evident that it would prove of long duration; and the Athenians now proceeded to provide for this contingency. It was agreed that a reserve fund of 1000 talents should be set apart, which was not to be touched in any other case than an attack upon Athens by sea. Any citizen who proposed to make a different use of the fund incurred thereby the punishment of death. With the same view it was resolved to reserve every year 100 of their best triremes, fully manned and equipped.

Towards the winter Pericles delivered, from a lofty platform erected in the Ceramicus, the funeral oration of those who had fallen in the war. This speech, or at all events the substance of it, has been preserved by Thucydides, who may possibly have heard it pronounced. It is a valuable monument of eloquence and patriotism, and particularly interesting for the sketch which it contains of Athenian manners as well as of the Athenian constitution.

§ 4. Another year had elapsed, and in the spring of B.C. 430 the Peloponnesians, under Archidamus, again invaded Attica. At the same time the Athenians were attacked by a more insidious and more formidable enemy. The plague broke out in the crowded city. This terrible disorder, which was supposed to have originated in Æthiopia, had already desolated Asia and many of the countries around the Mediterranean. At Athens it first appeared in the Piræus; and the numbers of people now congregated in a narrow space caused it to spread with fearful rapidity. A great proportion of those who were seized perished in from seven to nine days. Even in those who recovered it generally left behind some dreadful and incurable distemper. It frequently attacked the mental faculties, and left those who re covered from it so entirely deprived of memory that they could neither recognise themselves nor others. The disorder being new, the physicians could find no remedy in the resources of their art, nor, as may be well supposed, did the charms and incantations to which the superstitious resorted prove more effectual. Despair now began to take possession of the Athenians. Some suspected that the Peloponnesians had poisoned the wells; others attributed the pestilence to the anger of Apollo. A dreadful state of moral dissolution followed. The sick were seized with unconquerable despondency; whilst a great part of the population who had hitherto escaped the disorder, expecting soon to be attacked in turn, abandoned themselves to all manner of excess, debauchery, and crime. The dread of contagion produced an all pervading selfishness. Men abstained from tending and alleviating the sufferings even of their nearest relatives and friends during their sickness, as well as from administering the sacred rites

of sepulture to their remains after death. These pious offices of duty and friendship either remained unperformed, or were left to be discharged by strangers, who, having recovered from the disease, enjoyed an immunity from its further attacks. Often would a struggle arise for the possession of a funeral pile, and many a body was burnt on the pile destined for another. But for the most part the dead and the dying lay unheeded in the streets and temples, but more particularly around the wells, whither they had crowded to quench the burning and insatiable thirst excited by the disorder. The very dogs died that preyed upon the corpses, whilst by a peculiar instinct the vultures and other birds of prey abstained from feeding on them.

The numbers carried off by the pestilence can hardly be estimated at less than a fourth of the whole population. Such at least was about the ascertained proportion among the knights and hoplites forming the upper classes. The number of victims among the poorer part of the population was never ascertained, but there can be no doubt that the ratio among these was much higher.

§ 5. Oppressed at once by war and pestilence, their lands desolated, their homes filled with mourning, it is not surprising that the Athenians were seized with rage and despair, or that they vented their anger on Pericles, whom they deemed the author of their misfortunes. But that statesman still adhered to his plans with unshaken firmness. Though the Lacedæmonians were in Attica, though the plague had already seized on Athens, he was vigorously pushing his plans of offensive operations. A foreign expedition might not only divert the popular mind, but would prove beneficial by relieving the crowded city of part of its population; and accordingly a fleet was fitted out, of which Pericles himself took the command, and which committed devastations upon various parts of the Peloponnesian coast. But, upon returning from this expedition, Pericles found the public feeling more exasperated than before. Envoys had even been despatched to Sparta to sue for peace, but had been dismissed without a hearing; a disappointment which had rendered the populace still more furious. Pericles now found it necessary to call a public assembly in order to vindicate his conduct, and to encourage the desponding citizens to persevere. But though he succeeded in persuading them to prosecute the war with vigour, they still continued to nourish their feelings of hatred against the great statesman. His political enemies, of whom Cleon was the chief, took advantage of this state of the public mind to bring against him a charge of peculation. The main object of this accusation was to incapacitate him for the

office of strategus or general. He was brought before the dicastery on this charge, and sentenced to pay a considerable fine; but eventually a strong re-action occurred in his favour. He was re-elected general, and apparently regained all the influence he had ever possessed.

§ 6. But he was not destined long to enjoy this return of popularity. His life was now closing in, and its end was clouded by a long train of domestic misfortunes. The epidemic deprived him not only of many personal and political friends, but also of several near relations, amongst whom were his sister and his two legitimate sons, Xanthippus and Paralus. The death of the latter was a severe blow to him. During the funeral ceremonies, as he placed a garland on the body of this his favourite son, he was completely overpowered by his feelings and wept aloud. His ancient house was now left without an heir. By Aspasia, however, he had an illegitimate son who bore his own name, and whom the Athenians now legitimised, and thus alleviated, as far as lay in their power, the misfortunes of their great leader; a proceeding all the more striking, since Pericles himself had proposed the law which deprived of citizenship all those who were not Athenians on the mother's side, as well as on the father's.

