The Historians' History of the World 03 [Greece to the Peloponnesian War]

One great point of the policy of Pericles was to keep the people always either amused or employed. During peace an exercising squadron of sixty trireme galleys was sent out for eight months in every year. Nor was this without a further use than merely engaging the attention of the people, and maintaining the navy in vigour. He sometimes took the command in person: and, sailing among the distant dependencies of the empire, settled disputes between them, and confirmed the power and extended the influence of Athens. The Ægean and the Propontis did not bound his voyages: he penetrated into the Euxine; and finding the distant Grecian settlement of Sinope divided between Timesileus, who affected the tyranny, and an opposing party, he left there Lamachus with thirteen ships, and a land-force with whose assistance to the popular side the tyrant and those of his faction were expelled. The justice of what followed may indeed appear questionable. Their houses and property, apportioned into six hundred lots, were offered to so many Athenian citizens; and volunteers were not wanting to accept the offer, and settle at Sinope. To disburden the government at home, by providing advantageous establishments, in distant parts, for the poor and discontented among the sovereign citizens of Athens, was a policy more than once resorted to by Pericles. It was during his administration, in the year, according to Diodorus, in which the Thirty Years’ Truce was concluded, that the deputation came from the Thessalian adventurers who had been expelled by the Crotoniats from their attempted establishment in the deserted territory of Sybaris, in consequence of which, under his patronage, the colony was settled with which the historian Herodotus then, and afterward the orator Lysias, passing to Thurii, both established themselves there.

A GREEK FEDERATION PLANNED

Plutarch has attributed to Pericles a noble project, unnoticed by any earlier extant author, but worthy of his capacious mind, and otherwise also bearing some characters of authenticity and truth. It was no less than to unite all Greece under one great federal government, of which Athens should be the capital. But the immediate and direct avowal of such a purpose would be likely to raise jealousies so numerous and extensive as to form insuperable obstacles to the execution. The religion of the nation was that alone in which the Grecian people universally claimed a clear common interest; and even in this every town and almost every family claimed something peculiar to itself. In the vehemence of public alarm, during the Persian invasion, vows had been, in some places, made to the gods for sacrifices, to an extent beyond what the votaries, when blessed with deliverance beyond hope, were able to perform; and some temples, destroyed by the invaders, were not yet restored; probably because the means of those in whose territories they had stood were deficient. Taking these circumstances then for his ground, Pericles proposed that a congress of deputies from every republic of the nation should be assembled at Athens, for the purpose first of inquiring concerning vows for the safety of Greece yet unperformed, and temples, injured by the barbarians, not yet restored; and then of proceeding to concert measures for the lasting security of navigation in the Grecian seas, and for the preservation of peace by land also between all the states composing the Greek nation. The naval question, but still more the ruin which, in the Persian invasion, had befallen northern Greece, and especially Attica, while Peloponnesus had felt nothing of its evils, gave pretensions for Athens to take the lead in the business. On the motion of Pericles, a decree of the Athenian people directed the appointment of ministers to invite every Grecian state to send its deputies. Plutarch, rarely attentive to political information, has not at all indicated what attention was shown, or what participation proposed, for Lacedæmon. His prejudices indeed we find very generally adverse to the Lacedæmonian government, and favouring the Athenian democracy. But, judging from the friendship which, according to the authentic information of Thucydides, subsisted between Pericles and Archidamus, king of Lacedæmon, through life, it is little likely that, in putting forward the project for the peace of Greece, Pericles would have proposed anything derogatory to the just weight and dignity of Sparta; which indeed would have been, with peace the pretence, only putting forward a project of contest.