It is unnecessary to give a detailed account of all that Pericles did to make his native city the most glorious in the ancient world. Greek architecture and sculpture under his patronage reached perfection. To him Athens owed the Parthenon, the Erechtheum, left unfinished at his death, the Propylæa, the Odeum, and numberless other public and sacred edifices; he also liberally encouraged music and the drama; and during his life, industry and commerce were in so flourishing a condition that prosperity was universal in Attica.

At length, in 431, the long foreseen and inevitable Peloponnesian war broke out between Athens and Sparta. The plan of Pericles was for Athens to adopt a defensive attitude, to defend the city itself, leaving Attica to be ravaged by the enemy, but to cripple the power of Sparta by harassing its coasts. The story of the war must be told elsewhere; here it is enough to say that the result was unfavorable to Athens for reasons for which Pericles was only in small part to blame. He trusted in the ultimate success of Athens, both from her superior wealth and from her possessing the command of the sea, but he had not calculated upon the deterioration in her citizens' spirit, nor upon the robust courage of the Bœotian and Spartan infantry. Nor was his advice to keep behind the city walls rather than face the enemy in the field, best calculated to arouse the Athenians' courage. The plague ravaged the city in 430, and in the autumn of the following year, Pericles died after a lingering fever. His two sons had been carried off by the plague, he had been harassed by a charge of peculation brought by Cleon, and the actual infliction of a fine by the dicastery, while he had been without office from July, 430, to July, 429, but before the last he recovered his hold over the Ecclesia, and was gratified in the closing days of his life by its legitimation of his and Aspasia's son.

As a statesman his greatest fault was a failure to foresee that personal government is ultimately ruinous to a nation. He taught the people to follow a leader, but he could not perpetuate a descent of leaders like himself. Hence we cannot wonder, when days of trouble broke over Athens, how that men spoke bitterly of Pericles and all his glory. Yet he was a lofty-minded statesman, inspired by noble aspirations, and his heart was full of a noble love for the city and her citizens. Plutarch tells the story that, as he lay dying and apparently unconscious, his friends around his bed were passing in review the great achievements of his life, and the nine trophies which he had erected at different times for so many victories. The dying patriot quietly interrupted with the characteristic sentence: "What you praise in my life belongs partly to good fortune, and is, at best, common to me with many generals. But that of which I am proudest, you have left unnoticed—no Athenian has ever put on mourning through any act of mine."[Back to Contents]

SOCRATES
From the French of Fénelon
(468-399 B.C.)

Socrates, who, by the consent of all antiquity, has been considered as the most virtuous and enlightened of Pagan philosophers, was a citizen of Athens, and belonged to the town of Alopecé.

He was born in the fourth year of the 77th Olympiad. His father, Sophroniscus, was a sculptor; and his mother, Phanaretè, a midwife.

He first studied philosophy under Anaxagoras, and next under Archelaus, the natural philosopher. But finding that all these vain speculations concerning natural objects served no useful purpose, and had no influence in rendering the philosopher a better man, he devoted himself to the study of ethics; and (as Cicero, in the third book of his Tusculan Questions, observes) may be said to be the founder of moral philosophy among the Greeks. In the first book, speaking of him still more particularly and more extensively, he expresses himself thus: "It is my opinion (and it is an opinion in which all are agreed) that Socrates was the first who, calling off the attention of philosophy from the investigation of secrets which nature has concealed (but to which alone all preceding philosophers had attached themselves), engaged her in those things which concern the duties of common life; his object was to investigate the nature of virtue and vice; and to point out the characteristics of good and evil; saying, that the investigation of celestial phenomena was a subject far above the reach of our powers; and that even were they more within the reach of our faculties, it could have no influence in regulating our conduct."

That part of philosophy, then, whose province is the cultivation of morals, and which embraces every age and condition of life, he made his only study. This new mode of philosophizing was the better received on this account, that he who was the founder of it, fulfilling with the most scrupulous care all the duties of a good citizen, whether in peace or in war, enforced by example the precepts which he taught.