 1 On seeing certain wealthy foreigners in Rome carrying puppies and young monkeys about in their bosoms and fondling them, Caesar asked, We are told if the women in their country did not bear children, thus in right princely fashion rebuking those who squander on animals that proneness to love and loving affection which is ours by nature, and which is due only to our fellow men. Since then our souls are by nature possessed of great fondness for learning and fondness for seeing, it is surely reasonable to kid those who abuse this fondness on objects all unworthy either of their eyes or ears, to the neglect of those which are good and serviceable. Our outward sense, since it apprehends the objects which encounter it by virtue of their mere impact upon it, must needs perhaps regard everything that presents itself, be it useful or useless, but in the exercise of his mind every man, if he pleases, has the natural power to turn himself away in every case, and to change, without the least difficulty, to that object upon which he himself determines. It is meat therefore that he pursue what is best, to the end that he may not merely regard it, but also be edified by regarding it. A color as suited to the eye of its freshness and its pleasantness as well stimulates and nourishes the vision, and so our intellectual vision must be applied to such objects as, by their very charm, invited onward to its own proper good. Such objects are to be found in virtuous deeds, these implant in those who search them out a great and zealous eagerness which leads to imitation. In other cases admiration of the deed is not immediately accompanied by an impulse to do it. Nay, many times on the contrary, while we delight in the work, we despise the workmen, as for instance in the case of perfumes and dyes. We take a delight in them, but dyers and perfumers we regard as illiberal and vulgar folk. It was a fine saying of Antisthenes when he heard that Ismenius was an excellent Piper, but he's a worthless man, said he, otherwise he wouldn't be so good a Piper. And so Philip once said to his son, who, as the wine went round, plucked the strings charmingly and skillfully, art thou not ashamed to pluck the strings so well? It is enough, surely, if a king have leisure to hear others pluck the strings, and he pays great deference to the muses if he be bet a spectator of such contests. Piper with one's own hands on lowly tasks gives witness, in the toil thus expended on useless things, to one's own indifference to hire things. No generous youth, from seeing the Zeus at Pisa, or the Hera at Argos, longs to be fetious or polycletus, nor to be anachryon or philotus or arkylochus out of pleasure in their poems. For it does not of necessity follow that, if the work delights you with its grace, the one who wrought it is worthy of your esteem. Wherefore the spectator is not advantaged by those things at side of which no ardor for imitation arises in the breast, nor any uplift of the soul arousing zealous impulses to do the like. But virtuous action straightway so disposes a man that he no sooner admires the works of virtue than he strives to emulate those who wrought them. The good things of fortune we love to possess and enjoy. Those of virtue we love to perform. The former we are willing should be ours at the hands of others. The latter we wish that others rather should have at our hands. The good creates a stir of activity towards itself, and implants it once in the spectator and active impulse. It does not form his character by ideal representation alone, but through the investigation of its work it furnishes him with a dominant purpose. For such reasons I have decided to persevere in my writing of lives, and so have composed this tenth book, containing the life of Pericles and that of Fabius Maximus, who waged such lengthy war with Hannibal. The men were alike in their virtues, and more especially in their gentleness and rectitude, and by their ability to endure the follies of their peoples and of their colleagues in office, they proved of the greatest service to their countries. But whether I aim correctly at the proper mark must be decided from what I have written. Pericles was of the tribe Acomantus, of the Dei-Mei Hilargus, and of the foremost family and lineage on both sides. His father, Xanthippus, who conquered the generals of the king at Machela, married Agariste, granddaughter of that Cleisthenes who, in such noble fashion, expelled the Pisistrate and destroyed their tyranny, instituted laws, and established a constitution best atempered for the promotion of harmony and safety. She in her dreams once fancied that she had given birth to a man, and a few days thereafter bore Pericles. His personal appearance was unimpeachable, except that his head was rather long and out of due proportion. For this reason the images of him, almost all of them, wear helmets, because the artists, as it would seem, were not willing to approach him with deformity. The comic poets of Attica used to call him Cynosophilus, or Squillhead. The Squill is sometimes called Cynus, so the comic poet Cratonus, in his Chyrens, says, Faction and Saturn, that ancient of days, were united in wedlock. Their offspring was of all tyrants the greatest and low. He is called by the gods, the head Corpeller. And again in his nemesis comes Zeus, of guests and heads, the Lord. Antelocletes speaks of him as sitting on the Acropolis in the greatest perplexity, now heavy of head and now alone, from the eleven-couch chamber of his head, causing vast uproar to arise. And Eupolis, in his demis, having inquiries made about each one of the demagogues as they come up from Hades, says, when Pericles is called out last, the very head of those below hast thou now brought. His teacher in music, most writers state, was Domon, whose name, they say, should be pronounced with the first syllable short. But Aristotle said he had a thorough musical training at the hands of Pythelides. Now Domon seems to have been a consummate sophist, but to have taken refuge behind the name of music in order to conceal from the multitude his real power, and he associated with Pericles, that political athlete, as it were, in the capacity of rubber and trainer. However, Domon was not left unmolested in this use of his lyre as a screen, but was ostracized for being a great schemer and a friend of tyranny, and became a butt of the comic poets. At all events Plato represented someone as inquiring of him thus. In the first place tell me, then, I beseech thee, thou who art the Chiron, as they say, who to Pericles gave his craft. Pericles was also a pupil of Zeno, the Eliotic, who discoursed on the natural world, like Parmenides, and perfected a species of refutative catch which was sure to bring an opponent to grief, as Tymon of Flius expressed it. His was a tongue that could argue both ways with a fury resistless, Zenos, a sailor of all things. But the man who most consorted with Pericles, and did most to clothe him with a majestic demeanor that had more weight than any demagogue's appeals, yes, and who lifted on high and exalted the dignity of his character, was Ana Zagoras, the Clazomenian, whom men of that day used to call noose, either because they admired that comprehension of his which proved of such surpassing greatness in the investigation of nature, or because he was the first to enthrone in the universe, not chance, nor yet necessity, as the source of its orderly arrangement, but mind, noose, pure and simple, which distinguishes and sets apart, in the midst of an otherwise chaotic mass, the substances which have like elements. This man, Pericles, extravagantly admired, and being gradually filled full of the so-called higher philosophy and elevated speculation. He not only had, as it seems, a spirit that was solemn and a discourse that was lofty and free from plebeian, said reckless effrontery, but also a composure of countenance that never relaxed into laughter, a gentleness of carriage and cast of attire that suffered no emotion to disturb it, while he was speaking, a modulation of voice that was far from boisterous, and canny similar characteristics which struck all his fears with wondering amazement. It is at any rate a fact that, once on a time when he had been abused and insulted all day long by a certain lewd fellow of the baser sort, he endured it all quietly, though it was in the marketplace, where he had urgent business to transact, and towards evening went away homewards unruffled, the fellow following along and heaping all manner of contumely upon him. When he was about to go indoors at being now dark, he ordered a servant to take a torch and escort the fellow in safety back to his own home. The poet Ion, however, says that Pericles had a presumptuous and somewhat arrogant manner of address, and that into his haughtiness there entered a good deal of disdain and contempt for others. He praises, on the other hand, the tact, complacence, and elegant address which Simon showed in his social intercourse. But we must ignore Ion, with his demanding that virtue, like a dramatic tetrology, have some sort of farcical appendage. Zeno, when men called the austerity of Pericles a mere thirst for reputation, and swollen conceit, urged them to have some such thirst for reputation themselves, with the idea that the very assumption of nobility might in time produce, all unconsciously, something like an eager and habitual practice of it. These were not the only advantages Pericles had of his association with Anax Zagoras. It appears that he was also lifted by him above superstition, that feeling which is produced by amazement at what happens in religions above us. It affects those who are ignorant of the causes of such things, and are crazed about divine intervention, and confounded through their inexperience in this domain, whereas the doctrines of natural philosophy reproof such ignorance and inexperience, and substitute for timorous and inflamed superstition that unshakable reverence which is attended by good hope. A story is told that once upon a time the head of a one horned ram was brought to Pericles from his country-place, and that lampon the seer, when he saw how the horn grew strong and solid from the middle of the forehead, declared that, whereas there were two powerful parties in the city, that of Thucydides and that of Pericles, the mastery would finally devolve upon one man, the man to whom this sign had been given. Anax Zagoras, however, had the skull cut in two, and showed that the brain had not filled out its position, but had drawn together to a point, like an egg, at that particular spot in the entire cavity where the root of the horn began. At that time, the story says, it was Anax Zagoras who won the plaudits of the bystanders, but a little while after it was lampon, for Thucydides was overthrown, and Pericles was entrusted with the entire control of all the interests of the people. Now there was nothing in my opinion to prevent both of them, the naturalist and the seer, from being in the right of the matter, the one correctly defined the cause, the other the object or purpose. It was the proper province of the one to observe why anything happens, and how it comes to be what it is, of the other to declare for what purpose anything happens and what it means. And those who declare that the discovery of the cause, in any phenomenon, does away with the meaning, do not perceive that they are doing away not only with divine portents, but also with artificial tokens, such as the ringing of gongs, the language of fire-signals, and the shadows of the pointers on sundials. Each of these has been made, through some causal adaptation, to have some meaning. However, perhaps this is a matter for a different treatise. As a young man, Pericles was exceedingly reluctant to face the people, since it was thought that in feature he was like the tyrant, Peace Estratus, and when men well on in years remarked also that his voice was sweet, and his tongue glib and speedy in discourse, they were struck with amazement at the resemblance. Besides, since he was rich, of brilliant lineage, and had friends of the greatest influence, he feared that he might be ostracised, and so at first had not to do with politics, but devoted himself rather to a military career where he was brave in enterprising. However, when Aristides was dead, and the masticleys in banishment and Simon was kept by his campaigns for the most part abroad, then at last Pericles decided to devote himself to the people, espousing the cause of the poor and the many instead of the few and the rich, contrary to his own nature, which was anything but popular. But he feared, as it would seem, to encounter a suspicion of aiming at tyranny, and when he saw that Simon was very aristocratic in his sympathies, and was held an extraordinary affection by the party of the good and true, he began to court the favour of the multitude, thereby securing safety for himself and power to wield against his rival. Straightway, too, he made a different ordering in his way of life. On one street only in the city was he seen to be walking, the one which took him to the marketplace and the council chamber. Invitations to dinner, and all such friendly and familiar intercourse he declined, so that during the long period that elapsed while he was at the head of the state, there was not a single friend to whose house he went to dine, except that when his kinsman, Ureptolamus, gave a wedding-feast, he attended until the libations