[11]. It is said that once, when Pericles was transacting business in public, a low fellow railed at him all day long, and at nightfall dogged him to his house, reviling him in the foulest language. Pericles took no notice of him till he reached his own door, when he bade one of the servants take a torch and light the man home.
In his youth he distinguished himself in the field, but eschewed politics, fearing, it is said, the suspicions which might be excited in the populace not only by his wealth, high birth, and powerful friends, but by the striking resemblance to the tyrant Pisistratus which old men traced in his personal appearance, musical voice, and flowing speech. But when the banishment of Themistocles and the death of Aristides had somewhat cleared the political stage, Pericles came forward as the champion of the democratic or progressive party, in opposition to Cimon, the leader of the aristocratic or conservative party. The two leaders differed hardly less than their policies. Both indeed were men of aristocratic birth and temper, honourable, brave, and generous, faithful and laborious in the service of Athens. But Cimon was a true sailor, blunt, jovial, free-handed, who sang a capital song, and was always equally ready to drink or fight, to whose artless mind (he was innocent of even a smattering of letters[[12]]) the barrack-room life of the barbarous Spartans seemed the type of human perfectibility, and whose simple programme was summed up in the maxim “fight the Persians.” Naturally the new ideas of political progress and intellectual development had no place in his honest head; naturally he was a sturdy supporter of the good old times of which, to the popular mind, he was the best embodiment. Pericles, grave, studious, reserved, was himself penetrated by those ideas of progress and culture which he undertook to convert into political and social realities; philosophy was his recreation; during the whole course of his political career he never accepted but once an invitation to dinner, and he was never to be seen walking except between his house and the popular assembly and senate-house. He husbanded his patrimony and regulated his domestic affairs with rigid economy that he might escape both the temptation and the suspicion of enriching himself at the public expense.
[12]. It is amusing to read in Plutarch of this stout old salt sitting in judgment on the respective merits of Aeschylus and Sophocles.
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, 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 six thousand 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 might 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 Theorikon 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, and the Erechtheum, both on the acropolis, the former completed in 438 B.C., the latter left unfinished at Pericles’s death; the magnificent Propylaea or vestibule to the acropolis, built between 437 and 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 mastermind 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 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 likely, 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 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.