Plutarch's Lives, trans by A. H. Clough
by Plutarch
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman
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These things performed, Camillus, leaving his son Lucius in the camp to
guard the prisoners and secure the booty, passed into the enemy's
country, where, having taken the city of the Aequians and reduced the
Volscians to obedience, he then immediately led his army to Sutrium, not
having heard what had befallen the Sutrians, but making haste to assist
them, as if they were still in danger and besieged by the Tuscans.
They, however, had already surrendered their city to their enemies, and
destitute of all things, with nothing left but their clothes, met
Camillus on the way, leading their wives and children, and bewailing
their misfortune. Camillus himself was struck with compassion, and
perceiving the soldiers weeping, and commiserating their case, while the
Sutrians hung about and clung to them, resolved not to defer revenge,
but that very day to lead his army to Sutrium; conjecturing that the
enemy, having just taken a rich and plentiful city, without an enemy
left within it, nor any from without to be expected, would be found
abandoned to enjoyment and unguarded. Neither did his opinion fail him;
he not only passed through their country without discovery, but came up
to their very gates and possessed himself of the walls, not a man being
left to guard them, but their whole army scattered about in the houses,
drinking and making merry. Nay, when at last they did perceive that the
enemy had seized the city, they were so overloaded with meat and wine,
that few were able so much as to endeavor to escape, but either waited
shamefully for their death within doors, or surrendered themselves to
the conqueror. Thus the city of the Sutrians was twice taken in one
day; and they who were in possession lost it, and they who had lost
regained it, alike by the means of Camillus. For all which actions he
received a triumph, which brought him no less honor and reputation than
the two former ones; for those citizens who before most regarded him
with an evil eye, and ascribed his successes to a certain luck rather
than real merit, were compelled by these last acts of his to allow the
whole honor to his great abilities and energy.

Of all the adversaries and enviers of his glory, Marcus Manlius was the
most distinguished, he who first drove back the Gauls when they made
their night attack upon the Capitol, and who for that reason had been
named Capitolinus. This man, affecting the first place in the
commonwealth, and not able by noble ways to outdo Camillus's reputation,
took that ordinary course towards usurpation of absolute power, namely,
to gain the multitude, those of them especially that were in debt;
defending some by pleading their causes against their creditors,
rescuing others by force, and not suffering the law to proceed against
them; insomuch that in a short time he got great numbers of indigent
people about him, whose tumults and uproars in the forum struck terror
into the principal citizens. After that Quintius Capitolinus, who was
made dictator to suppress these disorders, had committed Manlius to
prison, the people immediately changed their apparel, a thing never done
but in great and public calamities, and the senate, fearing some tumult,
ordered him to be released. He, however, when set at liberty, changed
not his course, but was rather the more insolent in his proceedings,
filling the whole city with faction and sedition. They chose,
therefore, Camillus again military tribune; and a day being appointed
for Manlius to answer to his charge, the prospect from the place where
his trial was held proved a great impediment to his accusers; for the
very spot where Manlius by night fought with the Gauls overlooked the
forum from the Capitol, so that, stretching forth his hands that way,
and weeping, he called to their remembrance his past actions, raising
compassion in all that beheld him. Insomuch that the judges were at a
loss what to do, and several times adjourned the trial, unwilling to
acquit him of the crime, which was sufficiently proved, and yet unable
to execute the law while his noble action remained, as it were, before
their eyes. Camillus, considering this, transferred the court outside
the gates to the Peteline Grove, from whence there is no prospect of the
Capitol. Here his accuser went on with his charge, and his judges were
capable of remembering and duly resenting his guilty deeds. He was
convicted, carried to the Capitol, and flung headlong from the rock; so
that one and the same spot was thus the witness of his greatest glory,
and monument of his most unfortunate end. The Romans, besides, razed
his house, and built there a temple to the goddess they call Moneta,
ordaining for the future that none of the patrician order should ever
dwell on the Capitoline.

And now Camillus, being called to his sixth tribuneship, desired to be
excused, as being aged, and perhaps not unfearful of the malice of
fortune, and those reverses which seem to ensue upon great prosperity.
But the most apparent pretense was the weakness of his body, for he
happened at that time to be sick; the people, however, would admit of no
excuses, but, crying that they wanted not his strength for horse or for
foot service, but only his counsel and conduct, constrained him to
undertake the command, and with one of his fellow-tribunes to lead the
army immediately against the enemy. These were the Praenestines and
Volscians, who, with large forces, were laying waste the territory of
the Roman confederates. Having marched out with his army, he sat down
and encamped near the enemy, meaning himself to protract the war, or if
there should come any necessity or occasion of fighting, in the mean
time to regain his strength. But Lucius Furius, his colleague, carried
away with the desire of glory, was not to be held in, but, impatient to
give battle, inflamed the inferior officers of the army with the same
eagerness; so that Camillus, fearing he might seem out of envy to be
wishing to rob the young men of the glory of a noble exploit, consented,
though unwillingly, that he should draw out the forces, whilst himself,
by reason of weakness, stayed behind with a few in the camp. Lucius,
engaging rashly, was discomfited, when Camillus, perceiving the Romans
to give ground and fly, could not contain himself, but, leaping from his
bed, with those he had about him ran to meet them at the gates of the
camp, making his way through the flyers to oppose the pursuers; so that
those who had got within the camp turned back at once and followed him,
and those that came flying from without made head again and gathered
about him, exhorting one another not to forsake their general. Thus the
enemy for that time, was stopped in his pursuit. The next day Camillus
drawing out his forces and joining battle with them, overthrew them by
main force, and, following close upon them, entered pell-mell with them
into their camp and took it, slaying the greatest part of them.
Afterwards, having heard that the city Satricum was taken by the
Tuscans, and the inhabitants, all Romans, put to the sword, he sent home
to Rome the main body of his forces and heaviest-armed, and, taking
with him the lightest and most vigorous soldiers, set suddenly upon the
Tuscans, who were in the possession of the city, and mastered them,
slaying some and expelling the rest; and so, returning to Rome with
great spoils, gave signal evidence of their superior wisdom, who, not
mistrusting the weakness and age of a commander endued with courage and
conduct, had rather chosen him who was sickly and desirous to be
excused, than younger men who were forward and ambitious to command.

When, therefore, the revolt of the Tusculans was reported, they gave
Camillus the charge of reducing them, choosing one of his five
colleagues to go with him. And when every one was eager for the place,
contrary to the expectation of all, he passed by the rest and chose
Lucius Furius, the very same man who lately, against the judgment of
Camillus, had rashly hazarded and nearly lost a battle; willing, as it
should seem, to dissemble that miscarriage, and free him from the shame
of it. The Tusculans, hearing of Camillus's coming against them, made a
cunning attempt at revoking their act of revolt; their fields, as in
times of highest peace, were full of plowman and shepherds; their gates
stood wide open, and their children were being taught in the schools; of
the people, such as were tradesmen, he found in their workshops, busied
about their several employments, and the better sort of citizens walking
in the public places in their ordinary dress; the magistrates hurried
about to provide quarters for the Romans, as if they stood in fear of no
danger and were conscious of no fault. Which arts, though they could
not dispossess Camillus of the conviction he had of their treason, yet
induced some compassion for their repentance; he commanded them to go to
the senate and deprecate their anger, and joined himself as an
intercessor in their behalf, so that their city was acquitted of all
guilt and admitted to Roman citizenship, These were the most memorable
actions of his sixth tribuneship.

After these things, Licinius Stolo raised a great sedition in the city,
and brought the people to dissension with the senate, contending, that
of two consuls one should be chosen out of the commons, and not both out
of the patricians. Tribunes of the people were chosen, but the election
of consuls was interrupted and prevented by the people. And as this
absence of any supreme magistrate was leading to yet further confusion,
Camillus was the fourth time created dictator by the senate, sorely
against the people's will, and not altogether in accordance with his
own; he had little desire for a conflict with men whose past services
entitled them to tell him that he had achieved far greater actions in
war along with them than in politics with the patricians, who, indeed,
had only put him forward now out of envy; that, if successful, he might
crush the people, or, failing, be crushed himself. However, to provide
as good a remedy as he could for the present, knowing the day on which
the tribunes of the people intended to prefer the law, he appointed it
by proclamation for a general muster, and called the people from the
forum into the Campus, threatening to set heavy fines upon such as
should not obey. On the other side, the tribunes of the people met his
threats by solemnly protesting they would fine him in fifty thousand
drachmas of silver, if he persisted in obstructing the people from
giving their suffrages for the law. Whether it were, then, that he
feared another banishment or condemnation which would ill become his age
and past great actions, or found himself unable to stem the current of
the multitude, which ran strong and violent, he betook himself, for the
present, to his house, and afterwards, for some days together,
professing sickness, finally laid down his dictatorship. The senate
created another dictator; who, choosing Stolo, leader of the sedition,
to be his general of horse, suffered that law to be enacted and
ratified, which was most grievous to the patricians, namely, that no
person whatsoever should possess above five hundred acres of land.
Stolo was much distinguished by the victory he had gained; but, not long
after, was found himself to possess more than he had allowed to others,
and suffered the penalties of his own law.

And now the contention about election of consuls coming on (which was
the main point and original cause of the dissension, and had throughtout
furnished most matter of division between the senate and the people),
certain intelligence arrived, that the Gauls again, proceeding from the
Adriatic Sea, were marching in vast numbers upon Rome. On the very
heels of the report followed manifest acts also of hostility; the
country through which they marched was all wasted, and such as by flight
could not make their escape to Rome were dispersing and scattering among
the mountains. The terror of this war quieted the sedition; nobles and
commons, senate and people together, unanimously chose Camillus the
fifth time dictator; who, though very aged, not wanting much of
fourscore years, yet, considering the danger and necessity of his
country, did not, as before, pretend sickness, or depreciate his own
capacity, but at once undertook the charge, and enrolled soldiers. And,
knowing that the great force of the barbarians lay chiefly in their
swords, with which they laid about them in a rude and inartificial
manner, hacking and hewing the head and shoulders, he caused head-pieces
entire of iron to be made for most of his men, smoothing and polishing
the outside, that the enemy's swords, lighting upon them, might either
slide off or be broken; and fitted also their shields with a little rim
of brass, the wood itself not being sufficient to bear off the blows.
Besides, he taught his soldiers to use their long javelins in close
encounter, and, by bringing them under their enemy's swords, to receive
their strokes upon them.

When the Gauls drew near, about the river Anio, dragging a heavy camp
after them, and loaded with infinite spoil, Camillus drew forth his
forces, and planted himself upon a hill of easy ascent, and which had
many dips in it, with the object that the greatest part of his army
might lie concealed, and those who appeared might be thought to have
betaken themselves, through fear, to those upper grounds. And the more
to increase this opinion in them, he suffered them, without any
disturbance, to spoil and pillage even to his very trenches, keeping
himself quiet within his works, which were well fortified; till, at
last, perceiving that part of the enemy were scattered about the country
foraging, and that those that were in the camp did nothing day and night
but drink and revel, in the nighttime he drew up his lightest-armed
men, and sent them out before to impede the enemy while forming into
order, and to harass them when they should first issue out of their
camp; and early in the morning brought down his main body, and set them
in battle array in the lower grounds, a numerous and courageous army,
not, as the barbarians had supposed, an inconsiderable and fearful
division. The first thing that shook the courage of the Gauls was, that
their enemies had, contrary to their expectation, the honor of being
aggressors. In the next place, the light-armed men, falling upon them
before they could get into their usual order or range themselves in
their proper squadrons, so disturbed and pressed upon them, that they
were obliged to fight at random, without any order at all. But at last,
when Camillus brought on his heavy-armed legions, the barbarians, with
their swords drawn, went vigorously to engage them; the Romans, however,
opposing their javelins and receiving the force of their blows on those
parts of their defenses which were well guarded with steel, turned the
edge of their weapons, being made of a soft and ill-tempered metal, so
that their swords bent and doubled up in their hands; and their shields
were pierced through and through, and grew heavy with the javelins that
stuck upon them. And thus forced to quit their own weapons, they
endeavored to take advantage of those of their enemies, laid hold of the
javelins with their hands, and tried to pluck them away. But the
Romans, perceiving them now naked and defenseless, betook themselves to
their swords, which they so well used, that in a little time great
slaughter was made in the foremost ranks, while the rest fled over all
parts of the level country; the hills and upper grounds Camillus had
secured beforehand, and their camp they knew it would not be difficult
for the enemy to take, as, through confidence of victory, they had left
it unguarded. This fight, it is stated, was thirteen years after the
sacking of Rome; and from henceforward the Romans took courage, and
surmounted the apprehensions they had hitherto entertained of the
barbarians, whose previous defeat they had attributed rather to
pestilence and a concurrence of mischances than to their own superior
valor. And, indeed, this fear had been formerly so great, that they
made a law, that priests should be excused from service in war, unless
in an invasion from the Gauls.

This was the last military action that ever Camillus performed; for the
voluntary surrender of the city of the Velitrani was but a mere
accessory to it. But the greatest of all civil contests, and the
hardest to be managed, was still to be fought out against the people;
who, returning home full of victory and success, insisted, contrary to
established law, to have one of the consuls chosen out of their own
body. The senate strongly opposed it, and would not suffer Camillus to
lay down his dictatorship, thinking, that, under the shelter of his
great name and authority, they should be better able to contend for the
power of the aristocracy. But when Camillus was sitting upon the
tribunal, dispatching public affairs, an officer, sent by the tribunes
of the people, commanded him to rise and follow him, laying his hand
upon him, as ready to seize and carry him away; upon which, such a noise
and tumult as was never heard before, filled the whole forum; some that
were about Camillus thrusting the officer from the bench, and the
multitude below calling out to him to bring Camillus down. Being at a
loss what to do in these difficulties, he yet laid not down his
authority, but, taking the senators along with him, he went to the
senate-house; but before he entered, besought the gods that they would
bring these troubles to a happy conclusion, solemnly vowing, when the
tumult was ended, to build a temple to Concord. A great conflict of
opposite opinions arose in the senate; but, at last, the most moderate
and most acceptable to the people prevailed, and consent was given, that
of two consuls, one should be chosen from the commonalty. When the
dictator proclaimed this determination of the senate to the people, at
the moment, pleased and reconciled with the senate, as indeed could not
otherwise be, they accompanied Camillus home, with all expressions and
acclamations of joy; and the next day, assembling together, they voted a
temple of Concord to be built, according to Camillus's vow, facing the
assembly and the forum; and to the feasts, called the Latin holidays,
they added one day more, making four in all; and ordained that, on the
present occasion, the whole people of Rome should sacrifice with
garlands on their heads.

In the election of consuls held by Camillus, Marcus Aemilius was chosen
of the patricians, and Lucius Sextius the first of the commonalty; and
this was the last of all Camillus's actions. In the year following, a
pestilential sickness infected Rome, which, besides an infinite number
of the common people, swept away most of the magistrates, among whom was
Camillus; whose death cannot be called immature, if we consider his
great age, or greater actions, yet was he more lamented than all the
rest put together that then died of that distemper.

PERICLES

Caesar once, seeing some wealthy strangers at Rome, carrying up and
down with them in their arms and bosoms young puppy-dogs and monkeys,
embracing and making much of them, took occasion not unnaturally to ask
whether the women in their country were not used to bear children; by
that prince-like reprimand gravely reflecting upon persons who spend and
lavish upon brute beasts that affection and kindness which nature has
implanted in us to be bestowed on those of our own kind. With like
reason may we blame those who misuse that love of inquiry and
observation which nature has implanted in our souls, by expending it on
objects unworthy of the attention either of their eyes or their ears,
while they disregard such as are excellent in themselves, and would do
them good.

The mere outward sense, being passive in responding to the impression of
the objects that come in its way and strike upon it, perhaps cannot help
entertaining and taking notice of everything that addresses it, be it
what it will, useful or unuseful; but, in the exercise of his mental
perception, every man, if he chooses, has a natural power to turn
himself upon all occasions, and to change and shift with the greatest
ease to what he shall himself judge desirable. So that it becomes a
man's duty to pursue and make after the best and choicest of everything,
that he may not only employ his contemplation, but may also be
improved by it. For as that color is most suitable to the eye whose
freshness and pleasantness stimulates and strengthens the sight, so a
man ought to apply his intellectual perception to such objects as, with
the sense of delight, are apt to call it forth, and allure it to its
own proper good and advantage.

Such objects we find in the acts of virtue, which also produce in the
minds of mere readers about them, an emulation and eagerness that may
lead them on to imitation. In other things there does not immediately
follow upon the admiration and liking of the thing done, any strong
desire of doing the like. Nay, many times, on the very contrary, when
we are pleased with the work, we slight and set little by the workman or
artist himself, as, for instance, in perfumes and purple dyes, we are
taken with the things themselves well enough, but do not think dyers and
perfumers otherwise than low and sordid people. It was not said amiss
by Antisthenes, when people told him that one Ismenias was an excellent
piper, "It may be so," said he, "but he is but a wretched human being,
otherwise he would not have been an excellent piper."  And king Philip,
to the same purpose, told his son Alexander, who once at a merry-meeting
played a piece of music charmingly and skillfully, "Are you not ashamed,
son, to play so well?"  For it is enough for a king, or prince to find
leisure sometimes to hear others sing, and he does the muses quite honor
enough when he pleases to be but present, while others engage in such
exercises and trials of skill.

He who busies himself in mean occupations produces, in the very pains he
takes about things of little or no use, an evidence against himself of
his negligence and indisposition to what is really good. Nor did any
generous and ingenuous young man, at the sight of the statue of Jupiter
at Pisa, ever desire to be a Phidias, or, on seeing that of Juno at
Argos, long to be a Polycletus, or feel induced by his pleasure in their
poems to wish to be an Anacreon or Philetas or Archilochus. For it does
not necessarily follow, that, if a piece of work please for its
gracefulness, therefore he that wrought it deserves our admiration.
Whence it is that neither do such things really profit or advantage the
beholders, upon the sight of which no zeal arises for the imitation of
them, nor any impulse or inclination, which may prompt any desire or
endeavor of doing the like. But virtue, by the bare statement of its
actions, can so affect men's minds as to create at once both admiration
of the things done and desire to imitate the doers of them. The goods
of fortune we would possess and would enjoy; those of virtue we long to
practice and exercise; we are content to receive the former from others,
the latter we wish others to experience from us. Moral good is a
practical stimulus; it is no sooner seen, than it inspires an impulse to
practice; and influences the mind and character not by a mere imitation
which we look at, but, by the statement of the fact, creates a moral
purpose which we form.

And so we have thought fit to spend our time and pains in writing of the
lives of famous persons; and have composed this tenth book upon that
subject, containing the life of Pericles, and that of Fabius Maximus,
who carried on the war against Hannibal, men alike, as in their other
virtues and good parts, so especially in their mild and upright temper
and demeanor, and in that capacity to bear the cross-grained humors of
their fellow-citizens and colleagues in office which made them both most
useful and serviceable to the interests of their countries. Whether we
take a right aim at our intended purpose, it is left to the reader to
judge by what he shall here find.

Pericles was of the tribe Acamantis, and the township Cholargus, of the
noblest birth both on his father's and mother's side. Xanthippus, his
father, who defeated the king of Persia's generals in the battle at
Mycale, took to wife Agariste, the grandchild of Clisthenes, who drove
out the sons of Pisistratus, and nobly put an end to their tyrannical
usurpation, and moreover made a body of laws, and settled a model of
government admirably tempered and suited for the harmony and safety of
the people.

His mother, being near her time, fancied in a dream that she was brought
to bed of a lion, and a few days after was delivered of Pericles, in
other respects perfectly formed, only his head was somewhat longish and
out of proportion. For which reason almost all the images and statues
that were made of him have the head covered with a helmet, the workmen
apparently being willing not to expose him. The poets of Athens called
him Schinocephalos, or squill-head, from schinos, a squill, or sea-
onion. One of the comic poets, Cratinus, in the Chirons,
tells us that --

Old Chronos once took queen Sedition to wife;
Which two brought to life
That tyrant far-famed,
Whom the gods the supreme skull-compeller have named.

And, in the Nemesis, addresses him --

Come, Jove, thou head of gods.

And a second, Teleclides, says, that now, in embarrassment with
political difficulties, he sits in the city,--

Fainting underneath the load
Of his own head; and now abroad,
From his huge gallery of a pate,
Sends forth trouble to the state.

And a third, Eupolis, in the comedy called the Demi, in a series of
questions about each of the demagogues, whom he makes in the play to
come up from hell, upon Pericles being named last, exclaims,--

And here by way of summary, now we've done,
Behold, in brief, the heads of all in one.

The master that taught him music, most authors are agreed, was Damon
(whose name, they say, ought to be pronounced with the first syllable
short). Though Aristotle tells us that he was thoroughly practiced in
all accomplishments of this kind by Pythoclides. Damon, it is not
unlikely, being a sophist, out of policy, sheltered himself under the
profession of music to conceal from people in general his skill in other
things, and under this pretense attended Pericles, the young athlete of
politics, so to say, as his training-master in these exercises. Damon's
lyre, however, did not prove altogether a successful blind; he was
banished the country by ostracism for ten years, as a dangerous
intermeddler and a favorer of arbitrary power, and, by this means, gave
the stage occasion to play upon him. As, for instance, Plato, the comic
poet, introduces a character, who questions him --

Tell me, if you please,
Since you're the Chiron who taught Pericles.

Pericles, also, was a hearer of Zeno, the Eleatic, who treated of
natural philosophy in the same manner as Parmenides did, but had also
perfected himself in an art of his own for refuting and silencing
opponents in argument; as Timon of Phlius describes it, --

Also the two-edged tongue of mighty Zeno, who,
Say what one would, could argue it untrue.

But he that saw most of Pericles, and furnished him most especially with
a weight and grandeur of sense, superior to all arts of popularity, and
in general gave him his elevation and sublimity of purpose and of
character, was Anaxagoras of Clazomenae; whom the men of those times
called by the name of Nous, that is, mind, or intelligence, whether in
admiration of the great and extraordinary gift he displayed for the
science of nature, or because that he was the first of the philosophers
who did not refer the first ordering of the world to fortune or chance,
nor to necessity or compulsion, but to a pure, unadulterated
intelligence, which in all other existing mixed and compound things acts
as a principle of discrimination, and of combination of like with like.

For this man, Pericles entertained an extraordinary esteem and
admiration, and, filling himself with this lofty, and, as they call it,
up-in-the-air sort of thought, derived hence not merely, as was natural,
elevation of purpose and dignity of language, raised far above the base
and dishonest buffooneries of mob-eloquence, but, besides this, a
composure of countenance, and a serenity and calmness in all his
movements, which no occurrence whilst he was speaking could disturb, a
sustained and even tone of voice, and various other advantages of a
similar kind, which produced the greatest effect on his hearers. Once,
after being reviled and ill-spoken of all day long in his own hearing by
some vile and abandoned fellow in the open marketplace, where he was
engaged in the dispatch of some urgent affair, he continued his business
in perfect silence, and in the evening returned home composedly, the man
still dogging him at the heels, and pelting him all the way with abuse
and foul language; and stepping into his house, it being by this time
dark, he ordered one of his servants to take a light, and to go along
with the man and see him safe home. Ion, it is true, the dramatic poet,
says that Pericles's manner in company was somewhat over-assuming and
pompous; and that into his high bearing there entered a good deal of
slightingness and scorn of others; he reserves his commendation for
Cimon's ease and pliancy and natural grace in society. Ion, however,
who must needs make virtue, like a show of tragedies, include some comic
scenes, we shall not altogether rely upon; Zeno used to bid those who
called Pericles's gravity the affectation of a charlatan, to go and
affect the like themselves; inasmuch as this mere counterfeiting might
in time insensibly instill into them a real love and knowledge of those
noble qualities.

Nor were these the only advantages which Pericles derived from
Anaxagoras's acquaintance; he seems also to have become, by his
instructions, superior to that superstition with which an ignorant
wonder at appearances, for example, in the heavens possesses the minds
of people unacquainted with their causes, eager for the supernatural,
and excitable through an inexperience which the knowledge of natural
causes removes, replacing wild and timid superstition by the good hope
and assurance of an intelligent piety.

There is a story, that once Pericles had brought to him from a country
farm of his, a ram's head with one horn, and that Lampon, the diviner,
upon seeing the horn grow strong and solid out of the midst of the
forehead, gave it as his judgment, that, there being at that time two
potent factions, parties, or interests in the city, the one of
Thucydides and the other of Pericles, the government would come about to
that one of them in whose ground or estate this token or indication of
fate had shown itself. But that Anaxagoras, cleaving the skull in
sunder, showed to the bystanders that the brain had not filled up its
natural place, but being oblong, like an egg, had collected from all
parts of the vessel which contained it, in a point to that place from
whence the root of the horn took its rise. And that, for that time,
Anaxagoras was much admired for his explanation by those that were
present; and Lampon no less a little while after, when Thucydides was
overpowered, and the whole affairs of the state and government came into
the hands of Pericles.

And yet, in my opinion, it is no absurdity to say that they were both in
the right, both natural philosopher and diviner, one justly detecting
the cause of this event, by which it was produced, the other the end for
which it was designed. For it was the business of the one to find out
and give an account of what it was made, and in what manner and by what
means it grew as it did; and of the other to foretell to what end and
purpose it was so made, and what it might mean or portend. Those who
say that to find out the cause of a prodigy is in effect to destroy its
supposed signification as such, do not take notice that, at the same
time, together with divine prodigies, they also do away with signs and
signals of human art and concert, as, for instance, the clashings of
quoits, fire-beacons, and the shadows on sun-dials, every one of which
things has its cause, and by that cause and contrivance is a sign of
something else. But these are subjects, perhaps, that would better
befit another place.

Pericles, while yet but a young man, stood in considerable apprehension
of the people, as he was thought in face and figure to be very like the
tyrant Pisistratus, and those of great age remarked upon the sweetness
of his voice, and his volubility and rapidity in speaking, and were
struck with amazement at the resemblance. Reflecting, too, that he had
a considerable estate, and was descended of a noble family, and had
friends of great influence, he was fearful all this might bring him to
be banished as a dangerous person; and for this reason meddled not at
all with state affairs, but in military service showed himself of a
brave and intrepid nature. But when Aristides was now dead, and
Themistocles driven out, and Cimon was for the most part kept abroad by
the expeditions he made in parts out of Greece, Pericles, seeing things
in this posture, now advanced and took his side, not with the rich and
few, but with the many and poor, contrary to his natural bent, which was
far from democratical; but, most likely, fearing he might fall under
suspicion of aiming at arbitrary power, and seeing Cimon on the side of
the aristocracy, and much beloved by the better and more distinguished
people, he joined the party of the people, with a view at once both to
secure himself and procure means against Cimon.

He immediately entered, also, on quite a new course of life and
management of his time. For he was never seen to walk in any street but
that which led to the marketplace and the council-hall, and he avoided
invitations of friends to supper, and all friendly visiting and
intercourse whatever; in all the time he had to do with the public,
which was not a little, he was never known to have gone to any of his
friends to a supper, except that once when his near kinsman Euryptolemus
married, he remained present till the ceremony of the drink-offering,
and then immediately rose from table and went his way. For these
friendly meetings are very quick to defeat any assumed superiority, and
in intimate familiarity an exterior of gravity is hard to maintain.
Real excellence, indeed, is most recognized when most openly looked
into; and in really good men, nothing which meets the eyes of external
observers so truly deserves their admiration, as their daily common life
does that of their nearer friends. Pericles, however, to avoid any
feeling of commonness, or any satiety on the part of the people,
presented himself at intervals only, not speaking to every business, nor
at all times coming into the assembly, but, as Critolaus says, reserving
himself, like the Salaminian galley,@ for great occasions, while matters
of lesser importance were dispatched by friends or other speakers under
his direction. And of this number we are told Ephialtes made one, who
broke the power of the council of Areopagus, giving the people,
according to Plato's expression, so copious and so strong a draught of
liberty, that, growing wild and unruly, like an unmanageable horse, it,
as the comic poets say, --

" -- got beyond all keeping in,
Champing at Euboea, and among the islands leaping in."