were made, and then Straightway rose up and departed. Conviviality is prone to break down and overpower the haughtiest reserve, and in familiar intercourse the dignity which is assumed for appearance's sake is very hard to maintain. Whereas in the case of true and genuine virtue, fairest appears that which most appears, and nothing in the conduct of good men is so admirable in the eyes of strangers, as their daily walking conversation is in the eyes of those who share it. And so it was that Pericles, seeking to avoid the satiety which springs from continual intercourse, made his approaches to the people by intervals, as it were, not speaking on every question, nor addressing the people on every occasion, but offering himself like the Salamnian Tyreim, as Critulus says, for great emergencies. The rest of his policy he carried out by commissioning his friends and other public speakers. One of these, as they say, was Effialtis, who broke down the power of the Council of Aeropagus, and so poured out for the citizens to use the words of Plato, too much undiluted freedom, by which the people was rendered unruly, just like a horse, and, as the comic poets say, no longer had the patience to obey the reign, but nabbed Uboa and trampled on the islands. Moreover, by way of providing himself with a style of discourse which was adapted, like a musical instrument, to his motive life and the grandeur of his sentiments, he often made an auxiliary string of anaxogorus, subtly mingling, as it were, with his rhetoric, the die of natural science. It was from natural science, as the Divine Plato says, that he acquired his loftiness of thought and perfectness of execution, in addition to his natural gifts, and by applying what he learned to the art of speaking, he far excelled all other speakers. It was thus they say that he got his surname, though some suppose it was from the structures with which he adorned the city, and others from his ability as a statesman and a general, that he was called Olympian. It is not at all unlikely that his reputation was the result of blending in him of many high qualities. But the comic poets of that day, who let fly, both in earnest and in jest, many shafts of speech against him, make it plain that he got this surname chiefly because of his diction. They spoke of him as thundering and lightning when he harangued his audience, and as wielding a dread thunderbolt in his tongue. There is on record also a certain saying of Thucydides, the son of Melisius, touching the clever persuasiveness of Pericles, a saying uttered in jest. Thucydides belonged to the party of the good and true, and was for a very long time a political antagonist of Pericles. When Archidamus, the king of the Lachodemonians, asked him whether he or Pericles was the better wrestler, he replied, Whenever I throw him in wrestling he disputes the fall, and carries his point, and persuades the very men who saw him fall. The truth is, however, that even Pericles, with all his gifts, was cautious in his discourse, so that whenever he came forward to speak he prayed the gods that there might not escape him unaware as a single word, which was unsuited to the matter under discussion. In writing he left nothing behind him except the decrees which he proposed, and only a few in all of his memorable sayings are preserved, as, for instance, his urging the removal of Jukina as the eyesore of Piraeus, and his declaring that he already beheld wars whooping down upon them from the Peloponnesus. Once also when Sophocles, who was general with him on a certain naval expedition, praised a lovely boy, he said, It is not his hands only, Sophocles, that a general must keep clean, but his eyes as well. Again, Stessimbratus says that, in his funeral oration over those who had fallen in the Samyan War, he declared that they had become immortal like the gods. The gods themselves, he said, we cannot see, but from the honors which they received, and the blessings which they bestow, we conclude that they are immortal. So it was, he said, with those who had given their lives for their country. Thucydides describes the administration of Pericles as rather aristocratic, in name of democracy, but in fact a government by the greatest citizen. But many others say that the people was first led on by him into allotments of public land, festival grants, and distributions of fees for public services, thereby falling into bad habits, and becoming luxurious and wanton under the influence of his public measures, instead of frugal and self-sufficing. Let us therefore examine in detail the reason for this change in him. In the beginning, as has been said, pitted as he was against the reputation of Simon, he tried to ingratiate himself with the people. And since he was the inferior in wealth and property, by means of which Simon would win over the poor, furnishing a dinner every day to any Athenian who wanted it, bestowing raiment on the elderly men, and removing the fences from his estates, that whosoever wished might pluck the fruit. Pericles, outdone in popular arts of this sort, had recourse to the distribution of the people's own wealth. This was on the advice of demonities of the De Me Oa, as Aristotle has stated. And soon, what with festival grants and jurors' wages and other fees and largeses, he bribed the multitude by the whole sale and used them in opposition to the council of the Areopagus. Of this body he himself was not a member, since the lot had not made him either first Archon, or Archon Thesymotic, or King Archon, or Archon Polymarch. These offices were in ancient times filled by lot, and through them those who properly acquitted themselves were promoted into the Areopagus. For this reason all the more did Pericles, strong in the affections of the people, lead a successful party against the council of the Areopagus. Not only was the council robbed of most of its jurisdiction by effialities, but Simon also, on the charge of being a lover of Sparta and a hater of the people, was ostracized, a man who yielded to none in wealth and lineage, who had won most glorious victories over the barbarians, and had filled the city full of money and spoils, as it is written in his life. Such was the power of Pericles among the people. Now ostracism involved legally a period of ten years banishment. But in the meanwhile the Lachodimonians invaded the district of Tanagra with a great army, and the Athenian straightway saluted out against them. So Simon came back from his banishment and stationed himself with his tribesmen in line of battle, and determined by his deeds to rid himself of the charge of two great love for Sparta, in that he shared the perils of his fellow citizens. But the friends of Pericles banded together and drove him from the ranks, on the ground that he was under sentence of banishment. For which reason, it is thought, Pericles fought most sturdily in that battle, and was the most conspicuous of all in exposing himself to danger. And there fell in this battle all the friends of Simon to a man, whom Pericles had accused with him of two great love for Sparta. Wherefore, sore repentance fell upon the Athenians, and a longing desire for Simon, defeated as they were on the confines of Attica, and expecting as they did a grievous war with the coming of spring. So then Pericles, perceiving this, hesitated not to gratify the desires of the multitude, but wrote with his own hand the decree which recalled the man. Whereupon Simon came back from banishment and made peace between the cities. For the Lachodemonians were as kindly disposed towards him as they were full of hatred towards Pericles, and the other popular leaders. Some, however, said that the decree for the restoration of Simon was not drafted by Pericles until a secret compact had been made between them. Through the agency of El Penise, Simon's sister, to the effect that Simon should sail out with a fleet of two hundred ships, and have command in foreign parts, attempting to subdue the territory of the king, while Pericles should have supreme power in the city. And it was thought that before this, too, El Penise had rendered Pericles more lenient towards Simon, when he stood his trial on the capital charge of Treason. Pericles was at that time one of the committee of prosecution appointed by the people, and on El Penise's coming to him and supplicating him, said to her with a smile, El Penise, thou art an old woman, thou art an old woman, to attempt such tasks. However, he made only one speech, by way of formerly executing his commission, and in the end did the least harm to Simon of all his accusers. How, then, can one put trust in Ito Menius, who accused Pericles of assassinating the popular leader Ephialtes, though he was his friend and partner in his political program, out of mere jealousy and envy of his reputation? These charges he has raked up from one source or other and hurled them, as if so much venom, against one who was perhaps not in all points irreproachable, but who had a noble disposition and an ambitious spirit wherein no such savage and bestial feelings can have their abode. As for Ephialtes, who was a terror to the oligarchs and inexorable in exacting accounts from those who wronged the people, and in prosecuting them, his enemies laid plots against him, and had him slain secretly by Aristodikus of Tanagra, as Aristotle says. As for Simon, he died on his campaign in Cyprus. Then the aristocrats, aware even some time before this that Pericles was already become the greatest citizen, but wishing nevertheless to have someone in the city who should stand up against him and blunt the edge of his power, that it might not be an out-and-out monarchy, put forward through citities of Alopeci, a discrete man and a relative of Simon, to oppose him. He, being less of a warrior than Simon, and more of a forensic speaker and statesman, by keeping watch and ward in the city, and by wrestling bouts with Pericles on the Bhima, soon bought the administration into even poise. He would not suffer the party of the good and true, as they called themselves, to be scattered up and down and blended with the populace, as here to fore, the weight of their character being thus obscured by numbers, but by culling them out and assembling them into one body, he made their collective influence, thus become weighty, as it were, a counter-poison the balance. Now there had been from the beginning a sort of seam hidden beneath the surface of affairs, as in a piece of iron, which faintly indicated a divergence between the popular and the aristocratic program, but the emulous ambition of these two men cut a deep gash in the state, and caused one section of it to be called the demos, or the people, and the other the aliyagoi, or the few. At this time therefore particularly, Pericles gave the reins to the people, and made his policy one of pleasing them, ever devising some sort of pageant in the town for the masses, or feast, or a procession, amusing them like children with not uncouth delights, and sending out sixty triremes annually, on which large numbers of the citizens sailed for about eight months under pay, practising at the same time and acquiring the art of seamanship. In addition to this he dispatched a thousand settlers into the Chersonesis, and five hundred to Naxos, and to Andros half that number, and a thousand to Thrace to settle with the Bissalti, and others to Italy, when the site of Sibaris was settled, which they named Thury. All this he did by way of lightning the city of its mob of lazy and idle busybodies, rectifying the embarrassments of the poor people, and giving the alien for neighbors and imposing garrison which should prevent rebellion. End of Pericles, Part I. But that which brought the most delightful adornment to Athens, and the greatest amazement to the rest of mankind, that which alone now testifies for Hellas that her ancient power and splendour, of which so much is told, was no idle fiction, I mean his construction of sacred edifices, this more than all the public measures of Pericles, his enemies maligned and slandered. They cried out in the assemblies, The people has lost its fair fame and is in ill repute because it has removed the public monies of the Hellenes from Delos into its own keeping, and that seemliest of all excuses which it had to urge against its accusers, to wit, that out of fear of the barbarians it took the public funds from that sacred aisle, and was now guarding them in a stronghold, of this Pericles has robbed it. And surely Hellas is insulted with a dire insult, and manifestly subjected to tyranny when she sees that, with her own enforced contributions for the war, we are gilding and bedisoning our city, which for all the world like a wanton woman, adds to her wardrobe precious stones and costly statues, and temples worth their millions. For his part, Pericles would instruct the people that it owed no account of their monies to the allies, provided it carried on the war for them and kept off the barbarians. Not a horse do they furnish, said he, not a ship, not a hoplite, but money simply, and this belongs not to those who give it, but to those who take it, if only they furnish that for which they take in and pay. And it is but meat that the city, when she is sufficiently equipped with all that is necessary for prosecuting the war, should apply her abundance to such works, as by their completion will bring everlasting glory, and while in process of completion will bring that abundance into actual