Plutarch has attributed to Pericles a noble project, unnoticed by any earlier extant author, but worthy of his capacious mind, and otherwise also bearing some characters of authenticity and truth. It was no less than to unite all Greece under one great federal government, of which Athens should be the capital. But the immediate and direct avowal of such a purpose would be likely to raise jealousies so numerous and extensive as to form insuperable obstacles to the execution. The religion of the nation was that alone in which the Grecian people universally claimed a clear common interest; and even in this every town and almost every family claimed something peculiar to itself. In the vehemence of public alarm, during the Persian invasion, vows had been, in some places, made to the gods for sacrifices, to an extent beyond what the votaries, when blessed with deliverance beyond hope, were able to perform; and some temples, destroyed by the invaders, were not yet restored; probably because the means of those in whose territories they had stood were deficient. Taking these circumstances then for his ground, Pericles proposed that a congress of deputies from every republic of the nation should be assembled at Athens, for the purpose first of inquiring concerning vows for the safety of Greece yet unperformed, and temples, injured by the barbarians, not yet restored; and then of proceeding to concert measures for the lasting security of navigation in the Grecian seas, and for the preservation of peace by land also between all the states composing the Greek nation. The naval question, but still more the ruin which, in the Persian invasion, had befallen northern Greece, and especially Attica, while Peloponnesus had felt nothing of its evils, gave pretensions for Athens to take the lead in the business. On the motion of Pericles, a decree of the Athenian people directed the appointment of ministers to invite every Grecian state to send its deputies. Plutarch, rarely attentive to political information, has not at all indicated what attention was shown, or what participation proposed, for Lacedæmon. His prejudices indeed we find very generally adverse to the Lacedæmonian government, and favouring the Athenian democracy. But, judging from the friendship which, according to the authentic information of Thucydides, subsisted between Pericles and Archidamus, king of Lacedæmon, through life, it is little likely that, in putting forward the project for the peace of Greece, Pericles would have proposed anything derogatory to the just weight and dignity of Sparta; which indeed would have been, with peace the pretence, only putting forward a project of contest.
Pericles, when he formed his coalition with Cimon, seems to have entered heartily into the enlarged views of that great man; and, with the hope that, through their coalition, both the oligarchical and the democratical powers in Athens might be held justly balanced, had early in view to establish the peace of Greece on a union between Athens and Lacedæmon. It is however evident, from the narrative of Thucydides, that Archidamus rarely could direct the measures of the Lacedæmonian government. On a view of all information, then, it may seem probable that the project of Pericles was concerted with Archidamus; and that the opposition of those in Lacedæmon, of an adverse faction concurred with opposition from those in Athens, who apprehended injury to their interests from a new coalition with the aristocratical party, to compel the great projector to abandon his magnificent and beneficent purpose.[f]
FOOTNOTES
[45] Plutarch tells a story—characteristic if not true—of a rude fellow who, after railing at Pericles all day, as he was transacting business in public, followed him after dusk with abusive language to his door, when Pericles ordered one of his servants to take a light, and conduct the man home.
Ruins of Haliartus