The style of speaking most consonant to his form of life and the dignity
of his views he found, so to say, in the tones of that instrument with
which Anaxagoras had furnished him; of his teaching he continually
availed himself, and deepened the colors of rhetoric with the dye of
natural science. For having, in addition to his great natural genius,
attained, by the study of nature, to use the words of the divine Plato,
this height of intelligence, and this universal consummating power, and
drawing hence whatever might be of advantage to him in the art of
speaking, he showed himself far superior to all others. Upon which
account, they say, he had his nickname given him, though some are of
opinion he was named the Olympian from the public buildings with which
he adorned the city; and others again, from his great power in public
affairs, whether of war or peace. Nor is it unlikely that the
confluence of many attributes may have conferred it on him. However,
the comedies represented at the time, which, both in good earnest and in
merriment, let fly many hard words at him, plainly show that he got that
appellation especially from his speaking; they speak of his "thundering
and lightning" when he harangued the people, and of his wielding a
dreadful thunderbolt in his tongue.

A saying also of Thucydides, the son of Melesias, stands on record,
spoken by him by way of pleasantry upon Pericles's dexterity.
Thucydides was one of the noble and distinguished citizens, and had been
his greatest opponent; and, when Archidamus, the king of the
Lacedaemonians, asked him whether he or Pericles were the better
wrestler, he made this answer: "When I," said he, "have thrown him and
given him a fair fall, by persisting that he had no fall, he gets the
better of me, and makes the bystanders, in spite of their own eyes,
believe him."  The truth, however, is, that Pericles himself was very
careful what and how he was to speak, insomuch that, whenever he went up
to the hustings, he prayed the gods that no one word might unawares slip
from him unsuitable to the matter and the occasion.

He has left nothing in writing behind him, except some decrees; and
there are but very few of his sayings recorded; one, for example, is,
that he said Aegina must, like a gathering in a man's eye, be removed
from Piraeus; and another, that he said he saw already war moving on its
way towards them out of Peloponnesus. Again, when on a time Sophocles,
who was his fellow-commissioner in the generalship, was going on board
with him, and praised the beauty of a youth they met with in the way to
the ship, "Sophocles," said he, "a general ought not only to have clean
hands, but also clean eyes."  And Stesimbrotus tells us, that, in his
encomium on those who fell in battle at Samos, he said they were become
immortal, as the gods were. "For," said he, "we do not see them
themselves, but only by the honors we pay them, and by the benefits they
do us, attribute to them immortality; and the like attributes belong
also to those that die in the service of their country."

Since Thucydides describes the rule of Pericles as an aristocratical
government, that went by the name of a democracy, but was, indeed, the
supremacy of a single great man, while many others say, on the contrary,
that by him the common people were first encouraged and led on to such
evils as appropriations of subject territory; allowances for attending
theaters, payments for performing public duties, and by these bad habits
were, under the influence of his public measures, changed from a sober,
thrifty people, that maintained themselves by their own labors, to
lovers of expense, intemperance, and license, let us examine the cause
of this change by the actual matters of fact.

At the first, as has been said, when he set himself against Cimon's
great authority, he did caress the people. Finding himself come short of
his competitor in wealth and money, by which advantages the other was
enabled to take care of the poor, inviting every day some one or other
of the citizens that was in want to supper, and bestowing clothes on the
aged people, and breaking down the hedges and enclosures of his grounds,
that all that would might freely gather what fruit they pleased,
Pericles, thus outdone in popular arts, by the advice of one Damonides
of Oea, as Aristotle states, turned to the distribution of the public
moneys; and in a short time having bought the people over, what with
moneys allowed for shows and for service on juries, and what with other
forms of pay and largess, he made use of them against the council of
Areopagus, of which he himself was no member, as having never been
appointed by lot either chief archon, or lawgiver, or king, or captain.
For from of old these offices were conferred on persons by lot, and they
who had acquitted themselves duly in the discharge of them were advanced
to the court of Areopagus. And so Pericles, having secured his power
and interest with the populace, directed the exertions of his party
against this council with such success, that most of those causes and
matters which had been used to be tried there, were, by the agency of
Ephialtes, removed from its cognizance, Cimon, also, was banished by
ostracism as a favorer of the Lacedaemonians and a hater of the people,
though in wealth and noble birth he was among the first, and had won
several most glorious victories over the barbarians, and had filled the
city with money and spoils of war; as is recorded in the history of his
life. So vast an authority had Pericles obtained among the people.

The ostracism was limited by law to ten years; but the Lacedaemonians,
in the mean time, entering with a great army into the territory of
Tanagra, and the Athenians going out against them, Cimon, coming from
his banishment before his time was out, put himself in arms and array
with those of his fellow-citizens that were of his own tribe, and
desired by his deeds to wipe off the suspicion of his favoring the
Lacedaemonians, by venturing his own person along with his country-men.
But Pericles's friends, gathering in a body, forced him to retire as a
banished man. For which cause also Pericles seems to have exerted
himself more in that than in any battle, and to have been conspicuous
above all for his exposure of himself to danger. All Cimon's friends,
also, to a man, fell together side by side, whom Pericles had accused
with him of taking part with the Lacedaemonians. Defeated in this
battle on their own frontiers, and expecting a new and perilous attack
with return of spring, the Athenians now felt regret and sorrow for the
loss of Cimon, and repentance for their expulsion of him. Pericles,
being sensible of their feelings, did not hesitate or delay to gratify
it, and himself made the motion for recalling him home. He, upon his
return, concluded a peace betwixt the two cities; for the Lacedaemonians
entertained as kindly feelings towards him as they did the reverse
towards Pericles and the other popular leaders.

Yet some there are who say that Pericles did not propose the order for
Cimon's return till some private articles of agreement had been made
between them, and this by means of Elpinice, Cimon's sister; that Cimon,
namely, should go out to sea with a fleet of two hundred ships, and be
commander-in-chief abroad, with a design to reduce the king of Persia's
territories, and that Pericles should have the power at home.

This Elpinice, it was thought, had before this time procured some
favor for her brother Cimon at Pericles's hands, and induced him to be
more remiss and gentle in urging the charge when Cimon was tried for his
life; for Pericles was one of the committee appointed by the commons to
plead against him. And when Elpinice came and besought him in her
brother's behalf, he answered, with a smile, "O Elpinice, you are too
old a woman to undertake such business as this."  But, when he appeared
to impeach him, he stood up but once to speak, merely to acquit himself
of his commission, and went out of court, having done Cimon the least
prejudice of any of his accusers.

How, then, can one believe Idomeneus, who charges Pericles as if he had
by treachery procured the murder of Ephialtes, the popular statesman,
one who was his friend, and of his own party in all his political
course, out of jealousy, forsooth, and envy of his great reputation?
This historian, it seems, having raked up these stories, I know not
whence, has befouled with them a man who, perchance, was not altogether
free from fault or blame, but yet had a noble spirit, and a soul that
was bent on honor; and where such qualities are, there can no such cruel
and brutal passion find harbor or gain admittance. As to Ephialtes, the
truth of the story, as Aristotle has told it, is this: that having made
himself formidable to the oligarchical party, by being an
uncompromising asserter of the people's rights in calling to account and
prosecuting those who any way wronged them, his enemies, lying in wait
for him, by the means of Aristodicus the Tanagraean, privately
dispatched him.

Cimon, while he was admiral, ended his days in the Isle of Cyprus. And
the aristocratical party, seeing that Pericles was already before this
grown to be the greatest and foremost man of all the city, but
nevertheless wishing there should be somebody set up against him, to
blunt and turn the edge of his power, that it might not altogether prove
a monarchy, put forward Thucydides of Alopece, a discreet person, and a
near kinsman of Cimon's, to conduct the opposition against him; who,
indeed, though less skilled in warlike affairs than Cimon was, yet was
better versed in speaking and political business, and keeping close
guard in the city, and engaging with Pericles on the hustings, in a
short time brought the government to an equality of parties. For he
would not suffer those who were called the honest and good (persons of
worth and distinction) to be scattered up and down and mix themselves
and be lost among the populace, as formerly, diminishing and obscuring
their superiority amongst the masses; but taking them apart by
themselves and uniting them in one body, by their combined weight he was
able, as it were upon the balance, to make a counter-poise to the other
party.

For, indeed, there was from the beginning a sort of concealed split, or
seam, as it might be in a piece of iron, marking the different popular
and aristocratical tendencies; but the open rivalry and contention of
these two opponents made the gash deep, and severed the city into the
two parties of the people and the few. And so Pericles, at that time
more than at any other, let loose the reins to the people, and made his
policy subservient to their pleasure, contriving continually to have
some great public show or solemnity, some banquet, or some procession or
other in the town to please them, coaxing his countrymen like children,
with such delights and pleasures as were not, however, unedifying.
Besides that every year he sent out threescore galleys, on board of
which there went numbers of the citizens, who were in pay eight months,
learning at the same time and practicing the art of seamanship.

He sent, moreover, a thousand of them into the Chersonese as planters,
to share the land among them by lot, and five hundred more into the isle
of Naxos, and half that number to Andros, a thousand into Thrace to
dwell among the Bisaltae, and others into Italy, when the city Sybaris,
which now was called Thurii, was to be repeopled. And this he did to
ease and discharge the city of an idle, and, by reason of their
idleness, a busy, meddling crowd of people; and at the same time to meet
the necessities and restore the fortunes of the poor townsmen, and to
intimidate, also, and check their allies from attempting any change, by
posting such garrisons, as it were, in the midst of them.

That which gave most pleasure and ornament to the city of Athens, and
the greatest admiration and even astonishment to all strangers, and that
which now is Greece's only evidence that the power she boasts of and her
ancient wealth are no romance or idle story, was his construction of the
public and sacred buildings. Yet this was that of all his actions in
the government which his enemies most looked askance upon and caviled at
in the popular assemblies, crying out how that the commonwealth of
Athens had lost its reputation and was ill-spoken of abroad for removing
the common treasure of the Greeks from the isle of Delos into their own
custody; and how that their fairest excuse for so doing, namely, that
they took it away for fear the barbarians should seize it, and on
purpose to secure it in a safe place, this Pericles had made
unavailable, and how that "Greece cannot but resent it as an
insufferable affront, and consider herself to be tyrannized over openly,
when she sees the treasure, which was contributed by her upon a
necessity for the war, wantonly lavished out by us upon our city, to
gild her all over, and to adorn and set her forth, as it were some vain
woman, hung round with precious stones and figures and temples, which
cost a world of money."

Pericles, on the other hand, informed the people, that they were in no
way obliged to give any account of those moneys to their allies, so long
as they maintained their defense, and kept off the barbarians from
attacking them; while in the meantime they did not so much as supply
one horse or man or ship, but only found money for the service; "which
money," said he, "is not theirs that give it, but theirs that receive
it, if so be they perform the conditions upon which they receive it."
And that it was good reason, that, now the city was sufficiently
provided and stored with all things necessary for the war, they should
convert the overplus of its wealth to such undertakings, as would
hereafter, when completed, give them eternal honor, and, for the
present, while in process, freely supply all the inhabitants with
plenty. With their variety of workmanship and of occasions for service,
which summon all arts and trades and require all hands to be employed
about them, they do actually put the whole city, in a manner, into
state-pay; while at the same time she is both beautified and maintained
by herself. For as those who are of age and strength for war are
provided for and maintained in the armaments abroad by their pay out of
the public stock, so, it being his desire and design that the
undisciplined mechanic multitude that stayed at home should not go
without their share of public salaries, and yet should not have them
given them for sitting still and doing nothing, to that end he thought
fit to bring in among them, with the approbation of the people, these
vast projects of buildings and designs of works, that would be of some
continuance before they were finished, and would give employment to
numerous arts, so that the part of the people that stayed at home might,
no less than those that were at sea or in garrisons or on expeditions,
have a fair and just occasion of receiving the benefit and having their
share of the public moneys.

The materials were stone, brass, ivory, gold, ebony cypress-wood; and
the arts or trades that wrought and fashioned them were smiths and
carpenters, molders, founders and braziers, stone-cutters, dyers,
goldsmiths, ivory-workers, painters, embroiderers, turners; those again
that conveyed them to the town for use, merchants and mariners and ship-
masters by sea, and by land, cartwrights, cattle-breeders, waggoners,
rope-makers, flax-workers, shoe-makers and leather-dressers, roadmakers,
miners. And every trade in the same nature, as a captain in an army has
his particular company of soldiers under him, had its own hired company
of journeymen and laborers belonging to it banded together as in array,
to be as it were the instrument and body for the performance of the
service. Thus, to say all in a word, the occasions and services of
these public works distributed plenty through every age and condition.

As then grew the works up, no less stately in size than exquisite in
form, the workmen striving to outvie the material and the design with
the beauty of their workmanship, yet the most wonderful thing of all was
the rapidity of their execution. Undertakings, any one of which singly
might have required, they thought, for their completion, several
successions and ages of men, were every one of them accomplished in the
height and prime of one man's political service. Although they say,
too, that Zeuxis once, having heard Agatharchus the painter boast of
dispatching his work with speed and ease, replied, "I take a long time."
For ease and speed in doing a thing do not give the work lasting
solidity or exactness of beauty; the expenditure of time allowed to a
man's pains beforehand for the production of a thing is repaid by way of
interest with a vital force for its preservation when once produced.
For which reason Pericles's works are especially admired, as having been
made quickly, to last long. For every particular piece of his work was
immediately, even at that time, for its beauty and elegance, antique;
and yet in its vigor and freshness looks to this day as if it were just
executed. There is a sort of bloom of newness upon those works of his,
preserving them from the touch of time, as if they had some perennial
spirit and undying vitality mingled in the composition of them.

Phidias had the oversight of all the works, and was surveyor-general,
though upon the various portions other great masters and workmen were
employed. For Callicrates and Ictinus built the Parthenon; the chapel
at Eleusis, where the mysteries were celebrated, was begun by Coroebus,
who erected the pillars that stand upon the floor or pavement, and
joined them to the architraves; and after his death Metagenes of Xypete
added the frieze and the upper line of columns; Xenocles of Cholargus
roofed or arched the lantern on the top of the temple of Castor and
Pollux; and the long wall, which Socrates says he himself heard Pericles
propose to the people, was undertaken by Callicrates. This work
Cratinus ridicules, as long in finishing, --

'Tis long since Pericles, if words would do it,
Talk'd up the wall; yet adds not one mite to it.

The Odeum, or music-room, which in its interior was full of seats and
ranges of pillars, and outside had its roof made to slope and descend
from one single point at the top, was constructed, we are told, in
imitation of the king of Persia's Pavilion; this likewise by Pericles's
order; which Cratinus again, in his comedy called The Thracian Women,
made an occasion of raillery, --

So, we see here,
Jupiter Long-pate Pericles appear,
Since ostracism time, he's laid aside his head,
And wears the new Odeum in its stead.

Pericles, also, eager for distinction, then first obtained the decree
for a contest in musical skill to be held yearly at the Panathenaea, and
he himself, being chosen judge, arranged the order and method in which
the competitors should sing and play on the flute and on the harp. And
both at that time, and at other times also, they sat in this music-room
to see and hear all such trials of skill.

The propylaea, or entrances to the Acropolis, were finished in five
years' time, Mnesicles being the principal architect. A strange
accident happened in the course of building, which showed that the
goddess was not averse to the work, but was aiding and cooperating to
bring it to perfection. One of the artificers, the quickest and the
handiest workman among them all, with a slip of his foot fell down from
a great height, and lay in a miserable condition, the physicians having
no hopes of his recovery. When Pericles was in distress about this,
Minerva appeared to him at night in a dream, and ordered a course of
treatment, which he applied, and in a short time and with great ease
cured the man. And upon this occasion it was that he set up a brass
statue of Minerva, surnamed Health, in the citadel near the altar, which
they say was there before. But it was Phidias who wrought the goddess's
image in gold, and he has his name inscribed on the pedestal as the
workman of it; and indeed the whole work in a manner was under his
charge, and he had, as we have said already, the oversight over all the
artists and workmen, through Pericles's friendship for him; and this,
indeed, made him much envied, and his patron shamefully slandered with
stories, as if Phidias were in the habit of receiving, for Pericles's
use, freeborn women that came to see the works. The comic writers of
the town, when they had got hold of this story, made much of it, and
bespattered him with all the ribaldry they could invent, charging him
falsely with the wife of Menippus, one who was his friend and served as
lieutenant under him in the wars; and with the birds kept by Pyrilampes,
an acquaintance of Pericles, who, they pretended, used to give presents
of peacocks to Pericles's female friends. And how can one wonder at any
number of strange assertions from men whose whole lives were devoted to
mockery, and who were ready at any time to sacrifice the reputation of
their superiors to vulgar envy and spite, as to some evil genius, when
even Stesimbrotus the Thasian has dared to lay to the charge of Pericles
a monstrous and fabulous piece of criminality with his son's wife? So
very difficult a matter is it to trace and find out the truth of
anything by history, when, on the one hand, those who afterwards write
it find long periods of time intercepting their view, and, on the other
hand, the contemporary records of any actions and lives, partly through
envy and ill-will, partly through favor and flattery, pervert and
distort truth.

When the orators, who sided with Thucydides and his party, were at one
time crying out, as their custom was, against Pericles, as one who
squandered away the public money, and made havoc of the state revenues,
he rose in the open assembly and put the question to the people, whether
they thought that he had laid out much; and they saying, "Too much, a
great deal."  "Then," said he, "since it is so, let the cost not go to
your account, but to mine; and let the inscription upon the buildings
stand in my name."  When they heard him say thus, whether it were out of
a surprise to see the greatness of his spirit, or out of emulation of
the glory of the works, they cried aloud, bidding him to spend on, and
lay out what he thought fit from the public purse, and to spare no cost,
till all were finished.

At length, coming to a final contest with Thucydides, which of the two
should ostracize the other out of the country, and having gone through
this peril, he threw his antagonist out, and broke up the confederacy
that had been organized against him. So that now all schism and
division being at an end, and the city brought to evenness and unity, he
got all Athens and all affairs that pertained to the Athenians into his
own hands, their tributes, their armies, and their galleys, the islands,
the sea, and their wide-extended power, partly over other Greeks and
partly over barbarians, and all that empire, which they possessed,
founded and fortified upon subject nations and royal friendships and
alliances.

After this he was no longer the same man he had been before, nor as tame
and gentle and familiar as formerly with the populace, so as readily to
yield to their pleasures and to comply with the desires of the
multitude, as a steersman shifts with the winds. Quitting that loose,
remiss, and, in some cases, licentious court of the popular will, he
turned those soft and flowery modulations to the austerity of
aristocratical and regal rule; and employing this uprightly and
undeviatingly for the country's best interests, 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; and sometimes, too, urging and
pressing them forward extremely against their will, he made them,
whether they would or no, yield submission to what was for their
advantage. In which, to say the truth, he did but like a skillful
physician, who, in a complicated and chronic disease, as he sees
occasion, at one while allows his patient the moderate use of such
things as please him, at another while gives him keen pains and drugs to
work the cure. 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, he alone, as a great master, knowing how to handle
and deal fitly with each one of them, and, in an especial manner, making
that use of hopes and fears, as his two chief rudders, with the one to
check the career of their confidence at any time, with the other to
raise them up and cheer them when under any discouragement, plainly
showed by this, that rhetoric, or the art of speaking, is, in Plato's
language, the government of the souls of men, and that her chief
business is to address the affections and passions, which are as it were
the strings and keys to the soul, and require a skillful and careful
touch to be played on as they should be. The source of this
predominance was not barely his power of language, but, as Thucydides
assures us, the reputation of his life, and the confidence felt in his
character; his manifest freedom from every kind of corruption, and
superiority to all considerations of money. Notwithstanding he had made
the city Athens, which was great of itself, as great and rich as can be
imagined, and though he were himself in power and interest more than
equal to many kings and absolute rulers, who some of them also
bequeathed by will their power to their children, he, for his part, did
not make the patrimony his father left him greater than it was by one
drachma.

Thucydides, indeed, gives a plain statement of the greatness of his
power; and the comic poets, in their spiteful manner, more than hint at
it, styling his companions and friends the new Pisistratidae, and
calling on him to abjure any intention of usurpation, as one whose
eminence was too great to be any longer proportionable to and compatible
with a democracy or popular government. 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;
To build up, if he likes, stone walls around a town; and again, if so he
likes, to pull them down;
Their treaties and alliances, power, empire, peace, and war, their
wealth and their success forevermore.

Nor was all this the luck of some happy occasion; nor was it the mere
bloom and grace of a policy that flourished for a season; but having for
forty years together maintained the first place among statesmen such as
Ephialtes and Leocrates and Myronides and Cimon and Tolmides and
Thucydides were, after the defeat and banishment of Thucydides, for no
less than fifteen years longer, in the exercise of one continuous
unintermitted command in the office, to which he was annually reelected,
of General, he preserved his integrity unspotted; though otherwise he
was not altogether idle or careless in looking after his pecuniary
advantage; his paternal estate, which of right belonged to him, he so
ordered that it might neither through negligence be wasted or lessened,
nor yet, being so full of business as he was, cost him any great trouble
or time with taking care of it; and put it into such a way of management
as he thought to be the most easy for himself, and the most exact. All
his yearly products and profits he sold together in a lump, and supplied
his household needs afterward by buying everything that he or his
family wanted out of the market. Upon which account, his children, when
they grew to age, were not well pleased with his management, and the
women that lived with him were treated with little cost, and complained
of this way of housekeeping, where everything was ordered and set down
from day to day, and reduced to the greatest exactness; since there was
not there, as is usual in a great family and a plentiful estate, any
thing to spare, or over and above; but all that went out or came in, all
disbursements and all receipts, proceeded as it were by number and
measure. His manager in all this was a single servant, Evangelus by
name, a man either naturally gifted or instructed by Pericles so as to
excel every one in this art of domestic economy.

All this, in truth, was very little in harmony with Anaxagoras's wisdom;
if, indeed, it be true that he, by a kind of divine impulse and
greatness of spirit, voluntarily quitted his house, and left his land to
lie fallow and to be grazed by sheep like a common. But the life of a
contemplative philosopher and that of an active statesman are, I
presume, not the same thing; for the one merely employs, upon great and
good objects of thought, an intelligence that requires no aid of
instruments nor supply of any external materials; whereas the other, who
tempers and applies his virtue to human uses, may have occasion for
affluence, not as a matter of mere necessity, but as a noble thing;
which was Pericles's case, who relieved numerous poor citizens.

However, there is a story, that Anaxagoras himself, while Pericles was
taken up with public affairs, lay neglected, and that, now being grown
old, he wrapped himself up with a resolution to die for want of food;
which being by chance brought to Pericles's ear, he was horror-struck,
and instantly ran thither, and used all the arguments and entreaties he
could to him, lamenting not so much Anaxagoras's condition as his own,
should he lose such a counselor as he had found him to be; and that,
upon this, Anaxagoras unfolded his robe, and showing himself, made
answer: "Pericles," said he, "even those who have occasion for a lamp
supply it with oil."

The Lacedaemonians beginning to show themselves troubled at the growth
of the Athenian power, Pericles, on the other hand, to elevate the
people's spirit yet more, and to raise them to the thought of great
actions, proposed a decree, to summon all the Greeks in what part
soever, whether of Europe or Asia, every city, little as well as great,
to send their deputies to Athens to a general assembly, or convention,
there to consult and advise concerning the Greek temples which the
barbarians had burnt down, and the sacrifices which were due from them
upon vows they had made to their gods for the safety of Greece when they
fought against the barbarians; and also concerning the navigation of the
sea, that they might henceforward all of them pass to and fro and trade
securely, and be at peace among themselves.

Upon this errand, there were twenty men, of such as were above fifty
years of age, sent by commission; five to summon the Ionians and Dorians
in Asia, and the islanders as far as Lesbos and Rhodes; five to visit
all the places in the Hellespont and Thrace, up to Byzantium; and other
five besides these to go to Boeotia and Phocis and Peloponnesus, and
from hence to pass through the Locrians over to the neighboring
continent, as far as Acarnania and Ambracia; and the rest to take their
course through Euboea to the Oetaeans and the Malian Gulf, and to the
Achaeans of Phthiotis and the Thessalians; all of them to treat with the
people as they passed, and to persuade them to come and take their part
in the debates for settling the peace and jointly regulating the affairs
of Greece.

Nothing was effected, nor did the cities meet by their deputies, as was
desired; the Lacedaemonians, as it is said, crossing the design
underhand, and the attempt being disappointed and baffled first in
Peloponnesus. I thought fit, however, to introduce the mention of it,
to show the spirit of the man and the greatness of his thoughts.

In his military conduct, he gained a great reputation for wariness; he
would not by his good-will engage in any fight which had much
uncertainty or hazard; he did not envy the glory of generals whose rash
adventures fortune favored with brilliant success, however they were
admired by others; nor did he think them worthy his imitation, but
always used to say to his citizens that, so far as lay in his power,
they should continue immortal, and live forever. Seeing Tolmides, the
son of Tolmaeus, upon the confidence of his former successes, and
flushed with the honor his military actions had procured him, making
preparation to attack the Boeotians in their own country, when there was
no likely opportunity, and that he had prevailed with the bravest and
most enterprising of the youth to enlist themselves as volunteers in the
service, who besides his other force made up a thousand, he endeavored
to withhold him and to advise him from it in the public assembly,
telling him in a memorable saying of his, which still goes about, that,
if he would not take Pericles's advice, yet he would not do amiss to
wait and be ruled by time, the wisest counselor of all. This saying, at
that time, was but slightly commended; but within a few days after, when
news was brought that Tolmides himself had been defeated and slain in
battle near Coronea, and that many brave citizens had fallen with him,
it gained him great repute as well as good-will among the people, for
wisdom and for love of his countrymen.

But of all his expeditions, that to the Chersonese gave most
satisfaction and pleasure, having proved the safety of the Greeks who
inhabited there. For not only by carrying along with him a thousand
fresh citizens of Athens he gave new strength and vigor to the cities,
but also by belting the neck of land, which joins the peninsula to the
continent, with bulwarks and forts from sea to sea, he put a stop to the
inroads of the Thracians, who lay all about the Chersonese, and closed
the door against a continual and grievous war, with which that country
had been long harassed, lying exposed to the encroachments and influx of
barbarous neighbors, and groaning under the evils of a predatory
population both upon and within its borders.

Nor was he less admired and talked of abroad for his sailing round the
Peloponnesus, having set out from Pegae, or The Fountains, the port of
Megara, with a hundred galleys. For he not only laid waste the sea-
coast, as Tolmides had done before, but also, advancing far up into main
land with the soldiers he had on board, by the terror of his appearance
drove many within their walls; and at Nemea, with main force, routed and
raised a trophy over the Sicyonians, who stood their ground and joined
battle with him. And having taken on board a supply of soldiers into
the galleys, out of Achaia, then in league with Athens he crossed with
the fleet to the opposite continent, and, sailing along by the mouth of
the river Achelous overran Acarnania, and shut up the Oeniadae within
their city walls, and having ravaged and wasted their country, weighed
anchor for home with the double advantage of having shown himself
formidable to his enemies, and at the same time safe and energetic to
his fellow-citizens; for there was not so much as any chance-miscarriage
that happened, the whole voyage through, to those who were under his
charge.

Entering also the Euxine Sea with a large and finely equipped fleet, he
obtained for the Greek cities any new arrangements they wanted, and
entered into friendly relations with them; and to the barbarous nations,
and kings and chiefs round about them, displayed the greatness of the
power of the Athenians, their perfect ability and confidence to sail
wherever they had a mind, and to bring the whole sea under their
control. He left the Sinopians thirteen ships of war, with soldiers
under the command of Lamachus, to assist them against Timesileus the
tyrant; and when he and his accomplices had been thrown out, obtained a
decree that six hundred of the Athenians that were willing should sail
to Sinope and plant themselves there with the Sinopians, sharing among
them the houses and land which the tyrant and his party had previously
held.

But in other things he did not comply with the giddy impulses of the
citizens, nor quit his own resolutions to follow their fancies, when,
carried away with the thought of their strength and great success, they
were eager to interfere again in Egypt, and to disturb the king of
Persia's maritime dominions. Nay, there were a good many who were, even
then, possessed with that unblessed and inauspicious passion for Sicily,
which afterward the orators of Alcibiades's party blew up into a flame.
There were some also who dreamt of Tuscany and of Carthage, and not
without plausible reason in their present large dominion and the
prosperous course of their affairs.

