Plutarch: Lives of the noble Grecians and Romans
that he may not only employ his contemplation, but may also be
improved by it. For as that color is most suitable to the eye whose
freshness and pleasantness stimulates and strengthens the sight, so a
man ought to apply his intellectual perception to such objects as, with
the sense of delight, are apt to call it forth, and allure it to its
own proper good and advantage.
Such objects we find in the acts of virtue, which also produce in the
minds of mere readers about them, an emulation and eagerness that may
lead them on to imitation. In other things there does not immediately
follow upon the admiration and liking of the thing done, any strong
desire of doing the like. Nay, many times, on the very contrary, when
we are pleased with the work, we slight and set little by the workman or
artist himself, as, for instance, in perfumes and purple dyes, we are
taken with the things themselves well enough, but do not think dyers and
perfumers otherwise than low and sordid people. It was not said amiss
by Antisthenes, when people told him that one Ismenias was an excellent
piper, "It may be so," said he, "but he is but a wretched human being,
otherwise he would not have been an excellent piper." And king Philip,
to the same purpose, told his son Alexander, who once at a merry-meeting
played a piece of music charmingly and skillfully, "Are you not ashamed,
son, to play so well?" For it is enough for a king, or prince to find
leisure sometimes to hear others sing, and he does the muses quite honor
enough when he pleases to be but present, while others engage in such
exercises and trials of skill.
He who busies himself in mean occupations produces, in the very pains he
takes about things of little or no use, an evidence against himself of
his negligence and indisposition to what is really good. Nor did any
generous and ingenuous young man, at the sight of the statue of Jupiter
at Pisa, ever desire to be a Phidias, or, on seeing that of Juno at
Argos, long to be a Polycletus, or feel induced by his pleasure in their
poems to wish to be an Anacreon or Philetas or Archilochus. For it does
not necessarily follow, that, if a piece of work please for its
gracefulness, therefore he that wrought it deserves our admiration.
Whence it is that neither do such things really profit or advantage the
beholders, upon the sight of which no zeal arises for the imitation of
them, nor any impulse or inclination, which may prompt any desire or
endeavor of doing the like. But virtue, by the bare statement of its
actions, can so affect men's minds as to create at once both admiration
of the things done and desire to imitate the doers of them. The goods
of fortune we would possess and would enjoy; those of virtue we long to
practice and exercise; we are content to receive the former from others,
the latter we wish others to experience from us. Moral good is a
practical stimulus; it is no sooner seen, than it inspires an impulse to
practice; and influences the mind and character not by a mere imitation
which we look at, but, by the statement of the fact, creates a moral
purpose which we form.
And so we have thought fit to spend our time and pains in writing of the
lives of famous persons; and have composed this tenth book upon that
subject, containing the life of Pericles, and that of Fabius Maximus,
who carried on the war against Hannibal, men alike, as in their other
virtues and good parts, so especially in their mild and upright temper
and demeanor, and in that capacity to bear the cross-grained humors of
their fellow-citizens and colleagues in office which made them both most
useful and serviceable to the interests of their countries. Whether we
take a right aim at our intended purpose, it is left to the reader to
judge by what he shall here find.
Pericles was of the tribe Acamantis, and the township Cholargus, of the
noblest birth both on his father's and mother's side. Xanthippus, his
father, who defeated the king of Persia's generals in the battle at
Mycale, took to wife Agariste, the grandchild of Clisthenes, who drove
out the sons of Pisistratus, and nobly put an end to their tyrannical
usurpation, and moreover made a body of laws, and settled a model of
government admirably tempered and suited for the harmony and safety of
the people.
His mother, being near her time, fancied in a dream that she was brought
to bed of a lion, and a few days after was delivered of Pericles, in
other respects perfectly formed, only his head was somewhat longish and
out of proportion. For which reason almost all the images and statues
that were made of him have the head covered with a helmet, the workmen
apparently being willing not to expose him. The poets of Athens called
him Schinocephalos, or squill-head, from schinos, a squill, or sea-
onion. One of the comic poets, Cratinus, in the Chirons,
tells us that --
Old Chronos once took queen Sedition to wife;
Which two brought to life
That tyrant far-famed,
Whom the gods the supreme skull-compeller have named.
And, in the Nemesis, addresses him --
Come, Jove, thou head of gods.
And a second, Teleclides, says, that now, in embarrassment with
political difficulties, he sits in the city,--
Fainting underneath the load
Of his own head; and now abroad,
From his huge gallery of a pate,
Sends forth trouble to the state.
And a third, Eupolis, in the comedy called the Demi, in a series of
questions about each of the demagogues, whom he makes in the play to
come up from hell, upon Pericles being named last, exclaims,--
And here by way of summary, now we've done,
Behold, in brief, the heads of all in one.
