d by the war,
was confiscated. In Persia, he represented himself as a deserter, and
subsequently acquired influence with Artaxerxes, and devoted his talents
to laying out schemes for the subjugation of Greece. He received the large
sum of fifty talents yearly, and died at sixty-five years of age, with a
blighted reputation, such as no previous services could redeem from
infamy.

(M454) Aristides died four years after the ostracism of Themistocles,
universally respected, and he died so poor as not to have enough for his
funeral expenses. Nor did any of his descendants ever become rich.

(M455) Xerxes himself, the Ahasuerus of the Scriptures, who commanded the
largest expedition ever recorded in human annals, reached Sardis, eight
months after he had left it, disgusted with active enterprise, and buried
himself amid the intrigues of his court and seraglio, in Susa, as recorded
in the book of Esther. He was not deficient in generous impulses, but
deficient in all those qualities which make men victorious in war. He died
fifteen years after, the victim of a conspiracy, in his palace, B.C.
465--six years after Themistocles had sought his protection.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE AGE OF PERICLES.

(M456) With the defeat of the Persian armies, Athens and Sparta became,
respectively, the leaders of two great parties in Greece. Athens advocated
maritime interests and democratic institutions; Sparta, was the champion
of the continental and oligarchal powers. The one was Ionian, and
organized the league of Delos, under the management of Aristides; the
other was Dorian, and chief of the Peloponnesian confederacy. The
rivalries between these leading States involved a strife between those
ideas and interests of which each was the recognized representative. Those
States which previously had been severed from each other by geographical
position and diversity of interests, now rallied under the guidance either
of Athens or Sparta. The intrigues of Themistocles and Pausanias had
prevented that Panhellenic union, so necessary for the full development of
political power, and which was for a time promoted by the Persian war.
Athens, in particular, gradually came to regard herself as a pre-eminent
power, to which the other States were to be tributary. Her empire, based
on maritime supremacy, became a tyranny to which it was hard for the old
allies to submit.

(M457) But the rivalry between Sparta and Athe