The Athenians were a fickle people, and before long they forgot their anger and Pericles found himself as popular as ever. They were even eager to carry on the war with Sparta.
Once before Pericles had been attacked by his enemies. He was accused, along with Pheidias the sculptor, of having kept some of the gold which was intended to adorn the statue of Athene in the Parthenon. But it was easy to prove that the charge was false, for the gold had been fixed to the statue in such a way that it could be easily detached.
Pericles demanded that this should be done, so that the gold might be weighed. His enemies could not refuse the test. So the gold was taken off the statue, weighed, and found to be correct.
Against Pheidias there were other charges, one being that in the frieze of the Parthenon there were sculptured portraits of himself and Pericles. In 432 B.C. the great sculptor was thrown into prison, where he died before the day fixed for his trial.
The plague, which had disappeared for a year, broke out again in 429 B.C. with new violence.
Pericles had already lost two sons through the terrible scourge. When Paralus, his favourite child, died, he placed a garland upon his body, and shut himself in his house to mourn. Nor could he be persuaded afterward to take much interest in the affairs of the State.
A year later, he was himself stricken by the plague. He recovered, but was soon after attacked by fever which he was too weak to resist.
As he lay dying, his friends gathered around his bed. Thinking that he did not hear what they said, they began to speak to one another of the great things he had done during his life.
But Pericles heard, and interrupting them said, ‘What you praise in me is partly the result of good fortune, and, at all events, common to me with many other commanders. What I am most proud of, you have not noticed. No Athenian ever put on mourning for an act of mine!’ These were his last words.
Plutarch tells us that ‘Pericles was indeed a character deserving our high admiration, not only for his equitable and mild temper, but also for the high spirit and feeling which made him regard it the noblest of all his honours, that, in the exercise of such immense power, he never had treated any enemy as irreconcilably opposed to him. And it appears to me,’ says Plutarch, ‘that this one thing gives that otherwise childish and arrogant title a fitting and becoming significance; so dispassionate a temper, a life so pure and unblemished, might well be called Olympian, in accordance with our conceptions of the divine beings to whom, as the natural authors of all good and of nothing evil, we ascribe the rule and government of the world.’