service, in that all sorts of activity and diversified demands arise, which rouse every art and stir every hand, and bring, as it were, the whole city under pay, so that she not only adorns but supports herself as well from her own resources. And it was true that his military expeditions supplied those who were in the full vigor of manhood with abundant resources from the common funds, and in his desire that the unwarlike throng of common laborers should neither have no share at all in the public receipts, nor yet get fees for laziness and idleness, he boldly suggested to the people projects for great constructions, and designs for works which would call many arts into play, and involve long periods of time, in order that the stay-at-homes, no wit less than the sailors and sentinels and soldiers, might have a pretext for getting a beneficial share of the public wheel. The materials to be used were stone, bronze, ivory, gold, ebony, and cypress wood. The arts which should elaborate and work up these materials were those of the carpenter, molder, bronze smith, stonecutter, dyer, worker in gold and ivory, painter, embroiderer, embosser, to say nothing of the forwarders and furnishers of the material, such as factors, sailors and pilots by sea, and by land, wagon-makers, trainers of yoked beasts, and drivers. There were also rope-makers, weavers, leather-workers, road-builders, and miners. And since each particular art, like a general with the army under his separate command, kept its own throng of unskilled and untrained laborers in compact array, to be as an instrument unto player and as body unto soul in subordinate service, it came to pass that for every age, almost, and in every capacity the city's great abundance was distributed, and scattered abroad by such demands. So the works arose, no less towering in their grandeur than inimitable in the grace of their outlines, since the workmen eagerly strove to surpass themselves in the beauty of their handicraft. And yet the most wonderful thing about them was the speed with which they rose. Each one of them, men thought, would require many successive generations to complete it, but all of them were fully completed in the heyday of a single administration. And yet they say that once on a time when Agatharcus the painter was boasting loudly of the speed and ease with which he made his figures, Xuxis heard him, and said, Mind take and last a long time. And it is true that deafness and speed in working do not impart the work in abiding weight of influence, nor an exactness of beauty, whereas the time which is put out to loan in laboriously creating pays a large and generous interest in the preservation of the creation. For this reason are the works of Pericles all the more to be wondered at. They were created in a short time, for all time. Each one of them, in its beauty, was even then and at once unique, but in the freshness of its figure it is, even to the present day, recent and newly wrought. Such is the bloom of perpetual newness, as it were, upon these works of his, which makes them ever to look untouched by time, as though the unfaltering breath of an ageless spirit has been infused into them. His general manager and general overseer was fideous, although the several works had great architects and artists besides. Of the Parthenon, for instance, with its cella of a hundred feet in length, Calicrates and Ictanus were the architects. It was Corobus who began to build the sanctuary of the Mysteries at Ileucis, and he planted the columns on the floor and yoked their capitals together with architraves. But on his death, Metagenes, of the Dime Zipit, carried up the frieze in the upper tier of the mountains, while Xenoclese, of the Dime Colorgris, set on the high lantern over the shrine. For the long wall, concerning which Socrates says he himself heard Paraclese introduce a measure, Calicrates was the contractor. Cratonus pokes fun at this work for its slow progress and in these words. Since ever so long now, in word, has Paraclese pushed the thing, in fact he does not budget. The odium, which was arranged internally with many tiers of seats and many pillars, and which had a roof made with a circular slope from a single peak, they say was an exact reproduction of the great king's pavilion, and this too was built under the superintendents of Paraclese. Wherefore Cratonus and his Thracian women rails at him again, the squeal-headed Zeus, low here he comes, the odium like a cap upon his cranium, now that for good in all the ostracism is o'er. Then first did Paraclese, so fond of honor was he, get a decree past that a musical contest be held as part of the Pan-Athenaic Festival, and prescribed how the contestants must blow the flute or sing or pluck the zither. These musical contests were witnessed, both then and thereafter in the odium. The propylaea of the acropolis were brought to completion in the space of five years, Minesclese being their architect. A wonderful thing happened in the course of their building, which indicated that the goddess was not holding herself aloof, but was a helper both in the inception and in the completion of the work. One of its artificers, the most active and zealous of them all, lost his footing and fell from a great height, and lay in a sorry plight, disparate of by the physicians. Paraclese was much cast down at this, but the goddess appeared to him in a dream and prescribed a course of treatment for him to use, so that he speedily and easily healed the man. It was in commemoration of this that he set up the bronze statue of Athena Hadjia on the acropolis near the altar of that goddess, which was there before, as they say. But it was Phidias who produced the great golden image of the goddess, and he is duly inscribed on the tablet as the workman who made it. Everything almost was under his charge, and all the artists and artisans, as I have said, were under his superintendents, owing to his friendship with Paraclese. This brought envy upon the one and contumely on the other, to the effect that Phidias made assignations for Paraclese with freeborn women who would come ostensibly to see the works of art. The comic poets took up this story and bespattered Paraclese with charges of abounding wantonness, connecting their slanders with the wife of Manipus, a man who was his friend, and a colleague in the general ship, and with the bird culture of Pyrrolampus, who, since he was the comrade of Paraclese, was accused of using his peacocks to bribe the women with whom Paraclese consorted. And why should any one be astonished that men of wanton life lose no occasion for offering up sacrifices, as it were, of contumely as abuse of their superiors, to the evil deity of popular envy, when even Stesembrotus of Thessos has ventured to make public charge against Paraclese of a dreadful and fabulous impiety with his son's wife? To such degree, it seems, is truth hedged about with difficulty and hard to capture by research, since those who come after the events in question find that lapse of time is an obstacle to their proper perception of them, while the research of their contemporaries into men's deeds and lives, partly through envious hatred and partly through fawning flattery, defiles and distorts the truth. Thucydides and his party kept denouncing Paraclese for playing fast and loose with the public moneys, and annihilating the revenues. Paraclese therefore asked the people in assembly whether they thought he had expended too much, and on their declaring that it was altogether too much. Well, then, said he, let it not have been spent on your account but mine, and I will make the inscriptions of dedication in my own name. When Paraclese had said this, whether it was that they admired his magnanimity or vied with his ambition to get the glory of his works, they cried out with a loud voice and bade him take freely from the public funds for his outlays, and to spare not whatsoever. And finally he ventured to undergo with Thucydides the contest of the ostracism, wherein he secured his rival's banishment, and the dissolution of the faction which had been arrayed against him. Thus then, seeing that political differences were entirely remitted and the city had become a smooth surface, as it were, and altogether united, he brought under his own control Athens and all the issues dependent on the Athenians. Tributes, armies, triremes, the islands, the sea, the vast power derived from Hellenes, vast also from barbarians, and a supremacy that was securely hedged about with subject nations, friendship and dynastic alliances. But then he was no longer the same man as before, nor alike submissive to the people and ready to yield and give in to the desires of the multitude as steersmen to the breezes. Nay, rather, forsaking his former lacks and sometimes rather effeminate management of the people, as it were a flowery and soft melody, he struck the high and clear note of an aristocratic and kingly statesmanship, and employing it for the best interests of all in a direct and undeviating fashion, he led the people, for the most part willingly, by his persuasions and instructions. And yet there were times when they were sorely vexed with him, and then he tightened the reins and forced them into the way of their advantage with the master's hand, for all the world like a wise physician who treats a complicated disease of longstanding, occasionally with harmless indulgences to please his patient, and occasionally, too, with caustics and bitter drugs which work salvation. For whereas all sorts of distempers, as was to be expected, were rife in a rabble which possessed such vast empires, and was so endowed by nature, that he could manage each one of these cases suitably, and more than anything else he used the people's hopes and fears, like rudders, so to speak, giving timely check to their arrogance, and allaying and comforting their despair. Thus he proved that rhetoric, or the art of speaking, is to use Plato's words and enchantment of the soul, and that her chiefest business is a careful study of the affections and passions, which are, so to speak, strings and stops of the soul, requiring a very judicious fingering and striking. The reason for his success was not his power as a speaker merely, but as Thucydides says, the reputation of his life and the confidence reposed in him as one who was manifestly proven to be utterly disinterested and superior to bribes. He made the city, great as it was when he took it, the greatest and richest of all cities, and grew to be superior in power to kings and tyrants. Some of these actually appointed him guardian of their sons, but he did not make his estate a single drachma greater than it was when his father left it to him. Of his power there can be no doubt, since Thucydides gives so clear an exposition of it, and the comic poets unwittingly reveal it even in their malicious jibes, calling him and his associates new Piscistratidae, and urging him to take solemn oath not to make himself a tyrant, on the plea for soothe that his preeminence was incommensurate with a democracy and too oppressive. Thucydides says that the Athenians had handed over to him, with the city's assessment, the city's themselves, to bind or release as he pleases, their ramparts of stone to build up if he likes, and then to pull down again straight away, their treaties, their forces, their might, peace and riches, and all the fair goods of good fortune. ROGERS And this was not the fruit of a golden moment, nor the culminating popularity of an administration that bloomed for a season. Nay, rather, he stood first for forty years among such men as Effialtes, Leocrates, Myronides, Simon, Talmuddes, and Thucydides, and after the deposition of Thucydides and his ostracism, for no less than fifteen of these years did he secure an imperial sway that was continuous and unbroken, by means of his annual tenure of the Office of General. During all these years he kept himself untainted by corruption, although he was not altogether indifferent to money-making. Indeed, the wealth which was legally his by inheritance from his father, that it might not from sheer neglect take to itself wings and fly away, nor yet cause him much trouble and loss of time when he was busy with higher things, he said into such orderly dispensation as he thought was easiest and most exact. This was to sell his annual products altogether in the lump, and then to buy in the market each article as it was needed, and so provide the ways and means of daily life. For this reason he was not liked by his sons when they grew up, nor did their wives find in him a liberal purveyor, but they murmured at his expenditure for the day merely and under the most exact restrictions, there being no surplus of supplies at all, as in a great house and under generous circumstances, but every outlay and every intake preceding all by count and measure. His agent in securing all this great exactitude was a single servant, evangelist, who was either gifted by nature or trained by Pericles, so as to surpass everybody else in domestic economy. It is true that this conduct was not in accord with the wisdom of an exagerus, since that philosopher actually abandoned his house and left his land to lie fallow for sheep-crazing, owing to the lofty thoughts with which he was inspired. But the life of a speculative philosopher is not the same thing, I think, as that of a statesman. The one exercises intellect without the aid of instruments and independent of external