cracy, but in
reality a government in the hands of the first man." And the Athens of
his day was the home of AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Anaxagoras,
Zeno, Protagoras, Socrates, as well as Myron and Phidias; while there
flourished at the same time, but elsewhere in Greece, Herodotus,
Hippocrates, Pindar, Empedocles, and Democritus. The centre of this
splendid group was Pericles, of whom the truthful pen of Thucydides
records that he never did anything unworthy of his high position, that
he did not flatter the people or oppress his adversaries, and that with
all his unlimited command of the public purse, he was personally
incorruptible.

Soon after this the Samian war broke out, in which Pericles gained high
renown as a naval commander. This war originated in a quarrel between
Miletus and the island of Samos, in which Athens was led to take part
with the former. The Samians, after an obstinate struggle, were beaten,
and a peace was concluded (439). The position in which Athens then stood
toward many of the Greek states was peculiar. Since the time of the
Persian invasion, she had been the leader of the confederacy formed to
resist the attacks of the powerful enemy, and the guardian of the
confederate treasury kept in the isle of Delos. Pericles caused the
treasury to be removed to Athens, and commuting the contingents of the
allies for money, enormously increased the contributions to the
patriotic fund, Athens herself undertaking to protect the confederacy.
The grand charge against Pericles is that he applied the money thus
obtained to other purposes than those for which it was designed; that,
in short, he adorned and enriched Athens with the spoils of the allied
states. To his mind Hellas was subordinate to Athens, and he confounded
the splendor of the dominant city with the splendor of Greece, in a
manner possible to a man of poetic imagination, hardly to a man of the
highest honor. His enemies, who dared not attack himself, struck at him
in the persons of his friends. Phidias was flung into prison for the
impiety of introducing portraits of himself and Pericles into the battle
of the Amazons depicted on the shield of the goddess Athena in the
Parthenon; the brilliant Aspasia, the famous mistress of Pericles, was
arraigned on a charge of impiety, and only acquitted through the
eloquence of Pericles on her behalf; while the aged Anaxagoras was
driven from the city.

It is unnecessary to give a detailed account of