But Pericles curbed this passion for foreign conquest, and unsparingly
pruned and cut down their ever busy fancies for a multitude of
undertakings; and directed their power for the most part to securing and
consolidating what they had already got, supposing it would be quite
enough for them to do, if they could keep the Lacedaemonians in check;
to whom he entertained all along a sense of opposition; which, as upon
many other occasions, so he particularly showed by what he did in the
time of the holy war. The Lacedaemonians, having gone with an army to
Delphi, restored Apollo's temple, which the Phocians had got into their
possession, to the Delphians; immediately after their departure,
Pericles, with another army, came and restored the Phocians. And the
Lacedaemonians having engraven the record of their privilege of
consulting the oracle before others, which the Delphians gave them, upon
the forehead of the brazen wolf which stands there, he, also, having
received from the Phocians the like privilege for the Athenians, had it
cut upon the same wolf of brass on his right side.

That he did well and wisely in thus restraining the exertions of the
Athenians within the compass of Greece, the events themselves that
happened afterward bore sufficient witness. For, in the first place,
the Euboeans revolted, against whom he passed over with forces; and
then, immediately after, news came that the Megarians were turned their
enemies, and a hostile army was upon the borders of Attica, under the
conduct of Plistoanax, king of the Lacedaemonians. Wherefore Pericles
came with his army back again in all haste out of Euboea, to meet the
war which threatened at home; and did not venture to engage a numerous
and brave army eager for battle; but perceiving that Plistoanax was a
very young man, and governed himself mostly by the counsel and advice of
Cleandrides, whom the ephors had sent with him, by reason of his youth,
to be a kind of guardian and assistant to him, he privately made trial
of this man's integrity, and, in a short time, having corrupted him with
money, prevailed with him to withdraw the Peloponnesians out of Attica.
When the army had retired and dispersed into their several states, the
Lacedaemonians in anger fined their king in so large a sum of money,
that, unable to pay it, he quitted Lacedaemon; while Cleandrides fled,
and had sentence of death passed upon him in his absence. This was the
father of Gylippus, who overpowered the Athenians in Sicily. And it
seems that this covetousness was an hereditary disease transmitted from
father to son; for Gylippus also afterwards was caught in foul
practices, and expelled from Sparta for it. But this we have told at
large in the account of Lysander.

When Pericles, in giving up his accounts of this expedition, stated a
disbursement of ten talents, as laid out upon fit occasion, the people,
without any question, nor troubling themselves to investigate the
mystery, freely allowed of it. And some historians, in which number is
Theophrastus the philosopher, have given it as a truth that Pericles
every year used to send privately the sum of ten talents to Sparta, with
which he complimented those in office, to keep off the war; not to
purchase peace neither, but time, that he might prepare at leisure, and
be the better able to carry on war hereafter.

Immediately after this, turning his forces against the revolters, and
passing over into the island of Euboea with fifty sail of ships and five
thousand men in arms, he reduced their cities, and drove out the
citizens of the Chalcidians, called Hippobotae, horse-feeders, the
chief persons for wealth and reputation among them; and removing all the
Histiaeans out of the country, brought in a plantation of Athenians in
their room; making them his one example of severity, because they had
captured an Attic ship and killed all on board.

After this, having made a truce between the Athenians and Lacedaemonians
for thirty years, he ordered, by public decree, the expedition against
the Isle of Samos, on the ground, that, when they were bid to leave off
their war with the Milesians, they had not complied. And as these
measures against the Samians are thought to have been taken to please
Aspasia, this may be a fit point for inquiry about the woman, what art
or charming faculty she had that enabled her to captivate, as she did,
the greatest statesmen, and to give the philosophers occasion to speak
so much about her, and that, too, not to her disparagement. That she
was a Milesian by birth, the daughter of Axiochus, is a thing
acknowledged. 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. Thargelia was a great beauty, extremely charming, and at
the same time sagacious; she had numerous suitors among the Greeks, and
brought all who had to do with her over to the Persian interest, 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. Aspasia,
some say, was courted and caressed by Pericles upon account of her
knowledge and skill in politics. Socrates himself would sometimes go to
visit her, and some of his acquaintance with him; and those who
frequented her company would carry their wives with them to listen to
her. Her occupation was any thing but creditable, her house being a
home for young courtesans. Aeschines tells us also, that Lysicles, a
sheep-dealer, a man of low birth and character, by keeping Aspasia
company after Pericles's death, came to be a chief man in Athens. And
in Plato's Menexenus, though we do not take the introduction as quite
serious, still thus much seems to be historical, that she had the repute
of being resorted to by many of the Athenians for instruction in the art
of speaking. Pericles's inclination for her seems, however, to have
rather proceeded from the passion of love. He had a wife that was near
of kin to him, who had been married first to Hipponicus, by whom she had
Callias, surnamed the Rich; and also she brought Pericles, while she
lived with him, two sons, Xanthippus and Paralus. Afterwards, when they
did not well agree nor like to live together, he parted with her, with
her own consent, to another man, and himself took Aspasia, and loved her
with wonderful affection; every day, both as he went out and as he came
in from the marketplace, he saluted and kissed her.

In the comedies she goes by the nicknames of the new Omphale and
Deianira, and again is styled Juno. Cratinus, in downright terms, calls
her a harlot.

To find him a Juno the goddess of lust
Bore that harlot past shame,
Aspasia by name.

It should seem, also, that he had a son by her; Eupolis, in his Demi,
introduced Pericles asking after his safety, and Myronides replying,

"My son?"  "He lives; a man he had been long,
But that the harlot-mother did him wrong."

Aspasia, they say, became so celebrated and renowned, that Cyrus also,
who made war against Artaxerxes for the Persian monarchy, gave her whom
he loved the best of all his concubines the name of Aspasia, who before
that was called Milto. She was a Phocaean by birth, the daughter of one
Hermotimus, and, when Cyrus fell in battle, was carried to the king, and
had great influence at court. These things coming into my memory as I
am writing this story, it would be unnatural for me to omit them.

Pericles, however, was particularly charged with having proposed to the
assembly the war against the Samians, from favor to the Milesians, upon
the entreaty of Aspasia. For the two states were at war for the
possession of Priene; and the Samians, getting the better, refused to
lay down their arms and to have the controversy betwixt them decided by
arbitration before the Athenians. Pericles, therefore, fitting out a
fleet, went and broke up the oligarchical government at Samos, and,
taking fifty of the principal men of the town as hostages, and as many
of their children, sent them to the isle of Lemnos, there to be kept,
though he had offers, as some relate, of a talent a piece for himself
from each one of the hostages, and of many other presents from those who
were anxious not to have a democracy. Moreover, Pissuthnes the Persian,
one of the king's lieutenants, bearing some good-will to the Samians,
sent him ten thousand pieces of gold to excuse the city. Pericles,
however, would receive none of all this; but after he had taken that
course with the Samians which he thought fit, and set up a democracy
among them, sailed back to Athens.

But they, however, immediately revolted, Pissuthnes having privily got
away their hostages for them, and provided them with means for the war.
Whereupon Pericles came out with a fleet a second time against them, and
found them not idle nor slinking away, but manfully resolved to try for
the dominion of the sea. The issue was, that, after a sharp sea-fight
about the island called Tragia, Pericles obtained a decisive victory,
having with forty-four ships routed seventy of the enemy's, twenty of
which were carrying soldiers.

Together with his victory and pursuit, having made himself master of the
port, he laid siege to the Samians, and blocked them up, who yet, one
way or other, still ventured to make sallies, and fight under the city
walls. But after that another greater fleet from Athens was arrived,
and that the Samians were now shut up with a close leaguer on every
side, Pericles, taking with him sixty galleys, sailed out into the main
sea, with the intention, as most authors give the account, to meet a
squadron of Phoenician ships that were coming for the Samians' relief,
and to fight them at as great distance as could be from the island;
but, as Stesimbrotus says, with a design of putting over to Cyprus;
which does not seem to be probable. But whichever of the two was his
intent, it seems to have been a miscalculation. For on his departure,
Melissus, the son of Ithagenes, a philosopher, being at that time
general in Samos, despising either the small number of the ships that
were left or the inexperience of the commanders, prevailed with the
citizens to attack the Athenians. And the Samians having won the
battle, and taken several of the men prisoners, and disabled several of
the ships, were masters of the sea, and brought into port all
necessaries they wanted for the war, which they had not before.
Aristotle says, too, that Pericles himself had been once before this
worsted by this Melissus in a sea-fight.

The Samians, that they might requite an affront which had before been
put upon them, branded the Athenians, whom they took prisoners, in their
foreheads, with the figure of an owl. For so the Athenians had marked
them before with a Samaena, which is a sort of ship, low and flat in the
prow, so as to look snub-nosed, but wide and large and well-spread in
the hold, by which it both carries a large cargo and sails well. And it
was so called, because the first of that kind was seen at Samos, having
been built by order of Polycrates the tyrant. These brands upon the
Samians' foreheads, they say, are the allusion in the passage of
Aristophanes, where he says, --

For, oh, the Samians are a lettered people.

Pericles, as soon as news was brought him of the disaster that had
befallen his army, made all the haste he could to come in to their
relief, and having defeated Melissus, who bore up against him, and put
the enemy to flight, he immediately proceeded to hem them in with a wall,
resolving to master them and take the town, rather with some cost and
time, than with the wounds and hazards of his citizens. But as it was a
hard matter to keep back the Athenians, who were vexed at the delay, and
were eagerly bent to fight, he divided the whole multitude into eight
parts, and arranged by lot that that part which had the white bean
should have leave to feast and take their ease, while the other seven
were fighting. And this is the reason, they say, that people, when at
any time they have been merry, and enjoyed themselves, call it white
day, in allusion to this white bean.

Ephorus the historian tells us besides, that Pericles made use of
engines of battery in this siege, being much taken with the curiousness
of the invention, with the aid and presence of Artemon himself, the
engineer, who, being lame, used to be carried about in a litter, where
the works required his attendance, and for that reason was called
Periphoretus. But Heraclides Ponticus disproves this out of Anacreon's
poems, where mention is made of this Artemon Periphoretus several ages
before the Samian war, or any of these occurrences. And he says that
Artemon, being a man who loved his ease, and had a great apprehension of
danger, for the most part kept close within doors, having two of his
servants to hold a brazen shield over his head, that nothing might fall
upon him from above; and if he were at any time forced upon necessity to
go abroad, that he was carried about in a little hanging bed, close to
the very ground, and that for this reason he was called Periphoretus.

In the ninth month, the Samians surrendering themselves and delivering
up the town, Pericles pulled down their walls, and seized their
shipping, and set a fine of a large sum of money upon them, part of
which they paid down at once, and they agreed to bring in the rest by a
certain time, and gave hostages for security. Duris the Samian makes a
tragical drama out of these events, charging the Athenians and Pericles
with a great deal of cruelty, which neither Thucydides, nor Ephorus, nor
Aristotle have given any relation of, and probably with little regard to
truth; how, for example, he brought the captains and soldiers of the
galleys into the market-place at Miletus, and there having bound them
fast to boards for ten days, then, when they were already all but half
dead, gave order to have them killed by beating out their brains with
clubs, and their dead bodies to be flung out into the open streets and
fields, unburied. Duris, however, who even where he has no private
feeling concerned, is not wont to keep his narrative within the limits
of truth, is the more likely upon this occasion to have exaggerated the
calamities which befell his country, to create odium against the
Athenians. Pericles, however, after the reduction of Samos, returning
back to Athens, took care that those who died in the war should be
honorably buried, and made a funeral harangue, as the custom is, in
their commendation at their graves, for which he gained great
admiration. As he came down from the stage on which he spoke, the rest
of the women came and complimented him, taking him by the hand, and
crownings him with garlands and ribbons, like a victorious athlete in
the games; but Elpinice, coming near to him, said, "These are brave
deeds, Pericles, that you have done, and such as deserve our chaplets;
who have lost us many a worthy citizen, not in a war with Phoenicians or
Medes, like my brother Cimon, but for the overthrow of an allied and
kindred city."  As Elpinice spoke these words, he, smiling quietly, as
it is said, returned her answer with this verse, --

Old women should not seek to be perfumed.

Ion says of him, that, upon this exploit of his, conquering the Samians,
he indulged very high and proud thoughts of himself: whereas Agamemnon
was ten years taking a barbarous city, he had in nine months' time
vanquished and taken the greatest and most powerful of the Ionians. And
indeed it was not without reason that he assumed this glory to himself,
for, in real truth, there was much uncertainty and great hazard in this
war, if so be, as Thucydides tells us, the Samian state were within a
very little of wresting the whole power and dominion of the sea out of
the Athenians' hands.

After this was over, the Peloponnesian war beginning to break out in
full tide, he advised the people to send help to the Corcyrseans, who
were attacked by the Corinthians, and to secure to themselves an island
possessed of great naval resources, since the Peloponnesians were
already all but in actual hostilities against them. The people readily
consenting to the motion, and voting an aid and succor for them, he
dispatched Lacedaemonius, Cimon's son, having only ten ships with him,
as it were out of a design to affront him; for there was a great
kindness and friendship betwixt Cimon's family and the Lacedaemonians;
so, in order that Lacedaemonius might lie the more open to a charge, or
suspicion at least, of favoring the Lacedaemonians and playing false, if
he performed no considerable exploit in this service, he allowed him a
small number of ships, and sent him out against his will; and indeed he
made it somewhat his business to hinder Cimon's sons from rising in the
state, professing that by their very names they were not to be looked
upon as native and true Athenians, but foreigners and strangers, one
being called Lacedaemonius, another Thessalus, and the third Eleus; and
they were all three of them, it was thought, born of an Arcadian woman.
Being, however, ill spoken of on account of these ten galleys, as having
afforded but a small supply to the people that were in need, and yet
given a great advantage to those who might complain of the act of
intervention, Pericles sent out a larger force afterward to Corcyra,
which arrived after the fight was over. And when now the Corinthians,
angry and indignant with the Athenians, accused them publicly at
Lacedaemon, the Megarians joined with them, complaining that they were,
contrary to common right and the articles of peace sworn to among the
Greeks, kept out and driven away from every market and from all ports
under the control of the Athenians. The Aeginetans, also, professing to
be ill-used and treated with violence, made supplications in private to
the Lacedaemonians for redress, though not daring openly to call the
Athenians in question. In the meantime, also, the city Potidaea, under
the dominion of the Athenians, but a colony formerly of the Corinthians,
had revolted, and was beset with a formal siege, and was a further
occasion of precipitating the war.

Yet notwithstanding all this, there being embassies sent to Athens, and
Archidamus, the king of the Lacedaemonians, endeavoring to bring the
greater part of the complaints and matters in dispute to a fair
determination, and to pacify and allay the heats of the allies, it is
very likely that the war would not upon any other grounds of quarrel
have fallen upon the Athenians, could they have been prevailed with to
repeal the ordinance against the Megarians, and to be reconciled to
them. Upon which account, since Pericles was the man who mainly opposed
it, and stirred up the people's passions to persist in their contention
with the Megarians, he was regarded as the sole cause of the war.

They say, moreover, that ambassadors went, by order from Lacedaemon to
Athens about this very business, and that when Pericles was urging a
certain law which made it illegal to take down or withdraw the tablet of
the decree, one of the ambassadors, Polyalces by name, said, "Well, do
not take it down then, but turn it; there is no law, I suppose, which
forbids that;" which, though prettily said, did not move Pericles from
his resolution. There may have been, in all likelihood, something of a
secret grudge and private animosity which he had against the Megarians.
Yet, upon a public and open charge against them, that they had
appropriated part of the sacred land on the frontier, he proposed a
decree that a herald should be sent to them, and the same also to the
Lacedaemonians, with an accusation of the Megarians; an order which
certainly shows equitable and friendly proceeding enough. And after
that the herald who was sent, by name Anthemocritus, died, and it was
believed that the Megarians had contrived his death, then Charinus
proposed a decree against them, that there should be an irreconcilable
and implacable enmity thenceforward betwixt the two commonwealths; and
that if any one of the Megarians should but set his foot in Attica, he
should be put to death; and that the commanders, when they take the
usual oath, should, over and above that, swear that they will twice
every year make an inroad into the Megarian country; and that
Anthemocritus should be buried near the Thriasian Gates, which are now
called the Dipylon, or Double Gate.

On the other hand, the Megarians, utterly denying and disowning the
murder of Anthemocritus, throw the whole matter upon Aspasia and
Pericles, availing themselves of the famous verses in the Acharnians,

To Megara some of our madcaps ran,
And stole Simaetha thence, their courtesan.
Which exploit the Megarians to outdo,
Came to Aspasia's house, and took off two.

The true occasion of the quarrel is not so easy to find out. But of
inducing the refusal to annul the decree, all alike charge Pericles.
Some say he met the request with a positive refusal, out of high spirit
and a view of the state's best interests, accounting that the demand
made in those embassies was designed for a trial of their compliance,
and that a concession would be taken for a confession of weakness, as if
they durst not do otherwise; while other some there are who say that it
was rather out of arrogance and a willful spirit of contention, to show
his own strength, that he took occasion to slight the Lacedaemonians.
The worst motive of all, which is confirmed by most witnesses, is to the
following effect. Phidias the Molder had, as has before been said,
undertaken to make the statue of Minerva. Now he, being admitted to
friendship with Pericles, and a great favorite of his, had many enemies
upon this account, who envied and maligned him; who also, to make trial
in a case of his, what kind of judges the commons would prove, should
there be occasion to bring Pericles himself before them, having tampered
with Menon, one who had been a workman with Phidias, stationed him ill
the market-place, with a petition desiring public security upon his
discovery and impeachment of Phidias. The people admitting the man to
tell his story, and the prosecution proceeding in the assembly, there
was nothing of theft or cheat proved against him; for Phidias, from the
very first beginning, by the advice of Pericles, had so wrought and
wrapt the gold that was used in the work about the statue, that they
might take it all off and make out the just weight of it, which Pericles
at that time bade the accusers do. But the reputation of his works was
what brought envy upon Phidias, especially that where he represents the
fight of the Amazons upon the goddesses' shield, he had introduced a
likeness of himself as a bald old man holding up a great stone with both
hands, and had put in a very fine representation of Pericles fighting
with an Amazon. And the position of the hand, which holds out the spear
in front of the face, was ingeniously contrived to conceal in some
degree the likeness, which, meantime, showed itself on either side.

Phidias then was carried away to prison, and there died of a disease;
but, as some say, of poison, administered by the enemies of Pericles, to
raise a slander, or a suspicion, at least, as though he had procured it.
The informer Menon, upon Glycon's proposal, the people made free from
payment of taxes and customs, and ordered the generals to take care that
nobody should do him any hurt. About the same time, Aspasia was
indicted of impiety, upon the complaint of Hermippus the comedian, who
also laid further to her charge that she received into her house
freeborn women for the uses of Pericles. And Diopithes proposed a
decree, that public accusation should be laid against persons who
neglected religion, or taught new doctrines about things above,
directing suspicion, by means of Anaxagoras, against Pericles himself.
The people receiving and admitting these accusations and complaints, at
length, by this means, they came to enact a decree, at the motion of
Dracontides, that Pericles should bring in the accounts of the moneys he
had expended, and lodge them with the Prytanes; and that the judges,
carrying their suffrage from the altar in the Acropolis, should examine
and determine the business in the city. This last clause Hagnon took
out of the decree, and moved that the causes should be tried before
fifteen hundred jurors, whether they should be styled prosecutions for
robbery, or bribery, or any kind of malversation. Aspasia, Pericles
begged off, shedding, as Aeschines says, many tears at the trial, and
personally entreating the jurors. But fearing how it might go with
Anaxagoras, he sent him out of the city. And finding that in Phidias's
case he had miscarried with the people, being afraid of impeachment, he
kindled the war, which hitherto had lingered and smothered, and blew it
up into a flame; hoping, by that means, to disperse and scatter these
complaints and charges, and to allay their jealousy; the city usually
throwing herself upon him alone, and trusting to his sole conduct, upon
the urgency of great affairs and public dangers, by reason of his
authority and the sway he bore.

These are given out to have been the reasons which induced Pericles not
to suffer the people of Athens to yield to the proposals of the
Lacedaemonians; but their truth is uncertain.

The Lacedaemonians, for their part, feeling sure that if they could once
remove him, they might be at what terms they pleased with the Athenians,
sent them word that they should expel the "Pollution" with which
Pericles on the mother's side was tainted, as Thucydides tells us. But
the issue proved quite contrary to what those who sent the message
expected; instead of bringing Pericles under suspicion and reproach,
they raised him into yet greater credit and esteem with the citizens, as
a man whom their enemies most hated and feared. In the same way, also,
before Archidamus, who was at the head of the Peloponnesians, made his
invasion into Attica, he told the Athenians beforehand, that if
Archidamus, while he laid waste the rest of the country, should forbear
and spare his estate, either on the ground of friendship or right of
hospitality that was betwixt them, or on purpose to give his enemies an
occasion of traducing him, that then he did freely bestow upon the state
all that his land and the buildings upon it for the public use. The
Lacedaemonians, therefore, and their allies, with a great army, invaded
the Athenian territories, under the conduct of king Archidamus, and
laying waste the country, marched on as far as Acharnae, and there
pitched their camp, presuming that the Athenians would never endure
that, but would come out and fight them for their country's and their
honor's sake. But Pericles looked upon it as dangerous to engage in
battle, to the risk of the city itself, against sixty thousand men-at-
arms of Peloponnesians and Boeotians; for so many they were in number
that made the inroad at first; and he endeavored to appease those who
were desirous to fight, and were grieved and discontented to see how
things went, and gave them good words, saying, that "trees, when they
are lopped and cut, grow up again in a short time but men, being once
lost, cannot easily be recovered."  He did not convene the people into
an assembly, for fear lest they should force him to act against his
judgment; but, like a skillful steersman or pilot of a ship, who, when a
sudden squall comes on, out at sea, makes all his arrangements, sees
that all is tight and fast, and then follows the dictates of his skill,
and minds the business of the ship, taking no notice of the tears and
entreaties of the sea-sick and fearful passengers, so he, having shut up
the city gates, and placed guards at all posts for security, followed
his own reason and judgment, little regarding those that cried out
against him and were angry at his management, although there were a
great many of his friends that urged him with requests, and many of his
enemies threatened and accused him for doing as he did, and many made
songs and lampoons upon him, which were sung about the town to his
disgrace, reproaching him with the cowardly exercise of his office of
general, and the tame abandonment of everything to the enemy's hands.

Cleon, also, already was among his assailants, making use of the feeling
against him as a step to the leadership of the people, as appears in the
anapaestic verses of Hermippus.

Satyr-king, instead of swords,
Will you always handle words?
Very brave indeed we find them,
But a Teles lurks behind them.

Yet to gnash your teeth you're seen,
When the little dagger keen,
Whetted every day anew,
Of sharp Cleon touches you.

Pericles, however, was not at all moved by any attacks, but took all
patiently, and submitted in silence to the disgrace they threw upon him
and the ill-will they bore him; and, sending out a fleet of a hundred
galleys to Peloponnesus, he did not go along with it in person, but
stayed behind, that he might watch at home and keep the city under his
own control, till the Peloponnesians broke up their camp and were gone.
Yet to soothe the common people, jaded and distressed with the war, he
relieved them with distributions of public moneys, and ordained new
divisions of subject land. For having turned out all the people of
Aegina, he parted the island among the Athenians, according to lot.
Some comfort, also, and ease in their miseries, they might receive from
what their enemies endured. For the fleet, sailing round the
Peloponnese, ravaged a great deal of the country, and pillaged and
plundered the towns and smaller cities; and by land he himself entered
with an army the Megarian country, and made havoc of it all. Whence it
is clear that the Peloponnesians, though they did the Athenians much
mischief by land, yet suffering as much themselves from them by sea,
would not have protracted the war to such a length, but would quickly
have given it over, as Pericles at first foretold they would, had not
some divine power crossed human purposes.

In the first place, the pestilential disease, or plague, seized upon the
city, and ate up all the flower and prime of their youth and strength.
Upon occasion of which, the people, distempered and afflicted in their
souls, as well as in their bodies, were utterly enraged like madmen
against Pericles, and, like patients grown delirious, sought to lay
violent hands on their physician, or, as it were, their father. They
had been possessed, by his enemies, with the belief that the occasion of
the plague was the crowding of the country people together into the
town, forced as they were now, in the heat of the summer-weather, to
dwell many of them together even as they could, in small tenements and
stifling hovels, and to be tied to a lazy course of life within doors,
whereas before they lived in a pure, open, and free air. The cause and
author of all this, said they, is he who on account of the war has
poured a multitude of people from the country in upon us within the
walls, and uses all these many men that he has here upon no employ or
service, but keeps them pent up like cattle, to be overrun with
infection from one another, affording them neither shift of quarters nor
any refreshment.

With the design to remedy these evils, and do the enemy some
inconvenience, Pericles got a hundred and fifty galleys ready, and
having embarked many tried soldiers, both foot and horse, was about to
sail out, giving great hope to his citizens, and no less alarm to his
enemies, upon the sight of so great a force. And now the vessels having
their complement of men, and Pericles being gone aboard his own galley,
it happened that the sun was eclipsed, and it grew dark on a sudden, to
the affright of all, for this was looked upon as extremely ominous.
Pericles, therefore, perceiving the steersman seized with fear and at a
loss what to do, took his cloak and held it up before the man's face,
and, screening him with it so that he could not see, asked him whether
he imagined there was any great hurt, or the sign of any great hurt in
this, and he answering No, "Why," said he, "and what does that differ
from this, only that what has caused that darkness there, is something
greater than a cloak?"  This is a story which philosophers tell their
scholars. Pericles, however after putting out to sea, seems not to have
done any other exploit befitting such preparations, and when he had laid
siege to the holy city Epidaurus, which gave him some hope of surrender,
miscarried in his design by reason of the sickness. For it not only
seized upon the Athenians, but upon all others, too, that held any sort
of communication with the army. Finding after this the Athenians ill
affected and highly displeased with him, he tried and endeavored what he
could to appease and re-encourage them. But he could not pacify or
allay their anger, nor persuade or prevail with them any way, till they
freely passed their votes upon him, resumed their power, took away his
command from him, and fined him in a sum of money; which, by their
account that say least, was fifteen talents, while they who reckon most,
name fifty. The name prefixed to the accusation was Cleon, as Idomeneus
tells us; Simmias, according to Theophrastus; and Heraclides Ponticus
gives it as Lacratidas.

After this, public troubles were soon to leave him unmolested; the
people, so to say, discharged their passion in their stroke, and lost
their stings in the wound. But his domestic concerns were in an unhappy
condition many of his friends and acquaintance having died in the plague
time, and those of his family having long since been in disorder and in
a kind of mutiny against him. For the eldest of his lawfully begotten
sons, Xanthippus by name, being naturally prodigal, and marrying a young
and expensive wife, the daughter of Tisander, son of Epilycus, was
highly offended at his father's economy in making him but a scanty
allowance, by little and little at a time. He sent, therefore, to a
friend one day, and borrowed some money of him in his father Pericles's
name, pretending it was by his order. The man coming afterward to
demand the debt, Pericles was so far from yielding to pay it, that he
entered an action against him. Upon which the young man, Xanthippus,
thought himself so ill used and disobliged, that he openly reviled his
father; telling first, by way of ridicule, stories about his
conversations at home, and the discourses he had with the sophists and
scholars that came to his house. As for instance, how one who was a
practicer of the five games of skill, having with a dart or javelin
unawares against his will struck and killed Epitimus the Pharsalian, his
father spent a whole day with Protagoras in a serious dispute, whether
the javelin, or the man that threw it, or the masters of the games who
appointed these sports, were, according to the strictest and best
reason, to be accounted the cause of this mischance. Besides this,
Stesimbrotus tells us that it was Xanthippus who spread abroad among the
people the infamous story concerning his own wife; and in general that
this difference of the young man's with his father, and the breach
betwixt them, continued never to be healed or made up till his death.
For Xanthippus died in the plague time of the sickness. At which time
Pericles also lost his sister, and the greatest part of his relations
and friends, and those who had been most useful and serviceable to him
in managing the affairs of state. However, he did not shrink or give in
upon these occasions, nor betray or lower his high spirit and the
greatness of his mind under all his misfortunes; he was not even so much
as seen to weep or to mourn, or even attend the burial of any of his
friends or relations, till at last he lost his only remaining legitimate
son. Subdued by this blow and yet striving still, as far as he could,
to maintain his principle and to preserve and keep up the greatness of
his soul when he came, however, to perform the ceremony of putting a
garland of flowers upon the head of the corpse, he was vanquished by his
passion at the sight, so that he burst into exclamations, and shed
copious tears, having never done any such thing in all his life before.

