PERICLES 37 the allies for money, enormously increased the contributions to the patriotic fund, Athens herself undertaking to protect the confederacy. The grand charge against Pericles is that he applied the money thus obtained to other purposes than those for which it was designed ; that, in short, he adorned and enriched Athens with the spoils of the allied states. To his mind Hellas was subordinate to Athens, and he confounded the splendor of the dominant city with the splen- dor of Greece, in a manner possible to a man of poetic imagination, hardly to a man of the highest honor. His enemies, who dared not attack himself, struck at him in the persons of his friends. Phidias was flung into prison for the impiety of introducing 'portraits of himself and Pericles into the battle of the Amazons de- picted on the shield of the goddess Athena in the Parthenon ; the brilliant As- pasia, the famous mistress of Pericles, was arraigned on a charge of impiety, and only acquitted through the eloquence of Pericles on her behalf ; while the aged Anaxagoras was driven from the city. It is unnecessary to give a detailed account of all that Pericles did to make his native city the most glorious in the ancient world. Greek architecture and sculpture under his patronage reached perfection. To him Athens owed the Par- thenon, the Erechtheum, left unfinished at his death, the Propylaea, the Odeum, and numberless other public and sacred edifices ; he also liberally encouraged music and the drama ; and during his life, industry and commerce were in so flourishing a condition that prosperity was universal in Attica. At length, in 431, the long foreseen and inevitable Peloponnesian war broke out between Athens and Sparta. The plan of Pericles was for Athens to adopt a defensive attitude, to defend the city itself, leaving Attica to be ravaged by the enemy, but to cripple the power of Sparta by harassing its coasts. The story of the war must be told elsewhere ; here it is enough to say that the result was un- favorable to Athens for reasons for which Pericles was only in small part to blame. He trusted in the ultimate success of Athens, both from her superior wealth and from her possessing the command of the sea, but he had not calculated upon the deterioration in her citizens' spirit, nor upon the robust courage of the Boeotian and Spartan infantry. Nor was his advice to keep behind the city walls rather than face the enemy in the field, best calculated to arouse the Athenians' courage. The plague ravaged the city in 430, and in the autumn of the follow- ing year, Pericles died after a lingering fever. His two sons had been carried off by the plague, he had been harassed by a charge of peculation brought by Cleon, and the actual infliction of a fine by the dicastery, while he had been without office from July, 430, to July, 429, but before the .last he recovered his hold over the Ecclesia, and was gratified in the closing days of his life by its legit- imation of his and Aspasia's son. As a statesman his greatest fault was a failure to foresee that personal govern- ment is ultimately ruinous to a nation. He taught the people to follow a leader, but he could not perpetuate a descent of leaders like himself. Hence we cannot wonder, when days of trouble broke over Athens, how that men spoke bitterly of Pericles and all his glory. Yet he was a lofty-minded statesman, inspired by
