Pericles

Therefore also, before Archidamus invaded Attica with the Peloponnesians, Pericles made public proclamation to the Athenians, that in case Archidamus, while ravaging everything else, should spare his estates, either out of regard for the friendly tie that existed between them, or with an eye to affording his enemies grounds for slander, he would make over to the city his lands and the homesteads thereon.

Accordingly, the Lacedaemonians and their allies invaded Attica with a great host under the leadership of Archidamus the king. And they advanced, ravaging the country as they went, as far as Acharnae, where they encamped, supposing that the Athenians would not tolerate it, but would fight with them out of angry pride.

Pericles, however, looked upon it as a terrible thing to join battle with sixty thousand Peloponnesian and Boeotian hoplites (those who made the first invasion were as numerous as that), and stake the city itself upon the issue. So he tried to calm down those who were eager to fight, and who were in distress at what the enemy was doing, by saying that trees, though cut and lopped, grew quickly, but if men were destroyed it was not easy to get them again.

And he would not call the people together into an assembly, fearing that he would be constrained against his better judgement, but, like the helmsman of a ship, who, when a stormy wind swoops down upon it in the open sea, makes all fast, takes in sail, and exercises his skill, disregarding the tears and entreaties of the sea-sick and timorous passengers, so he shut the city up tight, put all parts of it under safe garrison, and exercised his own judgement, little heeding the brawlers and malcontents.

And yet many of his friends beset him with entreaties, and many of his enemies with threats and denunciations, and choruses sang songs of scurrilous mockery, railing at his generalship for its cowardice, and its abandonment of everything to the enemy. Cleon, too, was already harassing him, taking advantage of the wrath with which the citizens regarded him to make his own way toward the leadership of the people,

as these anapaestic verses of Hermippus[*](From his Moirai, or Fates. Kock, Com. Att. Frag. i. pp. 236 f. ) show:—

1. Thou king of the Satyrs, why pray wilt thou not
2. Take the spear for thy weapon, and stop the dire talk
3. With the which, until now, thou conductest the war.
4. While the soul of a Teles is in thee?
5. If the tiniest knife is but laid on the stone
6. To give it an edge, thou gnashest thy teeth,
7. As if bitten by fiery Cleon.

However, Pericles was moved by no such things, but gently and silently underwent the ignominy and the hatred, and, sending out an armament of a hundred ships against the Peloponnesus, did not himself sail with it, but remained behind, keeping the city under watch and ward and well in hand, until the Peloponnesians withdrew. Then, by way of soothing the multitude, who, in spite of their enemies’ departure, were distressed over the war, he won their favour by distributions of moneys and proposed allotments of conquered lands; the Aeginetans, for instance, he drove out entirely, and parcelled out their island among the Athenians by lot. And some consolation was to be had from what their enemies suffered.