to recover these prisoners, she agreed to evacuate Boeotia,
and to permit the re-establishment of the aristocracies which she had
formerly overthrown. But the Athenian reverses did not end here. The
expulsion of the partisans of Athens from the government of Phocis and
Locris, and the revolt of Euboea and Megara, were announced in quick
succession. The youthful Pleistoanax, king of Sparta, actually
penetrated, with an army of Lacedaemonians and Peloponnesian allies, as
far as the neighbourhood of Eleusis; and the capital itself, it is
said, was saved only by Pericles having bribed the Spartan monarch.
Pericles reconquered Euboea; but this was the only possession which the
Athenians succeeded in recovering. Their empire on land had vanished
more, speedily than it had been acquired; and they were therefore
induced to conclude, at the beginning of B.C. 445, a THIRTY YEARS'
TRUCE with Sparta and her allies, by which they consented to abandon
all the acquisitions which they had made in Peloponnesus, and to leave
Megara to be included among the Peloponnesian allies of Sparta.

From the Thirty Years' Truce to the commencement of the Peloponnesian
war, few political events of any importance occurred. During these
fourteen years (B.C. 445-431) Pericles continued to enjoy the sole
direction of affairs. His views were of the most lofty kind. Athens
was to become the capital of Greece, and the centre of art and
refinement. In her external appearance the city was to be rendered
worthy of the high position to which she aspired, by the beauty and
splendour of her public buildings, by her works of art in sculpture,
architecture, and painting, and by the pomp and magnificence of her
religious festivals. All these objects Athens was enabled to attain in
an incredibly short space of time, through the genius and energy of her
citizens and the vast resources at her command. No state has ever
exhibited so much intellectual activity and so great a progress in art
as was displayed by Athens in the period which elapsed between the
Thirty Years' Truce and the breaking out of the Peloponnesian war. She
was the seat and centre of Grecian literature. The three great tragic
poets of Greece were natives of Attica. AEschylus, the earliest of the
three, had recently died in Sicily; but Sophocles was now at the full
height of his reputation, and Euripides was rapidly rising into notice.
Aristophanes, the greatest of the Grecian comic poets,