and confirm the naval supremacy of Athens,
and afford a means of subsistence for her poorer citizens. But his
greatest project was to form, in concert with the other Hellenic states,
a grand Hellenic confederation in order to put an end to the mutually
destructive wars of kindred peoples, and to make Greece one mighty
nation, fit to front the outlying world. The idea was not less sagacious
than it was grand. Had it been accomplished, the semi-barbarous
Macedonians would have menaced the civilized Greeks in vain, and even
Rome at a later period, might perhaps have found the Adriatic, and not
the Euphrates, the limit of her empire. But the Spartan aristocrats were
utterly incapable of appreciating such exalted patriotism, or of
understanding the political necessity for it, and by their secret
intrigues the well-planned scheme was brought to nothing. Athens and
Sparta were already in that mood toward each other which rendered the
disaster of the Peloponnesian war inevitable. When the Spartans, in 448,
restored to the Delphians the guardianship of the temple and treasures
of Delphi, of which they had been deprived by the Phocians, the
Athenians immediately after marched an army thither and reinstated the
latter. Three years later an insurrection broke out in the tributary
Megara and Euboea, and the Spartans again appeared in the field as the
allies of the insurgents. The position of Athens was critical. Pericles
wisely declined to fight against all his enemies at once. A bribe of ten
talents sent the Spartans home, and the insurgents were then thoroughly
subdued. The thirty years' peace with Sparta (445) left him free to
carry out his schemes for the internal prosperity of Athens.

Cimon was now dead and was succeeded in the leadership of the
aristocratic party by Thucydides, son of Melesias, who in 444 B.C. made
a strong effort to overthrow the supremacy of Pericles by attacking him
in the popular assembly for squandering the public money on buildings
and in festivals and amusements. Thucydides made an effective speech;
but Pericles immediately rose and offered to execute the buildings at
his own expense, if the citizens would allow him to put his own name
upon them instead of theirs. The sarcasm was successful. Thucydides was
ostracized, and to the end of his life, Pericles reigned the undisputed
master of the public policy of Athens. During the rest of his career
"there was," says the historian Thucydides, "in name a demo