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

The accusing party thus appeared to have carried their point, and to have disgraced, as well as excluded from re-election, the veteran statesman. But the event disappointed their expectations. The imposition of the fine not only satiated all the irritation of the people against him, but even occasioned a serious reaction in his favour, and brought back as strongly as ever the ancient sentiment of esteem and admiration. It was quickly found that those who had succeeded Pericles as generals neither possessed nor deserved in an equal degree the public confidence and he was accordingly soon re-elected, with as much power and influence as he had ever in his life enjoyed.

But that life, long, honourable, and useful, had already been prolonged considerably beyond the sixtieth year, and there were but too many circumstances, besides the recent fine, which tended to hasten as well as to embitter its close. At the very moment when Pericles was preaching to his countrymen, in a tone almost reproachful, the necessity of manful and unabated devotion to the common country, in the midst of private suffering—he was himself among the greatest of sufferers, and most hardly pressed to set the example of observing his own precepts. The epidemic carried off not merely his two sons (the only two legitimate, Xanthippus and Paralus), but also his sister, several other relatives, and his best and most useful political friends. Amidst this train of domestic calamities, and in the funeral obsequies of so many of his dearest friends, he remained master of his grief, and maintained his habitual self command, until the last misfortune—the death of his favourite son Paralus, which left his house without any legitimate representative to maintain the family and the hereditary sacred rites. On this final blow, though he strove to command himself as before, yet at the obsequies of the young man, when it became his duty to place a wreath on the dead body, his grief became uncontrollable, and he burst out, for the first time in his life, into profuse tears and sobbing.

In the midst of these several personal trials he received the intimation, through Alcibiades and some other friends, of the restored confidence of the people towards him, and his re-election to the office of strategus. But it was not without difficulty that he was persuaded to present himself again at the public assembly, and resume the direction of affairs. The regret of the people was formally expressed to him for the recent sentence—perhaps indeed the fine may have been repaid to him, or some evasion of it permitted, saving the forms of law—in the present temper of the city; which was further displayed towards him by the grant of a remarkable exemption from a law of his own original proposition. He had himself, some years before, been the author of that law, whereby the citizenship of Athens was restricted to persons born both of Athenian fathers and Athenian mothers, under which restriction several thousand persons, illegitimate on the mother’s side, are said to have been deprived of the citizenship, on occasion of a public distribution of corn. Invidious as it appeared to grant, to Pericles singly, an exemption from a law which had been strictly enforced against so many others, the people were now moved not less by compassion than by anxiety to redress their own previous severity. Without a legitimate heir, the house of Pericles, one branch of the great Alcmæonid gens by his mother’s side, would be left deserted, and the continuity of the family sacred rites would be broken—a misfortune painfully felt by every Athenian family, as calculated to wrong all the deceased members, and provoke their posthumous displeasure towards the city. Accordingly, permission was granted to Pericles to legitimise, and to inscribe in his own gens and phratry, his natural son by Aspasia, who bore his own name.