The city having made trial of other generals for the conduct of war, and
orators for business of state, when they found there was no one who was
of weight enough for such a charge, or of authority sufficient to be
trusted with so great a command, regretted the loss of him, and invited
him again to address and advise them, and to reassume the office of
general. He, however, lay at home in dejection and mourning; but was
persuaded by Alcibiades and others of his friends to come abroad and
show himself to the people; who having, upon his appearance, made their
acknowledgments, and apologized for their untowardly treatment of him,
he undertook the public affairs once more; and, being chosen general,
requested that the statute concerning base-born children, which he
himself had formerly caused to be made, might be suspended; that so the
name and race of his family might not, for absolute want of a lawful
heir to succeed, be wholly lost and extinguished. The case of the
statute was thus: Pericles, when long ago at the height of his power in
the state, having then, as has been said, children lawfully begotten,
proposed a law that those only should be reputed true citizens of Athens
who were born of such parents as were both Athenians. After this, the
king of Egypt having sent to the people, by way of present, forty
thousand bushels of wheat, which were to be shared out among the
citizens, a great many actions and suits about legitimacy occurred, by
virtue of that edict; cases which, till that time, had not been known
nor taken notice of; and several persons suffered by false accusations.
There were little less than five thousand who were convicted and sold
for slaves; those who, enduring the test, remained in the government and
passed muster for true Athenians were found upon the poll to be fourteen
thousand and forty persons in number.

It looked strange, that a law, which had been carried so far against so
many people, should be canceled again by the same man that made it; yet
the present calamity and distress which Pericles labored under in his
family broke through all objections, and prevailed with the Athenians to
pity him, as one whose losses and misfortunes had sufficiently punished
his former arrogance and haughtiness. His sufferings deserved, they
thought, their pity, and even indignation, and his request was such as
became a man to ask and men to grant; they gave him permission to enroll
his son in the register of his fraternity, giving him his own name.
This son afterward, after having defeated the Peloponnesians at
Arginusae, was, with his fellow-generals, put to death by the people.

About the time when his son was enrolled, it should seem, the plague
seized Pericles, not with sharp and violent fits, as it did others that
had it, but with a dull and lingering distemper, attended with various
changes and alterations, leisurely, by little and little, wasting the
strength of his body, and undermining the noble faculties of his soul.
So that Theophrastus, in his Morals, when discussing whether men's
characters change with their circumstances, and their moral habits,
disturbed by the ailings of their bodies, start aside from the rules of
virtue, has left it upon record, that Pericles, when he was sick, showed
one of his friends that came to visit him, an amulet or charm that the
women had hung about his neck; as much as to say, that he was very sick
indeed when he would admit of such a foolery as that was.

When he was now near his end, the best of the citizens and those of his
friends who were left alive, sitting about him, were speaking of the
greatness of his merit, and his power, and reckoning up his famous
actions and the number of his victories; for there were no less than
nine trophies, which, as their chief commander and conqueror of their
enemies, he had set up, for the honor of the city. They talked thus
together among themselves, as though he were unable to understand or
mind what they said, but had now lost his consciousness. He had
listened, however, all the while, and attended to all, and speaking out
among them, said, that he wondered they should commend and take notice
of things which were as much owing to fortune as to anything else, and
had happened to many other commanders, and, at the same time, should not
speak or make mention of that which was the most excellent and greatest
thing of all. "For," said he, "no Athenian, through my means, ever wore
mourning."

He was indeed a character deserving our high admiration, not only for
his equitable and mild temper, which all along in the many affairs of
his life, and the great animosities which he incurred, he constantly
maintained; but also for the high spirit and feeling which made him
regard it the noblest of all his honors that, in the exercise of such
immense power, he never had gratified his envy or his passion, nor ever
had treated any enemy as irreconcilably opposed to him. And to me it
appears that this one thing gives that otherwise childish and arrogant
title a fitting and becoming significance; so dispassionate a temper, a
life so pure and unblemished, in the height of power and place, might
well be called Olympian, in accordance with our conceptions of the
divine beings, to whom, as the natural authors of all good and of
nothing evil, we ascribe the rule and government of the world. Not as
the poets represent, who, while confounding us with their ignorant
fancies, are themselves confuted by their own poems and fictions, and
call the place, indeed, where they say the gods make their abode, a
secure and quiet seat, free from all hazards and commotions, untroubled
with winds or with clouds, and equally through all time illumined with a
soft serenity and a pure light, as though such were a home most
agreeable for a blessed and immortal nature; and yet, in the meanwhile,
affirm that the gods themselves are full of trouble and enmity and anger
and other passions, which no way become or belong to even men that have
any understanding. But this will, perhaps, seem a subject fitter for
some other consideration, and that ought to be treated of in some other
place.

The course of public affairs after his death produced a quick and speedy
sense of the loss of Pericles. Those who, while he lived, resented his
great authority, as that which eclipsed themselves, presently after his
quitting the stage, making trial of other orators and demagogues,
readily acknowledged that there never had been in nature such a
disposition as his was, more moderate and reasonable in the height of
that state he took upon him, or more grave and impressive in the
mildness which he used. And that invidious arbitrary power, to which
formerly they gave the name of monarchy and tyranny, did then appear to
have been the chief bulwark of public safety; so great a corruption and
such a flood of mischief and vice followed, which he, by keeping weak
and low, had withheld from notice, and had prevented from attaining
incurable height through a licentious impunity.

FABIUS

Having related the memorable actions of Pericles, our history now
proceeds to the life of Fabius. A son of Hercules and a nymph, or some
woman of that country, who brought him forth on the banks of Tiber, was,
it is said, the first Fabius, the founder of the numerous and
distinguished family of the name. Others will have it that they were
first called Fodii, because the first of the race delighted in digging
pitfalls for wild beasts, fodere being still the Latin for to dig, and
fossa for a ditch, and that in process of time, by the change of the two
letters they grew to be called Fabii. But be these things true or
false, certain it is that this family for a long time yielded a great
number of eminent persons. Our Fabius, who was fourth in descent from
that Fabius Rullus who first brought the honorable surname of Maximus
into his family, was also, by way of personal nickname, called
Verrucosus, from a wart on his upper lip; and in his childhood they in
like manner named him Ovicula, or The Lamb, on account of his extreme
mildness of temper. His slowness in speaking, his long labor and pains
in learning, his deliberation in entering into the sports of other
children, his easy submission to everybody, as if he had no will of his
own, made those who judged superficially of him, the greater number,
esteem him insensible and stupid; and few only saw that this tardiness
proceeded from stability, and discerned the greatness of his mind, and
the lionlikeness of his temper. But as soon as he came into
employments, his virtues exerted and showed themselves; his reputed want
of energy then was recognized by people in general, as a freedom of
passion; his slowness in words and actions, the effect of a true
prudence; his want of rapidity, and his sluggishness, as constancy and
firmness.

Living in a great commonwealth, surrounded by many enemies, he saw the
wisdom of inuring his body (nature's own weapon) to warlike exercises,
and disciplining his tongue for public oratory in a style comformable
to his life and character. His eloquence, indeed, had not much of
popular ornament, nor empty artifice, but there was in it great weight
of sense; it was strong and sententious, much after the way of
Thucydides. We have yet extant his funeral oration upon the death of
his son, who died consul, which he recited before the people.

He was five times consul, and in his first consulship had the honor of a
triumph for the victory he gained over the Ligurians, whom he defeated
in a set battle, and drove them to take shelter in the Alps, from whence
they never after made any inroad nor depredation upon their neighbors.
After this, Hannibal came into Italy, who, at his first entrance, having
gained a great battle near the river Trebia, traversed all Tuscany with
his victorious army, and, desolating the country round about, filled
Rome itself with astonishment and terror. Besides the more common signs
of thunder and lightning then happening, the report of several unheard
of and utterly strange portents much increased the popular
consternation. For it was said that some targets sweated blood; that at
Antium, when they reaped their corn, many of the ears were filled with
blood; that it had rained redhot stones; that the Falerians had seen the
heavens open and several scrolls falling down, in one of which was
plainly written, "Mars himself stirs his arms."  But these prodigies had
no effect upon the impetuous and fiery temper of the consul Flaminius,
whose natural promptness had been much heightened by his late unexpected
victory over the Gauls, when he fought them contrary to the order of the
senate and the advice of his colleague. Fabius, on the other side,
thought it not seasonable to engage with the enemy; not that he much
regarded the prodigies, which he thought too strange to be easily
understood, though many were alarmed by them; but in regard that the
Carthaginians were but few, and in want of money and supplies, he deemed
it best not to meet in the field a general whose army had been tried in
many encounters, and whose object was a battle, but to send aid to their
allies, control the movements of the various subject cities, and let the
force and vigor of Hannibal waste away and expire, like a flame, for want
of aliment.

These weighty reasons did not prevail with Flaminius, who protested he
would never suffer the advance of the enemy to the city, nor be reduced,
like Camillus in former time, to fight for Rome within the walls of
Rome. Accordingly he ordered the tribunes to draw out the army into the
field; and though he himself, leaping on horseback to go out, was no
sooner mounted but the beast, without any apparent cause, fell into so
violent a fit of trembling and bounding that he cast his rider headlong
on the ground, he was no ways deterred; but proceeded as he had begun,
and marched forward up to Hannibal, who was posted near the Lake
Thrasymene in Tuscany. At the moment of this engagement, there happened
so great an earthquake, that it destroyed several towns, altered the
course of rivers, and carried off parts of high cliffs, yet such was the
eagerness of the combatants, that they were entirely insensible of it.

In this battle Flaminius fell, after many proofs of his strength and
courage, and round about him all the bravest of the army, in the whole,
fifteen thousand were killed, and as many made prisoners. Hannibal,
desirous to bestow funeral honors upon the body of Flaminius, made
diligent search after it, but could not find it among the dead, nor was
it ever known what became of it. Upon the former engagement near
Trebia, neither the general who wrote, nor the express who told the
news, used straightforward and direct terms, nor related it otherwise
than as a drawn battle, with equal loss on either side; but on this
occasion, as soon as Pomponius the praetor had the intelligence, he
caused the people to assemble, and, without disguising or dissembling
the matter, told them plainly, "We are beaten, O Romans, in a great
battle; the consul Flaminius is killed; think, therefore, what is to be
done for your safety."  Letting loose his news like a gale of wind upon
an open sea, he threw the city into utter confusion: in such
consternation, their thoughts found no support or stay. The danger at
hand at last awakened their judgments into a resolution to choose a
dictator, who, by the sovereign authority of his office and by his
personal wisdom and courage, might be able to manage the public affairs.
Their choice unanimously fell upon Fabius, whose character seemed equal
to the greatness of the office; whose age was so far advanced as to give
him experience, without taking from him the vigor of action; his body
could execute what his soul designed; and his temper was a happy
compound of confidence and cautiousness.

Fabius, being thus installed in the office of dictator, in the first
place gave the command of the horse to Lucius Minucius; and next asked
leave of the senate for himself, that in time of battle he might serve
on horseback, which by an ancient law amongst the Romans was forbid to
their generals; whether it were, that, placing their greatest strength
in their foot, they would have their commanders-in-chief posted amongst
them, or else to let them know, that, how great and absolute soever
their authority were, the people and senate were still their masters, of
whom they must ask leave. Fabius, however, to make the authority of his
charge more observable, and to render the people more submissive and
obedient to him, caused himself to be accompanied with the full body of
four and twenty lictors; and, when the surviving consul came to visit
him, sent him word to dismiss his lictors with their fasces, the ensigns
of authority, and appear before him as a private person.

The first solemn action of his dictatorship was very fitly a religious
one: an admonition to the people, that their late overthrow had not
befallen them through want of courage in their soldiers, but through the
neglect of divine ceremonies in the general. He therefore exhorted them
not to fear the enemy, but by extraordinary honor to propitiate the
gods. This he did, not to fill their minds with superstition, but by
religious feeling to raise their courage, and lessen their fear of the
enemy by inspiring the belief that Heaven was on their side. With this
view, the secret prophecies called the Sibylline Books were consulted;
sundry predictions found in them were said to refer to the fortunes and
events of the time; but none except the consulter was informed.
Presenting himself to the people, the dictator made a vow before them to
offer in sacrifice the whole product of the next season, all Italy over,
of the cows, goats, swine, sheep, both in the mountains and the plains;
and to celebrate musical festivities with an expenditure of the precise
sum of 333 sestertia and 333 denarii, with one third of a denarius over.
The sum total of which is, in our money, 83,583 drachmas and 2 obols.
What the mystery might be in that exact number is not easy to determine,
unless it were in honor of the perfection of the number three, as being
the first of odd numbers, the first that contains in itself
multiplication, with all other properties whatsoever belonging to
numbers in general.

In this manner Fabius having given the people better heart for the
future, by making them believe that the gods took their side, for his
own part placed his whole confidence in himself, believing that the gods
bestowed victory and good fortune by the instrumentality of valor and of
prudence; and thus prepared he set forth to oppose Hannibal, not with
intention to fight him, but with the purpose of wearing out and wasting
the vigor of his arms by lapse of time, of meeting his want of resources
by superior means, by large numbers the smallness of his forces. With
this design, he always encamped on the highest grounds, where the
enemy's horse could have no access to him. Still he kept pace with
them; when they marched he followed them, when they encamped he did the
same, but at such a distance as not to be compelled to an engagement,
and always keeping upon the hills, free from the insults of their horse;
by which means he gave them no rest, but kept them in a continual alarm.

But this his dilatory way gave occasion in his own camp for suspicion of
want of courage; and this opinion prevailed yet more in Hannibal's army.
Hannibal was himself the only man who was not deceived, who discerned
his skill and detected his tactics, and saw, unless he could by art or
force bring him to battle, that the Carthaginians, unable to use the
arms in which they were superior, and suffering the continual drain of
lives and treasure in which they were inferior, would in the end come to
nothing. He resolved, therefore, with all the arts and subtilties of
war to break his measures, and to bring Fabius to an engagement; like a
cunning wrestler, watching every opportunity to get good hold and close
with his adversary. He at one time attacked, and sought to distract his
attention, tried to draw him off in various directions, endeavored in
all ways to tempt him from his safe policy. All this artifice, though
it had no effect upon the firm judgment and conviction of the dictator.
yet upon the common soldier and even upon the general of the horse
himself, it had too great an operation: Minucius, unseasonably eager
for action, bold and confident, humored the soldiery, and himself
contributed to fill them with wild eagerness and empty hopes, which they
vented in reproaches upon Fabius, calling him Hannibal's pedagogue,
since he did nothing else but follow him up and down and wait upon him.
At the same time, they cried up Minucius for the only captain worthy to
command the Romans; whose vanity and presumption rose so high in
consequence, that he insolently jested at Fabius's encampments upon the
mountains, saying that he seated them there as on a theater, to behold
the flames and desolation of their country. And he would sometimes ask
the friends of the general, whether it were not his meaning, by thus
leading them from mountain to mountain, to carry them at last (having no
hopes on earth) up into heaven, or to hide them in the clouds from
Hannibal's army? When his friends reported these things to the
dictator, persuading him that, to avoid the general obloquy, he should
engage the enemy, his answer was, "I should be more fainthearted than
they make me, if, through fear of idle reproaches, I should abandon my
own convictions. It is no inglorious thing to have fear for the safety
of our country, but to be turned from one's course by men's opinions, by
blame, and by misrepresentation, shows a man unfit to hold an office
such as this, which, by such conduct, he makes the slave of those whose
errors it is his business to control."

An oversight of Hannibal occurred soon after. Desirous to refresh his
horse in some good pasture-grounds, and to draw off his army, he ordered
his guides to conduct him to the district of Casinum. They, mistaking
his bad pronunciation, led him and his army to the town of Casilinum, on
the frontier of Campania which the river Lothronus, called by the Romans
Vulturnus, divides in two parts. The country around is enclosed by
mountains, with a valley opening towards the sea, in which the river
overflowing forms a quantity of marsh land with deep banks of sand, and
discharges itself into the sea on a very unsafe and rough shore. While
Hannibal was proceeding hither, Fabius, by his knowledge of the roads,
succeeded in making his way around before him, and dispatched four
thousand choice men to seize the exit from it and stop him up, and
lodged the rest of his army upon the neighboring hills in the most
advantageous places; at the same time detaching a party of his lightest
armed men to fall upon Hannibal's rear; which they did with such
success, that they cut off eight hundred of them, and put the whole army
in disorder. Hannibal, finding the error and the danger he was fallen
into, immediately crucified the guides; but considered the enemy to be
so advantageously posted, that there was no hopes of breaking through
them; while his soldiers began to be despondent and terrified, and to
think themselves surrounded with embarrassments too difficult to be
surmounted.

Thus reduced, Hannibal had recourse to stratagem; he caused two thousand
head of oxen which he had in his camp, to have torches or dry fagots
well fastened to their horns, and lighting them in the beginning of the
night, ordered the beasts to be driven on towards the heights commanding
the passages out of the valley and the enemy's posts; when this was
done, he made his army in the dark leisurely march after them. The oxen
at first kept a slow, orderly pace, and with their lighted heads
resembled an army marching by night, astonishing the shepherds and herds
men of the hills about. But when the fire had burnt down the horns of
the beasts to the quick, they no longer observed their sober pace, but,
unruly and wild with their pain, ran dispersed about, tossing their
heads and scattering the fire round about them upon each other and
setting light as they passed to the trees. This was a surprising
spectacle to the Romans on guard upon the heights. Seeing flames which
appeared to come from men advancing with torches, they were possessed
with the alarm that the enemy was approaching in various quarters, and
that they were being surrounded; and, quitting their post, abandoned the
pass, and precipitately retired to their camp on the hills. They were
no sooner gone, but the light-armed of Hannibal's men, according to his
order, immediately seized the heights, and soon after the whole army,
with all the baggage, came up and safely marched through the passes.

Fabius, before the night was over, quickly found out the trick; for some
of the beasts fell into his hands; but for fear of an ambush in the
dark, he kept his men all night to their arms in the camp. As soon as
it was day, he attacked the enemy in the rear, where, after a good deal
of skirmishing in the uneven ground, the disorder might have become
general, but that Hannibal detached from his van a body of Spaniards,
who, of themselves active and nimble, were accustomed to the climbing of
mountains. These briskly attacked the Roman troops who were in heavy
armor, killed a good many, and left Fabius no longer in condition to
follow the enemy. This action brought the extreme of obloquy and
contempt upon the dictator; they said it was now manifest that he was
not only inferior to his adversary, as they had always thought, in
courage, but even in that conduct, foresight, and generalship, by which
he had proposed to bring the war to an end.

And Hannibal, to enhance their anger against him, marched with his army
close to the lands and possessions of Fabius, and, giving orders to his
soldiers to burn and destroy all the country about, forbade them to do
the least damage in the estates of the Roman general, and placed guards
for their security. This, when reported at Rome, had the effect with
the people which Hannibal desired. Their tribunes raised a thousand
stories against him, chiefly at the instigation of Metilius, who, not so
much out of hatred to him as out of friendship to Minucius, whose
kinsman he was, thought by depressing Fabius to raise his friend. The
senate on their part were also offended with him, for the bargain he had
made with Hannibal about the exchange of prisoners, the conditions of
which were, that, after exchange made of man for man, if any on either
side remained, they should be redeemed at the price of two hundred and
fifty drachmas a head. Upon the whole account, there remained two
hundred and forty Romans unexchanged, and the senate now not only
refused to allow money for the ransoms, but also reproached Fabius for
making a contract, contrary to the honor and interest of the
commonwealth, for redeeming men whose cowardice had put them in the
hands of the enemy. Fabius heard and endured all this with invincible
patience; and, having no money by him, and on the other side being
resolved to keep his word with Hannibal and not to abandon the captives,
he dispatched his son to Rome to sell land, and to bring with him the
price, sufficient to discharge the ransoms; which was punctually
performed by his son, and delivery accordingly made to him of the
prisoners, amongst whom many, when they were released, made proposals to
repay the money; which Fabius in all cases declined.

About this time, he was called to Rome by the priests, to assist,
according to the duty of his office, at certain sacrifices, and was thus
forced to leave the command of the army with Minucius; but before he
parted, not only charged him as his commander-in-chief, but besought and
entreated him, not to come, in his absence, to a battle with Hannibal.
His commands, entreaties, and advice were lost upon Minucius; for his
back was no sooner turned but the new general immediately sought
occasions to attack the enemy. And notice being brought him that
Hannibal had sent out a great part of his army to forage, he fell upon a
detachment of the remainder, doing great execution, and driving them to
their very camp, with no little terror to the rest, who apprehended
their breaking in upon them; and when Hannibal had recalled his
scattered forces to the camp, he, nevertheless, without any loss, made
his retreat, a success which aggravated his boldness and presumption,
and filled the soldiers with rash confidence. The news spread to Rome,
where Fabius, on being told it, said that what he most feared was
Minucius's success: but the people, highly elated, hurried to the forum
to listen to an address from Metilius the tribune, in which he
infinitely extolled the valor of Minucius, and fell bitterly upon
Fabius, accusing him for want not merely of courage, but even of
loyalty; and not only him, but also many other eminent and considerable
persons; saying that it was they that had brought the Carthaginians into
Italy, with the design to destroy the liberty of the people; for which
end they had at once put the supreme authority into the hands of a
single person, who by his slowness and delays might give Hannibal
leisure to establish himself in Italy, and the people of Carthage time
and opportunity to supply him with fresh succors to complete his
conquests

Fabius came forward with no intention to answer the tribune, but only
said, that they should expedite the sacrifices, that so he might
speedily return to the army to punish Minucius, who had presumed to
fight contrary to his orders; words which immediately possessed the
people with the belief that Minucius stood in danger of his life. For
it was in the power of the dictator to imprison and to put to death, and
they feared that Fabius, of a mild temper in general, would be as hard
to be appeased when once irritated, as he was slow to be provoked.
Nobody dared to raise his voice in opposition. Metilius alone, whose
office of tribune gave him security to say what he pleased (for in the
time of a dictatorship that magistrate alone preserves his authority),
boldly applied himself to the people in the behalf of Minucius: that
they should not suffer him to be made a sacrifice to the enmity of
Fabius, nor permit him to be destroyed, like the son of Manlius
Torquatus, who was beheaded by his father for a victory fought and
triumphantly won against order; he exhorted them to take away from
Fabius that absolute power of a dictator, and to put it into more worthy
hands, better able and more inclined to use it for the public good.
These impressions very much prevailed upon the people, though not so far
as wholly to dispossess Fabius of the dictatorship. But they decreed
that Minucius should have an equal authority with the dictator in the
conduct of the war; which was a thing then without precedent, though a
little later it was again practiced after the disaster at Cannae; when
the dictator, Marcus Junius, being with the army, they chose at Rome
Fabius Buteo dictator, that he might create new senators, to supply the
numerous places of those who were killed. But as soon as, once acting
in public, he had filled those vacant places with a sufficient number,
he immediately dismissed his lictors, and withdrew from all his
attendance, and, mingling like a common person with the rest of the
people, quietly went about his own affairs in the forum.

The enemies of Fabius thought they had sufficiently humiliated and
subdued him by raising Minucius to be his equal in authority; but they
mistook the temper of the man, who looked upon their folly as not his
loss, but like Diogenes, who, being told that some persons derided him,
made answer, "But I am not derided," meaning that only those were really
insulted on whom such insults made an impression, so Fabius, with great
tranquillity and unconcern, submitted to what happened, and contributed
a proof to the argument of the philosophers that a just and good man is
not capable of being dishonored. His only vexation arose from his fear
lest this ill counsel, by supplying opportunities to the diseased
military ambition of his subordinate, should damage the public cause.
Lest the rashness of Minucius should now at once run headlong into some
disaster, he returned back with all privacy and speed to the army; where
he found Minucius so elevated with his new dignity, that, a
joint-authority not contenting him, he required by turns to have the
command of the army every other day. This Fabius rejected, but was
contented that the army should be divided; thinking each general singly
would better command his part, than partially command the whole. The
first and fourth legion he took for his own division, the second and
third he delivered to Minucius; so also of the auxiliary forces each
had an equal share.

Minucius, thus exalted, could not contain himself from boasting of his
success in humiliating the high and powerful office of the dictatorship.
Fabius quietly reminded him that it was, in all wisdom, Hannibal, and
not Fabius, whom he had to combat; but if he must needs contend with his
colleague, it had best be in diligence and care for the preservation of
Rome; that it might not be said, a man so favored by the people served
them worse than he who had been ill-treated and disgraced by them.

The young general, despising these admonitions as the false humility of
age, immediately removed with the body of his army, and encamped by
himself. Hannibal, who was not ignorant of all these passages, lay
watching his advantage from them. It happened that between his army and
that of Minucius there was a certain eminence, which seemed a very
advantageous and not difficult post to encamp upon; the level field
around it appeared, from a distance, to be all smooth and even, though
it had many inconsiderable ditches and dips in it, not discernible to
the eye. Hannibal, had he pleased, could easily have possessed himself
of this ground; but he had reserved it for a bait, or train, in proper
season, to draw the Romans to an engagement. Now that Minucius and
Fabius were divided, he thought the opportunity fair for his purpose;
and, therefore, having in the night time lodged a convenient number of
his men in these ditches and hollow places, early in the morning he sent
forth a small detachment, who, in the sight of Minucius, proceeded to
possess themselves of the rising ground. According to his expectation,
Minucius swallowed the bait, and first sends out his light troops, and
after them some horse, to dislodge the enemy; and, at last, when he saw
Hannibal in person advancing to the assistance of his men, marched down
with his whole army drawn up. He engaged with the troops on the
eminence, and sustained their missiles; the combat for some time was
equal; but as soon as Hannibal perceived that the whole army was now
sufficiently advanced within the toils he had set for them, so that
their backs were open to his men whom he had posted in the hollows, he
gave the signal; upon which they rushed forth from various quarters, and
with loud cries furiously attacked Minucius in the rear. The surprise
and the slaughter was great, and struck universal alarm and disorder
through the whole army. Minucius himself lost all his confidence; he
looked from officer to officer, and found all alike unprepared to face
the danger, and yielding to a flight, which, however, could not end in
safety. The Numidian horsemen were already in full victory riding about
the plain, cutting down the fugitives.

Fabius was not ignorant of this danger of his countrymen; he foresaw
what would happen from the rashness of Minucius, and the cunning of
Hannibal; and, therefore, kept his men to their arms, in readiness to
wait the event; nor would he trust to the reports of others, but he
himself, in front of his camp, viewed all that passed. When, therefore,
he saw the army of Minucius encompassed by the enemy, and that by their
countenance and shifting their ground, they appeared more disposed to
flight than to resistance, with a great sigh, striking his hand upon his
thigh, he said to those about him, "O Hercules! how much sooner than I
expected, though later than he seemed to desire, hath Minucius destroyed
himself!"  He then commanded the ensigns to be led forward and the army
to follow, telling them, "We must make haste to rescue Minucius, who is
a valiant man, and a lover of his country; and if he hath been too
forward to engage the enemy, at another time we will tell him of it."
Thus, at the head of his men, Fabius marched up to the enemy, and first
cleared the plain of the Numidians; and next fell upon those who were
charging the Romans in the rear, cutting down all that made opposition,
and obliging the rest to save themselves by a hasty retreat, lest they
should be environed as the Romans had been. Hannibal, seeing so sudden
a change of affairs, and Fabius, beyond the force of his age, opening
his way through the ranks up the hill-side, that he might join Minucius,
warily forbore, sounded a retreat, and drew off his men into their camp;
while the Romans on their part were no less contented to retire in
safety. It is reported that upon this occasion Hannibal said jestingly
to his friends: "Did not I tell you, that this cloud which always
hovered upon the mountains would, at some time or other, come down with
a storm upon us?"

