s leading a life of pleasure and endowed with immortality; there were
male Peris as well as female, and they were intermediate between angels
and demons.

PERIANDER, the tyrant of Corinth from 625 to 585 B.C., was one of
the seven sages of Greece, and a patron of literature and the arts; Arion
and Anacharsis lived at his Court.

PERICLES, the great Athenian statesman, born in Athens, of noble
parentage; was a devoted disciple of Anaxagoras; entered public life 467
B.C. as a democrat, and soon became head of the democratic party, to the
increase of the power of the citizens and annihilation of the domination
of the oligarchy centred in the Areopagus; hostile to territorial
aggrandisement, he sought, as his chief ambition, the unification of
Greece in one grand confederacy, but was defeated in this noble aim by
the jealousy of Sparta; he put down all rivalry, however, in Athens
itself, and established himself as absolute ruler with the consent of the
citizens, reforming the laws, adorning the city, and encouraging
literature and the arts, masters, many wise in the one and skilful in the
other, he had at his disposal, such as few or none of the cities of the
world had ever before or have had since; the resulting prosperity did but
enhance the envy of the other States, Sparta in particular, and two years
before he died the spirit of hostility took shape in the outbreak of the
PELOPONNESIAN WAR (q. v.); he had surrounded the city with
walls, and his policy was to defend it from within them rather than face
the enemy in the field, but it proved fatal, for it tended to damp rather
than quicken the ardour of the citizens, and to add to this a plague
broke out among them in 430 B.C., which cut down the most valiant of
their number, and he himself lay down to die the year after; he was a
high-souled, nobly-bred man, great in all he thought and did, and he
gathered around him nearly all the noble-minded and noble-hearted men of
his time to adorn his reign and make Athens the envy of the world; _d_.
429 B.C.

PERIER, CASIMIR, a French banker and politician, born at Grenoble;
took part in the Revolution of 1830, became Minister of the Interior in
1831; suppressed the insurrections at Paris and Lyons; died of cholera
(1777-1832).

PERIGEE, the point in the orbit of the moon or a planet nearest the
earth.

PERIGORD, an ancient territory of France, S. of Guienne, famous for
its truffles, of which PERIGUEUX (q. v.) was t