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

The influence of Pericles with the Athenian public had become greater and greater as their political experience of him was prolonged. But the bitterness of his enemies appears to have increased along with it; and not long before this period, he had been indirectly assailed, as we have seen, through the medium of accusations against three different persons, all more or less intimate with him—his mistress Aspasia, the philosopher Anaxagoras, and the sculptor Phidias. It is said also that Dracontides proposed and carried a decree in the public assembly, that Pericles should be called on to give an account of the money which he had expended, and that the dicasts, before whom the account was rendered, should give their suffrage in the most solemn manner from the altar: this latter provision was modified by Agnon, who, while proposing that the dicasts should be fifteen hundred in number, retained the vote by pebbles in the urn according to ordinary custom.

If Pericles was ever tried on such a charge, there can be no doubt that he was honourably acquitted: for the language of Thucydides respecting his pecuniary probity is such as could not have been employed if a verdict of guilty on a charge of peculation had been publicly pronounced. But we cannot be certain that he ever was tried; indeed, another accusation urged by his enemies, and even by Aristophanes in the sixth year of the Peloponnesian War, implies that no trial took place: for it was alleged that Pericles, in order to escape this danger, “blew up the Peloponnesian War,” and involved his country in such confusion and peril as made his own aid and guidance indispensably necessary to her, especially that he passed the decree against the Megarians by which the war was really brought on. We know enough, however, to be certain that such a supposition is altogether inadmissible. The enemies of Pericles were far too eager, and too expert in Athenian political warfare, to have let him escape by such a stratagem. Moreover, we learn from the assurance of Thucydides that the war depended upon far deeper causes—that the Megarian decree was in no way the real cause of it; that it was not Pericles, but the Peloponnesians, who brought it on, by the blow struck at Potidæa.

All that we can make out, amidst these uncertified allegations, is that, in a year or two immediately preceding the Peloponnesian War, Pericles was hard pressed by the accusations of political enemies—perhaps even in his own person, but certainly in the persons of those who were most in his confidence and affection. And it was in this turn of his political position, that the Lacedæmonians sent to Athens the above-mentioned requisition, that the ancient Cylonian sacrilege might be at length cleared out; in other words, that Pericles and his family might be banished. Doubtless his enemies, as well as the partisans of Lacedæmon at Athens, would strenuously support this proposition. And the party of Lacedæmon at Athens was always strong, even during the middle of the war; to act as proxenus to the Lacedæmonians was accounted an honour even by the greatest Athenian families. On this occasion, however, the manœuvre did not succeed, nor did the Athenians listen to the requisition for banishing the sacrilegious Alcmæonids. On the contrary, they replied that the Spartans too had an account of sacrilege to clear off: for they had violated the sanctuary of Poseidon at Cape Tænarus, in dragging from it some helot suppliants; and the sanctuary of Athene Chalciœcus at Sparta, in blocking up and starving to death the guilty regent Pausanias. To require that Laconia might be cleared of these two acts of sacrilege, was the only answer which the Athenians made to the demand sent for the banishment of Pericles. Probably the actual effect of that demand was to strengthen him in the public esteem—very different from the effect of the same manœuvre when practised before by Cleomenes against Clisthenes.