While scouting the projects of the extreme Radicals for interfering in distant countries, he occasionally made a display of Athens power abroad, as in his expedition to the Black Sea,[1] and in the colonization of Thurii,[2] which marks the resumption of a Western policy.
The peaceful development of Athenian power was interrupted by the revolt of Samos in 440. Pericles himself led out a fleet against the seceders and, after winning a first engagement, unwisely divided his armament and allowed one squadron to be routed. In a subsequent battle he retrieved this disaster, and after a long blockade reduced the town itself. A demand for help which the Samians sent to Sparta was rejected at the instance of the Corinthians.
Turning to Pericles’ policy towards the members of the Delian League, we find that he frankly endeavoured to turn the allies into subjects (see Delian League). A special feature of his rule was the sending out of numerous cleruchies (q.v.), which served the double purpose of securing strategic points to Athens and converting the needy proletariate of the capital into owners of real property. The land was acquired either by confiscation from disaffected states or in exchange for a lowering of tribute. The chief cleruchies of Pericles are: Thracian Chersonese (453–452), Lemnos and Imbros, Andros, Naxos and Eretria (before 447),[3] Brea in Thrace (446); Oreus (445), Amisus and Astacus in the Black Sea (after 440); Aegina (431).
In his home policy Pericles carried out more fully Ephialtes project of making the Athenian people truly self-governing. His chief innovation was the introduction of payment from the public treasury for state service. Chief of all, he provided a remuneration of 1 to 2 obols a day for the jurymen, probably in 451.[4] Similarly he created a “theoricon” fund which enabled poor citizens to attend the dramatic representations of the Dionysia To him we may also attribute the 3 obols pay which the soldiers received during the Peloponnesian War in addition to the old-established provision-money. The archons and members of the boule, who certainly received remuneration in 411, and also some minor magistrates, were perhaps paid for the first time by Pericles. In connexion with this system of salaries should be mentioned a somewhat reactionary law carried by Pericles in 451, by which an Athenian parentage on both sides was made an express condition of retaining the franchise and with it the right of sitting on paid juries. The measure by which the archonship was opened to the third and (practically) to the fourth class of citizens (the Zeugitae and Thetes) may also be due to Pericles, the date is now known to be 457 (Const Ath 26; and see Archon).
The last years of his life were troubled by a new period of storm and stress which called for his highest powers of calculation and self-control. A conflict between Corcyra and Corinth, the second and third naval powers of Greece, led to the simultaneous appearance in Athens of an embassy from either combatant (433). Pericles had, as it seems, resumed of late a plan of Western expansion by forming alliances with Rhegium and Leontini, and the favourable position of Corcyra on the trade-route to Sicily and Italy, as well as its powerful fleet, no doubt helped to induce him to secure an alliance with that island, and so to commit an unfriendly act towards a leading representative of the Peloponnesian League. Pericles now seemed to have made up his mind that war with Sparta, the head of that League, had become inevitable. In the following spring he fastened a quarrel upon Potidaea, a town in Chalcidice, which was attached by ancient bonds to Corinth, and in the campaign which followed Athenian and Corinthian troops came to blows. A further casus belli was provided by a decree forbidding the importation of Megarian goods into the Athenian Empire[5] presumably in order to punish Megara for her alliance with Corinth (spring 432). The combined complaints of the injured parties led Sparta to summon a Peloponnesian congress which decided on war against Athens, failing a concession to Megara and Corinth (autumn 432). In this crisis Pericles persuaded the wavering assembly that compromise was useless, because Sparta was resolved to precipitate a war in any case. A further embassy calling upon the Athenians to expel the accursed family of the Alcmaeonidae, clearly aimed at Pericles himself as its chief representative, was left unheeded, and early in 431 hostilities began between Athens and Sparta and their respective allies (see Peloponnesian War).
At the same time, Pericles was being sorely hampered by his adversaries at home. The orthodox Conservatives and some democrats who were jealous of his influence, while afraid to beard the great statesman himself, combined to assail his nearest friends. The sculptor Pheidias (q.v.) was prosecuted on two vexatious charges (probably in 433), and before he could disprove the second he died under arrest. Anaxagoras was threatened with a law against atheists, and felt compelled to leave Athens. A scandalous charge against his mistress Aspasia, which he defeated by his personal intercession before the court, was taken very much to heart by Pericles. His position at home scarcely improved during the war. His policy of abandoning the land defence was unpopular with the land-owning section of the people, who from the walls of Athens could see their own property destroyed by the invaders. At the end of the first year of war (early in 430) Pericles made a great appeal to the pride of his countrymen in his well-known funeral speech. But in the ensuing summer, after a terrible outbreak of plague had ravaged the crowded city, the people became thoroughly demoralized. Pericles led a large squadron to harry the coasts of the Peloponnese, but met with little success. On his return the Athenians sued for peace, though without success, and a speech by Pericles had little effect on their spirits. Late in 430 they deposed him from his magistracy. In addition to this they prosecuted him on a charge of embezzlement, and imposed a fine of 50 talents. A revulsion of feeling soon led to his reinstatement, apparently with extraordinary powers. But the plague, which had carried off two of his sons and a sister, had left its mark also on Pericles himself. In the autumn of 429 he died[6] and was buried near the Academia, where Pausanias (150 A.D.) saw his tomb. A slightly idealized portrait of Pericles as strategus is preserved to us in the British Museum bust, No. 549, which is a good copy of the well-known bronze original by Cresilas.
If we now endeavour to give a general estimate of Pericles character and achievements, it will be well to consider the many departments of his activity one by one In his foreign policy Pericles differs from those statesmen of previous generations who sought above all the welfare of Greece as a whole. His standpoint was at all times purely Athenian. Nor did he combine great statesmanlike qualities with exceptional ability in the field We may clearly distinguish two periods in his administration of foreign affairs. At first, joining to Cimon’s anti-Persian ambitions and Themistocles’ schemes of Western expansion a new policy of aggression on the mainland, he endeavoured to push forward Athenian power in every direction, and engaged himself alike in Greece Proper, in the Levant and in Sicily. After Cimon’s death he renounced the war against Persia, and the collapse of 447–445 had the effect of completing his change
- ↑ The date can hardly be fixed; probably it was after 440.
- ↑ It has been doubted whether Pericles favoured this enterprise, but among its chief promoters were two of his friends, Lampon the soothsayer and Hippodamus the architect. The oligarch Cratmus (in a frag. of the Φυγάδες) violently attacks the whole project.
- ↑ These dates are suggested by the decrease of tribute which the inscriptions prove for this year.
- ↑ This is the date given by the Const. Ath., which also mentions a διαψη[φισμὸς τῶν δικαστῶν] (Blass’ restoration) in frag. c. 18. The confused story of Philochorus and Plutarch, by which 4760 citizens were disfranchised or even sold into slavery in 445, when an Egyptian prince sent a largess of corn, may refer to a subsequent application of Pericles’ law, though probably on a much milder scale than is here represented.
- ↑ The general impression in Greece was that this decree was the proximate cause of the war. The scurrilous motives which Aristophanes suggests for this measure can be entirely disregarded.
- ↑ His dying boast, that “no Athenian had put on mourning through his doing,” perhaps refers to his forbearance towards his political rivals, whom he refused to ruin by prosecution.