matters for noble ends, whereas the other, in as much as he brings his superior excellence into close contact with the common needs of mankind, must sometimes find wealth not merely one of the necessities of life, but also one of its noble things, as was actually the case with Pericles, who gave aid to many poor men. And besides they say that an exagerus himself, at a time when Pericles was absorbed in business, lay on his couch all neglected, in his old age, starving himself to death, his head already muffled for departure, and that when the matter came to the ears of Pericles he was struck with dismay, and ran at once to the poor man, and besought him most fervently to live, bewailing not so much that great teacher's lot as his own, where he now to be bereft of such a counselor in the conduct of the state. Then an exagerus, so the story goes, unmuffled his head and said to him, Pericles, even those who need a lamp pour oil therein. When the Lachodemonians began to be annoyed by the increasing power of the Athenians, Pericles, by way of inciting the people to cherish yet loftier thoughts and to deem itself worthy of great achievements, introduced a bill to the effect that all Hellenes, wheresoever resident in Europe or in Asia, small and large cities alike, should be invited to send deputies to a council at Athens. This was to deliberate concerning the Hellenic sanctuaries which the barbarians had burned down, concerning the sacrifices which were due to the gods in the name of Helles in fulfillment of vows made when they were fighting with the barbarians, and concerning the sea, that all might sail it fearlessly and keep to peace. To extend this invitation, twenty men, of such as were above fifty years of age, were sent out, five of whom invited the Ionians and Dorians in Asia, and on the islands between Lesbos and Rhodes, five visited the regions on the Helles Pond, and in Thrace, as far as Byzantium, five others were sent into Boshia and Focus and Peloponnesus, and from here, by way of the Ozzolian Lachrians, into the neighboring continent, as far as Arcanania and Embracia, while the rest proceeded through Yuboa to the oceans and the Melaic Gulf and the Pythotic Achaeans and the Thessalians, urging them all to come and take part in the deliberations for the peace and common welfare of Helles. But nothing was accomplished, nor did the cities come together by deputy, owing to the opposition of the Lachodemonians, as it is said, since the effort met with its first check in Peloponnesus. I have cited this incident, however, to show forth the man's disposition and the greatness of his thoughts. In his capacity as general, he was famous above all things for his saving caution. He neither undertook of his own accord a battle involving much uncertainty and peril, nor did he envy and imitate those who took great risks, enjoyed brilliant good fortune, and so were admired as great generals, and he was forever saying to his fellow citizens that, so far as lay in his power, they would remain alive forever and be immortals. So when he saw that Tolnedes, son of Tolmeus, all on account of his previous good fortune and of the exceeding great honor bestowed upon him for his wars, was getting ready, quite inopportunely, to make an incursion into Bosia, and that he had persuaded the bravest and most ambitious men of military age to volunteer for the campaign, as many as a thousand of them, aside from the rest of his forces, he tried to restrain and dissuade him in the popular assembly, uttering then that well-remembered saying, to Witt, that if he would not listen to Pericles, he would yet do full well to wait for that wisest of all councilor's time. This saying brought him only moderate repute at the time, but a few days afterwards, when word was brought in that Tolnedes himself was dead after defeat in battle no coronia, and that many brave citizens were dead likewise, then it brought Pericles great repute as well as good will, for that he was a man of discretion and patriotism. Of all his expeditions that to the cheresonesis was held in most loving remembrance, since it proved the salvation of the Helens who dwelt there. Not only did he bring thither a thousand Athenian colonists and stock the cities anew with vigorous manhood, but he also belted the neck of the Isthmus with defensive bulwarks from sea to sea, and so intercepted the incursions of the Thracians who swarmed about the cheresonesis, and shut out the perpetual and grievous war in which the country was all the time involved, in close touches it was with the neighboring communities of barbarians, and full to overflowing of robber bands whose haunts were on or within its borders. But he was admired and celebrated even amongst foreigners for his circumnavigation of the Peloponnesus, when he put to sea from Peje in the Megarid with a hundred triremes. He not only ravaged a great strip of seashore, as Tolnities had done before him, but also advanced far into the interior with hoplites from his ships, and drove all his enemies inside their walls in terror at his approach, accepting only the Scyonians, who made a stand against him in Arcanania, and joined battle with him. These he routed by main force and set up a trophy for his victory. Then from Achaia, which was friendly to him, he took soldiers on board his triremes and proceeded with his armament to the opposite mainland, where he sailed up the Akelos, overran Arcanania, shut up the people of Oniadi behind their walls, and after ravaging and devastating their territory went off homewards, having shown himself formidable to his enemies, but a safe and efficient leader for his fellow citizens. For nothing untoward befell, even as a result of chance, those who took part in the expedition. He also sailed into the Yuxin Sea with a large and splendidly equipped armament. There he affected what the Greek cities desired, and dealt with them humanely, while to the neighboring nations of barbarians with their kings and dynaths, he displayed the magnitude of his forces, and the fearless courage with which they sailed with or so ever they pleased, and brought the whole sea under their own control. He also left with the banished Sinopians thirteen ships of war and soldiers under command of Lomacus, to aid them against Timicilius. When the tyrant and all his adherents had been driven from the city, Pericles got a bill passed providing that six hundred volunteers of the Athenians should sail to Sinope, and settle down there with the Sinopians, dividing up among themselves the houses and lands which the tyrant and his followers had formerly occupied. But in other matters he did not accede to the vain impulses of the citizens, nor was he swept along with the tide when they were eager, from a sense of their great power and good fortune, to lay hands again upon Egypt and molest the realms of the king which lay along the sea. Many also were possessed already with that inordinate and inauspicious passion for Sicily which was afterwards kindled into flame by such orders as Ascibiades. And some there were who actually dreamed of Tuscany and Carthage, and that not without measure of hope, in view of the magnitude of their present supremacy and the full flowing tide of success in their undertakings. End of Pericles, Part II. Part III of Volume III of Plutarch's Parallel Lives. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Volume III of Plutarch's Parallel Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, translated by Bernadotte Perrin. Pericles, Part III. But Pericles was ever trying to restrain this extravagance of theirs, to lop off their expensive meddlesomeness, and to divert the greatest part of their forces to the guarding and securing of what they had already won. He considered it a great achievement to hold the Lachitimonians in check, and set himself in opposition to these in every way, as she showed above all of the things by what he did in the Sacred War. The Lachitimonians made an expedition to Delphi, while the Phocians had possession of the sanctuary there, and restored it to the Delphians. But no sooner had the Lachitimonians departed than Pericles made a counter expedition, and reinstated the Phocians. And whereas the Lachitimonians had the Promantea, or right of consulting the oracle in behalf of others also, which the Delphians had bestowed upon them, carved upon the forehead of the bronze wolf in the sanctuary, he secured from the Phocians this high privilege for the Athenians, and had it chiseled along the right side of the same wolf. That he was right in seeking to confine the power of the Athenians within lesser Greece was amply proved by what came to pass. To begin with, the Yuboans revolted, and he crossed over to the island with a hostile force. Then, straight way, word was brought to him that the Magarians had gone over to the enemy, and that an army of the enemy was on the confines of Attica under the leadership of Plius Stoanax, the king of the Lachitimonians. Accordingly, Pericles brought his forces back with all speed from Yubo for the war in Attica. He did not venture to join battle with hoplites who were so many, so brave, and so eager for battle, but seeing that Plius Stoanax was a very young man, and that out of all his advisers he set most store by Cleanderdas, whom the Ephors had sent along with him, by reason of his youth, to be a guardian and an assistant to him, he secretly made trial of this man's integrity, speedily corrupted him with bribes, and persuaded him to lead the Peloponnesians back out of Attica. When the army had withdrawn and had been disbanded to their several cities, the Lachitimonians, in indignation, laid a heavy fine upon their king, the full amount of which he was unable to pay, and so betook himself out of Lachitimon, while Cleanderdas, who had gone into voluntary exile, was condemned to death. He was the father of that Gallipis who overcame the Athenians in Sicily. And nature seems to have imparted covetousness to the son, as it were a congenital disease, owing to which he too, after noble achievements, was caught in base practices and banished from Sparta in disgrace. This story, however, I have told at length in my life of Lysander. When Pericles, in rendering his accounts for this campaign, recorded an expenditure of ten talents for sundry needs, the people approved it without officious meddling, and without even investigating the mystery. But some writers, among whom is Theophrastus the philosopher, have stated that every year ten talents found their way to Sparta from Pericles, and that with these he conciliated all the officials there, and so staved off the war, not purchasing peace but time, in which he could make preparations at his leisure and then carry on war all the better. However that may be, he again turned his attention to the rebels, and after crossing to Yuboa, with fifty ships of war and five thousand hoplites, he subdued the cities there. Those of the Calcidians who were styled Hippobote, or knights, and who were preeminent for wealth and reputation, he banished their city, and all the Histians he removed from the country and settled Athenians in their places, treating them and them only, thus inexorably, because they had taken an attic ship captive and slain its crew. After this, when peace had been made for thirty years between the Athenians and the Lachodimonians, he got a decree passed for his expedition to Samos, alleging against its people that, though they were ordered to break off their war against the Militians, they were not complying. Now since it is thought that he proceeded thus against the Samyans to gratify Aspasia, this may be a fitting place to raise the query what great art or power this woman had, that she managed, as she pleased, the foremost men of the State, and afforded the philosophers occasion to discuss her in exalted terms and at great length. That she was a Malaysian by birth, daughter of one, Axiocus, is generally agreed, and they say that it was an emulation of Thargelia, an Ionian woman of ancient times, that she made her onslaughts upon the most influential men. This Thargelia came to be a great beauty, and was endowed with grace of manners as well as clever wits. In as much as she lived on terms of intimacy with numberless Greeks, and attached all her consorts to the king of Persia, she stealthily sowed the seeds of person's sympathy in the cities of Greece by means of these lovers of hers, who were men of the greatest power and influence. And so Aspecia, as some say, was held in high favour by Pericles because of her rare political wisdom. Socrates sometimes came to see her with his disciples, and his intimate friends brought their wives to her to hear her discourse, although she presided over a business that was anything but honest or even reputable, since she kept a house of young courtesans. And Askenes says that Lysisclis, the sheep-dealer, a man of low birth and nature, came to be the first man at Athens by having with Aspecia after the death of Pericles. And in the menic zenis of Plato, even though the first part of it be written in a sportive vein, there is at any rate this much of fact, that the woman had the reputation of associating with many Aethelians as a teacher of rhetoric. However, the affection which Pericles had for Aspecia seems to have been rather of an amatory sort. For his own wife was near of kin to him, and she had been wedded first to Hipponicus, to whom she bore Calius, surnamed the rich. She bore also as the wife of