The Historians' History of the World 03

It will be seen that the judgment here quoted from Thucydides contradicts, in the most unqualified manner, the reproaches commonly made against Pericles of having corrupted the Athenian people—by distributions of the public money, and by giving way to their unwise caprices—for the purpose of acquiring and maintaining his own political power. Nay, the historian particularly notes the opposite qualities—self-judgment, conscious dignity, indifference to immediate popular applause or wrath when set against what was permanently right and useful—as the special characteristic of that great statesman. A distinction might indeed be possible, and Plutarch professes to note such distinction, between the earlier and the later part of his long political career. Pericles began (so that biographer says) by corrupting the people in order to acquire power; but having acquired it, he employed it in an independent and patriotic manner, so that the judgment of Thucydides, true respecting the later part of his life, would not be applicable to the earlier.

The internal political changes at Athens, respecting the Areopagus and the dicasteries, took place when Pericles was a young man, and when he cannot be supposed to have yet acquired the immense personal weight which afterwards belonged to him (Ephialtes in fact seems in those early days to have been a greater man than Pericles, if we may judge by the fact that he was selected by his political adversaries for assassination)—so that they might with greater propriety be ascribed to the party with which Pericles was connected, rather than to that statesman himself. But next, we have no reason to presume that Thucydides considered these changes as injurious, or as having deteriorated the Athenian character. All that he does say as to the working of Pericles on the sentiment and actions of his countrymen is eminently favourable.

Though Thucydides does not directly canvass the constitutional changes effected in Athens under Pericles, yet everything which he does say leads us to believe that he accounted the working of that statesman, upon the whole, on Athenian power as well as on Athenian character, eminently valuable, and his death as an irreparable loss. And we may thus appeal to the judgment of an historian who is our best witness in every conceivable respect, as a valid reply to the charge against Pericles of having corrupted the Athenian habits, character, and government. If he spent a large amount of the public treasure upon religious edifices and ornaments, and upon stately works for the city—yet the sum which he left untouched, ready for use at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, was such as to appear more than sufficient for all purposes of defence, or public safety, or military honour. It cannot be shown of Pericles that he ever sacrificed the greater object to the less—the permanent and substantially valuable, to the transitory and showy—assured present possessions, to the lust of new, distant, or uncertain conquests. If his advice had been listened to, the rashness which brought on the defeat of the Athenian Tolmides at Coronea in Bœotia would have been avoided, and Athens might probably have maintained her ascendency over Megara and Bœotia, which would have protected her territory from invasion, and given a new turn to the subsequent history.