Fabius, after his men had picked up the spoils of the field, retired to
his own camp, without saying any harsh or reproachful thing to his
colleague; who also on his part, gathering his army together, spoke and
said to them: "To conduct great matters and never commit a fault is
above the force of human nature; but to learn and improve by the faults
we have committed, is that which becomes a good and sensible man. Some
reasons I may have to accuse fortune, but I have many more to thank her;
for in a few hours she hath cured a long mistake, and taught me that I
am not the man who should command others, but have need of another to
command me; and that we are not to contend for victory over those to
whom it is our advantage to yield. Therefore in everything else
henceforth the dictator must be your commander; only in showing
gratitude towards him I will still be your leader, and always be the
first to obey his orders."  Having said this, he commanded the Roman
eagles to move forward, and all his men to follow him to the camp of
Fabius. The soldiers, then, as he entered, stood amazed at the novelty
of the sight, and were anxious and doubtful what the meaning might be.
When he came near the dictator's tent, Fabius went forth to meet him, on
which he at once laid his standards at his feet, calling him with a loud
voice his father; while the soldiers with him saluted the soldiers here
as their patrons, the term employed by freedmen to those who gave them
their liberty. After silence was obtained, Minucius said, "You have
this day, O dictator, obtained two victories; one by your valor and
conduct over Hannibal, and another by your wisdom and goodness over your
colleague; by one victory you preserved, and by the other instructed us;
and when we were already suffering one shameful defeat from Hannibal, by
another welcome one from you we were restored to honor and safety. I
can address you by no nobler name than that of a kind father, though a
father's beneficence falls short of that I have received from you. From
a father I individually received the gift of life; to you I owe its
preservation not for myself only, but for all these who are under me."
After this, he threw himself into the arms of the dictator; and in the
same manner the soldiers of each army embraced one another with gladness
and tears of joy.

Not long after, Fabius laid down the dictatorship, and consuls were
again created. Those who immediately succeeded, observed the same
method in managing the war, and avoided all occasions of fighting
Hannibal in a pitched battle; they only succored their allies, and
preserved the towns from falling off to the enemy. but afterwards, when
Terentius Varro, a man of obscure birth, but very popular and bold, had
obtained the consulship, he soon made it appear that by his rashness and
ignorance he would stake the whole commonwealth on the hazard. For it
was his custom to declaim in all assemblies, that, as long as Rome
employed generals like Fabius there never would be an end of the war;
vaunting that whenever he should get sight of the enemy, he would that
same day free Italy from the strangers. With these promises he so
prevailed, that he raised a greater army than had ever yet been sent out
of Rome. There were enlisted eighty-eight thousand fighting men; but
what gave confidence to the populace, only terrified the wise and
experienced, and none more than Fabius; since if so great a body, and
the flower of the Roman youth, should be cut off, they could not see any
new resource for the safety of Rome. They addressed themselves,
therefore, to the other consul, Aemilius Paulus, a man of great
experience in war, but unpopular, and fearful also of the people, who
once before upon some impeachment had condemned him; so that he needed
encouragement to withstand his colleague's temerity. Fabius told him,
if he would profitably serve his country, he must no less oppose Varro's
ignorant eagerness than Hannibal's conscious readiness, since both alike
conspired to decide the fate of Rome by a battle. "It is more
reasonable," he said to him, "that you should believe me than Varro, in
matters relating to Hannibal, when I tell you, that if for this year you
abstain from fighting with him, either his army will perish of itself,
or else he will be glad to depart of his own will. This evidently
appears, inasmuch as, notwithstanding his victories, none of the
countries or towns of Italy come in to him, and his army is not now the
third part of what it was at first."  To this Paulus is said to have
replied, "Did I only consider myself, I should rather choose to be
exposed to the weapons of Hannibal than once more to the suffrages of my
fellow-citizens, who are urgent for what you disapprove; yet since the
cause of Rome is at stake, I will rather seek in my conduct to please
and obey Fabius than all the world besides."

These good measures were defeated by the importunity of Varro; whom,
when they were both come to the army, nothing would content but a
separate command, that each consul should have his day; and when his
turn came, he posted his army close to Hannibal, at a village called
Cannae, by the river Aufidus. It was no sooner day, but he set up the
scarlet coat flying over his tent, which was the signal of battle. This
boldness of the consul, and the numerousness of his army, double theirs,
startled the Carthaginians; but Hannibal commanded them to their arms,
and with a small train rode out to take a full prospect of the enemy as
they were now forming in their ranks, from a rising ground not far
distant. One of his followers, called Gisco, a Carthaginian of equal
rank with himself, told him that the numbers of the enemy were
astonishing; to which Hannibal replied, with a serious countenance,
"There is one thing, Gisco, yet more astonishing, which you take no
notice of;" and when Gisco inquired what, answered, that "in all those
great numbers before us, there is not one man called Gisco."  This
unexpected jest of their general made all the company laugh, and as they
came down from the hill, they told it to those whom they met, which
caused a general laughter amongst them all, from which they were hardly
able to recover themselves. The army, seeing Hannibal's attendants come
back from viewing the enemy in such a laughing condition, concluded that
it must be profound contempt of the enemy, that made their general at
this moment indulge in such hilarity.

According to his usual manner, Hannibal employed stratagems to advantage
himself. In the first place, he so drew up his men that the wind was at
their backs, which at that time blew with a perfect storm of violence,
and, sweeping over the great plains of sand, carried before it a cloud
of dust over the Carthaginian army into the faces of the Romans, which
much disturbed them in the fight. In the next place, all his best men
he put into his wings; and in the body, which was somewhat more advanced
than the wings, placed the worst and the weakest of his army. He
commanded those in the wings, that, when the enemy had made a thorough
charge upon that middle advanced body, which he knew would recoil, as
not being able to withstand their shock, and when the Romans, in their
pursuit, should be far enough engaged within the two wings, they should,
both on the right and the left, charge them in the flank, and endeavor
to encompass them. This appears to have been the chief cause of the
Roman loss. Pressing upon Hannibal's front, which gave ground, they
reduced the form of his army into a perfect half-moon, and gave ample
opportunity to the captains of the chosen troops to charge them right
and left on their flanks, and to cut off and destroy all who did not
fall back before the Carthaginian wings united in their rear. To this
general calamity, it is also said, that a strange mistake among the
cavalry much contributed. For the horse of Aemilius receiving a hurt
and throwing his master, those about him immediately alighted to aid the
consul; and the Roman troops, seeing their commanders thus quitting
their horses, took it for a sign that they should all dismount and
charge the enemy on foot. At the sight of this, Hannibal was heard to
say, "This pleases me better than if they had been delivered to me bound
hand and foot."  For the particulars of this engagement, we refer our
reader to those authors who have written at large upon the subject.

The consul Varro, with a thin company, fled to Venusia; Aemilius Paulus,
unable any longer to oppose the flight of his men, or the pursuit of the
enemy, his body all covered with wounds, and his soul no less wounded
with grief, sat himself down upon a stone, expecting the kindness of a
dispatching blow. His face was so disfigured, and all his person so
stained with blood, that his very friends and domestics passing by knew
him not. At last Cornelius Lentulus, a young man of patrician race,
perceiving who he was, alighted from his horse, and, tendering it to
him, desired him to get up and save a life so necessary to the safety of
the commonwealth, which, at this time, would dearly want so great a
captain. But nothing could prevail upon him to accept of the offer; he
obliged young Lentulus, with tears in his eyes, to remount his horse;
then standing up, he gave him his hand, and commanded him to tell Fabius
Maximus that Aemilius Paulus had followed his directions to his very
last, and had not in the least deviated from those measures which were
agreed between them; but that it was his hard fate to be overpowered by
Varro in the first place, and secondly by Hannibal. Having dispatched
Lentulus with this commission, he marked where the slaughter was
greatest, and there threw himself upon the swords of the enemy. In this
battle it is reported that fifty thousand Romans were slain, four
thousand prisoners taken in the field, and ten thousand in the camp of
both consuls.

The friends of Hannibal earnestly persuaded him to follow up his
victory, and pursue the flying Romans into the very gates of Rome,
assuring him that in five days' time he might sup in the capitol; nor is
it easy to imagine what consideration hindered him from it. It would
seem rather that some supernatural or divine intervention caused the
hesitation and timidity which he now displayed, and which made Barcas, a
Carthaginian, tell him with indignation, "You know, Hannibal, how to
gain a victory, but not how to use it."  Yet it produced a marvelous
revolution in his affairs; he, who hitherto had not one town, market, or
seaport in his possession, who had nothing for the subsistence of his
men but what he pillaged from day to day, who had no place of retreat or
basis of operation, but was roving, as it were, with a huge troop of
banditti, now became master of the best provinces and towns of Italy,
and of Capua itself, next to Rome the most flourishing and opulent city,
all which came over to him, and submitted to his authority.

It is the saying of Euripides, that "a man is in ill-case when he must
try a friend," and so neither, it would seem, is a state in a good one,
when it needs an able general. And so it was with the Romans; the
counsels and actions of Fabius, which, before the battle, they had
branded as cowardice and fear, now, in the other extreme they accounted
to have been more than human wisdom; as though nothing but a divine
power of intellect could have seen so far, and foretold, contrary to the
judgment of all others, a result which, even now it had arrived, was
hardly credible. In him, therefore, they placed their whole remaining
hopes; his wisdom was the sacred altar and temple to which they fled for
refuge, and his counsels, more than anything, preserved them from
dispersing and deserting their city, as in the time when the Gauls took
possession of Rome. He, whom they esteemed fearful and pusillanimous
when they were, as they thought, in a prosperous condition, was now the
only man, in this general and unbounded dejection and confusion, who
showed no fear, but walked the streets with an assured and serene
countenance, addressed his fellow-citizens, checked the women's
lamentations, and the public gatherings of those who wanted thus to vent
their sorrows. He caused the senate to meet, he heartened up the
magistrates, and was himself as the soul and life of every office.

He placed guards at the gates of the city to stop the frighted multitude
from flying; he regulated and controlled their mournings for their slain
friends, both as to time and place; ordering that each family should
perform such observances within private walls, and that they should
continue only the space of one month, and then the whole city should be
purified. The feast of Ceres happening to fall within this time, it was
decreed that the solemnity should be intermitted, lest the fewness, and
the sorrowful countenance of those who should celebrate it, might too
much expose to the people the greatness of their loss; besides that, the
worship most acceptable to the gods is that which comes from cheerful
hearts. But those rites which were proper for appeasing their anger,
and procuring auspicious signs and presages, were by the direction of
the augurs carefully performed. Fabius Pictor, a near kinsman to
Maximus, was sent to consult the oracle of Delphi; and about the same
time, two vestals having been detected to have been violated, the one
killed herself, and the other, according to custom, was buried alive.

Above all, let us admire the high spirit and equanimity of this Roman
commonwealth; that when the consul Varro came beaten and flying home,
full of shame and humiliation, after he had so disgracefully and
calamitously managed their affairs, yet the whole senate and people went
forth to meet him at the gates of the city, and received him with honor
and respect. And, silence being commanded, the magistrates and chief of
the senate, Fabius amongst them, commended him before the people,
because he did not despair of the safety of the commonwealth, after so
great a loss, but was come to take the government into his hands, to
execute the laws, and aid his fellow-citizens in their prospect of
future deliverance.

When word was brought to Rome that Hannibal, after the fight, had
marched with his army into other parts of Italy, the hearts of the
Romans began to revive, and they proceeded to send out generals and
armies. The most distinguished commands were held by Fabius Maximus and
Claudius Marcellus, both generals of great fame, though upon opposite
grounds. For Marcellus, as we have set forth in his life, was a man of
action and high spirit, ready and bold with his own hand, and, as Homer
describes his warriors, fierce, and delighting in fights. Boldness,
enterprise, and daring, to match those of Hannibal, constituted his
tactics, and marked his engagements. But Fabius adhered to his former
principles, still persuaded that, by following close and not fighting
him, Hannibal and his army would at last be tired out and consumed, like
a wrestler in too high condition, whose very excess of strength makes
him the more likely suddenly to give way and lose it. Posidonius tells
us that the Romans called Marcellus their sword, and Fabius their
buckler; and that the vigor of the one, mixed with the steadiness of the
other, made a happy compound that proved the salvation of Rome. So that
Hannibal found by experience that, encountering the one, he met with a
rapid, impetuous river, which drove him back, and still made some breach
upon him; and by the other, though silently and quietly passing by him,
he was insensibly washed away and consumed; and, at last, was brought to
this, that he dreaded Marcellus when he was in motion, and Fabius when
he sat still. During the whole course of this war, he had still to do
with one or both of these generals; for each of them was five times
consul, and, as praetors or proconsuls or consuls, they had always a
part in the government of the army, till, at last, Marcellus fell into
the trap which Hannibal had laid for him, and was killed in his fifth
consulship. But all his craft and subtlety were unsuccessful upon
Fabius, who only once was in some danger of being caught, when
counterfeit letters came to him from the principal inhabitants of
Metapontum, with promises to deliver up their town if he would come
before it with his army, and intimations that they should expect him,
This train had almost drawn him in; he resolved to march to them with
part of his army, and was diverted only by consulting the omens of the
birds, which he found to be inauspicious; and not long after it was
discovered that the letters had been forged by Hannibal, who, for his
reception, had laid an ambush to entertain him. This, perhaps, we must
rather attribute to the favor of the gods than to the prudence of
Fabius.

In preserving the towns and allies from revolt by fair and gentle
treatment, and in not using rigor, or showing a suspicion upon every
light suggestion, his conduct was remarkable. It is told of him, that,
being informed of a certain Marsian, eminent for courage and good birth,
who had been speaking underhand with some of the soldiers about
deserting, Fabius was so far from using severity against him, that he
called for him, and told him he was sensible of the neglect that had
been shown to his merit and good service, which, he said, was a great
fault in the commanders who reward more by favor than by desert; "but
henceforward, whenever you are aggrieved," said Fabius, "I shall
consider it your fault, if you apply yourself to any but to me;" and
when he had so spoken, he bestowed an excellent horse and other presents
upon him; and, from that time forwards, there was not a faithfuller and
more trusty man in the whole army. With good reason he judged, that, if
those who have the government of horses and dogs endeavor by gentle
usage to cure their angry and untractable tempers, rather than by
cruelty and beating, much more should those who have the command of men
try to bring them to order and discipline by the mildest and fairest
means, and not treat them worse than gardeners do those wild plants,
which, with care and attention, lose gradually the savageness of their
nature, and bear excellent fruit.

At another time, some of his officers informed him that one of their men
was very often absent from his place, and out at nights; he asked them
what kind of man he was; they all answered, that the whole army had not
a better man, that he was a native of Lucania, and proceeded to speak of
several actions which they had seen him perform. Fabius made strict
inquiry, and discovered at last that these frequent excursions which he
ventured upon were to visit a young girl, with whom he was in love.
Upon which he gave private order to some of his men to find out the
woman and secretly convey her into his own tent; and then sent for the
Lucanian, and, calling him aside, told him, that he very well knew how
often he had been out away from the camp at night, which was a capital
transgression against military discipline and the Roman laws, but he
knew also how brave he was, and the good services he had done;
therefore, in consideration of them, he was willing to forgive him his
fault; but to keep him in good order, he was resolved to place one over
him to be his keeper, who should be accountable for his good behavior.
Having said this, he produced the woman, and told the soldier, terrified
and amazed at the adventure, "This is the person who must answer for
you; and by your future behavior we shall see whether your night rambles
were on account of love, or for any other worse design."

Another passage there was, something of the same kind, which gained him
possession of Tarentum. There was a young Tarentine in the army that
had a sister in Tarentum, then in possession of the enemy, who entirely
loved her brother, and wholly depended upon him. He, being informed
that a certain Bruttian, whom Hannibal had made a commander of the
garrison, was deeply in love with his sister, conceived hopes that he
might possibly turn it to the advantage of the Romans. And having first
communicated his design to Fabius, he left the army as a deserter in
show, and went over to Tarentum. The first days passed, and the
Bruttian abstained from visiting the sister; for neither of them knew
that the brother had notice of the amour between them. The young
Tarentine, however, took an occasion to tell his sister how he had heard
that a man of station and authority had made his addresses to her; and
desired her, therefore, to tell him who it was; "for," said he, "if he
be a man that has bravery and reputation, it matters not what countryman
he is, since at this time the sword mingles all nations, and makes them
equal; compulsion makes all things honorable; and in a time when right
is weak, we may be thankful if might assumes a form of gentleness."
Upon this the woman sends for her friend, and makes the brother and him
acquainted; and whereas she henceforth showed more countenance to her
lover than formerly, in the same degrees that her kindness increased,
his friendship, also, with the brother advanced. So that at last our
Tarentine thought this Bruttian officer well enough prepared to receive
the offers he had to make him; and that it would be easy for a mercenary
man, who was in love, to accept, upon the terms proposed, the large
rewards promised by Fabius. In conclusion, the bargain was struck, and
the promise made of delivering the town. This is the common tradition,
though some relate the story otherwise, and say, that this woman, by
whom the Bruttian was inveigled, to betray the town, was not a native of
Tarentum, but a Bruttian born, and was kept by Fabius as his concubine;
and being a countrywoman and an acquaintance of the Bruttian governor,
he privately sent her to him to corrupt him.

Whilst these matters were thus in process, to draw off Hannibal from
scenting the design, Fabius sends orders to the garrison in Rhegium,
that they should waste and spoil the Bruttian country, and should also
lay siege to Caulonia, and storm the place with all their might. These
were a body of eight thousand men, the worst of the Roman army, who had
most of them been runaways, and had been brought home by Marcellus from
Sicily, in dishonor, so that the loss of them would not be any great
grief to the Romans. Fabius, therefore, threw out these men as a bait
for Hannibal, to divert him from Tarentum; who instantly caught at it,
and led his forces to Caulonia; in the meantime, Fabius sat down before
Tarentum. On the sixth day of the siege, the young Tarentine slips by
night out of the town, and, having carefully observed the place where
the Bruttian commander, according to agreement, was to admit the Romans,
gave an account of the whole matter to Fabius; who thought it not safe
to rely wholly upon the plot, but, while proceeding with secrecy to the
post, gave order for a general assault to be made on the other side of
the town, both by land and sea. This being accordingly executed, while
the Tarentines hurried to defend the town on the side attacked, Fabius
received the signal from the Bruttian, scaled the walls, and entered the
town unopposed.

Here, we must confess, ambition seems to have overcome him. To make it
appear to the world that he had taken Tarentum by force and his own
prowess, and not by treachery, he commanded his men to kill the
Bruttians before all others; yet he did not succeed in establishing the
impression he desired, but merely gained the character of perfidy and
cruelty. Many of the Tarentines were also killed, and thirty thousand
of them were sold for slaves; the army had the plunder of the town, and
there was brought into the treasury three thousand talents. Whilst they
were carrying off everything else as plunder, the officer who took the
inventory asked what should be done with their gods, meaning the
pictures and statues; Fabius answered, "Let us leave their angry gods to
the Tarentines."  Nevertheless, he removed the colossal statue of
Hercules, and had it set up in the capitol, with one of himself on
horseback, in brass, near it; proceedings very different from those of
Marcellus on a like occasion, and which, indeed, very much set off in
the eyes of the world his clemency and humanity, as appears in the
account of his life.

Hannibal, it is said, was within five miles of Tarentum, when he was
informed that the town was taken. He said openly, "Rome, then, has also
got a Hannibal; as we won Tarentum, so have we lost it."  And, in
private with some of his confidants, he told them, for the first time,
that he always thought it difficult, but now he held it impossible, with
the forces he then had, to master Italy.

Upon this success, Fabius had a triumph decreed him at Rome, much more
splendid than his first; they looked upon him now as a champion who had
learned to cope with his antagonist, and could now easily foil his arts
and prove his best skill ineffectual. And, indeed, the army of Hannibal
was at this time partly worn away with continual action, and partly
weakened and become dissolute with overabundance and luxury. Marcus
Livius, who was governor of Tarentum when it was betrayed to Hannibal,
and then retired into the citadel, which he kept till the town was
retaken, was annoyed at these honors and distinctions, and, on one
occasion, openly declared in the senate, that by his resistance, more
than by any action of Fabius, Tarentum had been recovered; on which
Fabius laughingly replied: "You say very true, for if Marcus Livius had
not lost Tarentum, Fabius Maximus had never recovered it."  The people,
amongst other marks of gratitude, gave his son the consulship of the
next year; shortly after whose entrance upon his office, there being
some business on foot about provision for the war, his father, either by
reason of age and infirmity, or perhaps out of design to try his son,
came up to him on horseback. While he was still at a distance, the
young consul observed it, and bade one of his lictors command his father
to alight, and tell him that, if be had any business with the consul, he
should come on foot. The standers by seemed offended at the
imperiousness of the son towards a father so venerable for his age and
his authority, and turned their eyes in silence towards Fabius. He,
however, instantly alighted from his horse, and with open arms came up,
almost running, and embraced his son, saying, "Yes, my son, you do well,
and understand well what authority you have received, and over whom you
are to use it. This was the way by which we and our forefathers
advanced the dignity of Rome, preferring ever her honor and service to
our own fathers and children."

And, in fact, it is told that the great-grandfather of our Fabius, who
was undoubtedly the greatest man of Rome in his time, both in reputation
and authority, who had been five times consul, and had been honored with
several triumphs for victories obtained by him, took pleasure in serving
as lieutenant under his own son, when he went as consul to his command.
And when afterwards his son had a triumph bestowed upon him for his good
service, the old man followed, on horseback, his triumphant chariot, as
one of his attendants; and made it his glory, that while he really was,
and was acknowledged to be, the greatest man in Rome, and held a
father's full power over his son, he yet submitted himself to the laws
and the magistrate.

But the praises of our Fabius are not bounded here. He afterwards lost
this son, and was remarkable for bearing the loss with the moderation
becoming a pious father and a wise man, and, as it was the custom
amongst the Romans, upon the death of any illustrious person, to have a
funeral oration recited by some of the nearest relations, he took upon
himself that office, and delivered a speech in the forum, which he
committed afterwards to writing.

After Cornelius Scipio, who was sent into Spain, had driven the
Carthaginians, defeated by him in many battles, out of the country, and
had gained over to Rome many towns and nations with large resources, he
was received at his coming home with unexampled joy and acclamation of
the people; who, to show their gratitude, elected him consul for the
year ensuing. Knowing what high expectation they had of him, he thought
the occupation of contesting Italy with Hannibal a mere old man's
employment, and proposed no less a task to himself than to make Carthage
the seat of the war, fill Africa with arms and devastation, and so
oblige Hannibal, instead of invading the countries of others, to draw
back and defend his own. And to this end he proceeded to exert all the
influence he had with the people. Fabius, on the other side, opposed
the undertaking with all his might, alarming the city, and telling them
that nothing but the temerity of a hot young man could inspire them with
such dangerous counsels, and sparing no means, by word or deed, to
prevent it. He prevailed with the senate to espouse his sentiments; but
the common people thought that he envied the fame of Scipio, and that he
was afraid lest this young conqueror should achieve some great and noble
exploit, and have the glory, perhaps, of driving Hannibal out of Italy,
or even of ending the war, which had for so many years continued and
been protracted under his management.

To say the truth, when Fabius first opposed this project of Scipio, he
probably did it out of caution and prudence, in consideration only of
the public safety, and of the danger which the commonwealth might incur;
but when he found Scipio every day increasing in the esteem of the
people, rivalry and ambition led him further, and made him violent and
personal in his opposition. For he even applied to Crassus, the
colleague of Scipio, and urged him not to yield the command to Scipio,
but that, if his inclinations were for it, he should himself in person
lead the army to Carthage. He also hindered the giving money to Scipio
for the war; so that he was forced to raise it upon his own credit and
interest from the cities of Etruria, which were extremely attached to
him. On the other side, Crassus would not stir against him, nor remove
out of Italy, being, in his own nature, averse to all contention, and
also having, by his office of high priest, religious duties to retain
him. Fabius, therefore, tried other ways to oppose the design; he
impeded the levies, and he declaimed, both in the senate and to the
people, that Scipio was not only himself flying from Hannibal, but was
also endeavoring to drain Italy of all its forces, and to spirit away
the youth of the country to a foreign war, leaving behind them their
parents, wives, and children, and the city itself, a defenseless prey to
the conquering and undefeated enemy at their doors. With this he so far
alarmed the people, that at last they would only allow Scipio for the
war the legions which were in Sicily, and three hundred, whom he
particularly trusted, of those men who had served with him in Spain. In
these transactions, Fabius seems to have followed the dictates of his
own wary temper.

But, after that Scipio was gone over into Africa, when news almost
immediately came to Rome of wonderful exploits and victories, of which
the fame was confirmed by the spoils he sent home; of a Numidian king
taken prisoner; of a vast slaughter of their men; of two camps of the
enemy burnt and destroyed, and in them a great quantity of arms and
horses; and when, hereupon, the Carthaginians were compelled to send
envoys to Hannibal to call him home, and leave his idle hopes in Italy,
to defend Carthage; when, for such eminent and transcending services,
the whole people of Rome cried up and extolled the actions of Scipio;
even then, Fabius contended that a successor should be sent in his
place, alleging for it only the old reason of the mutability of fortune,
as if she would be weary of long favoring the same person. With this
language many did begin to feel offended; it seemed to be morosity and
ill-will, the pusillanimity of old age, or a fear, that had now become
exaggerated, of the skill of Hannibal. Nay, when Hannibal had put his
army on shipboard, and taken his leave of Italy, Fabius still could not
forbear to oppose and disturb the universal joy of Rome, expressing his
fears and apprehensions, telling them that the commonwealth was never in
more danger than now, and that Hannibal was a more formidable enemy
under the walls of Carthage than ever he had been in Italy; that it
would be fatal to Rome, whenever Scipio should encounter his victorious
army, still warm with the blood of so many Roman generals, dictators,
and consuls slain. And the people were, in some degree, startled with
these declamations, and were brought to believe, that the further off
Hannibal was, the nearer was their danger. Scipio, however, shortly
afterwards fought Hannibal, and utterly defeated him, humbled the pride
of Carthage beneath his feet, gave his countrymen joy and exultation
beyond all their hopes, and

"Long shaken on the seas restored the state."

Fabius Maximus, however, did not live to see the prosperous end of this
war, and the final overthrow of Hannibal, nor to rejoice in the
reestablished happiness and security of the commonwealth; for about the
time that Hannibal left Italy, he fell sick and died. At Thebes,
Epaminondas died so poor that he was buried at the public charge; one
small iron coin was all, it is said, that was found in his house.
Fabius did not need this, but the people, as a mark of their affection,
defrayed the expenses of his funeral by a private contribution from each
citizen of the smallest piece of coin; thus owning him their common
father, and making his end no less honorable than his life.

COMPARISON OF PERICLES WITH FABIUS

We have here had two lives rich in examples, both of civil and military
excellence. Let us first compare the two men in their warlike capacity.
Pericles presided in his commonwealth when it was in its most
flourishing and opulent condition, great and growing in power; so that
it may be thought it was rather the common success and fortune that kept
him from any fall or disaster. But the task of Fabius, who undertook
the government in the worst and most difficult times, was not to
preserve and maintain the well-established felicity of a prosperous
state, but to raise and uphold a sinking and ruinous commonwealth.
Besides, the victories of Cimon, the trophies of Myronides and
Leocrates, with the many famous exploits of Tolmides, were employed by
Pericles rather to fill the city with festive entertainments and
solemnities than to enlarge and secure its empire. Whereas Fabius, when
he took upon him the government, had the frightful object before his
eyes of Roman armies destroyed, of their generals and consuls slain, of
lakes and plains and forests strewed with the dead bodies, and rivers
stained with the blood of his fellow-citizens; and yet, with his mature
and solid cousels, with the firmness of his resolution, he, as it were,
put his shoulder to the falling commonwealth, and kept it up from
foundering through the failings and weakness of others. Perhaps it may
be more easy to govern a city broken and tamed with calamities and
adversity, and compelled by danger and necessity to listen to wisdom,
than to set a bridle on wantonness and temerity, and rule a people
pampered and restive with long prosperity as were the Athenians when
Pericles held the reins of government. But then again, not to be
daunted nor discomposed with the vast heap of calamities under which the
people of Rome at that time groaned and succumbed, argues a courage in
Fabius and a strength of purpose more than ordinary.

