succeeded to a very scanty fortune; and he would, perhaps, have found it difficult to raise the penalty of fifty talents due to the treasury if Callias, one of the wealthiest men of Athens, struck by the charms of his sister Elpinice, a woman more remarkable for her beauty and talents than for the propriety of her conduct, had not undertaken to discharge the penalty as the price of her hand. Cimon, however, had attracted notice, and gained reputation by the spirit which he displayed on the occasion of leaving the city on the approach of the barbarians, when he was the foremost to hang up a bridle in the Acropolis, as a sign that he placed all his hopes in the fleet, and by the valour with which he fought at Salamis; and many friendly voices encouraged him to tread in his father's footsteps. Aristides, in particular, saw in him a capacity and disposition that fitted him for a coadjutor to himself, and an antagonist to Themistocles, and exerted his influence in his favour; and the readiness with which the allied Greeks, when disgusted by the arrogance of Pausanias, united themselves with Athens was owed, in a great measure, to Cimon's mild temper, and to his frank and gentle manners. Yet we should be inclined to question the genuineness of his generosity and good-nature if we believed what was related by an author cited by Plutarch: that after the flight of Themistocles, Cimon procured a capital sentence against Epicrates for having aided the wife and children of the exile in escaping from Athens, and joining him in the dominions of Admetus.

The popularity of Themistocles was already declining, while Cimon, by a series of successful enterprises, was rapidly rising in public favour and esteem. The first of these triumphs, achieved in the third year after the battle of Platæa (B.C. 476), was the conquest of Eion on the Strymon, which was held by a Persian garrison, among whom were some men of high rank, and even related to the king. They were on friendly terms with the neighbouring Thracians, and, probably with their aid, gave great annoyance to the adjacent Greek towns. mon, after defeating and shutting them up, pressed the place so closely, that Boges, the Persian governor, unable to hold out, and disdaining to surrender, set fire to the town, and

* Plut., Cim., 9.

Ci

tocles who was the author of Cimon's fortune, by recomAccording to Diodorus (Mai, ii., p. 39), it was Themismending him as a son-in-law to a rich Athenian, who had consulted him on the choice of a husband for his daughter,

and whom he advised to look, not for wealth which wanted a man, but for a man who wanted wealth.

be felt irksome, and that Athens would only be able to preserve the advantages which she derived from her station in the confederacy by taking a new ground, and exacting by force what was no longer cheerfully given. Naxos was conquered after a hard siege, and, instead of an ally, became a subject of Athens; the first member of the confederacy which experienced from its protectors the worst evil which it had to fear from the Persians; but its example did not induce those who were exposed to the same danger either to unite in the defence of their liberty or to abstain from provoking a hike at

perished in the flames, which consumed his friends, family, and treasures. This victory was, on many accounts, peculiarly agreeable to the Athenians, who by it were relieved of a troublesome enemy, and gained a very important position, which not only provided immediately for the wants of many, but was the first step to the establishment of one of their most valuable colonies. They conferred the freedom of their city on Meno the Pharsalian,* who on this occasion gave them twelve talents, and himself came to their aid with 300 of his Penests, mounted at his own charge. The reward they bestowed on the conqueror was consider-tack. One after another they unseasonably reed, at the time, as an extraordinary mark of fa- fused compliance with the requisitions of the vour, and was celebrated in after ages, when leading state, and were punished with the loss much slighter services were far more richly of their independence. Many were imprudent recompensed, as a proof of the cheapness of the enough to seek ease from their burdens by sacancient heroism. It consisted in three stone rificing their strength. They offered to combusts of Hermes, each inscribed with two or mute their personal services in the endless exthree distichs in honour of the exploit, but con- peditions to which they were summoned for taining neither the name of the general, nor any stated payments of money. Cimon perceived allusion to his particular merit. In the course the advantage which Athens would reap from of the same year Cimon effected another con- this arrangement, and accepted it whenever it quest, which had a value in the eyes of the peo- was proposed. Its effect was, that the states ple independent of the substantial advantages which adopted it, exempt from the necessity of it afforded them. The inhabitants of the Isle keeping up a naval force of their own, were ever of Scyros, a mixed race of Pelasgians and Dolo- after exposed, without any means of defence, pians, had become infamous for piracy, and had to the growing demands of Athenian rapacity, incurred the ban of the Amphictyons by a breach and when the wants of their sovereign were of hospitality in plundering some Thessalian multiplied, found themselves in addition submerchants. Cimon seized this specious pre-jected to the very services from which they had text for exterminating the people, and dividing their land among Attic colonists. He was afterward fortunate or skilful enough to discover the relics of Theseus, who, according to an ancient tradition, had been buried in Scyros.+ An oracle was procured, which directed the Athe-land force had been collected at the mouth of nians to recover the hero's remains, and to treat them with due honour. Perhaps Cimon and his party may have thought it seasonable, on political grounds, to reanimate the popular veneration for the founder of the ancient order of things. The bones were dug up, and carried with great pomp to Athens, where a temple, which became a perpetual asylum for the oppressed, was erected in honour of the hero who had so often exerted his prowess in protecting innocence and redressing wrong.

