It was in the same year (432) that the great contest between Athens and Sparta, known as the Peloponnesian War, broke out. We may dismiss as a vulgar calumny the statement, often repeated in antiquity, but quite unsupported by Thucydides, that the war was brought about by Pericles for the purpose of avoiding a prosecution. The war was in truth inevitable; its real cause was Sparta’s jealousy of the growing power of Athens; its immediate occasion was the help lent by Athens to Corcyra in its war with Corinth. At first, with a hypocritical regard for religion, the Spartans demanded as a condition of peace that the Athenians should expel the race of the Alcmaeonidae (including, of course, Pericles), whose ancestors had been guilty of sacrilege about two centuries before. The Athenians retorted in kind, and, after a little more diplomatic fencing, the Spartans were constrained to show their hand by demanding bluntly that Athens should give back to the Greeks their independence—in other words, renounce her empire and abandon herself to the tender mercies of Sparta. Pericles encouraged the Athenians to reject the demand. He pointed out that Athens possessed advantages over the Peloponnesians in superior wealth and greater unity of counsels. He advised the Athenians, in case of war, not to take the field against the numerically superior forces of the Peloponnesians, but to allow the enemy to ravage Attica at will, while they confined themselves to the defence of the city. Through their fleet they would maintain communication with their island empire, procure supplies, and harass the enemy by sudden descents on his coasts. By pursuing this defensive policy without attempting to extend their empire, he predicted that they would be victorious. The people hearkened to him and replied to the Spartan ultimatum by counter-demands, which they knew would not be accepted. Pericles had not neglected in time of peace to prepare for war, and Athens was now well equipped with men, money, and ships.
In June of the following summer a Peloponnesian army invaded Attica. By the advice of Pericles the rural population, with their movables, had taken refuge in the city, while the cattle had been sent for safety to the neighbouring islands. The sight of their country ravaged under their eyes excited in the Athenians a longing to march out and meet the enemy, but in the teeth of popular clamour and obloquy Pericles steadily adhered to his defensive policy, content to protect the suburbs of Athens with cavalry. Meanwhile Athenian fleets retaliated upon the enemy’s coasts. About the same time, as a punishment for the share that they were supposed to have had in bringing on the war, the whole population of Aegina was expelled from their island to make room for Athenian colonists. This measure, directed by Pericles, relieved to some extent the pressure in the overcrowded capital, and secured a strong outpost on the side of Peloponnese. In the autumn, after the Peloponnesian army had been obliged by want of provisions to quit Attica and disband, Pericles conducted the whole available army of Athens into the territory of Megara, and laid it waste.
It was a custom with the Athenians that at the end of a campaign the bones of those who had fallen in battle should be buried with public honours in the beautiful suburb of Ceramicus, the Westminster of Athens, and the vast crowd of mourners and spectators gathered about the grave was addressed by a citizen chosen for his character and abilities to pay the last tribute of a grateful country to its departed brave. On the present occasion the choice fell on Pericles. Once before, at the close of the Samian War, it had been his lot to discharge a similar duty. The speech which he now delivered, as reported to us by Thucydides, is one of the noblest monuments of antiquity. It is indeed the creed of Athens and of Greece. In its aristocratic republicanism—recognising at once the equal legal rights and the unequal intrinsic merits of individuals—it differs alike from the monarchical spirit of mediaeval and modern Europe, with its artificial class distinctions, and from that reactionary communism which preaches the natural as well as the legal equality of men. In its frank admiration of art and letters and all the social festivals which humanise and cheer life, it is as far from the sullen asceticism and the wild debauchery of the East as the grave and manly simplicity of its style is removed from the fanciful luxuriance of Oriental rhetoric. Finally, in the words of comfort and exhortation addressed to the bereaved, the speech—to adopt Thirlwall’s description of another great effort of Athenian oratory—“ breathes the spirit of that high philosophy which, whether learnt in the schools or from life, has consoled the noblest of our kind in prisons, and on scaffolds, and under every persecution of adverse fortune.”
The fortitude of the Athenians was put to a still severer test in the following summer, when to the horrors of war (the Peloponnesians had again invaded Attica) were added the horrors of the plague, which spread havoc in the crowded city. Pericles himself escaped the scourge, but many of his relations and best friends, amongst them his sister and his two sons Xanthippus and Paralus, were struck down. With the elder of his sons, Xanthippus, a worthless young man, the father had been on bad terms, but the death of his surviving son, at an interval of a few days, affected him deeply, and when he came to lay the wreath upon the corpse, though he struggled hard to maintain his habitual calm, he broke down, and for the first time in his public life burst into a passion of weeping. But neither private grief nor public calamity shook for a moment the lofty courage and resolution with which he continued to the last to oppose a firm front alike to enemies without and to cravens within. While refusing as before to risk a battle in Attica, which he allowed the Peloponnesians to devastate at pleasure, he led in person a powerful fleet against Peloponnese, ravaged the coast, and destroyed the town of Prasiae in Laconia. But the Athenians were greatly disheartened; they sued for peace, and when their suit was rejected by Sparta they vented their ill-humour on Pericles, as the author of the war, by subjecting him to a fine. However, they soon repented of this burst of petulance, and atoned for it by re-electing him general and placing the government once more in his hands. Further, they allowed him to legitimate his son by Aspasia, that his house might not be without an heir. He survived this reconciliation about a year, but his name is not again mentioned in connexion with public affairs. In the autumn of 429 he died. We may well believe that the philosophy which had been the recreation of his happier days supported and consoled him in the clouded evening of his life. To his clement nature it was a peculiar consolation to reflect that he had never carried political differences to the shedding of blood. Indeed, his extraordinary, almost fatherly, tenderness for the life of every Athenian citizen is attested by various of his sayings. On his deathbed, when the friends about him were telling his long roll of glory, rousing himself from a lethargy into which he had fallen, he reminded them of his fairest title to honour: “No Athenian,” he said, “ever put on black through me.”
He was buried amongst the illustrious dead in the Ceramicus, and in after years Phormio, Thrasybulus, and Chabrias slept beside him. In person he was graceful and well made, save for an unusual height of head, which the comic poets were never weary of ridiculing. In the busts of him which we possess, his regular features, with the straight Greek nose and full lips, still preserve an expression of Olympian repose.
THE END
Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh.
Transcriber’s Note