We may set Tarentum retaken against Samos won by Pericles, and the
conquest of Euboea we may well balance with the towns of Campania;
though Capua itself was reduced by the consuls Fulvius and Appius. I do
not find that Fabius won any set battle but that against the Ligurians,
for which he had his triumph; whereas Pericles erected nine trophies for
as many victories obtained by land and by sea. But no action of
Pericles can be compared to that memorable rescue of Minucius, when
Fabius redeemed both him and his army from utter destruction; a noble
act, combining the highest valor, wisdom, and humanity. On the other
side, it does not appear that Pericles was ever so overreached as Fabius
was by Hannibal with his flaming oxen. His enemy there had, without his
agency, put himself accidentally into his power, yet Fabius let him slip
in the night, and, when day came, was worsted by him, was anticipated in
the moment of success, and mastered by his prisoner. If it is the part
of a good general, not only to provide for the present, but also to have
a clear foresight of things to come, in this point Pericles is the
superior; for he admonished the Athenians, and told them beforehand the
ruin the war would bring upon them, by their grasping more than they
were able to manage. But Fabius was not so good a prophet, when he
denounced to the Romans that the undertaking of Scipio would be the
destruction of the commonwealth. So that Pericles was a good prophet of
bad success, and Fabius was a bad prophet of success that was good.
And, indeed, to lose an advantage through diffidence is no less blamable
in a general than to fall into danger for want of foresight; for both
these faults, though of a contrary nature, spring from the same root,
want of judgment and experience.

As for their civil policy, it is imputed to Pericles that he occasioned
the war, since no terms of peace, offered by the Lacedaemonians, would
content him. It is true, I presume, that Fabius, also, was not for
yielding any point to the Carthaginians, but was ready to hazard all,
rather than lessen the empire of Rome. The mildness of Fabius towards
his colleague Minucius does, by way of comparison, rebuke and condemn
the exertions of Pericles to banish Cimon and Thucydides, noble,
aristocratic men, who by his means suffered ostracism. The authority of
Pericles in Athens was much greater than that of Fabius in Rome. Hence
it was more easy for him to prevent miscarriages arising from the
mistakes and insufficiency of other officers; only Tolmides broke loose
from him, and, contrary to his persuasions, unadvisedly fought with the
Boeotians, and was slain. The greatness of his influence made all
others submit and conform themselves to his judgment. Whereas Fabius,
sure and unerring himself, for want of that general power, had not the
means to obviate the miscarriages of others; but it had been happy for
the Romans if his authority had been greater, for so, we may presume,
their disasters had been fewer.

As to liberality and public spirit, Pericles was eminent in never taking
any gifts, and Fabius, for giving his own money to ransom his soldiers,
though the sum did not exceed six talents. Than Pericles, meantime, no
man had ever greater opportunities to enrich himself, having had
presents offered him from so many kings and princes and allies, yet no
man was ever more free from corruption. And for the beauty and
magnificence of temples and public edifices with which he adorned his
country, it must be confessed, that all the ornaments and structures of
Rome, to the time of the Caesars, had nothing to compare, either in
greatness of design or of expense, with the luster of those which
Pericles only erected at Athens.

ALCIBIADES

Alcibiades, as it is supposed, was anciently descended from Eurysaces,
the son of Ajax, by his father's side; and by his mother's side from
Alcmaeon. Dinomache, his mother, was the daughter of Megacles. His
father Clinias, having fitted out a galley at his own expense, gained
great honor in the sea-fight at Artemisium, and was afterwards slain in
the battle of Coronea, fighting against the Boeotians. Pericles and
Ariphron, the sons of Xanthippus, nearly related to him, became the
guardians of Alcibiades. It has been said not untruly that the
friendship which Socrates felt for him has much contributed to his fame;
and certain it is, that, though we have no account from any writer
concerning the mother of Nicias or Demosthenes, of Lamachus or Phormion,
of Thrasybulus or Theramenes, notwithstanding these were all illustrious
men of the same period, yet we know even the nurse of Alcibiades, that
her country was Lacedaemon, and her name Amycla; and that Zopyrus was
his teacher and attendant; the one being recorded by Antisthenes, and
the other by Plato.

It is not, perhaps, material to say anything of the beauty of
Alcibiades, only that it bloomed with him in all the ages of his life,
in his infancy, in his youth, and in his manhood; and, in the peculiar
character becoming to each of these periods, gave him, in every one of
them, a grace and a charm. What Euripides says, that

"Of all fair things the autumn, too, is fair,"

is by no means universally true. But it happened so with Alcibiades,
amongst few others, by reason of his happy constitution and natural
vigor of body. It is said that his lisping, when he spoke, became him
well, and gave a grace and persuasiveness to his rapid speech.
Aristophanes takes notice of it in the verses in which he jests at
Theorus; "How like a colax he is," says Alcibiades, meaning a corax;
on which it is remarked,

"How very happily he lisped the truth."

Archippus also alludes to it in a passage where he ridicules the son of
Alcibiades;

"That people may believe him like his father,
He walks like one dissolved in luxury,
Lets his robe trail behind him on the ground,
Carelessly leans his head, and in his talk affects to lisp."

His conduct displayed many great inconsistencies and variations, not
unnaturally, in accordance with the many and wonderful vicissitudes of
his fortunes; but among the many strong passions of his real character,
the one most prevailing of all was his ambition and desire of
superiority, which appears in several anecdotes told of his sayings
whilst he was a child. Once being hard pressed in wrestling, and
fearing to be thrown, he got the hand of his antagonist to his mouth,
and bit it with all his force; and when the other loosed his hold
presently, and said, "You bite, Alcibiades, like a woman."  "No,"
replied he, "like a lion."  Another time as he played at dice in the
street, being then but a child, a loaded cart came that way, when it was
his turn to throw; at first he called to the driver to stop, because he
was to throw in the way over which the cart was to pass; but the man
giving him no attention and driving on, when the rest of the boys
divided and gave way, Alcibiades threw himself on his face before the
cart, and, stretching himself out, bade the carter pass on now if he
would; which so startled the man, that he put back his horses, while all
that saw it were terrified, and, crying out, ran to assist Alcibiades.
When he began to study, he obeyed all his other masters fairly well, but
refused to learn upon the flute, as a sordid thing, and not becoming a
free citizen; saying, that to play on the lute or the harp does not in
any way disfigure a man's body or face, but one is hardly to be known by
the most intimate friends, when playing on the flute. Besides, one who
plays on the harp may speak or sing at the same time; but the use of the
flute stops the mouth, intercepts the voice, and prevents all
articulation. "Therefore," said he, "let the Theban youths pipe, who do
not know how to speak, but we Athenians, as our ancestors have told us,
have Minerva for our patroness, and Apollo for our protector, one of
whom threw away the flute, and the other stripped the Flute-player of
his skin."  Thus, between raillery and good earnest, Alcibiades kept not
only himself but others from learning, as it presently became the talk
of the young boys, how Alcibiades despised playing on the flute, and
ridiculed those who studied it. In consequence of which, it ceased to
be reckoned amongst the liberal accomplishments, and became generally
neglected.

It is stated in the invective which Antiphon wrote against Alcibiades,
that once, when he was a boy, he ran away to the house of Democrates,
one of those who made a favorite of him, and that Ariphron had
determined to cause proclamation to be made for him, had not Pericles
diverted him from it, by saying, that if he were dead, the proclaiming
of him could only cause it to be discovered one day sooner, and if he
were safe, it would be a reproach to him as long as he lived. Antiphon
also says, that he killed one of his own servants with the blow of a
staff in Sibyrtius's wrestling ground. But it is unreasonable to give
credit to all that is objected by an enemy, who makes open profession of
his design to defame him.

It was manifest that the many well-born persons who were continually
seeking his company, and making their court to him, were attracted and
captivated by his brilliant and extraordinary beauty only. But the
affection which Socrates entertained for him is a great evidence of the
natural noble qualities and good disposition of the boy, which Socrates,
indeed, detected both in and under his personal beauty; and, fearing
that his wealth and station, and the great number both of strangers and
Athenians who flattered and caressed him, might at last corrupt him,
resolved, if possible, to interpose, and preserve so hopeful a plant
from perishing in the flower, before its fruit came to perfection. For
never did fortune surround and enclose a man with so many of those
things which we vulgarly call goods, or so protect him from every weapon
of philosophy, and fence him from every access of free and searching
words, as she did Alcibiades; who, from the beginning, was exposed to
the flatteries of those who sought merely his gratification, such as
might well unnerve him, and indispose him to listen to any real adviser
or instructor. Yet such was the happiness of his genius, that he
discerned Socrates from the rest, and admitted him, whilst he drove away
the wealthy and the noble who made court to him. And, in a little time,
they grew intimate, and Alcibiades, listening now to language entirely
free from every thought of unmanly fondness and silly displays of
affection, finding himself with one who sought to lay open to him the
deficiencies of his mind, and repress his vain and foolish arrogance,

"Dropped like the craven cock his conquered wing."

He esteemed these endeavors of Socrates as most truly a means which the
gods made use of for the care and preservation of youth, and began to
think meanly of himself, and to admire him; to be pleased with his
kindness, and to stand in awe of his virtue; and, unawares to himself,
there became formed in his mind that reflex image and reciprocation of
Love, or Anteros,@ that Plato talks of. It was a matter of general
wonder, when people saw him joining Socrates in his meals and his
exercises, living with him in the same tent, whilst he was reserved and
rough to all others who made their addresses to him, and acted, indeed,
with great insolence to some of them. As in particular to Anytus, the
son of Anthemion, one who was very fond of him, and invited him to an
entertainment which he had prepared for some strangers. Alcibiades
refused the invitation; but, having drunk to excess at his own house
with some of his companions, went thither with them to play some frolic;
and, standing at the door of the room where the guests were enjoying
themselves, and seeing the tables covered with gold and silver cups, he
commanded his servants to take away the one half of them, and carry them
to his own house; and then, disdaining so much as to enter into the room
himself, as soon as he had done this, went away. The company was
indignant, and exclaimed at his rude and insulting conduct; Anytus,
however, said, on the contrary he had shown great consideration and
tenderness in taking only a part, when he might have taken all.

He behaved in the same manner to all others who courted him, except only
one stranger, who, as the story is told, having but a small estate, sold
it all for about a hundred staters, which he presented to Alcibiades,
and besought him to accept. Alcibiades, smiling and well pleased at the
thing, invited him to supper, and, after a very kind entertainment, gave
him his gold again, requiring him, moreover, not to fail to be present
the next day, when the public revenue was offered to farm, and to outbid
all others. The man would have excused himself, because the contract
was so large, and would cost many talents; but Alcibiades, who had at
that time a private pique against the existing farmers of the revenue,
threatened to have him beaten if he refused. The next morning, the
stranger, coming to the marketplace, offered a talent more than the
existing rate; upon which the farmers, enraged and consulting together,
called upon him to name his sureties, concluding that he could find
none. The poor man, being startled at the proposal, began to retire;
but Alcibiades, standing at a distance, cried out to the magistrates,
"Set my name down, he is a friend of mine; I will be security for him."
When the other bidders heard this, they perceived that all their
contrivance was defeated; for their way was, with the profits of the
second year to pay the rent for the year preceding; so that, not seeing
any other way to extricate themselves out of the difficulty, they began
to entreat the stranger, and offered him a sum of money. Alcibiades
would not suffer him to accept of less than a talent; but when that was
paid down, he commanded him to relinquish the bargain, having by this
device relieved his necessity.

Though Socrates had many and powerful rivals, yet the natural good
qualities of Alcibiades gave his affection the mastery. His words
overcame him so much, as to draw tears from his eyes, and to disturb his
very soul. Yet sometimes he would abandon himself to flatterers, when
they proposed to him varieties of pleasure, and would desert Socrates;
who, then, would pursue him, as if he had been a fugitive slave. He
despised everyone else, and had no reverence or awe for any but him.
Cleanthes the philosopher; speaking of one to whom he was attached, says
his only hold on him was by his ears, while his rivals had all the
others offered them; and there is no question that Alcibiades was very
easily caught by pleasures; and the expression used by Thucydides about
the excesses of his habitual course of living gives occasion to believe
so. But those who endeavored to corrupt Alcibiades, took advantage
chiefly of his vanity and ambition, and thrust him on unseasonably to
undertake great enterprises, persuading him, that as soon as he began to
concern himself in public affairs, he would not only obscure the rest of
the generals and statesmen, but outdo the authority and the reputation
which Pericles himself had gained in Greece. But in the same manner as
iron which is softened by the fire grows hard with the cold, and all its
parts are closed again; so, as often as Socrates observed Alcibiades to
be misled by luxury or pride, he reduced and corrected him by his
addresses, and made him humble and modest, by showing him in how many
things he was deficient, and how very far from perfection in virtue.

When he was past his childhood, he went once to a grammar-school, and
asked the master for one of Homer's books; and he making answer that he
had nothing of Homer's, Alcibiades gave him a blow with his fist, and
went away. Another schoolmaster telling him that he had Homer corrected
by himself; "How," said Alcibiades, "and do you employ your time in
teaching children to read? You, who are able to amend Homer, may well
undertake to instruct men."  Being once desirous to speak with Pericles,
he went to his house and was told there that he was not at leisure, but
busied in considering how to give up his accounts to the Athenians;
Alcibiades, as he went away, said, "It were better for him to consider
how he might avoid giving up his accounts at all."

Whilst he was very young, he was a soldier in the expedition against
Potidaea, where Socrates lodged in the same tent with him, and stood
next him in battle. Once there happened a sharp skirmish, in which
they both behaved with signal bravery; but Alcibiades receiving a wound,
Socrates threw himself before him to defend him, and beyond any question
saved him and his arms from the enemy, and so in all justice might have
challenged the prize of valor. But the generals appearing eager to
adjudge the honor to Alcibiades, because of his rank, Socrates, who
desired to increase his thirst after glory of a noble kind, was the
first to give evidence for him, and pressed them to crown him, and to
decree to him the complete suit of armor. Afterwards, in the battle of
Delium, when the Athenians were routed and Socrates with a few others
was retreating on foot, Alcibiades, who was on horseback, observing it,
would not pass on, but stayed to shelter him from the danger, and
brought him safe off, though the enemy pressed hard upon them, and cut
off many. But this happened some time after.

He gave a box on the ear to Hipponicus, the father of Callias, whose
birth and wealth made him a person of great influence and repute. And
this he did unprovoked by any passion or quarrel between them, but only
because, in a frolic, he had agreed with his companions to do it.
People were justly offended at this insolence, when it became known
through the city; but early the next morning, Alcibiades went to his
house and knocked at the door, and, being admitted to him, took off his
outer garment, and, presenting his naked body, desired him to scourge
and chastise him as he pleased. Upon this Hipponicus forgot all his
resentment, and not only pardoned him, but soon after gave him his
daughter Hipparete in marriage. Some say that it was not Hipponicus,
but his son Callias, who gave Hipparete to Alcibiades, together with a
portion of ten talents, and that after, when she had a child, Alcibiades
forced him to give ten talents more, upon pretense that such was the
agreement if she brought him any children. Afterwards, Callias, for
fear of coming to his death by his means, declared, in a full assembly
of the people, that if he should happen to die without children, the
state should inherit his house and all his goods. Hipparete was a
virtuous and dutiful wife, but, at last, growing impatient of the
outrages done to her by her husband's continual entertaining of
courtesans, as well strangers as Athenians, she departed from him and
retired to her brother's house. Alcibiades seemed not at all concerned
at this, and lived on still in the same luxury; but the law requiring
that she should deliver to the archon in person, and not by proxy, the
instrument by which she claimed a divorce, when, in obedience to the
law, she presented herself before him to perform this, Alcibiades came
in, caught her up, and carried her home through the marketplace, no one
daring to oppose him, nor to take her from him. She continued with him
till her death, which happened not long after, when Alcibiades had gone
to Ephesus. Nor is this violence to be thought so very enormous or
unmanly. For the law, in making her who desires to be divorced appear
in public, seems to design to give her husband an opportunity of
treating with her, and of endeavoring to retain her.

Alcibiades had a dog which cost him seventy minas, and was a very large
one, and very handsome. His tail, which was his principal ornament, he
caused to be cut off, and his acquaintance exclaiming at him for it, and
telling him that all Athens was sorry for the dog, and cried out upon
him for this action, he laughed, and said, "Just what I wanted has
happened, then. I wished the Athenians to talk about this, that they
might not say something worse of me."

It is said that the first time he came into the assembly was upon
occasion of a largess of money which he made to the people. This was
not done by design, but as he passed along he heard a shout, and
inquiring the cause, and having learned that there was a donative making
to the people, he went in amongst them and gave money also. The
multitude thereupon applauding him, and shouting, he was so transported
at it, that he forgot a quail which he had under his robe, and the bird,
being frighted with the noise, flew off; upon which the people made
louder acclamations than before, and many of them started up to pursue
the bird; and one Antiochus, a pilot, caught it and restored it to him,
for which he was ever after a favorite with Alcibiades.

He had great advantages for entering public life; his noble birth, his
riches, the personal courage he had shown in divers battles, and the
multitude of his friends and dependents, threw open, so to say, folding
doors for his admittance. But he did not consent to let his power with
the people rest on any thing, rather than on his own gift of eloquence.
That he was a master in the art of speaking, the comic poets bear him
witness; and the most eloquent of public speakers, in his oration
against Midias, allows that Alcibiades, among other perfections, was a
most accomplished orator. If, however, we give credit to Theophrastus,
who of all philosophers was the most curious inquirer, and the greatest
lover of history, we are to understand that Alcibiades had the highest
capacity for inventing, for discerning what was the right thing to be
said for any purpose, and on any occasion; but, aiming not only at
saying what was required, but also at saying it well, in respect, that
is, of words and phrases, when these did not readily occur, he would
often pause in the middle of his discourse for want of the apt word, and
would be silent and stop till he could recollect himself, and had
considered what to say.

His expenses in horses kept for the public games, and in the number of
his chariots, were matter of great observation; never did anyone but
he, either private person or king, send seven chariots to the Olympic
games. And to have carried away at once the first, the second, and the
fourth prize, as Thucydides says, or the third, as Euripides relates it,
outdoes far away every distinction that ever was known or thought of in
that kind. Euripides celebrates his success in this manner:--

"--But my song to you, Son of Clinias, is due.
Victory is noble; how much more
To do as never Greek before;
To obtain in the great chariot race
The first, the second, and third place;
With easy step advanced to fame,
To bid the herald three times claim
The olive for one victor's name."

The emulation displayed by the deputations of various states, in the
presents which they made to him, rendered this success yet more
illustrious. The Ephesians erected a tent for him, adorned
magnificently; the city of Chios furnished him with provender for his
horses and with great numbers of beasts for sacrifice; and the Lesbians
sent him wine and other provisions for the many great entertainments
which he made. Yet in the midst of all this he escaped not without
censure, occasioned either by the ill-nature of his enemies or by his
own misconduct. For it is said, that one Diomedes, all Athenian, a
worthy man and a friend to Alcibiades, passionately desiring to obtain
the victory at the Olympic games, and having heard much of a chariot
which belonged to the state at Argos, where he knew that Alcibiades had
great power and many friends, prevailed with him to undertake to buy the
chariot. Alcibiades did indeed buy it, but then claimed it for his own,
leaving Diomedes to rage at him, and to call upon the gods and men to
bear witness to the injustice. It would seem there was a suit at law
commenced upon this occasion, and there is yet extant an oration
concerning the chariot, written by Isocrates in defense of the son of
Alcibiades. But the plaintiff in this action is named Tisias, and not
Diomedes.

As soon as he began to intermeddle in the government, which was when he
was very young, he quickly lessened the credit of all who aspired to the
confidence of the people, except Phaeax, the son of Erasistratus, and
Nicias, the son of Niceratus, who alone could contest it with him.
Nicias was arrived at a mature age, and was esteemed their first
general. Phaeax was but a rising statesman like Alcibiades; he was
descended from noble ancestors, but was his inferior, as in many other
things, so, principally, in eloquence. He possessed rather the art of
persuading in private conversation than of debate before the people, and
was, as Eupolis said of him,

"The best of talkers, and of speakers worst."

There is extant an oration written by Phaeax against Alcibiades, in
which, amongst other things, it is said, that Alcibiades made daily use
at his table of many gold and silver vessels, which belonged to the
commonwealth, as if they had been his own.

There was a certain Hyperbolus, of the township of Perithoedae, whom
Thucydides also speaks of as a man of bad character, a general butt for
the mockery of all the comic writers of the time, but quite unconcerned
at the worst things they could say, and, being careless of glory, also
insensible of shame; a temper which some people call boldness and
courage, whereas it is indeed impudence and recklessness. He was liked
by nobody, yet the people made frequent use of him, when they had a mind
to disgrace or calumniate any persons in authority. At this time, the
people, by his persuasions, were ready to proceed to pronounce the
sentence of ten years' banishment, called ostracism. This they made use
of to humiliate and drive out of the city such citizens as outdid the
rest in credit and power, indulging not so much perhaps their
apprehensions as their jealousies in this way. And when, at this time,
there was no doubt but that the ostracism would fall upon one of those
three, Alcibiades contrived to form a coalition of parties, and,
communicating his project to Nicias, turned the sentence upon Hyperbolus
himself. Others say, that it was not with Nicias, but Phaeax, that he
consulted, and, by help of his party, procured the banishment of
Hyperbolus, when he suspected nothing less. For, before that time, no
mean or obscure person had ever fallen under that punishment, so that
Plato, the comic poet, speaking of Hyperbolus, might well say,

"The man deserved the fate; deny 't who can?
Yes, but the fate did not deserve the man;
Not for the like of him and his slave-brands
Did Athens put the sherd into our hands."

But we have given elsewhere a fuller statement of what is known to us of
the matter.

Alcibiades was not less disturbed at the distinctions which Nicias
gained amongst the enemies of Athens, than at the honors which the
Athenians themselves paid to him. For though Alcibiades was the proper
appointed person to receive all Lacedaemonians when they came to
Athens, and had taken particular care of those that were made prisoners
at Pylos, yet, after they had obtained the peace and restitution of the
captives, by the procurement chiefly of Nicias, they paid him very
special attentions. And it was commonly said in Greece, that the war
was begun by Pericles, and that Nicias made an end of it, and the peace
was generally called the peace of Nicias. Alcibiades was extremely
annoyed at this, and, being full of envy, set himself to break the
league. First, therefore, observing that the Argives, as well out of
fear as hatred to the Lacedaemonians, sought for protection against
them, he gave them a secret assurance of alliance with Athens. And
communicating, as well in person as by letters, with the chief advisers
of the people there, he encouraged them not to fear the Lacedaemonians,
nor make concessions to them, but to wait a little, and keep their eyes
on the Athenians, who, already, were all but sorry they had made peace,
and would soon give it up. And, afterwards, when the Lacedaemonians had
made a league with the Boeotians, and had not delivered up Panactum
entire, as they ought to have done by the treaty, but only after first
destroying it, which gave great offense to the people of Athens,
Alcibiades laid hold of that opportunity to exasperate them more highly.
He exclaimed fiercely against Nicias, and accused him of many things,
which seemed probable enough: as that, when he was general, he made no
attempt himself to capture their enemies that were shut up in the isle
of Sphacteria, but, when they were afterwards made prisoners by others,
he procured their release and sent them back to the Lacedaemonians, only
to get favor with them; that he would not make use of his credit with
them, to prevent their entering into this confederacy with the Boeotians
and Corinthians, and yet, on the other side, that he sought to stand in
the way of those Greeks who were inclined to make an alliance and
friendship with Athens, if the Lacedaemonians did not like it.

It happened, at the very time when Nicias was by these arts brought into
disgrace with the people, that ambassadors arrived from Lacedaemon, who,
at their first coming, said what seemed very satisfactory, declaring
that they had full powers to arrange all matters in dispute upon fair
and equal terms. The council received their propositions, and the
people was to assemble on the morrow to give them audience. Alcibiades
grew very apprehensive of this, and contrived to gain a secret
conference with the ambassadors. When they were met, he said: "What is
it you intend, you men of Sparta? Can you be ignorant that the council
always act with moderation and respect towards ambassadors, but that the
people are full of ambition and great designs? So that, if you let them
know what full powers your commission gives you, they will urge and
press you to unreasonable conditions. Quit therefore, this indiscreet
simplicity, if you expect to obtain equal terms from the Athenians, and
would not have things extorted from you contrary to your inclinations,
and begin to treat with the people upon some reasonable articles, not
avowing yourselves plenipotentiaries; and I will be ready to assist you,
out of good-will to the Lacedaemonians."  When he had said thus, he gave
them his oath for the performance of what he promised, and by this way
drew them from Nicias to rely entirely upon himself, and left them full
of admiration of the discernment and sagacity they had seen in him. The
next day, when the people were assembled and the ambassadors introduced,
Alcibiades, with great apparent courtesy, demanded of them, With what
powers they were come? They made answer that they were not come as
plenipotentiaries.

Instantly upon that, Alcibiades, with a loud voice, as though he had
received and not done the wrong, began to call them dishonest
prevaricators, and to urge that such men could not possibly come with a
purpose to say or do anything that was sincere. The council was
incensed, the people were in a rage, and Nicias, who knew nothing of the
deceit and the imposture, was in the greatest confusion, equally
surprised and ashamed at such a change in the men. So thus the
Lacedaemonian ambassadors were utterly rejected, and Alcibiades was
declared general, who presently united the Argives, the Eleans, and the
people of Mantinea, into a confederacy with the Athenians.

No man commended the method by which Alcibiades effected all this, yet
it was a great political feat thus to divide and shake almost all
Peloponnesus, and to combine so many men in arms against the
Lacedaemonians in one day before Mantinea; and, moreover, to remove the
war and the danger so far from the frontier of the Athenians, that even
success would profit the enemy but little, should they be conquerors,
whereas, if they were defeated, Sparta itself was hardly safe.

After this battle at Mantinea, the select thousand of the army of the
Argives attempted to overthrow the government of the people in Argos,
and make themselves masters of the city; and the Lacedaemonians came to
their aid and abolished the democracy. But the people took arms again,
and gained the advantage, and Alcibiades came in to their aid and
completed the victory, and persuaded them to build long walls, and by
that means to join their city to the sea, and so to bring it wholly
within the reach of the Athenian power. To this purpose, he procured
them builders and masons from Athens, and displayed the greatest zeal
for their service, and gained no less honor and power to himself than to
the commonwealth of Athens. He also persuaded the people of Patrae to
join their city to the sea, by building long walls; and when some one
told them, by way of warning, that the Athenians would swallow them up
at last Alcibiades made answer, "Possibly it may be so, but it will be
by little and little, and beginning at the feet, whereas the
Lacedaemonians will begin at the head and devour you all at once."  Nor
did he neglect either to advise the Athenians to look to their interests
by land, and often put the young men in mind of the oath which they had
made at Agraulos, to the effect that they would account wheat and
barley, and vines and olives, to be the limits of Attica; by which they
were taught to claim a title to all land that was cultivated and
productive.

But with all these words and deeds, and with all this sagacity and
eloquence, he intermingled exorbitant luxury and wantonness in his
eating and drinking and dissolute living; wore long purple robes like a
woman, which dragged after him as he went through the market-place;
caused the planks of his galley to be cut away, that so he might lie the
softer, his bed not being placed on the boards, but hanging upon girths.
His shield, again, which was richly gilded, had not the usual ensigns of
the Athenians, but a Cupid, holding a thunderbolt in his hand, was
painted upon it. The sight of all this made the people of good repute
in the city feel disgust and abhorrence, and apprehension also, at his
free-living, and his contempt of law, as things monstrous in themselves,
and indicating designs of usurpation. Aristophanes has well expressed
the people's feeling towards him:--

"They love, and hate, and cannot do without him."

And still more strongly, under a figurative expression,

"Best rear no lion in your state, 'tis true;
But treat him like a lion if you do."

