The Historians' History of the World 03

Connected with this reciprocal indulgence of individual diversity, was not only the hospitable reception of all strangers at Athens, which Pericles contrasts with the xenelasia

or jealous expulsion practised at Sparta—but also the many-sided activity, bodily and mental, visible in the former, so opposite to that narrow range of thought, exclusive discipline of the body, and never-ending preparation for war, which formed the system of the latter. His assertion that Athens was equal to Sparta even in her own solitary excellence—efficiency on the field of battle—is doubtless untenable. But not the less impressive is his sketch of that multitude of concurrent impulses which at this same time agitated and impelled the Athenian mind—the strength of one not implying the weakness of the remainder: the relish for all pleasures of art and elegance, and the appetite for intellectual expansion, coinciding in the same bosom with energetic promptitude as well as endurance: abundance of recreative spectacles, yet noway abating the cheerfulness of obedience even to the hardest calls of patriotic duty: that combination of reason and courage which encountered danger the more willingly from having discussed and calculated it beforehand: lastly, an anxious interest, as well as a competence of judgment, in public discussion and public action, common to every citizen rich and poor, and combined with every man’s own private industry. So comprehensive an ideal of many-sided social development, bringing out the capacities for action and endurance, as well as those for enjoyment, would be sufficiently remarkable, even if we supposed it only existing in the imagination of a philosopher: but it becomes still more so when we recollect that the main features of it at least were drawn from the fellow citizens of the speaker. It must be taken however as belonging peculiarly to the Athens of Pericles and his contemporaries; nor would it have suited either the period of the Persian War fifty years before, or that of Demosthenes seventy years afterwards.

At the former period, the art, letters, philosophy, adverted to with pride by Pericles, were as yet backward, while even the active energy and democratical stimulus, though very powerful, had not been worked up to the pitch which they afterwards reached: at the latter period, although the intellectual manifestations of Athens subsist in full or even increased vigour, we shall find the personal enterprise and energetic spirit of her citizens materially abated. As the circumstances, which we have already recounted, go far to explain the previous upward movement, so those which fill the coming chapters, containing the disasters of the Peloponnesian War, will be found to explain still more completely the declining tendency shortly about to commence. Athens was brought to the brink of entire ruin, from which it is surprising that she recovered at all—but noway surprising that she recovered at the expense of a considerable loss of personal energy in the character of her citizens.

And thus the season at which Pericles delivered his discourse lends to it an additional and peculiar pathos. It was delivered at a time when Athens was as yet erect and at her maximum: for though her real power was doubtless much diminished compared with the period before the Thirty Years’ Truce, yet the great edifices and works of art, achieved since then, tended to compensate that loss, in so far as the sense of greatness was concerned; and no one, either citizen or enemy, considered Athens as having at all declined. It was delivered at the commencement of the great struggle with the Peloponnesian confederacy, the coming hardships of which Pericles never disguised either to himself or to his fellow citizens, though he fully counted upon eventual success. Attica had been already invaded; it was no longer “the unwasted territory,” as Euripides had designated it in his tragedy Medea

, represented three or four months before the march of Archidamus—and a picture of Athens in her social glory was well calculated both to arouse the pride and nerve the courage of those individual citizens, who had been compelled once, and would be compelled again and again, to abandon their country residences and fields for a thin tent or confined hole in the city. Such calamities might indeed be foreseen: but there was one still greater calamity, which, though actually then impending, could not be foreseen.b

[430 B.C.]