rather than a general, though competent to both functions if occasion demanded, as every leading man in those days was required to be. Under Thucydides, the political and parliamentary opposition against Perikles assumed a constant character and an organization such as Kimon, with his exclusively military aptitudes, had never been able to establish. The aristocratical party in the commonwealth, the "honorable and respectable" citizens, as we find them styled, adopting their own nomenclature, now imposed upon themselves the obligation of undeviating regularity in their attendance on the public assembly, sitting together in a particular section, so as to be conspicuously parted from the Demos. In this manner, their applause and dissent, their mutual encouragement to each other, their distribution of parts to different speakers, was made more conducive to the party purposes than it had been before, when these distinguished persons had been intermingled with the mass of citizens.[1]Thucydides himself was eminent as a speaker, inferior only to Perikles, perhaps hardly inferior even to him. We are told that in reply to a question put to him by Archidamus, whether Perikles or he were the better wrestler, Thucydides replied: " Even when I throw him, he denies that he has fallen, gains his point, and talks over those who have actually seen him fall." [2] Such an opposition made to Perikles, in all the full license which a democratical constitution permitted, must have been both efficient and embarrassing; but the pointed severance of the aristocratical chiefs, which Thucydides, son of Melêsias, introduced, contributed probably at once to rally the democratical majority round Perikles, and to exasperate the bitterness of party-conflict. [3] As far as we can make out the grounds of the
- ↑ Compare the speech of Nikias, in reference to the younger citizens and partisans of Alkibiades sitting together near the latter in the assembly, οῦς ἐγὼ ὁρῶν νῦν ἐνθάδε τῷ αὐτῷ ἀνδρὶ παρακελεστοὺς καθημένους φοβοῦμαι, καἰ τοῖς πρεσβυτέροις ἀντιπαρακελεύομαι μὴ καταισχυνθῆναι, εἴ τῳ τις παρακάθηται τῶνδε, etc. (Thucyd. vi, 13.) See also Aristophanes, Ekklesiaz. 298, seq., about partisans sitting near together.
- ↑ Plutarch, Perikles, c. 8. Ὅταν ἐγὼ καταβαλῶ παλαίων, ἐκεῖνος ἀντιλεγων ὡς οὐ πέπτωκε, νικᾷ, καὶ μεταπείθει τοὺς ὁρῶντας.
- ↑ Plutarch, Perikles, c. 11. ἡ δ' ἑκείνων ἅμιλλα καὶ ϕιλοτιμία τῶν ἀνδρῶν βαθυτάτην τομὴν τεμοῦσα τῆς πόλεως, τὸ μὲν δῆμον, τὸ δ' ολίγους ἐποίησε καλεῖσθαι.