The truth is, his liberalities, his public shows, and other munificence
to the people, which were such as nothing could exceed, the glory of his
ancestors, the force of his eloquence, the grace of his person, his
strength of body, joined with his great courage and knowledge in
military affairs, prevailed upon the Athenians to endure patiently his
excesses, to indulge many things to him, and, according to their habit,
to give the softest names to his faults, attributing them to youth and
good nature. As, for example, he kept Agatharcus, the painter, a
prisoner till he had painted his whole house, but then dismissed him
with a reward. He publicly struck Taureas, who exhibited certain shows
in opposition to him and contended with him for the prize. He selected
for himself one of the captive Melian women, and had a son by her, whom
he took care to educate. This the Athenians styled great humanity; and
yet he was the principal cause of the slaughter of all the inhabitants
of the isle of Melos who were of age to bear arms, having spoken in
favor of that decree. When Aristophon, the painter, had drawn Nemea
sitting and holding Alcibiades in her arms, the multitude seemed pleased
with the piece, and thronged to see it, but older people disliked and
disrelished it, and looked on these things as enormities, and movements
towards tyranny. So that it was not said amiss by Archestratus, that
Greece could not support a second Alcibiades. Once, when Alcibiades
succeeded well in an oration which he made, and the whole assembly
attended upon him to do him honor, Timon the misanthrope did not pass
slightly by him, nor avoid him, as he did others, but purposely met him,
and, taking him by the hand, said, "Go on boldly, my son, and increase
in credit with the people, for thou wilt one day bring them calamities
enough."  Some that were present laughed at the saying, and some reviled
Timon; but there were others upon whom it made a deep impression; so
various was the judgment which was made of him, and so irregular his own
character.

The Athenians, even in the lifetime of Pericles, had already cast a
longing eye upon Sicily; but did not attempt any thing till after his
death. Then, under pretense of aiding their confederates, they sent
succors upon all occasions to those who were oppressed by the
Syracusans, preparing the way for sending over a greater force. But
Alcibiades was the person who inflamed this desire of theirs to the
height, and prevailed with them no longer to proceed secretly, and by
little and little, in their design, but to sail out with a great fleet,
and undertake at once to make themselves masters of the island. He
possessed the people with great hopes, and he himself entertained yet
greater; and the conquest of Sicily, which was the utmost bound of their
ambition, was but the mere outset of his expectation. Nicias endeavored
to divert the people from the expedition, by representing to them that
the taking of Syracuse would be a work of great difficulty; but
Alcibiades dreamed of nothing less than the conquest of Carthage and
Libya, and by the accession of these conceiving himself at once made
master of Italy and of Peloponnesus, seemed to look upon Sicily as
little more than a magazine for the war. The young men were soon
elevated with these hopes, and listened gladly to those of riper years,
who talked wonders of the countries they were going to; so that you
might see great numbers sitting in the wrestling grounds and public
places, drawing on the ground the figure of the island and the situation
of Libya and Carthage. Socrates the philosopher and Meton the
astrologer are said, however, never to have hoped for any good to the
commonwealth from this war; the one, it is to be supposed, presaging
what would ensue, by the intervention of his attendant Genius; and the
other, either upon rational consideration of the project, or by use of
the art of divination, conceived fears for its issue, and, feigning
madness, caught up a burning torch, and seemed as if he would have set
his own house on fire. Others report, that he did not take upon him to
act the madman, but secretly in the night set his house on fire, and the
next morning besought the people, that for his comfort, after such a
calamity, they would spare his son from the expedition. By which
artifice, he deceived his fellow-citizens, and obtained of them what he
desired.

Together with Alcibiades, Nicias, much against his will, was appointed
general: and he endeavored to avoid the command, not the less on
account of his colleague. But the Athenians thought the war would
proceed more prosperously, if they did not send Alcibiades free from
all restraint, but tempered his heat with the caution of Nicias. This
they chose the rather to do, because Lamachus, the third general, though
he was of mature years, yet in several battles had appeared no less hot
and rash than Alcibiades himself. When they began to deliberate of the
number of forces, and of the manner of making the necessary provisions,
Nicias made another attempt to oppose the design, and to prevent the
war; but Alcibiades contradicted him, and carried his point with the
people. And one Demostratus, an orator, proposing to give the generals
absolute power over the preparations and the whole management of the
war, it was presently decreed so. When all things were fitted for the
voyage, many unlucky omens appeared. At that very time the feast of
Adonis happened, in which the women were used to expose, in all parts of
the city, images resembling dead men carried out to their burial, and to
represent funeral solemnities by lamentations and mournful songs. The
mutilation, however, of the images of Mercury, most of which, in one
night, had their faces all disfigured, terrified many persons who were
wont to despise most things of that nature. It was given out that it
was done by the Corinthians, for the sake of the Syracusans, who were
their colony, in hopes that the Athenians, by such prodigies, might be
induced to delay or abandon the war. But the report gained no credit
with the people, nor yet the opinion of those who would not believe that
there was anything ominous in the matter, but that it was only an
extravagant action, committed, in that sort of sport which runs into
license, by wild young men coming from a debauch. Alike enraged and
terrified at the thing, looking upon it to proceed from a conspiracy of
persons who designed some commotions in the state, the council, as well
as the assembly of the people, which was held frequently in a few days'
space, examined diligently everything that might administer ground for
suspicion. During this examination, Androcles, one of the demagogues,
produced certain slaves and strangers before them, who accused
Alcibiades and some of his friends of defacing other images in the same
manner, and of having profanely acted the sacred mysteries at a drunken
meeting, where one Theodorus represented the herald, Polytion the torch-
bearer, and Alcibiades the chief priest, while the rest of the party
appeared as candidates for initiation, and received the title of
Initiates. These were the matters contained in the articles of
information, which Thessalus, the son of Cimon, exhibited against
Alcibiades, for his impious mockery of the goddesses, Ceres and
Proserpine. The people were highly exasperated and incensed against
Alcibiades upon this accusation, which, being aggravated by Androcles,
the most malicious of all his enemies, at first disturbed his friends
exceedingly. But when they perceived that all the sea-men designed for
Sicily were for him, and the soldiers also, and when the Argive and
Mantinean auxiliaries, a thousand men at arms, openly declared that they
had undertaken this distant maritime expedition for the sake of
Alcibiades, and that, if he was ill-used, they would all go home, they
recovered their courage, and became eager to make use of the present
opportunity for justifying him. At this his enemies were again
discouraged, fearing lest the people should be more gentle to him in
their sentence, because of the occasion they had for his service.
Therefore, to obviate this, they contrived that some other orators, who
did not appear to be enemies to Alcibiades, but really hated him no less
than those who avowed it, should stand up in the assembly and say, that
it was a very absurd thing that one who was created general of such an
army with absolute power, after his troops were assembled, and the
confederates were come, should lose the opportunity, whilst the people
were choosing his judges by lot, and appointing times for the hearing of
the cause. And, therefore, let him set sail at once; good fortune
attend him; and when the war should be at an end, he might then in
person make his defense according to the laws.

Alcibiades perceived the malice of this postponement, and, appearing in
the assembly represented that it was monstrous for him to be sent with
the command of so large an army, when he lay under such accusations and
calumnies; that he deserved to die, if he could not clear himself of the
crimes objected to him; but when he had so done, and had proved his
innocence, he should then cheerfully apply himself to the war, as
standing no longer in fear of false accusers. But he could not prevail
with the people, who commanded him to sail immediately. So he departed,
together with the other generals, having with them near 140 galleys,
5,100 men at arms, and about 1,300 archers, slingers, and light-armed
men, and all the other provisions corresponding.

Arriving on the coast of Italy, he landed at Rhegium, and there stated
his views of the manner in which they ought to conduct the war. He was
opposed by Nicias, but Lamachus being of his opinion, they sailed for
Sicily forthwith, and took Catana. This was all that was done while he
was there, for he was soon after recalled by the Athenians to abide his
trial. At first, as we before said, there were only some slight
suspicions advanced against Alcibiades, and accusations by certain
slaves and strangers. But afterwards, in his absence, his enemies
attacked him more violently, and confounded together the breaking the
images with the profanation of the mysteries, as though both had been
committed in pursuance of the same conspiracy for changing the
government. The people proceeded to imprison all that were accused,
without distinction, and without hearing them, and repented now,
considering the importance of the charge, that they had not immediately
brought Alcibiades to his trial, and given judgment against him. Any of
his friends or acquaintance who fell into the people's hands, whilst
they were in this fury, did not fail to meet with very severe usage.
Thucydides has omitted to name the informers, but others mention
Dioclides and Teucer. Amongst whom is Phrynichus, the comic poet, in
whom we find the following:--

"O dearest Hermes! only do take care,
And mind you do not miss your footing there;
Should you get hurt, occasion may arise
For a new Dioclides to tell lies."

To which he makes Mercury return this answer:--

"I will so, for I feel no inclination
To reward Teucer for more information."

The truth is, his accusers alleged nothing that was certain or solid
against him. One of them, being asked how he knew the men who defaced
the images, replying, that he saw them by the light of the moon, made a
palpable misstatement, for it was just new moon when the fact was
committed. This made all men of understanding cry out upon the thing;
but the people were as eager as ever to receive further accusations, nor
was their first heat at all abated, but they instantly seized and
imprisoned every one that was accused. Amongst those who were detained
in prison for their trials was Andocides the orator, whose descent the
historian Hellanicus deduces from Ulysses. He was always supposed to
hate popular government, and to support oligarchy. The chief ground of
his being suspected of defacing the images was because the great
Mercury, which stood near his house, and was an ancient monument of the
tribe Aegeis, was almost the only statue of all the remarkable ones,
which remained entire. For this cause, it is now called the Mercury of
Andocides, all men giving it that name, though the inscription is
evidence to the contrary. It happened that Andocides, amongst the rest
who were prisoners upon the same account, contracted particular
acquaintance and intimacy with one Timaeus, a person inferior to him in
repute, but of remarkable dexterity and boldness. He persuaded
Andocides to accuse himself and some few others of this crime, urging
to him that, upon his confession, he would be, by the decree of the
people, secure of his pardon, whereas the event of judgment is uncertain
to all men, but to great persons, such as he was, most formidable. So
that it was better for him, if he regarded himself, to save his life by
a falsity, than to suffer an infamous death, as really guilty of the
crime. And if he had regard to the public good, it was commendable to
sacrifice a few suspected men, by that means to rescue many excellent
persons from the fury of the people. Andocides was prevailed upon, and
accused himself and some others, and, by the terms of the decree,
obtained his pardon, while all the persons named by him, except some few
who had saved themselves by flight, suffered death. To gain the greater
credit to his information, he accused his own servants amongst others.
But notwithstanding this, the people's anger was not wholly appeased;
and being now no longer diverted by the mutilators, they were at leisure
to pour out their whole rage upon Alcibiades. And, in conclusion, they
sent the galley named the Salaminian, to recall him. But they expressly
commanded those that were sent, to use no violence, nor seize upon his
person, but address themselves to him in the mildest terms, requiring
him to follow them to Athens in order to abide his trial, and clear
himself before the people. For they feared mutiny and sedition in the
army in an enemy's country, which indeed it would have been easy for
Alcibiades to effect, if he had wished it. For the soldiers were
dispirited upon his departure, expecting for the future tedious delays,
and that the war would be drawn out into a lazy length by Nicias, when
Alcibiades, who was the spur to action, was taken away. For though
Lamachus was a soldier, and a man of courage, poverty deprived him of
authority and respect in the army. Alcibiades, just upon his departure,
prevented Messena from falling into the hands of the Athenians. There
were some in that city who were upon the point of delivering it up, but
he, knowing the persons, gave information to some friends of the
Syracusans, and so defeated the whole contrivance. When he arrived at
Thurii, he went on shore, and, concealing himself there, escaped those
who searched after him. But to one who knew him, and asked him if he
durst not trust his own native country, he made answer, "In everything
else, yes; but in a matter that touches my life, I would not even my own
mother, lest she might by mistake throw in the black ball instead of the
white."  When, afterwards, he was told that the assembly had pronounced
judgment of death against him, all he said was, "I will make them feel
that I am alive."

The information against him was conceived in this form:--

"Thessalus, the son of Cimon, of the township of Lacia, lays information
that Alcibiades, the son of Clinias, of the township of the Scambonidae,
has committed a crime against the goddesses Ceres and Proserpine, by
representing in derision the holy mysteries, and showing them to his
companions in his own house. Where, being habited in such robes as are
used by the chief priest when he shows the holy things, he named himself
the chief priest, Polytion the torch-bearer, and Theodorus, of the
township of Phegaea, the herald; and saluted the rest of his company as
Initiates and Novices. All which was done contrary to the laws and
institutions of the Eumolpidae, and the heralds and priests of the
temple at Eleusis."

He was condemned as contumacious upon his not appearing, his property
confiscated, and it was decreed that all the priests and priestesses
should solemnly curse him. But one of them, Theano, the daughter of
Menon, of the township of Agraule, is said to have opposed that part of
the decree, saying that her holy office obliged her to make prayers, but
not execrations.

Alcibiades, lying under these heavy decrees and sentences, when first he
fled from Thurii, passed over into Peloponnesus and remained some time
at Argos. But being there in fear of his enemies and seeing himself
utterly hopeless of return to his native country, he sent to Sparta,
desiring safe conduct, and assuring them that he would make them amends
by his future services for all the mischief he had done them while he
was their enemy. The Spartans giving him the security he desired, he
went eagerly, was well received, and, at his very first coming,
succeeded in inducing them, without any further caution or delay, to
send aid to the Syracusans; and so roused and excited them, that they
forthwith dispatched Gylippus into Sicily, to crush the forces which the
Athenians had in Sicily. A second point was, to renew the war upon the
Athenians at home. But the third thing, and the most important of all,
was to make them fortify Decelea, which above everything reduced and
wasted the resources of the Athenians.

The renown which he earned by these public services was equaled by the
admiration he attracted to his private life; he captivated and won over
everybody by his conformity to Spartan habits. People who saw him
wearing his hair close cut, bathing in cold water, eating coarse meal,
and dining on black broth, doubted, or rather could not believe, that he
ever had a cook in his house, or had ever seen a perfumer, or had worn a
mantle of Milesian purple. For he had, as it was observed, this
peculiar talent and artifice for gaining men's affections, that he could
at once comply with and really embrace and enter into their habits and
ways of life, and change faster than the chameleon. One color, indeed,
they say the chameleon cannot assume; it cannot make itself appear
white; but Alcibiades, whether with good men or with bad, could adapt
himself to his company, and equally wear the appearance of virtue or
vice. At Sparta, he was devoted to athletic exercises, was frugal and
reserved; in Ionia, luxurious, gay, and indolent; in Thrace, always
drinking; in Thessaly, ever on horseback; and when he lived with
Tisaphernes, the Persian satrap, he exceeded the Persians themselves in
magnificence and pomp. Not that his natural disposition changed so
easily, nor that his real character was so very variable, but, whenever
he was sensible that by pursuing his own inclinations he might give
offense to those with whom he had occasion to converse, he transformed
himself into any shape, and adopted any fashion, that he observed to be
most agreeable to them. So that to have seen him at Lacedaemon, a man,
judging by the outward appearance, would have said, "'Tis not Achilles's
son, but he himself, the very man" that Lycurgus designed to form; while
his real feelings and acts would have rather provoked the exclamation,
"'Tis the same woman still."  For while king Agis was absent, and abroad
with the army, he corrupted his wife Timaea, and had a child born by
her. Nor did she even deny it, but when she was brought to bed of a
son, called him in public Leotychides, but, amongst her confidants and
attendants, would whisper that his name was Alcibiades. To such a
degree was she transported by her passion for him. He, on the other
side, would say, in his vain way, he had not done this thing out of mere
wantonness of insult, nor to gratify a passion, but that his race might
one day be kings over the Lacedaemonians.

There were many who told Agis that this was so, but time itself gave the
greatest confirmation to the story. For Agis, alarmed by an earthquake,
had quitted his wife, and, for ten months after, was never with her;
Leotychides, therefore, being born after those ten months, he would not
acknowledge him for his son; which was the reason that afterwards he was
not admitted to the succession.

After the defeat which the Athenians received in Sicily, ambassadors
were dispatched to Sparta at once from Chios and Lesbos and Cyzicus, to
signify their purpose of revolting from the Athenians. The Boeotians
interposed in favor of the Lesbians, and Pharnabazus of the Cyzicenes,
but the Lacedaemonians, at the persuasion of Alcibiades, chose to assist
Chios before all others. He himself, also, went instantly to sea,
procured the immediate revolt of almost all Ionia, and, cooperating with
the Lacedaemonian generals, did great mischief to the Athenians. But
Agis was his enemy, hating him for having dishonored his wife, and also
impatient of his glory, as almost every enterprise and every success was
ascribed to Alcibiades. Others, also, of the most powerful and
ambitious amongst the Spartans, were possessed with jealousy of him,
and, at last, prevailed with the magistrates in the city to send orders
into Ionia that he should be killed. Alcibiades, however, had secret
intelligence of this, and, in apprehension of the result, while he
communicated all affairs to the Lacedaemonians, yet took care not to put
himself into their power. At last he retired to Tisaphernes, the king
of Persia's satrap, for his security, and immediately became the first
and most influential person about him. For this barbarian, not being
himself sincere, but a lover of guile and wickedness, admired his
address and wonderful subtlety. And, indeed, the charm of daily
intercourse with him was more than any character could resist or any
disposition escape. Even those who feared and envied him could not but
take delight, and have a sort of kindness for him, when they saw him and
were in his company. So that Tisaphernes, otherwise a cruel character,
and, above all other Persians, a hater of the Greeks, was yet so won by
the flatteries of Alcibiades, that he set himself even to exceed him in
responding to them. The most beautiful of his parks, containing
salubrious streams and meadows, where he had built pavilions, and places
of retirement royally and exquisitely adorned, received by his direction
the name of Alcibiades, and was always so called and so spoken of.

Thus Alcibiades, quitting the interests of the Spartans, whom he could
no longer trust, because he stood in fear of Agis, endeavored to do them
ill offices, and render them odious to Tisaphernes, who, by his means,
was hindered from assisting them vigorously, and from finally ruining
the Athenians. For his advice was to furnish them but sparingly with
money, and so wear them out, and consume them insensibly; when they had
wasted their strength upon one another, they would both become ready to
submit to the king. Tisaphernes readily pursued his counsel, and so
openly expressed the liking and admiration which he had for him, that
Alcibiades was looked up to by the Greeks of both parties, and the
Athenians, now in their misfortunes, repented them of their severe
sentence against him. And he, on the other side, began to be troubled
for them, and to fear lest, if that commonwealth were utterly destroyed,
he should fall into the hands of the Lacedaemonians, his enemies.

At that time the whole strength of the Athenians was in Samos. Their
fleet maintained itself here, and issued from these head-quarters to
reduce such as had revolted, and protect the rest of their territories;
in one way or other still contriving to be a match for their enemies at
sea. What they stood in fear of, was Tisaphernes and the Phoenician
fleet of one hundred and fifty galleys, which was said to be already
under sail; if those came, there remained then no hopes for the
commonwealth of Athens. Understanding this, Alcibiades sent secretly to
the chief men of the Athenians, who were then at Samos, giving them
hopes that he would make Tisaphernes their friend; he was willing, he
implied, to do some favor, not to the people, nor in reliance upon them,
but to the better citizens, if only, like brave men, they would make the
attempt to put down the insolence of the people, and, by taking upon
them the government, would endeavor to save the city from ruin. All of
them gave a ready ear to the proposal made by Alcibiades, except only
Phrynichus of the township of Dirades, one of the generals, who
suspected, as the truth was, that Alcibiades concerned not himself
whether the government were in the people or the better citizens, but
only sought by any means to make way for his return into his native
country, and to that end inveighed against the people, thereby to gain
the others, and to insinuate himself into their good opinion. But when
Phrynichus found his counsel to be rejected, and that he was himself
become a declared enemy of Alcibiades, he gave secret intelligence to
Astyochus, the enemy's admiral, cautioning him to beware of Alcibiades,
and to seize him as a double dealer, unaware that one traitor was making
discoveries to another. For Astyochus, who was eager to gain the favor
of Tisaphernes, observing the credit Alcibiades had with him, revealed
to Alcibiades all that Phrynichus had said against him. Alcibiades at
once dispatched messengers to Samos, to accuse Phrynichus of the
treachery. Upon this, all the commanders were enraged with Phrynichus,
and set themselves against him, and he, seeing no other way to extricate
himself from the present danger, attempted to remedy one evil by a
greater. He sent to Astyochus to reproach him for betraying him, and to
make an offer to him at the same time, to deliver into his hands both
the army and the navy of the Athenians. This occasioned no damage to
the Athenians, because Astyochus repeated his treachery, and revealed
also this proposal to Alcibiades. But this again was foreseen by
Phrynichus, who, expecting a second accusation from Alcibiades, to
anticipate him, advertised the Athenians beforehand that the enemy was
ready to sail in order to surprise them, and therefore advised them to
fortify their camp, and to be in a readiness to go aboard their ships.
While the Athenians were intent upon doing these things, they received
other letters from Alcibiades, admonishing them to beware of Phrynichus,
as one who designed to betray their fleet to the enemy, to which they
then gave no credit at all, conceiving that Alcibiades, who knew
perfectly the counsels and preparations of the enemy, was merely making
use of that knowledge, in order to impose upon them in this false
accusation of Phrynichus. Yet, afterwards, when Phrynichus was stabbed
with a dagger in the market-place by Hermon, one of the guard, the
Athenians, entering into an examination of the cause, solemnly condemned
Phrynichus of treason, and decreed crowns to Hermon and his associates.
And now the friends of Alcibiades, carrying all before them at Samos,
dispatched Pisander to Athens, to attempt a change of government, and to
encourage the aristocratical citizens to take upon themselves the
government, and overthrow the democracy, representing to them, that,
upon these terms, Alcibiades would procure them the friendship and
alliance of Tisaphernes.

This was the color and pretense made use of by those who desired to
change the government of Athens to an oligarchy. But as soon as they
prevailed, and had got the administration of affairs into their hands,
under the name of the Five Thousand (whereas, indeed, they were but four
hundred), they slighted Alcibiades altogether, and prosecuted the war
with less vigor; partly because they durst not yet trust the citizens,
who secretly detested this change, and partly because they thought the
Lacedaemonians, who always befriended the government of the few, would
be inclined to give them favorable terms.

The people in the city were terrified into submission, many of those who
had dared openly to oppose the four hundred having been put to death.
But those who were at Samos, indignant when they heard this news, were
eager to set sail instantly for the Piraeus; and, sending for
Alcibiades, they declared him general, requiring him to lead them on to
put down the tyrants. He, however, in that juncture, did not, as it
might have been thought a man would, on being suddenly exalted by the
favor of a multitude, think himself under an obligation to gratify and
submit to all the wishes of those who, from a fugitive and an exile, had
created him general of so great an army, and given him the command of
such a fleet. But, as became a great captain, he opposed himself to the
precipitate resolutions which their rage led them to, and, by
restraining them from the great error they were about to commit,
unequivocally saved the commonwealth. For if they then had sailed to
Athens, all Ionia and the islands and the Hellespont would have fallen
into the enemies' hands without opposition, while the Athenians,
involved in civil war, would have been fighting with one another within
the circuit of their own walls. It was Alcibiades alone, or, at least,
principally, who prevented all this mischief; for he not only used
persuasion to the whole army, and showed them the danger, but applied
himself to them, one by one, entreating some, and constraining others.
He was much assisted, however, by Thrasybulus of Stiria, who, having the
loudest voice, as we are told of all the Athenians, went along with him,
and cried out to those who were ready to be gone. A second great
service which Alcibiades did for them was, his undertaking that the
Phoenician fleet, which the Lacedaemonians expected to be sent to them
by the king of Persia, should either come in aid of the Athenians, or
otherwise should not come at all. He sailed off with all expedition in
order to perform this, and the ships, which had already been seen as
near as Aspendus, were not brought any further by Tisaphernes, who thus
deceived the Lacedaemonians; and it was by both sides believed that they
had been diverted by the procurement of Alcibiades. The Lacedaemonians,
in particular, accused him, that he had advised the Barbarian to stand
still, and suffer the Greeks to waste and destroy one another, as it was
evident that the accession of so great a force to either party would
enable them to take away the entire dominion of the sea from the other
side.

Soon after this, the four hundred usurpers were driven out, the friends
of Alcibiades vigorously assisting those who were for the popular
government. And now the people in the city not only desired, but
commanded Alcibiades to return home from his exile. He, however,
desired not to owe his return to the mere grace and commiseration of the
people, and resolved to come back, not with empty hands, but with glory,
and after some service done. To this end, he sailed from Samos with a
few ships, and cruised on the sea of Cnidos, and about the isle of Cos;
but receiving intelligence there that Mindarus, the Spartan admiral, had
sailed with his whole army into the Hellespont, and that the Athenians
had followed him, he hurried back to succor the Athenian commanders,
and, by good fortune, arrived with eighteen galleys at a critical time.
For both the fleets having engaged near Abydos, the fight between them
had lasted till night, the one side having the advantage on one quarter,
and the other on another. Upon his first appearance, both sides formed
a false impression; the enemy was encouraged, and the Athenians
terrified. But Alcibiades suddenly raised the Athenian ensign in the
admiral ship, and fell upon those galleys of the Peloponnesians which
had the advantage and were in pursuit. He soon put these to flight, and
followed them so close that he forced them on shore, and broke the ships
in pieces, the sailors abandoning them and swimming away, in spite of
all the efforts of Pharnabazus, who had come down to their assistance by
land, and did what he could to protect them from the shore. In fine,
the Athenians, having taken thirty of the enemy's ships, and recovered
all their own, erected a trophy. After the gaining of so glorious a
victory, his vanity made him eager to show himself to Tisaphernes, and,
having furnished himself with gifts and presents, and an equipage
suitable to his dignity, he set out to visit him. But the thing did not
succeed as he had imagined, for Tisaphernes had been long suspected by
the Lacedaemonians, and was afraid to fall into disgrace with his king,
upon that account, and therefore thought that Alcibiades arrived very
opportunely, and immediately caused him to be seized, and sent away
prisoner to Sardis; fancying, by this act of injustice, to clear himself
from all former imputations.

But about thirty days after, Alcibiades escaped from his keepers, and,
having got a horse, fled to Clazomenae, where he procured Tisaphernes'
additional disgrace by professing he was a party to his escape. From
there he sailed to the Athenian camp, and, being informed there that
Mindarus and Pharnabazus were together at Cyzicus, he made a speech to
the soldiers, telling them that sea-fighting, land-fighting, and, by the
gods, fighting against fortified cities too, must be all one for them,
as, unless they conquered everywhere, there was no money for them. As
soon as ever he got them on shipboard, he hasted to Proconnesus, and
gave command to seize all the small vessels they met, and guard them
safely in the interior of the fleet, that the enemy might have no notice
of his coming; and a great storm of rain, accompanied with thunder and
darkness, which happened at the same time, contributed much to the
concealment of his enterprise. Indeed, it was not only undiscovered by
the enemy, but the Athenians themselves were ignorant of it, for he
commanded them suddenly on board, and set sail when they had abandoned
all intention of it. As the darkness presently passed away, the
Peloponnesian fleet were seen riding out at sea in front of the harbor
of Cyzicus. Fearing, if they discovered the number of his ships, they
might endeavor to save themselves by land, he commanded the rest of the
captains to slacken, and follow him slowly, whilst he, advancing with
forty ships, showed himself to the enemy, and provoked them to fight.
The enemy, being deceived as to their numbers; despised them, and,
supposing they were to contend with those only, made themselves ready
and began the fight. But as soon as they were engaged, they perceived
the other part of the fleet coming down upon them, at which they were so
terrified that they fled immediately. Upon that, Alcibiades, breaking
through the midst of them with twenty of his best ships, hastened to the
shore, disembarked, and pursued those who abandoned their ships and fled
to land, and made a great slaughter of them. Mindarus and Pharnabazus,
coming to their succor, were utterly defeated. Mindarus was slain upon
the place, fighting valiantly; Pharnabazus saved himself by flight. The
Athenians slew great numbers of their enemies, won much spoil, and took
all their ships. They also made themselves masters of Cyzicus, which
was deserted by Pharnabazus, and destroyed its Peloponnesian garrison,
and thereby not only secured to themselves the Hellespont, but by force
drove the Lacedaemonians from out of all the rest of the sea. They
intercepted some letters written to the ephors, which gave an account of
this fatal overthrow, after their short laconic manner. "Our hopes are
at an end. Mindarus is slain. The men starve. We know not what to
do."

