Pericles. From a marble bust in the British Museum.
In accordance with the policy recommended by Pericles, and at his suggestion, the Athenians abandoned the whole of Attica to the ravages of the enemy. They removed into the city their families and household furniture, even to the wooden framework of their houses; their live stock was transported to Eubœa and the neighbouring islands. “Very grievous was this removal to them, because they had always been used, the greater part of them, to reside in the country.”[88] This preference of a country life the historian traces to the earliest times; the result no doubt of that superior security of life and property which induced the Athenians, at an earlier period than other Greeks, to desist from wearing arms as part of their usual dress. It was the more grievous, he adds, because after the Median war, in which all Attica was laid waste with fire and sword, their establishments had been newly restored; and, we may conjecture, with new comforts and elegances. Nor was the inconvenience confined to quitting the homes to which they had been long attached. The introduction of such a multitude within the walls of a single city led, of course, to serious inconvenience. Some few had town houses, or found a home with friends and relations; others set up the framework of their houses or constructed habitations as they could in the unoccupied spaces within the walls; and the poorest sheltered themselves in the towers of the walls, or in the temples, or wherever a place of refuge could be found. Even that space of ground which was called the Pelasgian,[89] of which an oracle had declared that it was “better uninhabited,” was not kept unoccupied by the superstition; “and the oracle,” says Thucydides, “seems to me to have turned out contrary to what was supposed, for the threatened evil came not by reason of the forbidden indwelling, but the necessity of the indwelling came through the war.”[90] Those evils, of which we have before spoken, arising from a large, indigent, and idle population, with little employment, except in state affairs, and little subsistence, except from the public treasury, must of course have been greatly increased by such an addition to the inhabitants of the city.
CHAPTER XII.
Medal of Boccaccio.