Plutarch: Lives of the noble Grecians and Romans
image in gold, and he has his name inscribed on the pedestal as the
workman of it; and indeed the whole work in a manner was under his
charge, and he had, as we have said already, the oversight over all the
artists and workmen, through Pericles's friendship for him; and this,
indeed, made him much envied, and his patron shamefully slandered with
stories, as if Phidias were in the habit of receiving, for Pericles's
use, freeborn women that came to see the works. The comic writers of
the town, when they had got hold of this story, made much of it, and
bespattered him with all the ribaldry they could invent, charging him
falsely with the wife of Menippus, one who was his friend and served as
lieutenant under him in the wars; and with the birds kept by Pyrilampes,
an acquaintance of Pericles, who, they pretended, used to give presents
of peacocks to Pericles's female friends. And how can one wonder at any
number of strange assertions from men whose whole lives were devoted to
mockery, and who were ready at any time to sacrifice the reputation of
their superiors to vulgar envy and spite, as to some evil genius, when
even Stesimbrotus the Thasian has dared to lay to the charge of Pericles
a monstrous and fabulous piece of criminality with his son's wife? So
very difficult a matter is it to trace and find out the truth of
anything by history, when, on the one hand, those who afterwards write
it find long periods of time intercepting their view, and, on the other
hand, the contemporary records of any actions and lives, partly through
envy and ill-will, partly through favor and flattery, pervert and
distort truth.
When the orators, who sided with Thucydides and his party, were at one
time crying out, as their custom was, against Pericles, as one who
squandered away the public money, and made havoc of the state revenues,
he rose in the open assembly and put the question to the people, whether
they thought that he had laid out much; and they saying, "Too much, a
great deal." "Then," said he, "since it is so, let the cost not go to
your account, but to mine; and let the inscription upon the buildings
stand in my name." When they heard him say thus, whether it were out of
a surprise to see the greatness of his spirit, or out of emulation of
the glory of the works, they cried aloud, bidding him to spend on, and
lay out what he thought fit from the public purse, and to spare no cost,
till all were finished.
At length, coming to a final contest with Thucydides, which of the two
should ostracize the other out of the country, and having gone through
this peril, he threw his antagonist out, and broke up the confederacy
that had been organized against him. So that now all schism and
division being at an end, and the city brought to evenness and unity, he
got all Athens and all affairs that pertained to the Athenians into his
own hands, their tributes, their armies, and their galleys, the islands,
the sea, and their wide-extended power, partly over other Greeks and
partly over barbarians, and all that empire, which they possessed,
founded and fortified upon subject nations and royal friendships and
alliances.
After this he was no longer the same man he had been before, nor as tame
and gentle and familiar as formerly with the populace, so as readily to
yield to their pleasures and to comply with the desires of the
multitude, as a steersman shifts with the winds. Quitting that loose,
remiss, and, in some cases, licentious court of the popular will, he
turned those soft and flowery modulations to the austerity of
aristocratical and regal rule; and employing this uprightly and
undeviatingly for the country's best interests, he was able generally to
lead the people along, with their own wills and consents, by persuading
and showing them what was to be done; and sometimes, too, urging and
pressing them forward extremely against their will, he made them,
whether they would or no, yield submission to what was for their
advantage. In which, to say the truth, he did but like a skillful
physician, who, in a complicated and chronic disease, as he sees
occasion, at one while allows his patient the moderate use of such
things as please him, at another while gives him keen pains and drugs to
work the cure. For there arising and growing up, as was natural, all
manner of distempered feelings among a people which had so vast a
command and dominion, he alone, as a great master, knowing how to handle
and deal fitly with each one of them, and, in an especial manner, making
that use of hopes and fears, as his two chief rudders, with the one to
check the career of their confidence at any time, with the other to
raise them up and cheer them when under any discouragement, plainly
showed by this, that rhetoric, or the art of speaking, is, in Plato's
language, the government of the souls of men, and that her chief
business is to address the affections and passions, which are as it were
the strings and keys to the soul, and require a skillful and careful
touch to be played on as they should be. The source of this
predominance was not barely his power of language, but, as Thucydides
assures us, the reputation of his life, and the confidence felt in his
character; his manifest freedom from every kind of corruption, and
superiority to all considerations of money. Notwithstanding he had made
the city Athens, which was great of itself, as great and rich as can be
imagined, and though he were himself in power and interest more than
equal to many kings and absolute rulers, who some of them also
bequeathed by will their power to their children, he, for his part, did
not make the patrimony his father left him greater than it was by one
drachma.
