Pericles

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.

Thucydides belonged to the party of the Good and True, and was for a very long time a political antagonist of Pericles. When Archidamus, the king of the Lacedaemonians, asked him whether he or Pericles was the better wrestler, he replied: Whenever I throw him in wrestling, he disputes the fall, and carries his point, and persuades the very men who saw him fall. The truth is, however, that even Pericles, with all his gifts, was cautious in his discourse, so that whenever he came forward to speak he prayed the gods that there might not escape him unawares a single word which was unsuited to the matter under discussion.

In writing he left nothing behind him except the decrees which he proposed, and only a few in all of his memorable sayings are preserved, as, for instance, his urging the removal of Aegina as the eye-sore of the Piraeus, and his declaring that he already beheld war swooping down upon them from Peloponnesus. Once also when Sophocles, who was general with him on a certain naval expedition,[*](Against Samos, 440-439 B.C.) praised a lovely boy, he said: It is not his hands only, Sophocles, that a general must keep clean, but his eyes as well.

Again, Stesimbrotus says that, in his funeral oration over those who had fallen in the Samian War, he declared that they had become immortal, like the gods; the gods themselves, he said, we cannot see, but from the honors which they receive, and the blessings which they bestow, we conclude that they are immortal. So it was, he said, with those who had given their lives for their country.

Thucydides describes[*](In the encomium on Pericles, Thuc. 2.65.9.) the administration of Pericles as rather aristocratic,—

in name a democracy, but in fact a government by the greatest citizen.

In the beginning, as has been said, pitted as he was against the reputation of Cimon, he tried to ingratiate himself with the people. And since he was the inferior in wealth and property, by means of which Cimon would win over the poor,—furnishing a dinner every day to any Athenian who wanted it, bestowing raiment on the elderly men, and removing the fences from his estates that whosoever wished might pluck the fruit,—Pericles, outdone in popular arts of this sort, had recourse to the distribution of the people’s own wealth. This was on the advice of Damonides, of the deme Oa, as Aristotle has stated.[*](Aristot. Const. Ath. 27.4.)