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

The internal political changes at Athens, respecting the Areopagus and the dicasteries, took place when Pericles was a young man, and when he cannot be supposed to have yet acquired the immense personal weight which afterwards belonged to him (Ephialtes in fact seems in those early days to have been a greater man than Pericles, if we may judge by the fact that he was selected by his political adversaries for assassination)—so that they might with greater propriety be ascribed to the party with which Pericles was connected, rather than to that statesman himself. But next, we have no reason to presume that Thucydides considered these changes as injurious, or as having deteriorated the Athenian character. All that he does say as to the working of Pericles on the sentiment and actions of his countrymen is eminently favourable.

Though Thucydides does not directly canvass the constitutional changes effected in Athens under Pericles, yet everything which he does say leads us to believe that he accounted the working of that statesman, upon the whole, on Athenian power as well as on Athenian character, eminently valuable, and his death as an irreparable loss. And we may thus appeal to the judgment of an historian who is our best witness in every conceivable respect, as a valid reply to the charge against Pericles of having corrupted the Athenian habits, character, and government. If he spent a large amount of the public treasure upon religious edifices and ornaments, and upon stately works for the city—yet the sum which he left untouched, ready for use at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, was such as to appear more than sufficient for all purposes of defence, or public safety, or military honour. It cannot be shown of Pericles that he ever sacrificed the greater object to the less—the permanent and substantially valuable, to the transitory and showy—assured present possessions, to the lust of new, distant, or uncertain conquests. If his advice had been listened to, the rashness which brought on the defeat of the Athenian Tolmides at Coronea in Bœotia would have been avoided, and Athens might probably have maintained her ascendency over Megara and Bœotia, which would have protected her territory from invasion, and given a new turn to the subsequent history.

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!