head of the latter stood Kimon, the son of the victor of Marathon.

Of Perikles it may be said that he was endowed with all the wisdom and foresight of Themistokles, and with a personal integrity which seems never to have been successfully called into question. Seeing clearly from the first that Themistokles had taken the true measure of the capabilities of his countrymen, Perikles set himself to the task of carrying out his policy with unswerving zeal; and thus when the conqueror of Salamis was ostracized, a younger statesman was at hand to take up his work and complete the fabric, of which he had laid the foundations and gone far towards raising the superstructure.

The form of Ephialtes is overshadowed by the commanding figure of Perikles: but it is no light praise to say of him that he was both poor and trustworthy. With an earnestness equal to that of his great ally he joined a keener sense of political wrongs and a more vehement impatience of political abuses. The legislation of Aristeides had made all citizens eligible for the Archonship: but the poorer citizens were little the nearer to being elected archons, and the reforms both of Aristeides and of Kleisthenes had left in the large judicial powers of public officers a source of evils which became continually less and less tolerable. To Ephialtes first, and to Perikles afterwards, it became evident that attempts to redress individual cases of abuse arising from this state of things were a mere waste of time. The public officers must be deprived of their discretionary judicial powers; the Areiopagos must lose its censorial privileges and its authority in the public assembly of the citizens, while the people themselves must become the final judges in all criminal as well as civil causes. To carry out the whole of this scheme they had a machinery ready to hand. The Heliaia in its Dikasteries (p. 43) had partially exercised this jurisdiction already; and nothing more was needed now than to make these Dikasteries permanent courts, the members of which should receive a regular pay for all days spent on such service. The adoption of these measures would at once sweep away the old evils; and Ephialtes with the support of Perikles carried them all. The Athenian constitution thus reached its utmost growth; and the history of the times which follow tells only of its conservation or of its decay.

These measures were preceded, as we might expect, by the ostracism of Kimon; and all hindrances were removed from the path of Ephialtes. The formidable jurisdiction of the archons was cut down to the power of inflicting a small fine, and they became simply officers for managing the preliminary business of cases to be brought before the Jury Courts. The majesty of the Areiopagos faded away, and, retaining its jurisdiction only in cases of homicide, it became an assembly of average Athenian citizens who had been chosen archons by lot.

In short the old times were gone; and the rage of the oligarchic faction (for such it must still be termed) could be appeased only with blood. Ephialtes was assassinated by a murderer hired, it is said, from the Boiotian Tanagra. Kimon had been sent into banishment by ostracism; and it is pleasant to think that this brave and able general had no hand in a dastardly crime, happily rare in Athenian annals.

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BOOK III.

THE EMPIRE OF ATHENS.

THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN ATHENS AND SPARTA.

CHAPTER I.

THE THIRTY YEARS' TRUCE.

EPHIALTES was dead; but the opposition, which had not shrunk from employing the weapon of assassination, became even more intense as Perikles matured his designs for the embellishment of the imperial city. The place of Kimon was now filled by his kinsman Thoukydides the son of Melesias, who, like Kimon, held that the revenues of Athens should still be used in distant enterprises against the power of Persia. This policy was resisted by Perikles, and the political atmosphere was now again so threatening that both parties turned to the remedy of ostracism. Like Kimon, Thoukydides fully thought that the vote would send his great rival into exile. The result was his own banishment; and the way was cleared for the carrying out of the vast public works on which Perikles had set his mind. A third wall was carried from the city parallel to the western or Peiraic wall to defend the harbour of Mounychia. Within the city gigantic portals under the name Propylaia guarded the entrance to the summit of the rock on which art of every kind achieved its highest triumphs. The Erechtheion, which had been burnt by the Persians, rose to more than its ancient grandeur, in spite of the vow that the ruined temples should be left as memorials of the invader's sacrilege, while high above all the surrounding buildings towered the magnificent fabric of the Parthenon, the home of the virgin goddess, whose

colossal form, standing in front of the temple, might be seen by the mariner as he doubled the Cape of Sounion.

The great aim of Perikles was to strengthen the power of Athens over the whole area occupied by her confederacy. The territory of Hestiaia in the north of Euboia, and the islands of Lemnos, Imbros, and Skyros, were thus occupied by Athenian settlers; and Perikles himself led a body of his countrymen to the Thrakian Chersonesos and even to Sinôpê which now became a member of the Athenian alliance. A generation had passed from the time when Athens lost 10,000 citizens in the attempt to found a colony at the mouth of the Strymon. The task was now undertaken successfully by Hagnon who thus became the founder of Amphipolis (437 B.C.).

Two years before the founding of this city Samos revolted from Athens. In one sense it is true to say that this revolt was caused by a feeling of impatience under Athenian supremacy. It is not the less true that this opposition of feeling and interest was confined for the most part to a small, although always powerful and sometimes preponderant, party in the subject cities. But there was also in every city a class which had not only no positive grievance against Athens, but a strong community of interest with her: and this class necessarily was the Demos. The tidings that Byzantion had joined in this revolt left to the Athenians no room to doubt the gravity of the crisis. A fleet of sixty ships was dispatched to Samos under Perikles, and the Samian oligarchy were compelled to submit in the ninth month after the beginning of the revolt. Following their example, the Byzantines also made their peace with Athens. Athenians escaped at the same time a far greater danger.nearer home. The Samians, like the men of Thasos, had applied for aid to the Spartans, who, no longer pressed by the Helot war, summoned a congress of their allies to discuss the question. For the truce which had still five-and-twenty years to run Sparta cared nothing: but she encountered an unexpected opposition from the Corinthians who insisted on the right of every independent state to deal as it pleased with its free or its subject allies. The Spartans were compelled to give way, and there can be no doubt that when some years later the Corinthians claimed the gratitude of the Athenians for this decision, they took credit for an act of good service singularly opportune. The tradition which asserted that the first sea-fight among

The