so dearly purchased a temporary relief.

In the year of the conquest of Naxos (B.C. 466), the same in which Themistocles took refuge in Asia, Cimon obtained his most memorable triumph over the Persians. A great sea and

the Eurymedon in Pamphylia; the fleet, according to Ephorus, who is most moderate in his numbers, amounted to 350, and the Persian commanders expected to be joined by 80 Phonician galleys from Cyprus. Cimon having strengthened his fleet by successive re-enforcements, as he slowly moved along the south coast of Asia Minor, till it amounted to 250 galleys, provoked the enemy to an engagement before the arrival of the Phoenicians, and having defeated them, and sunk or taken 200 ships, The next enterprises to which the Athenian sailed up the river to their camp, and landing arms were directed were important as the first his men, flushed with victory, completely routed step towards the establishment of a new sys- the Persian army, and carried away the rich tem in the relation between Athens and her al- booty which they left in their tents. Accordlies. The town of Carystus in Euboea, from what ing to the author whom Plutarch follows, he causes we are not informed, provoked the hos- still found time for another victory the same tility of the Athenians, and, though not support-day, and having sailed to meet the Phoenician ed by any other states in the island, made a long resistance before it was reduced to submission. Its revolt was, perhaps, considered as of too little importance to deserve more strenuous efforts for its suppression. But that of the rich and powerful island of Naxos, which followed, was of greater moment. It was an indication that the Athenian alliance began to

* Demosth., Aristocr., p. 687.

squadron, which had not heard of the defeat of their allies, fell in with it, and destroyed the whole.

Cimon's next enterprise was one in which he had a personal and hereditary interest. The Persians still kept possession of the Thracian Chersonesus, and were supported by some of the Thracian tribes of the mainland. Cimon sailed with a small force, and dislodged them, not only from the territory of the republic, but + According to Paus, i., 17, 6, the professed object of the from perhaps the most valuable part of his own first expedition was to avenge the murder of Theseus, though Lycomedes had been instigated by jealousy of the patrimony. It appears to have been soon after honours which his subjects paid to the hero. But the the power of the Athenians had been thus bones were not brought to Athens till six or seven years af- strengthened in this quarter-in the year fol ter the conquest of the island, in the archonship of Aphep-lowing the battles of the Eurymedon—that they sion, or Apsephion, B.C. 468. See Mr. Clinton, F. H., ., were again engaged in a contest with one of

p. 34.

their allies, who was able and disposed to make | lots, but by the free inhabitants of some of the a vigorous resistance. The Thasians were Laconian towns. The Spartans, though reducompelled to defend their gold mines on the ced to extreme weakness, were still masters of continent from the cupidity of Athens, which, the open country, and laid siege to Ithomé, but perhaps, claimed them as a conquest won from made very slow advances towards the reducthe Persians. The islanders were first defeat- tion of the place. In the mean while, the Thaed at sea by Cimon, and then closely besieged. sians, left to themselves, were compelled to caWhile the siege was in progress, the Athenians pitulate in the third year of the war, and after dissuffered a disastrous defeat in one of their most mantling their fortifications, surrendering their important possessions. They had sent a colony ships, ceding their continental territory and of ten thousand settlers, partly citizens and part- mines, paying a sum of money immediately, and ly allies, to establish themselves in a site on the stipulating to pay a certain tribute in future, Strymon, then called, from the various lines of were permitted to remain subjects of Athens. communication which branched from it, the Nine Ways, and occupied by the Edonian Thracians. These the colonists dislodged; but in an expedition which they made into the interior against the Edonian town of Drabescus they were attacked by the united forces of the Thracians, who viewed their settlement as a hostile invasion, and were cut off to a man.