After this period it was with difficulty that Pericles was persuaded by his friends to take any active part in public affairs; nor did he survive more than a twelvemonth. An attack of the prevailing epidemic was succeeded by a low and lingering fever, which undermined both his strength of body and vigour of intellect As he lay apparently unconscious on his death-bed, the friends who stood around it were engaged in recalling his exploits. The dying man interrupted them by remarking—“ What you praise in me is partly the result of good fortune, and at all events common to me with many other commanders. What I chiefly pride myself upon, you have not noticed-no Athenian ever wore mourning through me.'

The character of Pericles has been very variously estimated. Those who reflect upon the enormous influence which, for so long a period, and especially during the last fifteen years of his life, he exercised over an ingenious but fickle people like the Athenians, will hardly be disposed to question his intellectual superiority. This hold on the public affection was not, as in the case of Cimon, the result of any popularity of manner, for, as we have said, the demeanour of Pericles was characterized by a reserve bordering upon haughtiness. To what then are we to attribute it? Doubtless, in the first place, to his extraordinary eloquence. Cicero regards him as the first example of an almost perfect orator, at once delighting the Athenians with his copiousness

and grace and overawing them by the force and cogency of his diction and arguments. He seems, indeed, on the testimony of two comic poets who will not be suspected of exaggeration in his favour, to have singularly combined the power of persuasion with that more rapid and abrupt style of oratory which takes an audience by storm and defies all resistance. According to Eupolis, persuasion itself sat upon his lips, and he was the only orator who left a sting behind; whilst Aristophanes characterizes his eloquence as producing the same effects upon the social elements as a storm of thunder and lightning exerts upon the natural atmosphere. His reserved manners may have contributed, and were perhaps designed, to preserve his authority from falling into that contempt which proverbially springs from familiarity; whilst the popularity which he enjoyed in spite of them may probably be traced to the equivocal benefits which he had conferred on the Athenians, by not only making the humblest citizen a partaker in all the judicial and legislative functions of the state, but even paying him for the performance of them. These innovations are condemned by the two greatest philosophers, though of opposite schools, that Greece ever saw, by Plato and Aristotle, and not only by them but by the unanimous voice of antiquity. Pericles, indeed, by the unlimited authority which he possessed over the people, was able to counteract the evil effects of these changes, which, however, soon became apparent after his death, and made the city a prey to the artifices of demagogues and rhetors. But if Pericles, as a politician, may not be deserving of unqualified praise, Pericles as the accomplished man of genius and the liberal patron of literature and art, is worthy of the highest admiration. By these qualities he has justly given name to the most brilliant intellectual epoch that the world has ever seen. But on this point we have already touched, and shall have occasion to refer hereafter.

§ 7. Whilst the Athenians were suffering from the pestilence, the Lacedæmonians were prosecuting their second invasion even more extensively than in the previous year. Instead of confining their ravages to the Thriasian plain, and the country in the immediate neighbourhood of Athens, they now extended them to the more southern portions of Attica, and even as far as the mines of Laurium. The Athenians still kept within their walls; and the Lacedæmonians, after remaing forty days in their territory, again evacuated it as before. This year, however, the operations of the latter by sea formed a new feature in the war. Their fleet of 100 triremes, under the command of Cnemus, attacked and devastated the island of Zacynthus, but did not

succeed in effecting a permanent conquest. They were too inferior in naval strength to cope with the Athenians on the open sea; but the Peloponnesian privateers, especially those from the Megarian port of Nisæa, inflicted considerable loss on the Anthenian fisheries and commerce. Some of these privateers even ventured as far as the coasts of Asia Minor, and molested the Athenian trade, for the protection of which the Athenians were obliged to despatch a squadron of six triremes, under Melesander. A revolting feature in this predatory warfare was the cruelty with which the Lacedæmonians treated their prisoners, who were mercilessly slain, and their bodies cast into clefts and ravines. This produced retaliation on the part of the Athenians. Some Peloponnesian envoys, on their way to the court of Persia to solicit aid against Athens, were joined by the Corinthian general Aristeus, who persuaded them to visit the court of the Thracian king Sitalces, in order if possible to detach him from the Athenian alliance. But this was a fatal miscalculation. Not only was Sitalces firmly attached to the Athenians, but his son Sadocus had been admitted as a citizen of Athens; and the Athenian residents at the court of Sitalces induced him, in testimony of zeal and gratitude for his newly conferred rights, to procure the arrest of the Peloponnesian envoys. The whole party were accordingly seized and conducted to Athens, where they were put to death without even the form of a trial, and their bodies cast out among the rocks, by way of reprisal for the murders committed by the Lacedæmonians.

§ 8. By this act the Athenians got rid of Aristeus, who had proved himself an active and able commander, and who was the chief instigator of the revolt of Potidea as well as the principal cause of its successful resistance. In the following winter that town capitulated, after a blockade of two years, during which it suffered such extremity of famine, that even the bodies of the dead were converted into food. Although the garrison was reduced to such distress, and though the siege had cost Athens 2000 talents, the Athenian generals, Xenophon, the son of Euripides, and his two colleagues, granted the Potidæans favourable terms. For this they were reprimanded by the Athenians, who had expected to defray the expenses of the siege by selling the prisoners as slaves, and perhaps also to gratify their vengeance by putting the intrepid garrison to death. Potidea and its territory was now occupied by a body of 1000 colonists from Athens.

§ 9. The third year of the war (B.c. 429) was now opening and nothing decisive had been performed on either side. After