The master that taught him music, most authors are agreed, was Damon
(whose name, they say, ought to be pronounced with the first syllable
short). Though Aristotle tells us that he was thoroughly practiced in
all accomplishments of this kind by Pythoclides. Damon, it is not
unlikely, being a sophist, out of policy, sheltered himself under the
profession of music to conceal from people in general his skill in other
things, and under this pretense attended Pericles, the young athlete of
politics, so to say, as his training-master in these exercises. Damon's
lyre, however, did not prove altogether a successful blind; he was
banished the country by ostracism for ten years, as a dangerous
intermeddler and a favorer of arbitrary power, and, by this means, gave
the stage occasion to play upon him. As, for instance, Plato, the comic
poet, introduces a character, who questions him --
Tell me, if you please,
Since you're the Chiron who taught Pericles.
Pericles, also, was a hearer of Zeno, the Eleatic, who treated of
natural philosophy in the same manner as Parmenides did, but had also
perfected himself in an art of his own for refuting and silencing
opponents in argument; as Timon of Phlius describes it, --
Also the two-edged tongue of mighty Zeno, who,
Say what one would, could argue it untrue.
But he that saw most of Pericles, and furnished him most especially with
a weight and grandeur of sense, superior to all arts of popularity, and
in general gave him his elevation and sublimity of purpose and of
character, was Anaxagoras of Clazomenae; whom the men of those times
called by the name of Nous, that is, mind, or intelligence, whether in
admiration of the great and extraordinary gift he displayed for the
science of nature, or because that he was the first of the philosophers
who did not refer the first ordering of the world to fortune or chance,
nor to necessity or compulsion, but to a pure, unadulterated
intelligence, which in all other existing mixed and compound things acts
as a principle of discrimination, and of combination of like with like.
For this man, Pericles entertained an extraordinary esteem and
admiration, and, filling himself with this lofty, and, as they call it,
up-in-the-air sort of thought, derived hence not merely, as was natural,
elevation of purpose and dignity of language, raised far above the base
and dishonest buffooneries of mob-eloquence, but, besides this, a
composure of countenance, and a serenity and calmness in all his
movements, which no occurrence whilst he was speaking could disturb, a
sustained and even tone of voice, and various other advantages of a
similar kind, which produced the greatest effect on his hearers. Once,
after being reviled and ill-spoken of all day long in his own hearing by
some vile and abandoned fellow in the open marketplace, where he was
engaged in the dispatch of some urgent affair, he continued his business
in perfect silence, and in the evening returned home composedly, the man
still dogging him at the heels, and pelting him all the way with abuse
and foul language; and stepping into his house, it being by this time
dark, he ordered one of his servants to take a light, and to go along
with the man and see him safe home. Ion, it is true, the dramatic poet,
says that Pericles's manner in company was somewhat over-assuming and
pompous; and that into his high bearing there entered a good deal of
slightingness and scorn of others; he reserves his commendation for
Cimon's ease and pliancy and natural grace in society. Ion, however,
who must needs make virtue, like a show of tragedies, include some comic
scenes, we shall not altogether rely upon; Zeno used to bid those who
called Pericles's gravity the affectation of a charlatan, to go and
affect the like themselves; inasmuch as this mere counterfeiting might
in time insensibly instill into them a real love and knowledge of those
noble qualities.
Nor were these the only advantages which Pericles derived from
Anaxagoras's acquaintance; he seems also to have become, by his
instructions, superior to that superstition with which an ignorant
wonder at appearances, for example, in the heavens possesses the minds
of people unacquainted with their causes, eager for the supernatural,
and excitable through an inexperience which the knowledge of natural
causes removes, replacing wild and timid superstition by the good hope
and assurance of an intelligent piety.
There is a story, that once Pericles had brought to him from a country
farm of his, a ram's head with one horn, and that Lampon, the diviner,
upon seeing the horn grow strong and solid out of the midst of the
forehead, gave it as his judgment, that, there being at that time two
potent factions, parties, or interests in the city, the one of
Thucydides and the other of Pericles, the government would come about to
that one of them in whose ground or estate this token or indication of
fate had shown itself. But that Anaxagoras, cleaving the skull in
sunder, showed to the bystanders that the brain had not filled up its
natural place, but being oblong, like an egg, had collected from all
parts of the vessel which contained it, in a point to that place from
whence the root of the horn took its rise. And that, for that time,
Anaxagoras was much admired for his explanation by those that were
present; and Lampon no less a little while after, when Thucydides was
overpowered, and the whole affairs of the state and government came into
the hands of Pericles.
And yet, in my opinion, it is no absurdity to say that they were both in
the right, both natural philosopher and diviner, one justly detecting
the cause of this event, by which it was produced, the other the end for
which it was designed. For it was the business of the one to find out
and give an account of what it was made, and in what manner and by what
means it grew as it did; and of the other to foretell to what end and
purpose it was so made, and what it might mean or portend. Those who
say that to find out the cause of a prodigy is in effect to destroy its
supposed signification as such, do not take notice that, at the same