As the siege of Ithomé lingered, the Spartans called upon their allies for aid; and, among the rest, they did not blush to implore it from the Athenians. This application gave rise to a very warm debate in the Athenian assembly, and was treated by the leaders of the opposite parties as an occasion of trying their strength. The feelings with which it was received can scarcely be clearly understood without taking a view of these parties and of their relative position; and a short digression on this subject will be necessary to place many events of the following history in their proper light.

Cimon was, beyond dispute, the ablest and most successful general of his day; and his victories had shed a lustre on the arms of Athens which almost dimmed the glories of Marathon and Salamis. But while he was gaining renown abroad, he had rivals at home who were endeavouring to supplant him in the affections of the people, and to establish a system of do

The Thasians, alarmed at the turn which the war had taken, began to look out for foreign assistance. The jealousy of Sparta towards Athens had been betrayed, as we have seen, immediately after their joint victory over the common enemy; and the events of the subsequent period were not fitted to allay it. The Thasians, therefore, sent an embassy to engage the Spartans to make a diversion in their favour by invading Attica. Their envoys were favourably received, and dismissed with a secret promise that their wishes should be fulfilled; and the Spartans were preparing to keep their word, but had not yet taken any step which could dis-mestic and foreign policy directly counter to his close their intention to the Athenians, when a views, and were preparing contests for him in calamity befell them by which they were forced which his military talents would be of little to renounce this design, and to struggle hard avail. While Themistocles and Aristides were for their own preservation. The whole of La- occupying the political stage, an extraordinary conia was shaken by an earthquake, which open- genius had been ripening in obscurity, and was ed great chasms in the ground, and rolled down only waiting for a favourable juncture to issue huge masses from the highest peaks of Tayge- from the shade into the broad day of public life. tus: Sparta itself became a heap of ruins, in Xanthippus, the conqueror of Mycale, had marwhich not more than five houses are said to ried Agariste, a descendant of the famous Clehave been left standing.+ More than twenty isthenes, and had left two sons, Ariphron and thousand persons were believed to have been Pericles. Of Ariphron little is known besides destroyed by the shock, and the flower of the his name; but Pericles, to an observing eye, Spartan youth was overwhelmed by the fall of gave early indications of a mind formed for great the building in which they were exercising things, and a will earnestly bent on them. In themselves at the time. It was chiefly the his youth he had not rested satisfied with the presence of mind displayed on this occasion by ordinary Greek education, but had applied himKing Archidamus that preserved the state from self, with an ardour which was not even abated a still more terrible disaster. Many of the He- by the lapse of years, nor stifled by his public lots assembled, and hastened to the city to take avocations, to intellectual pursuits, which were advantage of the defenceless condition in which then new at Athens, and confined to a very narthey hoped to surprise their masters. But Ar- row circle of inquisitive spirits. His birth and chidamus, foreseeing the danger, as soon as the fortune afforded him the means of familiar infirst consternation had subsided, while the sur-tercourse with all the men most eminent in evvivers were busied among the ruins, ordered an alarm to be sounded, as of an enemy's approach, and gathered all his people round him in arms. The Helots, finding an armed band ready to receive them, retreated and dispersed. But though this danger was thus averted, the safe-lessons of Damon, who was believed to have ty of Sparta was not yet secured. The Messenians seized the opportunity of rising against their hated lords, and fortified themselves in the ancient stronghold of their liberty, Ithomé. Their insurrection was the more formidable, as they were joined, not only by many of the He

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ery kind of knowledge and art, who were already beginning to resort to Athens as a common seat of learning. Thus, though Pythoclides taught him to touch the cithara, he sought the elements of a higher kind of music in the

contributed mainly to train him for his political career: himself no ordinary person; for he was held up by the comic poets to public jealousy as a secret favourer of tyranny, and was driven from Athens by the process of ostracism. But Pericles also entered with avidity into the abstrusest philosophical speculations, and even took pleasure in the arid subtleties of the Ele

atic school, or, at least, in the ingenuity and the dialectic art with which they were unfolded to him by Zeno. But his principal guide in such researches, and the man who appears to have exercised the most powerful and durable influence on his mind and character, was the philosopher Anaxagoras, with whom he was long united in intimate friendship. Not only his public and private deportment, and his habits of thought, but the tone and style of his eloquence, were believed to have been formed by his intercourse with Anaxagoras. It was commonly supposed that this effect was produced by the philosopher's physical speculations, which, elevating his disciple above the ignorant superstition of the vulgar, had imparted to him the serene condescension and dignified language of a superior being. But we should be loath to believe that it was the possession of such physical secrets as Anaxagoras was able to communicate that inspired Pericles with his lofty conceptions, or that he was intoxicated with the little taste of science which had weaned him from a few popular prejudices. We should rather ascribe so deep an impression to the distinguishing tenet of the Anaxagorean system, by which the philosopher himself was supposed to have acquired the title of Mind from his contemporaries. The doctrine of an ordering intelligence, distinct from the material universe, and ruling it with absolute sway, was striking, from its novelty, and peculiarly congenial to the character of Pericles. Such was the supremacy which Athens exercised over the multitude of her dependant states, and such the ascendency which he felt himself destined to obtain over the multitude at Athens.