Thucydides, indeed, gives a plain statement of the greatness of his
power; and the comic poets, in their spiteful manner, more than hint at
it, styling his companions and friends the new Pisistratidae, and
calling on him to abjure any intention of usurpation, as one whose
eminence was too great to be any longer proportionable to and compatible
with a democracy or popular government. And Teleclides says the
Athenians had surrendered up to him --
The tribute of the cities, and with them, the cities too, to do with
them as he pleases, and undo;
To build up, if he likes, stone walls around a town; and again, if so he
likes, to pull them down;
Their treaties and alliances, power, empire, peace, and war, their
wealth and their success forevermore.
Nor was all this the luck of some happy occasion; nor was it the mere
bloom and grace of a policy that flourished for a season; but having for
forty years together maintained the first place among statesmen such as
Ephialtes and Leocrates and Myronides and Cimon and Tolmides and
Thucydides were, after the defeat and banishment of Thucydides, for no
less than fifteen years longer, in the exercise of one continuous
unintermitted command in the office, to which he was annually reelected,
of General, he preserved his integrity unspotted; though otherwise he
was not altogether idle or careless in looking after his pecuniary
advantage; his paternal estate, which of right belonged to him, he so
ordered that it might neither through negligence be wasted or lessened,
nor yet, being so full of business as he was, cost him any great trouble
or time with taking care of it; and put it into such a way of management
as he thought to be the most easy for himself, and the most exact. All
his yearly products and profits he sold together in a lump, and supplied
his household needs afterward by buying everything that he or his
family wanted out of the market. Upon which account, his children, when
they grew to age, were not well pleased with his management, and the
women that lived with him were treated with little cost, and complained
of this way of housekeeping, where everything was ordered and set down
from day to day, and reduced to the greatest exactness; since there was
not there, as is usual in a great family and a plentiful estate, any
thing to spare, or over and above; but all that went out or came in, all
disbursements and all receipts, proceeded as it were by number and
measure. His manager in all this was a single servant, Evangelus by
name, a man either naturally gifted or instructed by Pericles so as to
excel every one in this art of domestic economy.
All this, in truth, was very little in harmony with Anaxagoras's wisdom;
if, indeed, it be true that he, by a kind of divine impulse and
greatness of spirit, voluntarily quitted his house, and left his land to
lie fallow and to be grazed by sheep like a common. But the life of a
contemplative philosopher and that of an active statesman are, I
presume, not the same thing; for the one merely employs, upon great and
good objects of thought, an intelligence that requires no aid of
instruments nor supply of any external materials; whereas the other, who
tempers and applies his virtue to human uses, may have occasion for
affluence, not as a matter of mere necessity, but as a noble thing;
which was Pericles's case, who relieved numerous poor citizens.
However, there is a story, that Anaxagoras himself, while Pericles was
taken up with public affairs, lay neglected, and that, now being grown
old, he wrapped himself up with a resolution to die for want of food;
which being by chance brought to Pericles's ear, he was horror-struck,
and instantly ran thither, and used all the arguments and entreaties he
could to him, lamenting not so much Anaxagoras's condition as his own,
should he lose such a counselor as he had found him to be; and that,
upon this, Anaxagoras unfolded his robe, and showing himself, made
answer: "Pericles," said he, "even those who have occasion for a lamp
supply it with oil."
The Lacedaemonians beginning to show themselves troubled at the growth
of the Athenian power, Pericles, on the other hand, to elevate the
people's spirit yet more, and to raise them to the thought of great
actions, proposed a decree, to summon all the Greeks in what part
soever, whether of Europe or Asia, every city, little as well as great,
to send their deputies to Athens to a general assembly, or convention,
there to consult and advise concerning the Greek temples which the
barbarians had burnt down, and the sacrifices which were due from them
upon vows they had made to their gods for the safety of Greece when they
fought against the barbarians; and also concerning the navigation of the
sea, that they might henceforward all of them pass to and fro and trade
securely, and be at peace among themselves.
Upon this errand, there were twenty men, of such as were above fifty
years of age, sent by commission; five to summon the Ionians and Dorians
in Asia, and the islanders as far as Lesbos and Rhodes; five to visit
all the places in the Hellespont and Thrace, up to Byzantium; and other
five besides these to go to Boeotia and Phocis and Peloponnesus, and
from hence to pass through the Locrians over to the neighboring
continent, as far as Acarnania and Ambracia; and the rest to take their
course through Euboea to the Oetaeans and the Malian Gulf, and to the
Achaeans of Phthiotis and the Thessalians; all of them to treat with the
people as they passed, and to persuade them to come and take their part
in the debates for settling the peace and jointly regulating the affairs
of Greece.
Nothing was effected, nor did the cities meet by their deputies, as was
desired; the Lacedaemonians, as it is said, crossing the design
underhand, and the attempt being disappointed and baffled first in
Peloponnesus. I thought fit, however, to introduce the mention of it,
to show the spirit of the man and the greatness of his thoughts.
In his military conduct, he gained a great reputation for wariness; he