Pericles

But he feared, as it would seem, to encounter a suspicion of aiming at tyranny, and when he saw that Cimon was very aristocratic in his sympathies, and was held in extraordinary affection by the party of the Good and True, he began to court the favour of the multitude, thereby securing safety for himself, and power to wield against his rival.

Straightway, too, he made a different ordering in his way of life. On one street only in the city was he to be seen walking,—the one which took him to the market-place and the council-chamber. Invitations to dinner, and all such friendly and familiar intercourse, he declined, so that during the long period that elapsed while he was at the head of the state, there was not a single friend to whose house he went to dine, except that when his kinsman Euryptolemus gave a wedding feast, he attended until the libations were made,[*](That is, until the wine for the symposium was brought in,and drinking began.) and then straightway rose up and departed.

Conviviality is prone to break down and overpower the haughtiest reserve, and in familiar intercourse the dignity which is assumed for appearance’s sake is very hard to maintain. Whereas, in the case of true and genuine virtue, fairest appears what most appears, and nothing in the conduct of good men is so admirable in the eyes of strangers, as their daily walk and conversation is in the eyes of those who share it. And so it was that Pericles, seeking to avoid the satiety which springs from continual intercourse, made his approaches to the people by intervals, as it were, not speaking on every question, nor addressing the people on every occasion, but offering himself like the Salaminian trireme, as Critolaus says, for great emergencies. The rest of his policy he carried out by commissioning his friends and other public speakers.

One of these, as they say, was Ephialtes, who broke down the power of the Council of the Areiopagus, and so poured out for the citizens, to use the words of Plato,[*](Plat. Rep. 8.562c.) too much undiluted freedom, by which the people was rendered unruly, just like a horse, and, as the comic poets say, no longer had the patience to obey the rein, but nabbed Euboea and trampled on the islands.

Moreover, by way of providing himself with a style of discourse which was adapted, like a musical instrument, to his mode of life and the grandeur of his sentiments, he often made an auxiliary string of Anaxagoras, subtly mingling, as it were, with his rhetoric the dye of natural science. It was from natural science, as the divine Plato says,[*](Plat. Phaedrus 270a) that he

acquired his loftiness of thought and perfectness of execution, in addition to his natural gifts,

It was thus, they say, that he got his surname; though some suppose it was from the structures with which he adorned the city, and others from his ability as a statesman and a general, that he was called Olympian. It is not at all unlikely that his reputation was the result of the blending in him of many high qualities.

But the comic poets of that day who let fly, both in earnest and in jest, many shafts of speech against him, make it plain that he got this surname chiefly because of his diction; they spoke of him as thundering and lightening when he harangued his audience,[*](Cf. Aristoph. Ach. 528-531.) and as wielding a dread thunderbolt in his tongue. There is on record also a certain saying of Thucydides, the son of Melesias, touching the clever persuasiveness of Pericles, a saying uttered in jest.