The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [284]
14. This was the father of Gylippus, who later overpowered the Athenians in Sicily.
15. And it seems that this covetousness was an hereditary disease transmitted from father to son;
16. For Gylippus also afterwards was caught in foul practices, and expelled from Sparta for it.
17. When Pericles, in giving up his accounts of this expedition, stated a disbursement of ten talents, as laid out upon fit occasion,
18. The people, without any question, nor troubling themselves to investigate the mystery, freely allowed of it.
19. And some historians, in which number is Theophrastus the philosopher,
20. Have given it as a truth that Pericles every year used to send privately the sum of ten talents to Sparta,
21. With which he complimented those in office, to keep off the war;
22. Not to purchase peace, but time, that he might prepare at leisure, and be the better able to carry on war hereafter.
Chapter 42
1. Immediately after this, turning his forces against the Euboean rebels with fifty ships and five thousand men,
2. Pericles reduced their cities, and drove out the citizens of the Chalcidians, called Hippobotae, horse-feeders, the chief persons for wealth and reputation among them;
3. And removing all the Histiaeans out of the country, brought in a plantation of Athenians in their place,
4. Making them his one example of severity, because they had captured an Attic ship and killed all on board.
5. After this, having made a truce between the Athens and Sparta for thirty years,
6. He ordered, by public decree, the expedition against the isle of Samos,
7. On the ground that, when they were told to cease their war with the Milesians, they had not complied.
8. And as these measures against the Samians are thought to have been taken to please his mistress Aspasia,
9. This may be a fit point for enquiry about that woman, what art or charming faculty she had that enabled her to captivate, as she did, the greatest statesmen,
10. And to give the philosophers occasion to speak so much about her, and that, too, not to her disparagement.
11. That she was a Milesian by birth, the daughter of Axiochus, is acknowledged.
12. And they say it was in emulation of Thargelia, a courtesan of the old Ionian times, that she made her addresses to men of great power.
13. Thargelia was a great beauty, extremely charming, and at the same time sagacious;
14. She had numerous suitors among the Greeks, and brought all who had to do with her over to the Persian interest,
15. And by their means, being men of the greatest power and station, sowed the seeds of the Median faction up and down in several cities.
16. Aspasia, some say, was courted and caressed by Pericles upon account of her knowledge and skill in politics.
17. Socrates himself would sometimes go to visit her, and some of his acquaintance with him;
18. And those who frequented her company would carry their wives with them to listen to her.
19. Her house was a home for young courtesans. Aeschines tells us that Lysicles, a sheep-dealer, a man of low birth and character,
20. By keeping Aspasia company after Pericles’ death, came to be a chief man in Athens.
21. And in Plato’s Menexenus, though we do not take the introduction as quite serious, still thus much seems to be historical,
22. That she had the repute of being resorted to by many of the Athenians for instruction in the art of speaking.
23. Pericles’ inclination for her seems, however, to have proceeded from the passion of love.
24. He had a wife that was near kin to him, who had been married first to Hipponicus, by whom she had Callias, surnamed the Rich;
25. And also she brought Pericles, while she lived with him, two sons, Xanthippus and Paralus.
26. Afterwards, when they did not well agree, nor like to live together, he parted with her, with her own consent, to another man,
27. And himself took Aspasia, and loved her with wonderful affection;
28. Every day, both as he went out and as he came in from the marketplace, he saluted and kissed her.
29. In the comedies she goes by the nicknames