Pericles, Xanthapus and Perihus. Afterwards, since their married life was not agreeable, he legally bestowed her upon another man, with her own consent, and himself took Aspecia and loved her exceedingly. Twice a day, as they say, on going out and on coming in from the marketplace, he would salute her with a loving kiss. But in the comedies she is styled now the new Amphela, new Dienera, and now Hera. Crotonus flatly called her a prostitute in these lines, as his Hera, Aspecia, was born, the child of unnatural lust, a prostitute past shaming. And it appears also that he begat from her that bastard son, about whom Eupolis, in his demis, represented him as inquiring with these words, and my bastard, as he live, to which Maronides replies, yea, and had long been a man, had he not feared the mischief of his harlot birth. So renowned and celebrated to Aspecia become, they say, that even Cyrus, the one who went to war with the great king for the sovereignty of the Persians, gave the name of Aspecia to that one of his concubines whom he loved best, who before was called Milto. She was a faquem by birth, daughter of one Hermotimus, and after Cyrus had fallen in battle was carried captive to the king and acquired the greatest influence with him. These things coming to my recollection, as I write, it were perhaps unnatural to reject and pass them by. But to return to the war against the Sammians they accused Pericles of getting the decree for this past at the request of Aspecia and in the special behalf of the Militians, for the two cities were waging their war for the possession of Prian, and the Sammians were getting the better of it, and when the Athenians ordered them to stop the contest and submit the case to arbitration at Athens they would not obey. So Pericles set sail and broke up the oligarchical government which Sammos had, and then took fifty of the foremost men of the state, with as many of their children as hostages, and sent them off to Lemnos. And yet they say that every one of these hostages offered him a talent on his own account, and that the opponents of democracy in the city offered him many talents besides. And so further, Pissouthness, the Persian Satrep, who had much good will towards the Sammians, sent him ten thousand gold-staters and interceded for the city. However, Pericles took none of these bribes but treated the Sammians just as he had determined, set up a democracy and sailed back to Athens. Then the Sammians at once revolted after Pissouthness had stolen away their hostages from Lemnos for them, and in other ways equipped them for the war. Once more, therefore, Pericles set sail against them. They were not victims of sloth, nor yet of abject terror, but full of exceeding zeal in their determination to contest the supremacy of the sea. In a fierce sea-fight which came off near an island called Tregia, Pericles won a brilliant victory, with four and forty ships out fighting seventy, twenty of which were infantry transports. Close on the heels of his victorious pursuit came his seizure of the harbor, and then he laid formal siege to the Sammians, who somehow or other still had the daring to sally forth and fight with him before their walls. But soon a second and a larger armament came from Athens, and the Sammians were completely beleaguered and shut in. Then Pericles took sixty triremes and sailed out into the main sea, as most authorities say, because he wished to meet a fleet of Phoenician ships, which was coming to the aid of the Sammians, and fight it at as great a distance from Sammos as possible, but according to Cessim Brodus, because he had designs on Cyprus, which seems incredible. But in any case, whichever design he cherished, he seems to have made a mistake. For no sooner had he sailed off than Melissa's, the son of Ethagenes, a philosopher who was then acting as general at Sammos, despising either the small number of ships that were left, or the inexperience of the generals in charge of them, persuaded his fellow citizens to make an attack upon the Athenians. In the battle that ensued the Sammians were victorious, taking many of their enemy captive, and destroying many of their ships, so that they commanded the sea and laid in large store of such necessaries for the war as they did not have before. And Aristotle says that Pericles was himself also defeated by Melasus in the sea-fight which preceded this. The Sammians retaliated upon the Athenians by branding their prisoners in the forehead with owls, for the Athenians had once branded some of them with the Samina. Now the Samina is a ship of war with a boar's head designed for prow and ram, but more capacious than usual and punch-like, so that it is a good deep sea-traveler and a swift sailor too. It got this name because it made its first appearance in Sammos, where Palacrates the Tyrant had some built. To these brand-marks, they say, the verse of Aristophanes made rilling reference. For, oh, how lettered is the folk of the Sammians! Be that true or not, when Pericles learned of the disaster which had befallen his fleet, he came speedily to its aid. And though Melasus arrayed his forces against him, he conquered and routed the enemy and at once walled their city in, preferring to get the upper hand and capture it at the price of money and time, rather than of the wounds and deadly perils of his fellow citizens. And since it was a hard task for him to restrain the Athenians in their impatience of delay and eagerness to fight, he separated his whole force into eight divisions, had them draw lots and allowed the division which got the white bean to feast and take their ease, while the others did the fighting. And this is the reason, as they say, why those who have had a gay and festive time call it a white day, from the white bean. Ephrais says that Pericles actually employed siege engines in his admiration of their novelty, and that Artimon the engineer was with him there, who since he was lame, and so had to be brought on a stretcher to the works which demanded his instant attention, was dumbed paraphoritus. Heracliides Ponticus, however, refutes this story out of the poems of Anacrian, in which Artimon paraphoritus is mentioned many generations before the Sammian war and its events. And he says that Artimon was very luxurious in his life, as well as weak and panic-stricken in the presence of his fears, and therefore for the most part sat still at home, while two servants held a bronze shield over his head to keep anything from falling down upon it. Whenever he was forced to go abroad, he had himself carried in a little hammock, which was borne along just above the surface of the ground. On this account he was called paraphoritus. After eight months the Sammians surrendered, and Pericles tore down their walls, took away their ships of war, and laid a heavy fine upon them, part of which they paid at once, and part they agreed to pay at a fixed time, giving hostages therefor. To these details Durris the Sammian adds stuff for tragedy, accusing the Athenians and Pericles of great brutality, which is recorded neither by Thucydides nor Ephorists nor Aristotle. But he appears not to speak the truth when he says, forsooth, that Pericles had the Sammian triwarks and marines brought into the marketplace of Miletus and crucified there, and that then, when they had already suffered grievously for ten days, he gave orders to break their heads in with clubs and make an end of them, and then ease their bodies forth without burial rites. At all events, since it is not the want of Durris, even in cases where he has no private and personal interest, to hold his narrative down to the fundamental truth, it is all the more likely that here, in this instance, he has given a dreadful portrayal of the calamities of his country that he might collumniate the Athenians. When Pericles, after his subjection of Sammos, had returned to Athens, he gave honorable burial to those who had fallen in the war, and for the oration which he made, according to the custom, over their tombs, he won the greatest admiration. But as he came down from the Bima, while the rest of the women clasped his hand and fastened wreaths and fillets on his head, as though he were some victorious athlete, El Pinesi drew nigh and said, This is admiral in thee, Pericles, and deserving of wreaths, in that thou hast lost us many brave citizens, not in a war with Phoenicians or Medes, like my brother Simon, but in the subversion of an allied and kindred city. On El Pinesi's saying this, Pericles, with a quiet smile, it is said, quoted to her the verse of Arkelochus, Thou hast not else, in spite of years, perfumed thyself. Aion says that he had the most astonishingly great thoughts of himself for having subjected the Samnians, whereas Agnamemnon was all of ten years in taking the barbarian city, he had in nine months time reduced the foremost and most powerful people of Ionia. And indeed, his estimate of himself was not unjust. Nay, the war actually brought with it much uncertainty and great peril, if indeed, as Thucydides says, the city of Samos came within a very little of stripping from Athens her power on the sea. After this, when the billows of the Peloponnesian war were already rising and swelling, he persuaded the people to send aid and sucker to the Corsairians in their war with the Corinthians, and so to attach to themselves an island with a vigorous naval power at a time when the Peloponnesians were as good as actually at war with them. But when the people had voted to send the aid and sucker, he dispatched Lachodimonius, the son of Simon, with only ten ships, as it were in mockery of him. Now there was much good will and friendship on the part of the House of Simon towards the Lachodimonians. In order, therefore, that in case no greater conspicuous achievement should be performed under the general ship of Lachodimonius, he might so be all the more collumniated for his Laconism or sympathy with Sparta, Pericles gave him only a few ships and sent him forth against his will. And in general he was prone to thwart and check the sons of Simon, on the plea that not even in their names were they genuinely native, but rather aliens and strangers, since one of them bore the name of Lachodimonius, another that of Thessalus, and a third that of Ilius. And they were all held to be the sons of a woman of Arcadia. Accordingly, being harshly criticised because of these paltry ten ships, on the ground that he had furnished scanty aid and sucker to the needy friends of Athens, but a great pretext for war to her accusing enemies, he afterwards sent out other ships, and more of them, to Corsera, the ones which got there after the battle. The Corinthians were incensed at this procedure, and denounced the Athenians at Sparta, and were joined by the Magarians, who brought their complaint that from every marketplace and from all the harbours over which the Athenians had control, they were excluded and driven away, contrary to the common law and the formal oaths of the Greeks. The Agenitans also, deeming themselves wronged and outraged, kept up a secret wailing in the ears of the Lachodimonians, since they had not the courage to accuse the Athenians openly. At this juncture, Potidaea, too, a city that was subject to Athens, although a colony of Corinth revolted, and the siege laid to her hastened on the war all the more. Notwithstanding all, since embassies were repeatedly sent to Athens, and since Archidamus, the King of the Lachodimonians, tried to bring to a peaceful settlement most of the accusations of his allies and to soften their anger, it does not seem probable that the war would have come upon the Athenians for any remaining reasons, if only they could have been persuaded to rescind their decree against the Magarians and be reconciled with them. And therefore, since it was Pericles, who was mostly of all opposed to this, and who incited the people to abide by their contention with the Magarians, he alone was held responsible for the war. They say that when an embassy had come from Lachodimon to Athens to treat of these matters, and Pericles was shielding himself behind the plea, that a certain law prevented his taking down the tablet on which the decree was inscribed, Polyassies, one of the ambassadors, cried, Well, then, don't take it down, but turn the tablet to the wall. Surely there's no law preventing that. Clever as the proposal was, however, not one whit the more did Pericles give in. He must have secretly cherished, then, as it seems, some private grudge against the Magarians, but by way of public and open charge he accused them of appropriating to their own profane uses the sacred territory of Elusis, and proposed a decree that a herald be sent to them, the same also to go to the Lachodimonians with the denunciation of the Magarians. This decree at any rate is the work of Pericles, and aims at a reasonable and humane justification of his course. But after the herald who was sent, Anthemocrates, had been put to death through the agency of the Magarians, as it was believed, Charinas proposed a decree against them, to the effect that there be irreconcilable and implacable enmity on the part of Athens towards them, and that whosoever of the Magarians should set foot on the soil of Attica be punished with death, and that the generals, whenever they should take their ancestral oath of office, add to their oath this clause, that they would invade the Magarrid twice during each succeeding year, and that Anthemocrates be