The Historians' History of the World 03

Though his calculation was not realised, it was nevertheless founded upon most rational grounds. What Archidamus anticipated was on the point of happening, and nothing prevented it except the personal ascendency of Pericles, strained to its very utmost. So long as the invading army was engaged in the Thriasian plain, the Athenians had some faint hope that it might (like Plistoanax fourteen years before) advance no farther into the interior. But when it came to Acharnæ within sight of the city walls—when the ravagers were actually seen destroying buildings, fruit trees, and crops, in the plain of Athens, a sight strange to every Athenian eye except to those very old men who recollected the Persian invasion—the exasperation of the general body of citizens rose to a pitch never before known. The Acharnians first of all—next the youthful citizens, generally—became madly clamorous for arming and going forth to fight. Knowing well their own great strength, but less correctly informed of the superior strength of the enemy, they felt confident that victory was within their reach. Groups of citizens were everywhere gathered together, angrily debating the critical question of the moment; while the usual concomitants of excited feeling—oracles and prophecies of diverse tenor, many of them doubtless promising success against the enemy at Acharnæ—were eagerly caught up and circulated.

In this inflamed temper of the Athenian mind, Pericles was naturally the great object of complaint and wrath. He was denounced as the cause of all the existing suffering: he was reviled as a coward for not leading out the citizens to fight, in his capacity of general: the rational convictions as to the necessity of the war and the only practical means of carrying it on, which his repeated speeches had implanted, seemed to be altogether forgotten. This burst of spontaneous discontent was of course fomented by the numerous political enemies of Pericles, and particularly by Cleon,[47] now rising into importance as an opposition-speaker; whose talent for invective was thus first exercised under the auspices of the high aristocratical party, as well as of an excited public.

But no manifestations, however violent, could disturb either the judgment or the firmness of Pericles. He listened unmoved to all the declarations made against him, resolutely refusing to convene a public assembly, or any meeting invested with an authorised character, under the present irritated temper of the citizens. It appears that he as general, or rather the board of ten generals among whom he was one, must have been invested constitutionally with the power not only of calling the ecclesia when they thought fit, but also of preventing it from meeting, and of postponing even those regular meetings which commonly took place at fixed times, four times in the prytany. No assembly accordingly took place, and the violent exasperation of the people was thus prevented from realising itself in any rash public resolution. That Pericles should have held firm against this raging force, is but one among the many honourable points in his political character; but it is far less wonderful than the fact that his refusal to call the ecclesia was efficacious to prevent the ecclesia from being held. The entire body of Athenians were now assembled within the walls, and if he refused to convoke the ecclesia, they might easily have met in the Pnyx without him; for which it would not have been difficult at such a juncture to provide plausible justification. The inviolable respect which the Athenian people manifested on this occasion for the forms of their democratical constitution—assisted doubtless by their long-established esteem for Pericles, yet opposed to an excitement alike intense and pervading, and to a demand apparently reasonable, in so far as regarded the calling of an assembly for discussion—is one of the most memorable incidents in their history.