Thucydides the historian assures us, the reputation of his life,
and the confidence felt in his character; his manifest freedom from
every kind of corruption, and superiority to all considerations of
money. Notwithstanding he had made the city of Athens, which was great
of itself, as great and rich as can be imagined, and though he were
himself in power and interest more than equal to many kings and absolute
rulers, who some of them also bequeathed by will their power to their
children, he for his part, did not make the patrimony his father left
him greater than it was by one drachma.

Teleclides says the Athenians had surrendered to him--

The tributes of the cities, and, with them, the cities, too, to do
with them as he pleases, and undo;
To build up, if he likes, stone walls around a town; and again, if
so he likes, to pull them down;
Their treaties and alliances, power, empire, peace, and war, their
wealth and their success forevermore.

Nor was all this the luck of some happy occasion; nor was it the mere
bloom and grace of a policy that flourished for a season; but having for
fifty-five years together maintained the first place among statesmen, in
the exercise of one continuous unintermitted command in the office, to
which he was annually reelected, of General, he preserved his integrity
unspotted; though otherwise he was not altogether idle or careless in
looking after his pecuniary advantage; his paternal estate, which of
right belonged to him, he so ordered that it might neither through
negligence be wasted or lessened, nor yet, being so full of business as
he was, cost him any great trouble or time with taking care of it; and
put it into such a way of management as he thought to be most easy for
himself, and the most exact. All his yearly products and profits he sold
together in a lump, and supplied his household needs afterward by buying
everything that he or his family wanted out of the market. Upon which
account, his children, when they grew to age, were not well pleased with
his management; since there was not there, as is usual in a great family
and a plentiful estate, anything to spare, or over and above; but all
that went out or came in, all disbursements and all receipts, proceeded
as it were by number and measure. His manager in all this was a single
servant, Evangelus by name, a man either naturally gifted or instructed
by Pericles so as to excel every one in this art of