toleration of
rulers, alike show a great degree of popular intelligence and a great
practical liberty in social life.

(M485) The age of Pericles was also adorned by great historians and
philosophers. Herodotus and Thucydides have never been surpassed as
historians, while the Sophists who succeeded the more earnest philosophers
of a previous age, gave to Athenian youth a severe intellectual training.
Rhetoric, mathematics and natural history supplanted speculation, led to
the practice of eloquence as an art, and gave to society polish and
culture. The Sophists can not indeed be compared with those great men who
preceded or succeeded them in philosophical wisdom, but their influence in
educating the Grecian mind, and creating polished men of society, can not
be disproved. Politics became a profession in the democratic State, which
demanded the highest culture, and an extensive acquaintance with the
principles of moral and political science. This was the age of lectures,
when students voluntarily assembled to learn from the great masters of
thought that knowledge which would enable them to rise in a State where
the common mind was well instructed.

(M486) But it must also be admitted that while the age of Pericles
furnished an extraordinary stimulus to the people, in art, in literature,
in political science, and in popular institutions, the great teachers of
the day inculcated a selfish morality, and sought an aesthetic enjoyment
irrespective of high moral improvement, and the inevitable result was the
rapid degeneracy of Athens, and the decline even in political influence,
and strength, as was seen in the superior power of Sparta in the great
contest to which the two leading States of Greece were hurried by their
jealousies and animosities. The prosperity was delusive and outside; for
no intellectual triumph, no glories of art, no fascinations of literature,
can balance the moral forces which are generated in self-denial and lofty
public virtue.

(M487) It was while the power and glory of Pericles were at their height
that he formed that memorable attachment to Aspasia, a Milesian woman,
which furnished a fruitful subject for the attacks of the comic poets. She
was the most brilliant and intellectual woman of the age, and her house
was the resort of the literary men and philosophers and artists of Athens
until the death of Pericles. He formed as close a union with her as the
law allowed, and her influence in creating a