The Historians' History of the World 03

This cause seems to have been still pending, when one Diopithes procured a decree, by which persons who denied the being of the gods, or taught doctrines concerning the celestial bodies which were inconsistent with religion, were made liable to a certain criminal process. This stroke was aimed immediately at Anaxagoras—whose physical speculations had become famous, and were thought to rob the greatest of the heavenly beings of their inherent deity—but indirectly at his disciple and patron Pericles. When the discussion of this decree, and the prosecution commenced against Aspasia, had disposed the people to listen to other less probable charges, the main attack was opened, and the accusation which in the affair of Phidias had been silenced by the force of truth, was revived in another form. A decree was passed on the motion of one Dracontides, directing Pericles to give in his accounts to the Prytanis, to be submitted to a trial, which was to be conducted with extraordinary solemnity; for it was to be held in the citadel, and the jurors were to take the balls with which each signified his verdict, from the top of an altar. But this part of the decree was afterwards modified by an amendment moved by Agnon, which ordered the cause to be tried in the ordinary way, but by a body of fifteen hundred jurors. The uncertainty of the party which managed these proceedings, and their distrust as to the evidence which they should be able to procure, seem to be strongly marked by a clause in this decree, which provided that the offence imputed to Pericles might be described either as embezzlement, or by a more general name, as coming under the head of public wrong.

Yet all these machinations failed at least of reaching their main object. The issue of those which were directed against Anaxagoras cannot be exactly ascertained through the discrepancy of the accounts given of it. According to some authors he was tried, and condemned either to a fine and banishment or to death; but in the latter case made his escape from prison. According to others he was defended by Pericles, and acquitted. Plutarch says that Pericles, fearing the event of a trial, induced him to withdraw from Athens; and it seems to have been admitted on all hands, that he ended his long life in quiet and honour at Lampsacus. The danger which threatened Aspasia was also averted; but it seems that Pericles, who pleaded her cause, found need for his most strenuous exertions, and that in her behalf he descended to tears and entreaties, which no similar emergency of his own could ever draw from him. It was indeed probably a trial more of his personal influence than of his eloquence; and his success, hardly as it was won, may have induced his adversaries to drop the proceedings instituted against himself, or at least to postpone them to a fitter season. After weathering this storm he seems to have recovered his former high and firm position, which to the end of his life was never again endangered, except by one very transient gust of popular displeasure. He felt strong enough to resist the wishes, and to rebuke the impatience of the people. Yet it was a persuasion so widely spread among the ancients as to have lasted even to modern times, that his dread of the persecution which hung over him, and his consciousness that his expenditure of the public money would not bear a scrutiny, were at least among the motives which induced him to kindle the war which put an end to the Thirty Years’ Truce.c

Greek Terra-cotta Heads

(In the British Museum)

Greek Coins

CHAPTER XXVII. MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF THE AGE OF PERICLES

Hail, Nature’s utmost boast! unrivalled Greece!

My fairest reign! where every power benign

Conspired to blow the flower of human kind,

And lavished all that genius can inspire.

—James Thomson.

COST OF LIVING AND WAGES

Pericles

[460-410 B.C.]