be free to devote himself to thought, was the
first and best teacher of Pericles. Under his tutorship--better, the
companionship of this noble man--Pericles acquired that sublime
self-restraint, that intellectual breadth, that freedom from
superstition, which marked his character.

Superstitions are ossified metaphors, and back of every religious
fallacy lies a truth. The gods of Greece were once men who fought their
valiant fight and lived their day; the supernatural is the natural not
yet understood--it is the natural seen through the mist of one, two,
three, ten or twenty-five hundred years, when things loom large and out
of proportion--and all these things were plain to Pericles. Yet he kept
his inmost belief to himself, and let the mob believe whate'er it list.
Morley's book on "Compromise" would not have appealed much to
Pericles--his answer would have been, "A man must do what he can, and
not what he would." Yet he was no vulgar demagog truckling to the
caprices of mankind, nor was he a tyrant who pitted his will against the
many and subdued by a show of arms. For thirty years he kept peace at
home, and if this peace was once or twice cemented by an insignificant
foreign war, he proved thereby that he was abreast of Napoleon, who
said, "The cure for civil dissension is war abroad." Pericles stands
alone in his success as a statesman. It was Thomas Brackett Reed, I
believe, who said, "A statesman is a politician who is dead."

And this is a sober truth, for, to reveal the statesman, perspective is
required.

Pericles built and maintained a State, and he did it, as every statesman
must, by recognizing and binding to him ability. It is a fine thing to
have ability, but the ability to discover ability in others is the true
test. While Pericles lived, there also lived AEschylus, Sophocles,
Euripides, Pythagoras, Socrates, Herodotus, Zeno, Hippocrates, Pindar,
Empedocles and Democritus. Such a galaxy of stars has never been seen
before nor since--unless we have it now--and Pericles was their one
central sun.

Pericles was great in many ways--great as an orator, musician,
philosopher, politician, financier, and great and wise as a practical
leader. Lovers of beauty are apt to be dreamers, but this man had the
ability to plan, devise, lay out work and carry it through to a
successful conclusion. He infused others with his own animation, and
managed to set a whole cityful of lazy people building a temple grander
far