he table and went his way. For these
friendly meetings are very quick to defeat any assumed superiority, and
in intimate familiarity an exterior of gravity is hard to maintain. Real
excellence, indeed, is best recognized when most openly looked into; and
in really good men, nothing which meets the eyes of external observers
so truly deserves their admiration, as their daily common life does
that of their nearer friends. Pericles, however, to avoid any feeling of
commonness, or any satiety on the part of the people, presented himself
at intervals only, not speaking on every business, nor at all times
coming into the assembly, but, as Critoaus says, reserving himself,
like the Salaminian galley, for great occasions, while matters of
lesser importance were despatched by friends or other speakers under his
direction. And of this number we are told Ephialtes made one, who broke
the power of the council of Areopagus, giving the people, according to
Plato's expression, so copious and so strong a draught of liberty, that,
growing wild and unruly, like an unmanageable horse, it, as the comic
poets say,--

"--got beyond all keeping in,
Champing at Euboea, and among the islands leaping in."

The style of speaking most consonant to his form of life and the dignity
of his views he found, so to say, in the tones of that instrument with
which Anaxagoras had furnished him; of his teaching he continually
availed himself, and deepened the colors of rhetoric with the dye of
natural science.

A saying of Thucydides, the son of Melesias, stands on record, spoken by
him by way of pleasantry upon Pericles's dexterity. Thucydides was
one of the noble and distinguished citizens, and had been his greatest
opponent; and, when Archidamus, the king of the Lacedaemonians, asked
him whether he or Pericles were the better wrestler, he made this
answer: "When I," said he, "have thrown him and given him a fair fall,
he by persisting that he had no fall, gets the better of me, and makes
the bystanders, in spite of their own eyes, believe him."

The rule of Pericles has been described as an aristocratical government,
that went by the name of a democracy, but was, indeed, the supremacy of
a single great man; while many say, that by him the common people were
first encouraged and led on to such evils as appropriations of subject
territory, allowances for attending theatres, payments for performing
public duties, and by these bad habits were, u