The Historians' History of the World 03

Pericles is not to be treated as the author of the Athenian character: he found it with its very marked positive characteristics and susceptibilities, among which, those which he chiefly brought out and improved were the best. The lust of expeditions against the Persians, which Cimon would have pushed into Egypt and Cyprus, he repressed, after it had accomplished all which could be usefully aimed at: the ambition of Athens he moderated rather than encouraged: the democratical movement of Athens he regularised, and worked out into judicial institutions which ranked among the prominent features of Athenian life, and worked with a very large balance of benefit to the national mind as well as to the individual security, in spite of the many defects in their direct character as tribunals. But that point in which there was the greatest difference between Athens, as Pericles found it and as he left it, is unquestionably, the pacific and intellectual development—rhetoric, poetry, arts, philosophical research, and recreative variety. To which, if we add great improvement in the cultivation of the Attic soil, extension of Athenian trade, attainment and laborious maintenance of the maximum of maritime skill (attested by the battles of Phormion), enlargement of the area of complete security by construction of the Long Walls, lastly, the clothing of Athens in her imperial mantle, by ornaments architectural and sculptural—we shall make out a case of genuine progress realised during the political life of Pericles, such as the evils imputed to him, far more imaginary than real, will go but little way to alloy. How little, comparatively speaking, of the picture drawn by Pericles in his funeral harangue of 431 B.C., would have been correct, if the harangue had been delivered over those warriors who fell at Tanagra twenty-seven years before!

Taking him altogether, with his powers of thought, speech, and action, his competence civil and military, in the council as well as in the field, his vigorous and cultivated intellect, and his comprehensive ideas of a community in pacific and many-sided development, his incorruptible public morality, caution, and firmness, in a country where all those qualities were rare, and the union of them in the same individual of course much rarer—we shall find him without a parallel throughout the whole course of Grecian history.b

WILHELM ONCKEN’S ESTIMATE OF PERICLES

Among the important personages of antiquity, there is none on whom posterity has so fully agreed in its judgment, as on Pericles. When we meet with this name in modern works, we find but one general voice acknowledging his greatness, one voice of admiration for the unusual qualities which distinguished him.

Even the opposers of his political administration were just to him, even those who, in the great rising of Athenian democracy, saw the beginning of a splendid misery, did not deny their respect to the man, who by this development was assigned a place in the first rank. Without wishing to do so they heaped praise on him, in which we must decline to join, although we are the last to wish to rob him of his well-deserved fame. In the political revolution which resulted in the sovereignty of the constitutional demos, and in checking the ruin which only too soon followed, they credited him with so much blame and merit, as even had he divided it with Ephialtes and others, would still have surpassed the power of any mortal, though he were the greatest of the great.

Such great political events as those here mentioned, are not the work of individual men, not the act of a party, however great may be the aggregate of the particular forces it may have at command. They have their root in the nature of the conditions, in the disposition of the circumstances, in the requirements of society, in alliance with which the individual, like Antæus, derives fresh strength out of every defeat, and without which he is but rolling the stone of Sisyphus.

For such a deeply rooted change in the forms of political life in a community, whether that change be for good or evil, elementary forces are necessary which are neither subject to the command nor to the violence of the individual, which human will can neither loose nor arrest, and in the present case we have to deal with a revolution to effect which the agitators employed but a single lever, a single weapon, the convincing word, the power of oratory, the weight of reason.

Also the advent of the internal decay which, as is supposed, followed so rapidly on the violent exertion of the power of the Athenian mob at home, would not, had the times really been ripe for it, have awaited the death of Pericles, an event usually regarded, in flattering enough recognition of the greatness of the man, as the thunderbolt which struck and came to set fire to the heaped-up seeds of corruption.