subject of inexhaustible pleasantry for the comie poets of his day; but the old men who remembered Pisistratus were struck by the resemblance which they discovered between the tyrant and the young heir of the Alcmæonids, and not only in their features, but in the sweetness of voice and the volubility of utterance with which both expressed themselves. Still, after the ostracism of Themistocles and the death of Aristides, while Cimon was engaged in continual expeditions, Pericles began to present himself more and more to the public eye, and was soon the acknowledged chief of a powerful party, which openly aimed at counteracting Cimon's influence, and introducing opposite maxims into the public counsels.

To some of the ancients, indeed, it appeared that the course of policy adopted by Pericles was entirely determined by the spirit of emulation, which induced him to take a different ground from that which he found already occupied by Cimon; and that, as Cimon was at the head of the aristocratical party which had been represented by Aristides, he therefore placed himself in the front of that which had been led by Themistocles. The difference between these parties, after the revolution by which the ancestor of Pericles had undermined the power of the old aristocracy, was, for some time, very faintly marked, and we have seen that Aristides himself was the author of a very democratical measure, which threw the first offices of the state open to all classes of the citizens. The aristocracy had no hope of recovering what it had lost; but, as the commonalty grew more enterprising, it became also more intent on keeping all that it had retained, and on stopping all farther innovation at home. Abroad, too, though it was no longer a question whether Athens should continue to be a great maritime power, or should reduce her navy to the footing of the old naucraries, and though Cimon himself had actively pursued the policy of Themistocles, there was room for great difference of opinion as to the course which was to be fol

cal party wished, for their own sake at least, as much as for that of peace and justice, to preserve the balance of power as steady as possible in Greece, and directed the Athenian arms against the Persian empire with the greater energy, in the hope of diverting them from intestine warfare. The democratical party had other interests, and concurred only with that part of these views which tended towards enriching and aggrandizing the state.

It was, undoubtedly, not from the mere amusement of his leisure that Pericles had enriched his mind with so many rare acquirements. All of them were probably considered by him as instruments for the use of the statesman; and even those which seemed most remote from all practical purposes may have contributed to the cultivation of that natural eloquence to which he owed so much of his influ-lowed in her foreign relations. The aristocrati ence. He left no specimens of his oratory behind him, and we can only estimate it, like many other fruits of Greek genius, by the effect it produced. The few minute fragments preserved by Plutarch, which were recorded by earlier authors because they had sunk deep in the mind of his hearers, seem to indicate that he loved to concentrate his thoughts in a bold and vivid image, as when he called Ægina the eyesore of Piræus, and said that he descried war lowering from Peloponnesus. But though signally gifted and accomplished for political action, it was not without much hesitation and apprehension that he entered on a field where he saw ample room, indeed, for the display of his powers, but also many enemies and great dangers. The very superiority, of which he could not but be conscious, suggested a motive for alarm, as it might easily excite suspicion in the people of views adverse to their freedom; The contemporaries of Pisistratus seem to have discov and these fears were heightened by some cir-ered a striking likeness between his head and that of a stat cumstances, trifling in themselves, but capable some to have been sacrilegiously designed by the artist as ue of the god Dionysus, which was therefore supp sed by of awakening or confirming a popular prejudice. a portrait of the mortal, and was looked upon as a specimen His personal appearance was graceful and ma- of the tyrant's arrogance. (Athen., xu., p. 533.) Hence, jestic, notwithstanding a remarkable dispropor- about Aspasia, Hermippus, in one of his comedies, entitled probably not without a malicious allusion to the scandal tion in the length of his head, which became a Poricles King of the Satyrs. Plut., Per., 33.

It is as difficult wholly to clear Pericles from the charge of having been swayed by personal motives in the choice of his political system, as it would be to establish it. But even if it were certain that his decision was not the result of conviction, it might as fairly be attributed to a hereditary prepossession in favour of the principles for which his ancestors had contended, and Plut., Per., 3, 14.

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