buried honorably at the Thracian gates, which are now called the Dipulim. But the Magarians denied the murder of Anthemocrates, and threw the blame for Athenian hate on Aspezia and Pericles, appealing to those far famed and hackneyed versicles of the Acarnians. Sometha, Harlet, one of Magara's womankind, was stolen by Gilded Ews more drunk than otherwise, and so the Magarians, pangs of wrath all wreaking hot, paid back the theft and raped of Aspezia's Harlots, too. Well then, whatever the original ground for enacting the decree, and it is no easy matter to determine this, the fact that it was not rescinded, all men are likely to the charge of Pericles. Only some say that he persisted in his refusal in a lofty spirit and with a clear perception of the best interests of the city, regarding the injunction laid upon it as a test of its submissiveness, and its compliance as a confession of weakness, while others hold that it was rather a sort of arrogance and love of strife, as well as for the display of his power, that he scornfully defied the Lachitimonians. But the worst charge of all, and yet the one which has the most vouchers, runs something like this. Fideas the sculpture was contractor for the Great Statue, as I have said, and being admitted to the friendship of Pericles and acquiring the greatest influence with him, made some enemies through the jealousy which he excited. Others also made use of him to test the people and see what sort of a judge it would be in a case where Pericles was involved. These latter persuaded one men on, an assistant of Fideas, to take a suppliant seat in the marketplace, and demand immunity from punishment in case he should bring information and accusation against Fideas. The people accepted the man's proposal, and formal prosecution of Fideas was made in the assembly. Embezzlement indeed was not proven, for the gold of the statue, from the very start, had been so wrought upon and cast about it by Fideas, at the wise suggestion of Pericles, that it could all be taken off and weighed, and this is what Pericles actually ordered the accusers of Fideas to do at this time. But the reputation of his works nevertheless brought a burden of jealous hatred upon Fideas, and especially the fact that when he wrought the battle of the Amazons on the shield of the goddess, he carved out a figure that suggested himself as a bald old man, lifting on high a stone with both hands, and also inserted a very fine likeness of Pericles fighting with an Amazon. And the attitude of the hand, which holds out a spear in front of the face of Pericles, is cunningly contrived, as it were, with a desire to conceal the resemblance, which is, however, plain to be seen from either side. Fideas, accordingly, was led away to prison and died there of sickness, but some say of poison which the enemies of Pericles provided, that they might bring Calumni upon him. And to men on the informer, on motion of Glycan, the people gave immunity from taxation, and enjoined upon the generals to make provision for the man's safety. About this time also Asperia was put on trial for impiety, her Miphas the Comet poet being her prosecutor, who alleged further against her that she received free-born women into a place of asignation for Pericles. And Diopethas brought in a bill providing for the public impeachment of such as did not believe in gods, or who taught doctrines regarding the heavens, directing suspicion against Pericles by means of Anaxagoras. The people accepted with delight these slanders, and so, while they were in this mood, a bill was passed on motion of Dracontides, that Pericles should deposit his accounts of public monies with the Pritonies, and that the jurors should decide upon his case with ballads which had lain upon the altar of the goddess on the Acropolis. But Hagnon amended this clause of the bill with the motion that the case be tried before fifteen hundred jurors in the ordinary way, whether one wanted to call it a prosecution for embezzlement in bribery or malversation. Well then, Aspecia he begged off by shedding copious tears at the trial, as Eskenes says, and by entreating the jurors, and he feared for Anaxagoras so much that he sent him away from the city. And since in the case of Fideas he had come into collision with the people, he feared a jury in his own case, and so kindled into flame the threatening and smouldering war, hoping thereby to dissipate the charges made against him and to lay the people's jealousy in as much as when great undertakings were on foot and great perils threatened the city entrusted herself to him and to him alone by reason of his worth and power. Such then are the reasons which are alleged for his not suffering the people to yield to the Lachodemonians, but the truth about it is not clear. The Lachodemonians, perceiving that if he were deposed they would find the Athenians more pliant in their hands, ordered them to drive out the Silonian pollution, in which the family of Pericles on his mother's side was involved, as Thucydides states. But the attempt brought a result the opposite of what its makers designed, for in place of suspicion and slander, Pericles won even greater confidence and honor among the citizens than before, because they saw that their enemies hated and feared him above all other men. Therefore also, before Archdemus invaded Attica with the Peloponnesians, Pericles made public proclamation to the Athenians, that in case Archdemus, while ravaging everything else, should spare his estates, either out of regard for the friendly tie that existed between them, or with an eye to affording his enemy's grounds for slander, he would make over to the city his lands and the homesteads thereon. Accordingly the Lachodemonians and their allies invaded Attica with a great host under the leadership of Archdemus the King, and they advanced, ravaging the country as they went, as far as Arcarnay, where they encamped, supposing that the Athenians would not tolerate it but would fight with them out of angry pride. Pericles, however, looked upon it as a terrible thing to join battle with sixty thousand Peloponnesian and Bosian hoplites. Those who made the first invasion were as numerous as that, and staked the city itself upon the issue. So he tried to calm down those who were eager to fight, and who were in distress at what the enemy was doing, by saying that trees, though cut and lobbed, drew quickly, but if men were destroyed it was not easy to get them again. And he would not call the people together into an assembly, fearing that he would be constrained against his better judgment, but like the helmsmen of a ship, who, when a stormy wind swoops down upon it in the open sea, makes all fast, takes in sail and exercises his skill, disregarding the tears and entreaties of the seasick and timorous passengers. So he shut up the city tight, put all parts of it under safe garrison, and exercised his own judgment, little heeding the brawlers and malcontents. And yet many of his friends beset him within treaties, and many of his enemies with threats and denunciations, and choruses sang songs of scurrilous mockery, wailing at his generalship for its cowardice, and its abandonment of everything to the enemy. Cleon, too, was already harassing him, taking advantage of the wrath with which the citizens regarded him to make his own way toward the leadership of the people, as these anapestic verses of hermaphis show. Thou king of the sadders, why pray wilt thou not take the spear for thy weapon, and stop the dire talk, with the which until now thou conductest the war? While the soul of Attelas is in thee, if the tiniest knife is but laid on the stone, to give it an edge, thou gnashest thy teeth, as if bitten by fiery Cleon. However, Pericles was moved by no such things, but gently and silently underwent the ignominy and the hatred, and sending out an armament of a hundred ships against the Peloponnesus, did not himself sail with it, but remained behind, keeping the city under watch and warred and well in hand, until the Peloponnesians withdrew. Then by way of soothing the multitude, who in spite of their enemy's departure were distressed over the war, he won their favor by distributions of money and proposed allotments of conquered lands. The genitans, for instance, he drove out entirely, and parceled out their island among the Athenians by lot. And some consolation was to be had from what their enemies suffered. For the expedition around the Peloponnesus ravaged much territory and sacked villages in small cities, while Pericles himself, by land, invaded the Magard and raised it all. Wherein also it was evident that though their enemies did the Athenians much harm by land, they suffered much too at their hands by sea, and therefore would not have protracted the war to such a length, but would have speedily given up, just as Pericles prophesied in the beginning, had not a terrible visitation from heavenward thwarted human calculations. As it was in the first place a pestilential destruction fell upon them, and devoured clean the prime of their youth and power. It weakened them in body and in spirit, and made them altogether wild against Pericles, so that for all the world as the mad will attack a physician or a father, so they, in the delirium of the plague, attempted to do him harm, persuaded there too by his enemies. These urged that the plague was caused by the crowding of the rustic multitudes together into the city, where in the summer season many were huddled together in small dwellings and stifling barracks, and compelled to lead a stay at home and inactive life, instead of being in the pure and open air of heaven as they were want. They said that Pericles was responsible for this, who because of the war had poured the rabble from the country into the walled city, and then gave that mass of men no employment whatever, but suffered them, thus penned up like cattle, to fill one another full of corruption, and provided them no change or respite. Desiring to heal these evils, and at the same time to inflict some annoyance upon the enemy, he manned a hundred and fifty ships of war, and after embarking many brave hoplites and horsemen, was on the point of putting out to sea, affording great hope to the citizens, and no less fear to the enemy and consequence of so great a force. But when the ships were already manned, and Pericles had gone on board his own trireme, it chanced that the sun was eclipsed and darkness came on, and all were thoroughly frightened, looking upon it as a great portent. Accordingly, seeing that his steersman was timorous and utterly perplexed, Pericles held up his cloak before the man's eyes, and thus covering them asked him if he thought it anything dreadful, or pretentious of anything dreadful. No, said the steersman. How, then, said Pericles, is yonder event different from this, except that it is something rather larger than my cloak which has caused the obscurity. At any rate this tale is told in the schools of philosophy. Well then, on sailing forth, Pericles seems to have accomplished nothing worthy of his preparations. But after laying siege to sacred Epidaurus, which awakened a hope that it might be captured, he had no such good fortune because of the plague. Its fierce onset destroyed not only the Athenians themselves, but also those who, in any manner so ever, had dealings with their forces. The Athenians, being exasperated against him on this account, he tried to appease and encourage them. He did not, however, succeed in allaying their wrath, nor yet in changing their purposes, before they got their hostile ballots into their hands, became masters of his fate, stripped him of his command, and punished him with a fine. The amount of this was fifteen talents, according to those who give the lowest, and fifty, according to those who give the highest figures. The public prosecutor mentioned in the records of the case was Cleon, as Idomenius says, but according to Theophrastus it was simius, and Heracletes Ponticus mentions Locrides. So much, then, for his public troubles. They were likely soon to cease, now that the multitude had stung him, as it were, and left their passion with their sting. But his domestic affairs were in a sorry plight, since he had lost not a few of his intimate friends during the pestilence, and had for some time been rent and torn by a family feud. The eldest of his legitimate sons, Xanthippus, who was naturally prodigal, had married a young and extravagant wife, the daughter of Tissander, the son of Epilicus, was much displeased at his father's exactitude in making him but a meager allowance. And that a little at a time. Accordingly he sent to one of his father's friends and got money, pretending that Pericles bade him do it. When the friend afterwards demanded repayment of the loan, Pericles not only refused it, but brought suit against him to boot. So the young fellow Xanthippus, incensed at this, fell to abusing his father, publishing abroad to make men laugh his conduct of affairs at home, and the discourses which he held with the Sophists. For instance, a certain athlete had hit Epidymus the Pharsalian with a javelin, accidentally, and killed him. And Pericles, Xanthippus said, squandered an entire day discussing with Protagoras whether it was the javelin, or rather the one who hurled it, or the judges of the contests, that in the strictest sense ought to be held responsible for the disaster. Besides all this, the slanderous charge concerning his own