The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [280]
7. They cried aloud, bidding him to spend on, and lay out what he thought fit from the public purse, and to spare no cost, until everything was finished.
8. At length, coming to a final contest with Thucydides which of the two should banish the other out of the country,
9. And having gone through this peril, Pericles threw his antagonist out, and broke up the confederacy that had been organised against him.
10. So that now all schism and division being at an end, and the city brought to evenness and unity,
11. He got all Athens and all its affairs into his own hands, the tributes, armies, fleets, islands, sea, and their wide-extended power,
12. Partly over other Greeks and partly over barbarians;
13. And all that empire which they possessed, founded and fortified upon subject nations and royal friendships and alliances.
14. After this Pericles was no longer the same man he had been before,
15. Nor as tame and gentle and familiar as formerly with the populace,
16. So as readily to yield to their pleasures and to comply with the desires of the multitude, as a steersman shifts with the winds.
17. Quitting that loose, remiss and, in some cases, licentious court of the popular will,
18. He turned those soft and flowery modulations to the austerity of aristocratical and regal rule;
19. And employing this uprightly and undeviatingly for the country’s best interests,
20. He was able generally to lead the people along, with their own wills and consents, by persuading and showing them what was to be done;
21. And sometimes, too, urging and pressing them forward extremely against their will,
22. He made them, whether they would or no, yield submission to what was for their advantage.
23. In which, to say the truth, he behaved like a skilful physician, who, in a complicated and chronic disease, as he sees occasion,
24. At one time allows his patient the moderate use of such things as please him,
25. At another gives him keen pains and bitter drugs to work the cure.
26. For there arising and growing up, as was natural, all manner of distempered feelings among a people which had so vast a command and dominion,
27. He alone, as a great master, knowing how to handle and deal fitly with each one of them,
28. And, in an especial manner, making use of hopes and fears as his two chief rudders,
29. With the one to check the career of their confidence at any time,
30. With the other to raise them up and cheer them when under any discouragement,
31. Plainly showed by this, that rhetoric, the art of speaking, is as Plato says the government of the minds of men,
32. And its chief business is to address the affections and passions, which are the strings and keys to the mind, and require a skilful touch to be played on rightly.
Chapter 37
1. The source of Pericles’ predominance was not only his power of language, but, as Thucydides assures us, the reputation of his life, and the confidence felt in his character;
2. His manifest freedom from every kind of corruption, and superiority to all considerations of money.
3. Notwithstanding he had made the city of Athens, which was great of itself, as great and rich as can be imagined,
4. And though he was himself as powerful and influential as many kings and absolute rulers,
5. He did not make the personal patrimony left to him by his father greater than it was by a single penny.
6. Thucydides, indeed, gives a plain statement of the greatness of his power;
7. And the comic poets, in their spiteful manner, more than hint at it, styling his companions and friends the new Pisistratidae,
8. And calling on him to abjure any intention of usurpation,
9. As one whose eminence was too great to be any longer proportionable to and compatible with a democracy or popular government.
10. And Teleclides says the Athenians had surrendered up to him ‘the tribute of the cities, and with them, the cities too, to do with them as he pleases, and undo;
11. ‘To build up, if he