wife, Stesson Brodes says, was sewn abroad in public by Xanthippus himself, and also that the quarrel which the young man had with his father remained utterly incurable up to the time of his death, for Xanthippus fell sick and died during the plague. Pericles lost his sister also at that time, and of his relatives and friends the largest part, and those who were most serviceable to him in his administration of the city. He did not, however, give up, nor yet abandon his loftiness and grandeur of spirit because of his calamities. Nay, he was not even seen to weep, either at the funeral rites or at the grave of any of his connections, until indeed he lost the very last remaining one of his legitimate sons, Perilus. Even though he was bowed down at this stroke, he nevertheless tried to persevere in his habit and maintain his spiritual greatness. But as he later wreathed upon the dead, he was vanquished by his anguish at the sight, so that he broke out into wailing and shed a multitude of tears, although he had never done any such thing in all his life before. The city made trial of its other generals and councillors for the conduct of the war, but since no one appeared to have weight that was adequate or authority that was competent for such leadership, it yearned for Pericles, and summoned him back to the Bima and the War Office. He was lying dejectedly at home because of his sorrow, but was persuaded by Alcibiades and his other friends to resume his public life. When the people had apologised for their thankless treatment of him, and he had undertaken again the conduct of the state, and been elected general, he asked for a suspension of the law concerning children born out of wedlock, a law which he himself had formerly introduced, in order that the name and lineage of his house might not altogether expire through lack of succession. Many years before this, when Pericles was at the height of his political career, and had sons born in wedlock, as I have said, he proposed a law that only those should be reckoned Athenians whose parents on both sides were Athenians. And so when the King of Egypt sent a present to the people of forty thousand measures of grain, and this had to be divided up among the citizens, there was a great crop of prosecutions against citizens of the legal birth by the law of Pericles, who had up to that time escaped notice and had been overlooked, and many of them also suffered at the hands of informers. As a result, a little less than five thousand were convicted and sold into slavery, and those who retained their citizenship and were judged to be Athenians were found, as a result of this scrutiny, to be fourteen thousand and forty in number. It was, accordingly, a grave matter that the law which had been rigorously enforced against so many should now be suspended by the very man who had introduced it. And yet the calamities which Pericles was then suffering in his family life, regarded as a kind of penalty which he had paid for his arrogance and haughtiness of old, broke down the objections of the Athenians. They thought that what he suffered was by way of retribution, and that what he asked became a man to ask and men to grant, and so they suffered him to enroll his illegitimate son in the foragerie lists and to give him his own name. This was the son who afterwards conquered the Peloponnesians in a naval battle at the Arganusae Islands, and was put to death by the people along with his fellow generals. At this time it would seem the plague laid hold of Pericles, not with a violent attack, as in the case of others, nor acute, but one which, with a kind of sluggish distemper that prolonged itself through burying changes, used up his body slowly and undermined the loftiness of his spirit. Certain it is that Theophrastus, in his ethics, querying whether one's character follows the bent of one's fortunes and is forced by bodily sufferings to abandon its high excellence, records this fact that Pericles, as he lay sick, showed one of his friends who was come to see him an amulet that the women had hung around his neck, as much as to say that he was very badly off to put up with such folly as that. Being now near his end, the best of the citizens and those of his friends who survived were sitting around him holding discourse of his excellence and power, how great they had been, and estimating all his achievements and the number of his trophies. There were nine of these which he had set up as the city's victorious general. This discourse they were holding with one another, supposing that he no longer understood them, but had lost consciousness. He had been attending to it all, however, and speaking out among them said he was amazed at their phrasing and commemorating that in him which was due as much to fortune as to himself, and which had fallen to the lot of many generals besides, instead of mentioning his fairest and greatest title to their administration. For, said he, no living Athenian ever put on mourning because of me. So then the man is to be admired not only for his reasonableness and the gentleness which he maintained in the midst of many responsibilities and great enmities, but also for his loftiness of spirit, seeing that he regarded it as the noblest of all his titles to honor that he had never gratified his envy or his passion in the exercise of his vast power, nor treated any one of his foes as a foe incurable. And it seems to me that his otherwise purile and pompous surname is rendered unobjectionable and becoming by this one's circumstance, that it was so gracious in nature and a life so pure and undefiled in the exercise of sovereign power which were called Olympian, in as much as we do firmly hold that the divine rulers and kings of the universe are capable only of good, and incapable of evil. In this we are not like the poets, who confuse us with their ignorant fancies, and are convicted of inconsistency by their own stories, since they declare that the place where they say the gods dwell is a secure abode and tranquil, without experience of winds and clouds, but gleaming through all the unbroken time with the soft radiance of purest light, implying that some such manner of existence is most becoming to the blessed immortal, and yet they represent the gods themselves as full of malice and hatred and wrath, and other passions which ill become even men of any sense. But this perhaps will be thought matter for discussion elsewhere. The progress of events wrought in the Athenians a swift appreciation of Pericles and a keen sense of his loss. For those who, while he lived, were oppressed by a sense of his power, and felt that it kept him in obscurity, straight way on his removal made trial of other orders and popular leaders, only to be led to the confession that a character more moderate than his in its solemn dignity, and more august in its gentleness had not been created. That objectionable power of his, which they had used to call monarchy and tyranny, seemed to them now to have been a saving bulwark of the Constitution, so greatly was the state afflicted by the corruption and manifold baseness which he had kept weak and groveling, thereby covering it out of sight and preventing it from becoming incurably powerful. Such were the memorable things in the career of Pericles, as we have received them, and now let us change the course of our narrative and tell of Fabius. It was a nymph, they say, or a woman native to the country according to others, who consorted with Hercules by the river Tiber, and became by him the mother of Fabius, the founder of the family of the Fabii, which was a large one, and of high repute in Rome. But some writers state that the first members of the family were called Fodii in ancient times, from their practice of taking wild beasts and pitfalls. For down to the present time Fosse is the Latin for ditches, and Foderre for to-dake. In course of time, by a change of two letters, they were called Fabii. This family produced many great men, and from Rolis, the greatest of them, in this account called Maximus by the Romans, the Fabius Maximus of whom we now write was forth in descent. He had the surname of Verucoses from a physical peculiarity, namely, a small wart growing above his lip, and that of Ovicula, which signifies Lambkin, was given him because of the gentleness and gravity of his nature when he was yet a child. Indeed the calmness and silence of his demeanor, the great caution with which he indulged in childish pleasures, the slowness and difficulty with which he learned his lessons, and his continued submissiveness in dealing with his comrades led those who knew him superficially to suspect him of something like foolishness and stupidity. Only a few discerned the inexorable firmness in the depth of his soul, and the magnanimous and leotine qualities of his nature. But soon, as time went on and he was roused by the demands of active life, he made it clear even to the multitude that his seeming lack of energy was only lack of passion, that his caution was prudence, and that his never being quick nor even easy to move made him always steadfast and sure. He saw that the conduct of the State was a great task, and that wars must be many. He therefore trained his body for the wars, nature's own armor as it were, and his speech was an instrument of persuasion with the people, giving it a form right while befitting his manner of life. For it had no affectation, nor any empty forensic grace, but an import of peculiar dignity rendered weighty by an abundance of maxims. These they say most resemble those which Thucydides employs, and his speech of his is actually preserved, which was pronounced by him before the people in a eulogy of his son, who died a consul. The first two of the five consulships in which he served brought him the honour of a triumph over the Ligurians. These were defeated by him in battle with heavy loss, and retired into the Alps, where they ceased plundering and harrying the parts of Italy next to them. But Hannibal now burst into Italy, and was at first victorious in battle at the River Trebia. Then he marched through Tuscany, ravaging the countryside, and smote Rome with dire consternation and fear. Signs and portents occurred, some familiar to the Romans, like peals of thunder, others wholly strange and quite extraordinary. For instance it was said that shields sweated blood, that ears of corn were cut at Antium with blood upon them, that blazing fiery stones fell from on high, and that the people of Filari saw the heavens open and many tablets fall down and scatter themselves abroad, and that on one of these was written in letters plain to see, Mars now brandished his weapons. The consul, Gaius Flaminius, was daunted by none of these things, for he was a man of a fiery and ambitious nature, and besides he was elated by great successes which he had won before this, in a matter contrary to all expectation. He had, namely, although the senate dissented from his plan and his colleague violently opposed it, joined battle with the Gauls and defeated them. Fabius was also less disturbed by the signs and portents, because he thought it would be absurd, although they had great effect upon many. But when he learned how few and number the enemy were, and how great was their lack of resources, he exhorted the Romans to bide their time, and not to give battle to a man who wielded an army trained by many contests for this very issue, but to send aid to their allies, to keep their subject cities well in hand, and to suffer the culminating vigor of Hannibal to sink and expire of itself, like a flame that flares up from scant and slight material. Flaminius, however, was not persuaded, but declared that he would not suffer the war to be brought near Rome, and that he would not, like Cumulus of old, fight in the city for the city's defense. Accordingly he ordered the tribunes to lead the army forth. But as Flaminius himself sprang upon his horse, for no apparent reason and unaccountably, the animal was seized with quivering fright, and he was thrown and fell head foremost to the ground. Nevertheless he in no wise desisted from his purpose, but since he had set out at the beginning to face Hannibal drew up his forces near the lake called Thrasimene in Tuscany. When the soldiers of both armies had engaged at the very crisis of the battle, an earthquake occurred, by which cities were overthrown, rivers diverted from their channels, and fragments of cliffs torn away. And yet, although the disaster was so violent, no one of the combatants noticed it at all. Flaminius himself, then, while displaying many deeds of daring and prowess, fell, and round about him the flower of his army. The rest were routed with much slaughter, fifteen thousand were cut to pieces, and as many more taken prisoners. The body of Flaminius, to which Hannibal was eager to give honourable burial because of his valor, could not be found among the dead, but disappeared, no one ever knowing how. Now of the defeat sustained at Trebia neither the general who wrote nor the messenger who was sent with the tidings gave a straightforward account, the victory being falsely declared uncertain and doubtful. But as soon as Pomponius the praetor heard of this second defeat, he called an assembly of the people, faced it, and without round about or deceptive phrases. But in downright fashion said, Men of Rome, we have been beaten in a great battle. Our army has been cut to pieces. Our council, Flaminius, is dead. Take ye therefore, counsel for your own salvation and safety. This speech of his fell like a tempest upon the great sea of people before him, and threw the city into commotion, nor could deliberate reasoning hold its own and stay the general consternation. But all were brought at last to be of one mind, namely, that the situation demanded a soul and absolute authority, which they call a dictatorship, and a man who would wield this authority with energy and without fear. That Fabius Maximus and he alone was such a man, having a spirit and a dignity of character that fully matched the greatness of the office, and being, moreover, at the time of life when bodily vigor still suffices to carry out the counsels of the mind, and courage is tempered with prudence. Accordingly this course was adopted, and Fabius was appointed dictator. He himself appointed Marcus Minacheus to be his master of horse, and then at once asked permission of the Senate to use a horse himself when in the field. For this was not his right, but was forbidden by an ancient law, either because the Romans placed their greatest strength in their infantry, and for this reason thought that their commander ought to be with the phalanx and not leave it, or because they wished, since the power of the office, in all other respects, is as great as that of a tyrant, that in this joint at least the dictator should be plainly dependent on the people. However, Fabius himself was minded to show forth at once the magnitude and grandeur of his office, that the citizens might be more submissive and obedient to his command. He therefore appeared in public attended by a united band of twenty-four lictors with their fasses, and when the remaining counsel was coming to meet him, sent his adjudant to him with orders to dismiss his lictors, lay aside the insignia of his office, and meet him as a private person. After this he began with the gods, which is the fairest of all beginnings, and showed the people that the recent disaster was due to the neglect and scorn with which their general had treated religious rights, and not to the cowardice of those who fought under him. He thus induced them, instead of fearing their enemies, to propitiate and honor the gods. It was not that he filled them with superstition, but rather that he emboldened their valor with piety, allaying and removing the fear which their enemies inspired with hopes of aid from the gods. At this time, moreover, many of the so-called Sibylene books, containing secrets of service to the State, were consulted, and it is said that some of the irracular sayings therein preserved correspondence with the fortunes and events of the time. What was thus ascertained, however, could not be made public, but the dictator, in the presence of all the people, vowed to sacrifice to the gods an entire year's increase in goats, swine, sheep and cattle—that is, all that Italy's mountains, plains, rivers and meadows should breed in the coming spring. He likewise vowed to celebrate a musical and dramatic festival in honor of the gods, which should cost three hundred and thirty-three cistercia, plus three hundred and thirty-three denarii, plus one third of a denarius. This sum, in Greek money, amounts to eighty-three thousand five hundred and eighty-three drachmas, plus two obols. Now the reason for the exact prescription of this particular number is hard to give, unless it was thereby desired to laud the power of the number of three, as being a perfect number by nature, the first of odd numbers, the beginning of quantity, and as containing in itself the first differences in the elements of every number mingled and blended together. By thus fixing the thoughts of the people upon their relations with heaven, Fabius made them more tearful regarding the future. But he himself put all his hopes of victory in himself, believing that heaven bestowed success by reason of wisdom and valor, and turned his attention to Hannibal. He did not purpose to fight out the issue with him, but wished, having plenty of time, money, and been, to wear out and consume gradually his culminating vigor, his scanty resources, and his small army. Therefore, always pitching his camp in hilly regions so as to be out of reach of the enemy's cavalry, he hung threateningly over them. If they sat still, he too kept quiet. But if they moved, he would fetch a circuit down from the hides and show himself, just far enough away to avoid being forced to fight against his will, and yet near enough to make his very delays inspire the enemy with fear that he was going to give battle at last. But for merely consuming time in this way he was generally despised by his countrymen, and roundly abused even in his own camp. Much more did his enemies think him a man of no courage and mere nobody, all except Hannibal. He and he alone comprehended the cleverness of his antagonist and the style of warfare which he had adopted. He therefore made up his mind that by every possible device and constraint his foe must be induced to fight, or else the Carthaginians were undone, since they were unable to use their weapons in which they were superior, but were slowly losing and expending to no purpose their men and moneys in which they were inferior. He therefore resorted to every species of strategic trick and artifice, and tried them all, seeking like a clever athlete to get a hold upon his adversary. Now he would attack Fabius directly, now he would seek to throw his forces into confusion, and now he would try to lead them off every wither in his desire to divorce him from his safe defensive plans. But the purpose of Fabius, confident of a favorable issue, remained consistent and unchangeable. He was annoyed, however, by his master of horse, Manisius, who was eager to fight out of all reason and over-bold, and who sought to win a following in the army, which he filled with mad impetuousity and empty hopes. The soldiers railed at Fabius and scornfully called him Hannibal's pedagogue, but Manisius they considered a great man, and a general worthy of Rome. All the more, therefore, did he indulge his arrogance in boldness and scoffed at their encampments on the heights, where, as he said, the dictator was always arranging beautiful theaters for their spectacle of Italy, laid waste with fire and sword. And he would ask the friends of Fabius whether he was taking his army up into heaven, having lost all hope of earth, or whether he wrapped himself in clouds and mists merely to run away from the enemy. When his friends reported this to Fabius and advised him to do away with the oprobarium by risking battle, in that case surely, said he, I should be a greater coward than I am now held to be, if through fear of abusive jests I should abandon my fixed plans. And verily the fear which one exercises in behalf of his country is not shameful, but to be frightened from one's course by the opinions of men and by their slanderous censures, that marks a man unworthy of so high an office as this, who makes himself the slave of the fools over whom he is in duty bound to be lord and master. After this Hannibal fell into a grievous error. He wished to draw his army off some distance beyond Fabius and occupy planes affording pastridge. He therefore ordered his native guides to conduct him immediately after supper into the district of Casinum. But they did not hear the name correctly, owing to his foreign way of pronouncing it, and promptly hurried his forces to the edge of Campania into the city and district of Casinum, through the midst of which flows a dividing river called Verturnus by the Romans. The region is otherwise encompassed by mountains, but a narrow defile opens out toward the sea, in the vicinity of which it becomes marshy, from the overflow of the river, has high sand heaps and terminates in a beach, where there is no anchorage because of the dashing waves. While Hannibal was descending into this valley, Fabius, taking advantage of his acquaintance with the waves, marched round him and blocked up the narrow outlet with the detachment of four thousand heavy infantry. The rest of his army he posted to advantage on the remaining streets, while with the lightest and readiest of his troops he fell upon the enemy's rear guard, through their whole army into confusion, and slew about eight hundred of them. Hannibal now perceived the mistake in his position and its peril, and crucified the native guides who were responsible for it. He wished to effect a retreat, but despaired of dislodging his enemies by direct attack from the passes of which they were masters. All his men, moreover, were disheartened and fearful, thinking that they were surrounded on all sides by difficulties from which there was no escape. He therefore determined to cheat his enemies by a trick, the nature of which was as follows. He gave orders to take about two thousand of the cattle which they had captured, fastened to each of their horns a torch consisting of a bundle of whiz or faggots, and then in the night at a given signal to light the torches and drive the cattle towards the passes along the defiles guarded by the enemy. As soon as his orders had been obeyed he decamped with the rest of his army in the darkness which had now become and led it slowly along. The cattle, as long as the fire was slight and consumed only the wood, went on quietly as they were driven towards the slopes of the mountains, and the shepherds and herdsmen who looked down from the heights were amazed at the flames gleaming on the tips of their horns. They thought an army was marching in close array by the light of many torches. But when the horns had been burned down to the roots and the live flesh felt the flames and the cattle at the pain shook and tossed their heads, and so covered one another with quantities of fire, then they kept no order in their going, but in terror and anguish went dashing down the mountains, their foreheads and tails ablaze, and setting fire also to much of the forest through which they had fled. It was, of course, a fearful spectacle to the Romans guarding the passes. For the flames seemed to come from the torches in the hands of men who were running hither and thither with them. They were therefore in great commotion and fear, believing that the enemy were advancing upon them from all quarters and surrounding them on every side. Therefore they had not the courage to hold their posts, but withdrew to the main body of their army on the heights, and abandoned the defiles. Instantly the light-armed troops of Hannibal came up and took possession of the passes, and the rest of his forces presently joined them without any fear, although heavily encumbered with much spoil. It was still night when Fabius became aware of the ruse for some of the cattle in their random flight were captured by his men, but he was afraid of ambushes in the darkness, and so kept still with his forces under arms. When it was day, however, he pursued the enemy and hung upon their rear-guard, and there was hand-to-hand fighting over difficult ground and much tumult and confusion. At last Hannibal sent back from his van a body of Spaniards, noble, light-footed men and good mountaineers, who fell upon the heavy-armed Roman infantry, cut many of them to pieces, and forced Fabius to turn back. And now more than ever was Fabius the mark for scorn and abuse. He had renounced all bold and open fighting, with the idea of conquering Hannibal by the exercise of superior judgment and foresight, and now he was clearly vanquished himself by these very qualities in his foe and out-generaled. Hannibal, moreover, wishing to inflame still more the wrath of the Romans against Fabius, on coming to his fields, gave orders to burn and destroy everything else, but had these spared and these alone. He also set a guard over them, which suffered no harm to be done them, and nothing to be taken from them. When this was reported at Rome, it brought more odium upon Fabius. The tribunes of the people also kept up a constant denunciation of him, chiefly at the instigation and behest of Matilius. Not that Matilius hated Fabius, but he was a kinsman of Manisius, the master of horse, and thought that slander of the one meant honor and fame for the other. The Senate was also in an angry mood, and found particular fault with Fabius for the terms he had made with Hannibal concerning the prisoners of war. They had agreed between them to exchange the captives man for man, and if either party had more than the other, the one who recovered these was to pay two hundred and fifty dropmas per man. Accordingly, after the exchange of man for man was made, it was found that Hannibal still had two hundred and forty Romans left. The Senate decided not to send the ransom money for these, and found fault with Fabius for trying, in a manner so unbecoming and unprofitable to the State, to recover men whose cowardice had made them a prey to the enemy. When Fabius heard of this, he bore the resentment of his fellow citizens with equanimity, but since he had no money, and could not harbor the thought of cheating Hannibal and abandoning his countrymen to his fate, he sent his son to Rome with orders to sell his fields and bring the money to him at once at camp. The young man sold the estates and quickly made his return, whereupon Fabius sent the ransom money to Hannibal and got back the prisoners of war. Many of these afterwards offered to pay him the price of their ransom, but in no case did he take it, remitting it rather for all. End of Fabius Maximus Part 1