The soldiers who followed Alcibiades in this last fight were so exalted
with their success, and felt that degree of pride, that, looking on
themselves as invincible, they disdained to mix with the other soldiers,
who had been often overcome. For it happened not long before,
Thrasyllus had received a defeat near Ephesus, and, upon that occasion,
the Ephesians erected their brazen trophy to the disgrace of the
Athenians. The soldiers of Alcibiades reproached those who were under
the command of Thrasyllus with this misfortune, at the same time
magnifying themselves and their own commander, and it went so far that
they would not exercise with them, nor lodge in the same quarters. But
soon after, Pharnabazus, with a great force of horse and foot, falling
upon the soldiers of Thrasyllus, as they were laying waste the territory
of Abydos, Alcibiades came to their aid, routed Pharnabazus, and,
together with Thrasyllus, pursued him till it was night; and in this
action the troops united, and returned together to the camp, rejoicing
and congratulating one another. The next day he erected a trophy, and
then proceeded to lay waste with fire and sword the whole province which
was under Pharnabazus, where none ventured to resist; and he took divers
priests and priestesses, but released them without ransom. He prepared
next to attack the Chalcedonians, who had revolted from the Athenians,
and had received a Lacedaemonian governor and garrison. But having
intelligence that they had removed their corn and cattle out of the
fields, and were conveying it all to the Bithynians, who were their
friends, he drew down his army to the frontier of the Bithynians, and
then sent a herald to charge them with this proceeding. The Bithynians,
terrified at his approach, delivered up to him the booty, and entered
into alliance with him.

Afterwards he proceeded to the siege of Chalcedon, and enclosed it with
a wall from sea to sea. Pharnabazus advanced with his forces to raise
the siege, and Hippocrates, the governor of the town, at the same time,
gathering together all the strength he had, made a sally upon the
Athenians. Alcibiades divided his army so as to engage them both at
once, and not only forced Pharnabazus to a dishonorable flight, but
defeated Hippocrates, and killed him and a number of the soldiers with
him. After this he sailed into the Hellespont, in order to raise
supplies of money, and took the city of Selymbria, in which action,
through his precipitation, he exposed himself to great danger. For some
within the town had undertaken to betray it into his hands, and, by
agreement, were to give him a signal by a lighted torch about midnight.
But one of the conspirators beginning to repent himself of the design,
the rest, for fear of being discovered, were driven to give the signal
before the appointed hour. Alcibiades, as soon as he saw the torch
lifted up in the air, though his army was not in readiness to march, ran
instantly towards the walls, taking with him about thirty men only, and
commanding the rest of the army to follow him with all possible speed.
When he came thither, he found the gate opened for him, and entered with
his thirty men, and about twenty more light-armed men, who were come up
to them. They were no sooner in the city, but he perceived the
Selymbrians all armed, coming down upon him; so that there was no hope
of escaping if he stayed to receive them; and, on the other hand, having
been always successful till that day, wherever he commanded, he could
not endure to be defeated and fly. So, requiring silence by sound of a
trumpet, he commanded one of his men to make proclamation that the
Selymbrians should not take arms against the Athenians. This cooled
such of the inhabitants as were fiercest for the fight, for they
supposed that all their enemies were within the walls, and it raised the
hopes of others who were disposed to an accommodation. Whilst they were
parleying, and propositions making on one side and the other,
Alcibiades's whole army came up to the town. And now, conjecturing
rightly, that the Selymbrians were well inclined to peace, and fearing
lest the city might be sacked by the Thracians, who came in great
numbers to his army to serve as volunteers, out of kindness for him, he
commanded them all to retreat without the walls. And upon the
submission of the Selymbrians, he saved them from being pillaged, only
taking of them a sum of money, and, after placing an Athenian garrison
in the town, departed.

During this action, the Athenian captains who besieged Chalcedon
concluded a treaty with Pharnabazus upon these articles: that he should
give them a sum of money; that the Chalcedonians should return to the
subjection of Athens; and that the Athenians should make no inroad into
the province whereof Pharnabazus was governor; and Pharnabazus was also
to provide safe conducts for the Athenian ambassadors to the king of
Persia. Afterwards, when Alcibiades returned thither, Pharnabazus
required that he also should be sworn to the treaty; but he refused it,
unless Pharnabazus would swear at the same time. When the treaty was
sworn to on both sides Alcibiades went against the Byzantines, who had
revolted from the Athenians, and drew a line of circumvallation about
the city. But Anaxilaus and Lycurgus, together with some others, having
undertaken to betray the city to him upon his engagement to preserve the
lives and property of the inhabitants, he caused a report to be spread
abroad, as if, by reason of some unexpected movement in Ionia, he should
be obliged to raise the siege. And, accordingly, that day he made a
show to depart with his whole fleet; but returned the same night, and
went ashore with all his men at arms, and, silently and undiscovered,
marched up to the walls. At the same time, his ships rowed into the
harbor with all possible violence, coming on with much fury, and with
great shouts and outcries. The Byzantines, thus surprised and
astonished, while they all hurried to the defense of their port and
shipping, gave opportunity to those who favored the Athenians, securely
to receive Alcibiades into the city. Yet the enterprise was not
accomplished without fighting, for the Peloponnesians, Boeotians, and
Megarians not only repulsed those who came out of the ships, and forced
them on board again, but, hearing that the Athenians were entered on
the other side, drew up in order, and went to meet them. Alcibiades,
however, gained the victory after some sharp fighting, in which he
himself had the command of the right wing, and Theramenes of the left,
and took about three hundred, who survived of the enemy, prisoners of
war. After the battle, not one of the Byzantines was slain, or driven
out of the city, according to the terms upon which the city was put into
his hands, that they should receive no prejudice in life or property.
And thus Anaxilaus, being afterwards accused at Lacedaemon for this
treason, neither disowned nor professed to be ashamed of the action; for
he urged that he was not a Lacedaemonian, but a Byzantine and saw not
Sparta, but Byzantium, in extreme danger; the city so blockaded that it
was not possible to bring in any new provisions, and the Peloponnesians
and Boeotians, who were in garrison, devouring the old stores, whilst
the Byzantines, with their wives and children, were starving; that he
had not, therefore, betrayed his country to enemies, but had delivered
it from the calamities of war, and had but followed the example of the
most worthy Lacedaemonians, who esteemed nothing to be honorable and
just, but what was profitable for their country. The Lacedaemonians,
upon hearing his defense, respected it, and discharged all that were
accused.

And now Alcibiades began to desire to see his native country again, or
rather to show his fellow-citizens a person who had gained so many
victories for them. He set sail for Athens, the ships that accompanied
him being adorned with great numbers of shields and other spoils, and
towing after them many galleys taken from the enemy, and the ensigns and
ornaments of many others which he had sunk and destroyed; all of them
together amounting to two hundred. Little credit, perhaps, can be given
to what Duris the Samian, who professed to be descended from Alcibiades,
adds, that Chrysogonus, who had gained a victory at the Pythian games,
played upon his flute for the galleys, whilst the oars kept time with
the music; and that Callippides, the tragedian, attired in his buskins,
his purple robes, and other ornaments used in the theater, gave the word
to the rowers, and that the admiral galley entered into the port with a
purple sail. Neither Theopompus, nor Ephorus, nor Xenophon, mention
them. Nor, indeed, is it credible, that one who returned from so long
an exile, and such variety of misfortunes, should come home to his
countrymen in the style of revelers breaking up from a drinking-party.
On the contrary, he entered the harbor full of fear, nor would he
venture to go on shore, till, standing on the deck, he saw Euryptolemus,
his cousin, and others of his friends and acquaintance, who were ready
to receive him, and invited him to land. As soon as he was landed, the
multitude who came out to meet him scarcely seemed so much as to see any
of the other captains, but came in throngs about Alcibiades, and saluted
him with loud acclamations, and still followed him; those who could
press near him crowned him with garlands, and they who could not come up
so close yet stayed to behold him afar off, and the old men pointed him
out, and showed him to the young ones. Nevertheless, this public joy
was mixed with some tears, and the present happiness was allayed by the
remembrance of the miseries they had endured. They made reflections,
that they could not have so unfortunately miscarried in Sicily, or been
defeated in any of their other expectations, if they had left the
management of their affairs formerly, and the command of their forces,
to Alcibiades, since, upon his undertaking the administration, when they
were in a manner driven from the sea, and could scarce defend the
suburbs of their city by land, and, at the same time, were miserably
distracted with intestine factions, he had raised them up from this low
and deplorable condition, and had not only restored them to their
ancient dominion of the sea, but had also made them everywhere
victorious over their enemies on land.

There had been a decree for recalling him from his banishment already
passed by the people, at the instance of Critias, the son of
Callaeschrus, as appears by his elegies, in which he puts Alcibiades in
mind of this service:--

From my proposal did that edict come,
Which from your tedious exile brought you home;
The public vote at first was moved by me,
And my voice put the seal to the decree.

The people being summoned to an assembly, Alcibiades came in amongst
them, and first bewailed and lamented his own sufferings, and, in gentle
terms complaining of the usage he had received, imputed all to his hard
fortune, and some ill genius that attended him: then he spoke at large
of their prospects, and exhorted them to courage and good hope. The
people crowned him with crowns of gold, and created him general, both at
land and sea, with absolute power. They also made a decree that his
estate should be restored to him, and that the Eumolpidae and the holy
heralds should absolve him from the curses which they had solemnly
pronounced against him by sentence of the people. Which when all the
rest obeyed, Theodorus, the high-priest, excused himself, "For," said
he, "if he is innocent, I never cursed him."

But notwithstanding the affairs of Alcibiades went so prosperously, and
so much to his glory, yet many were still somewhat disturbed, and looked
upon the time of his arrival to be ominous. For on the day that he came
into the port, the feast of the goddess Minerva, which they call the
Plynteria, was kept. It is the twenty-fifth day of Thargelion, when the
Praxiergidae solemnize their secret rites, taking all the ornaments from
off her image, and keeping the part of the temple where it stands close
covered. Hence the Athenians esteem this day most inauspicious and
never undertake any thing of importance upon it; and, therefore, they
imagined that the goddess did not receive Alcibiades graciously and
propitiously, thus hiding her face and rejecting him. Yet,
notwithstanding, everything succeeded according to his wish. When the
one hundred galleys, that were to return with him, were fitted out and
ready to sail, an honorable zeal detained him till the celebration of
the mysteries was over. For ever since Decelea had been occupied, as
the enemy commanded the roads leading from Athens to Eleusis, the
procession, being conducted by sea, had not been performed with any
proper solemnity; they were forced to omit the sacrifices and dances and
other holy ceremonies, which had usually been performed in the way, when
they led forth Iacchus. Alcibiades, therefore, judged it would be a
glorious action, which would do honor to the gods and gain him esteem
with men, if he restored the ancient splendor to these rites, escorting
the procession again by land, and protecting it with his army in the
face of the enemy. For either, if Agis stood still and did not oppose,
it would very much diminish and obscure his reputation, or, in the other
alternative, Alcibiades would engage in a holy war, in the cause of the
gods, and in defense of the most sacred and solemn ceremonies; and this
in the sight of his country, where he should have all his fellow-
citizens witnesses of his valor. As soon as he had resolved upon this
design, and had communicated it to the Eumolpidae and heralds, he placed
sentinels on the tops of the hills, and at the break of day sent forth
his scouts. And then taking with him the priests and Initiates and the
Initiators, and encompassing them with his soldiers, he conducted them
with great order and profound silence; an august and venerable
procession, wherein all who did not envy him said, he performed at once
the office of a high-priest and of a general. The enemy did not dare to
attempt any thing against them, and thus he brought them back in safety
to the city. Upon which, as he was exalted in his own thought, so the
opinion which the people had of his conduct was raised to that degree,
that they looked upon their armies as irresistible and invincible while
he commanded them; and he so won, indeed, upon the lower and meaner sort
of people, that they passionately desired to have him "tyrant" over
them, and some of them did not scruple to tell him so, and to advise him
to put himself out of the reach of envy, by abolishing the laws and
ordinances of the people, and suppressing the idle talkers that were
ruining the state, that so he might act and take upon him the management
of affairs, without standing in fear of being called to an account.

How far his own inclinations led him to usurp sovereign power, is
uncertain, but the most considerable persons in the city were so much
afraid of it, that they hastened him on ship-board as speedily as they
could, appointing the colleagues whom he chose, and allowing him all
other things as he desired. Thereupon he set sail with a fleet of one
hundred ships, and, arriving at Andros, he there fought with and
defeated as well the inhabitants as the Lacedaemonians who assisted
them. He did not, however, take the city; which gave the first occasion
to his enemies for all their accusations against him. Certainly, if
ever man was ruined by his own glory, it was Alcibiades. For his
continual success had produced such an idea of his courage and conduct,
that, if he failed in anything he undertook, it was imputed to his
neglect, and no one would believe it was through want of power. For
they thought nothing was too hard for him, if he went about it in good
earnest. They fancied, every day, that they should hear news of the
reduction of Chios, and of the rest of Ionia, and grew impatient that
things were not effected as fast and as rapidly as they could wish for
them. They never considered how extremely money was wanting, and that,
having to carry on war with an enemy who had supplies of all things from
a great king, he was often forced to quit his armament, in order to
procure money and provisions for the subsistence of his soldiers. This
it was which gave occasion for the last accusation which was made
against him. For Lysander, being sent from Lacedaemon with a commission
to be admiral of their fleet, and being furnished by Cyrus with a great
sum of money, gave every sailor four obols a day, whereas before they
had but three. Alcibiades could hardly allow his men three obols, and
therefore was constrained to go into Caria to furnish himself with
money. He left the care of the fleet, in his absence, to Antiochus, an
experienced seaman, but rash and inconsiderate, who had express orders
from Alcibiades not to engage, though the enemy provoked him. But he
slighted and disregarded these directions to that degree, that, having
made ready his own galley and another, he stood for Ephesus, where the
enemy lay, and, as he sailed before the heads of their galleys, used
every provocation possible, both in words and deeds. Lysander at first
manned out a few ships, and pursued him. But all the Athenian ships
coming in to his assistance, Lysander, also, brought up his whole fleet,
which gained an entire victory. He slew Antiochus himself, took many
men and ships, and erected a trophy.

As soon as Alcibiades heard this news, he returned to Samos, and loosing
from thence with his whole fleet, came and offered battle to Lysander.
But Lysander, content with the victory he had gained, would not stir.
Amongst others in the army who hated Alcibiades, Thrasybulus, the son of
Thrason, was his particular enemy, and went purposely to Athens to
accuse him, and to exasperate his enemies in the city against him.
Addressing the people, he represented that Alcibiades had ruined their
affairs and lost their ships by mere self-conceited neglect of his
duties, committing the government of the army, in his absence, to men
who gained his favor by drinking and scurrilous talking, whilst he
wandered up and down at pleasure to raise money, giving himself up to
every sort of luxury and excess amongst the courtesans of Abydos and
Ionia, at a time when the enemy's navy were on the watch close at hand.
It was also objected to him, that he had fortified a castle near
Bisanthe in Thrace, for a safe retreat for himself, as one that either
could not, or would not, live in his own country. The Athenians gave
credit to these informations, and showed the resentment and displeasure
which they had conceived against him, by choosing other generals.

As soon as Alcibiades heard of this, he immediately forsook the army,
afraid of what might follow; and, collecting a body of mercenary
soldiers, made war upon his own account against those Thracians who
called themselves free, and acknowledged no king. By this means he
amassed to himself a considerable treasure, and, at the same time,
secured the bordering Greeks from the incursions of the barbarians.

Tydeus, Menander, and Adimantus, the new-made generals, were at that
time posted at Aegospotami, with all the ships which the Athenians had
left. From whence they were used to go out to sea every morning, and
offer battle to Lysander, who lay near Lampsacus; and when they had done
so, returning back again, lay, all the rest of the day, carelessly and
without order, in contempt of the enemy. Alcibiades, who was not far
off, did not think so slightly of their danger, nor neglect to let them
know it, but, mounting his horse, came to the generals, and represented
to them that they had chosen a very inconvenient station, where there
was no safe harbor, and where they were distant from any town; so that
they were constrained to send for their necessary provisions as far as
Sestos. He also pointed out to them their carelessness in suffering the
soldiers, when they went ashore, to disperse and wander up and down at
their pleasure, while the enemy's fleet, under the command of one
general, and strictly obedient to discipline, lay so very near them. He
advised them to remove the fleet to Sestos. But the admirals not only
disregarded what he said, but Tydeus, with insulting expressions;
commanded him to be gone, saying, that now not he, but others, had the
command of the forces. Alcibiades, suspecting something of treachery in
them, departed, and told his friends, who accompanied him out of the
camp, that if the generals had not used him with such insupportable
contempt, he would within a few days have forced the Lacedaemonians,
however unwilling, either to have fought the Athenians at sea, or to
have deserted their ships. Some looked upon this as a piece of
ostentation only; others said, the thing was probable, for that he might
have brought down by land great numbers of the Thracian cavalry and
archers, to assault and disorder them in their camp. The event
however, soon made it evident how rightly he had judged of the errors
which the Athenians committed. For Lysander fell upon them on a sudden,
when they least suspected it, with such fury that Conon alone, with
eight galleys, escaped him; all the rest, which were about two hundred,
he took and carried away, together with three thousand prisoners, whom
he put to death. And within a short time after, he took Athens itself,
burnt all the ships which he found there, and demolished their long
walls.

After this, Alcibiades, standing in dread of the Lacedaemonians, who
were now masters both at sea and land, retired into Bithynia. He sent
thither great treasure before him, took much with him, but left much
more in the castle where he had before resided. But he lost great part
of his wealth in Bithynia, being robbed by some Thracians who lived in
those parts, and thereupon determined to go to the court of Artaxerxes,
not doubting but that the king, if he would make trial of his abilities,
would find him not inferior to Themistocles, besides that he was
recommended by a more honorable cause. For he went, not as Themistocles
did, to offer his service against his fellow-citizens, but against their
enemies, and to implore the king's aid for the defense of his country.
He concluded that Pharnabazus would most readily procure him a safe
conduct, and therefore went into Phrygia to him, and continued to dwell
there some time, paying him great respect, and being honorably treated
by him. The Athenians, in the meantime, were miserably afflicted at
their loss of empire, but when they were deprived of liberty also, and
Lysander set up thirty despotic rulers in the city, in their ruin now
they began to turn to those thoughts which, while safety was yet
possible, they would not entertain; they acknowledged and bewailed their
former errors and follies, and judged this second ill-usage of
Alcibiades to be of all the most inexcusable. For he was rejected,
without any fault committed by himself; and only because they were
incensed against his subordinate for having shamefully lost a few ships,
they much more shamefully deprived the commonwealth of its most valiant
and accomplished general. Yet in this sad state of affairs, they had
still some faint hopes left them, nor would they utterly despair of the
Athenian commonwealth, while Alcibiades was safe. For they persuaded
themselves that if before, when he was an exile, he could not content
himself to live idly and at ease, much less now, if he could find any
favorable opportunity, would he endure the insolence of the
Lacedaemonians, and the outrages of the Thirty. Nor was it an absurd
thing in the people to entertain such imaginations, when the Thirty
themselves were so very solicitous to be informed and to get
intelligence of all his actions and designs. In fine, Critias
represented to Lysander that the Lacedaemonians could never securely
enjoy the dominion of Greece, till the Athenian democracy was absolutely
destroyed; and though now the people of Athens seemed quietly and
patiently to submit to so small a number of governors, yet so long as
Alcibiades lived, the knowledge of this fact would never suffer them to
acquiesce in their present circumstances.

Yet Lysander would not be prevailed upon by these representations, till
at last he received secret orders from the magistrates of Lacedaemon,
expressly requiring him to get Alcibiades dispatched: whether it was
that they feared his energy and boldness in enterprising what was
hazardous, or that it was done to gratify king Agis. Upon receipt of
this order, Lysander sent away a messenger to Pharnabazus, desiring him
to put it in execution. Pharnabazus committed the affair to Magaeus,
his brother, and to his uncle Susamithres. Alcibiades resided at that
time in a small village in Phrygia, together with Timandra, a mistress
of his. As he slept, he had this dream: he thought himself attired in
his mistress's habit, and that she, holding him in her arms, dressed his
head and painted his face as if he had been a woman; others say, he
dreamed that he saw Magaeus cut off his head and burn his body; at any
rate, it was but a little while before his death that he had these
visions. Those who were sent to assassinate him had not courage enough
to enter the house, but surrounded it first, and set it on fire.
Alcibiades, as soon as he perceived it, getting together great
quantities of clothes and furniture, threw them upon the fire to choke
it, and, having wrapped his cloak about his left arm, and holding his
naked sword in his right, he cast himself into the middle of the fire,
and escaped securely through it, before his clothes were burnt. The
barbarians, as soon as they saw him, retreated, and none of them durst
stay to expect him, or to engage with him, but, standing at a distance,
they slew him with their darts and arrows. When he was dead, the
barbarians departed, and Timandra took up his dead body, and, covering
and wrapping it up in her own robes, she buried it as decently and as
honorably as her circumstances would allow. It is said, that the famous
Lais, who was called the Corinthian, though she was a native of Hyccara,
a small town in Sicily, from whence she was brought a captive, was the
daughter of this Timandra. There are some who agree with this account
of Alcibiades's death in all points, except that they impute the cause
of it neither to Pharnabazus, nor Lysander, nor the Lacedaemonians:
but, they say, he was keeping with him a young lady of a noble house,
whom he had debauched, and that her brothers, not being able to endure
the indignity, set fire by night to the house where he was living, and,
as he endeavored to save himself from the flames, slew him with their
darts, in the manner just related.

CORIOLANUS

The patrician house of the Marcii in Rome produced many men of
distinction, and among the rest, Ancus Marcius, grandson to Numa by his
daughter, and king after Tullus Hostilius. Of the same family were also
Publius and Quintus Marcius, which two conveyed into the city the best
and most abundant supply of water they have at Rome. As likewise
Censorinus, who, having been twice chosen censor by the people,
afterwards himself induced them to make a law that nobody should bear
that office twice. But Caius Marcius, of whom I now write, being left
an orphan, and brought up under the widowhood of his mother, has shown
us by experience, that, although the early loss of a father may be
attended with other disadvantages, yet it can hinder none from being
either virtuous or eminent in the world, and that it is no obstacle to
true goodness and excellence; however bad men may be pleased to lay the
blame of their corruptions upon that misfortune and the neglect of them
in their minority. Nor is he less an evidence to the truth of their
opinion, who conceive that a generous and worthy nature without proper
discipline, like a rich soil without culture, is apt, with its better
fruits, to produce also much that is bad and faulty. While the force
and vigor of his soul, and a persevering constancy in all he undertook,
led him successfully into many noble achievements, yet, on the other
side, also, by indulging the vehemence of his passion, and through all
obstinate reluctance to yield or accommodate his humors and sentiments
to those of people about him, he rendered himself incapable of acting
and associating with others. Those who saw with admiration how proof
his nature was against all the softnesses of pleasure, the hardships of
service, and the allurements of gain, while allowing to that universal
firmness of his the respective names of temperance, fortitude, and
justice, yet, in the life of the citizen and the statesman, could not
choose but be disgusted at the severity and ruggedness of his
deportment, and with his overbearing, haughty, and imperious temper.
Education and study, and the favors of the muses, confer no greater
benefit on those that seek them, than these humanizing and civilizing
lessons, which teach our natural qualities to submit to the limitations
prescribed by reason, and to avoid the wildness of extremes.

Those were times at Rome in which that kind of worth was most esteemed
which displayed itself in military achievements; one evidence of which
we find in the Latin word for virtue, which is properly equivalent to
manly courage. As if valor and all virtue had been the same thing, they
used as the common term the name of the particular excellence. But
Marcius, having a more passionate inclination than any of that age for
feats of war, began at once, from his very childhood, to handle arms;
and feeling that adventitious implements and artificial arms would
effect little, and be of small use to such as have not their native and
natural weapons well fixed and prepared for service, he so exercised and
inured his body to all sorts of activity and encounter, that, besides
the lightness of a racer, he had a weight in close seizures and
wrestlings with an enemy, from which it was hard for any to disengage
himself; so that his competitors at home in displays of bravery, loath
to own themselves inferior in that respect, were wont to ascribe their
deficiencies to his strength of body, which they said no resistance and
no fatigue could exhaust.

The first time he went out to the wars, being yet a stripling, was when
Tarquinius Superbus, who had been king of Rome and was afterwards
expelled, after many unsuccessful attempts, now entered upon his last
effort, and proceeded to hazard all as it were upon a single throw. A
great number of the Latins and other people of Italy joined their
forces, and were marching with him toward the city, to procure his
restoration; not, however, so much out of a desire to serve and
oblige Tarquin, as to gratify their own fear and envy at the increase of
the Roman greatness, which they were anxious to check and reduce. The
armies met and engaged in a decisive battle, in the vicissitudes of
which, Marcius, while fighting bravely in the dictator's presence, saw a
Roman soldier struck down at a little distance, and immediately stepped
in and stood before him, and slew his assailant. The general, after
having gained the victory, crowned him for this act, one of the first,
with a garland of oaken branches; it being the Roman custom thus to
adorn those who had saved the life of a citizen; whether that the law
intended some special honor to the oak, in memory of the Arcadians, a
people the oracle had made famous by the name of acorn-eaters; or
whether the reason of it was because they might easily, and in all
places where they fought, have plenty of oak for that purpose; or,
finally, whether the oaken wreath, being sacred to Jupiter, the guardian
of the city, might, therefore, be thought a propel ornament for one who
preserved a citizen. And the oak, in truth, is the tree which bears the
most and the prettiest fruit of any that grow wild, and is the strongest
of all that are under cultivation; its acorns were the principal diet of
the first mortals, and the honey found in it gave them drink. I may
say, too, it furnished fowl and other creatures as dainties, in
producing mistletoe for birdlime to ensnare them. In this battle,
meantime, it is stated that Castor and Pollux appeared, and, immediately
after the battle, were seen at Rome just by the fountain where their
temple now stands, with their horses foaming with sweat, and told the
news of the victory to the people in the Forum. The fifteenth of July,
being the day of this conquest, became consequently a solemn holiday
sacred to the Twin Brothers.

It may be observed in general, that when young men arrive early at fame
and repute, if they are of a nature but slightly touched with emulation,
this early attainment is apt to extinguish their thirst and satiate
their small appetite; whereas the first distinctions of more solid and
weighty characters do but stimulate and quicken them and take them away,
like a wind, in the pursuit of honor; they look upon these marks and
testimonies to their virtue not as a recompense received for what they
have already done, but as a pledge given by themselves of what they will
perform hereafter, ashamed now to forsake or underlive the credit they
have won, or, rather, not to exceed and obscure all that is gone before
by the luster of their following actions. Marcius, having a spirit of
this noble make, was ambitious always to surpass himself, and did
nothing, how extraordinary soever, but he thought he was bound to outdo
it at the next occasion; and ever desiring to give continual fresh
instances of his prowess he added one exploit to another, and heaped up
trophies upon trophies, so as to make it a matter of contest also among
his commanders, the later still vying with the earlier, which should
pay him the greatest honor and speak highest in his commendation. Of
all the numerous wars and conflicts in those days, there was not one
from which he returned without laurels and rewards. And, whereas others
made glory the end of their daring, the end of his glory was his
mother's gladness; the delight she took to hear him praised and to see
him crowned, and her weeping for joy in his embraces, rendered him, in
his own thoughts, the most honored and most happy person in the world.
Epaminondas is similarly said to have acknowledged his feeling, that it
was the greatest felicity of his whole life that his father and mother
survived to hear of his successful generalship and his victory at
Leuctra. And he had the advantage, indeed, to have both his parents
partake with him, and enjoy the pleasure of his good fortune. But
Marcius, believing himself bound to pay his mother Volumnia all that
gratitude and duty which would have belonged to his father, had he also
been alive, could never satiate himself in his tenderness and respect to
her. He took a wife, also, at her request and wish, and continued, even
after he had children, to live still with his mother, without parting
families.

The repute of his integrity and courage had, by this time, gained him a
considerable influence and authority in Rome, when the senate, favoring
the wealthier citizens, began to be at variance with the common people,
who made sad complaints of the rigorous and inhuman usage they received
from the money-lenders. For as many as were behind with them, and had
any sort of property, they stripped of all they had, by the way of
pledges and sales; and such as through former exactions were reduced
already to extreme indigence, and had nothing more to be deprived of,
these they led away in person and put their bodies under constraint,
notwithstanding the scars and wounds that they could show in attestation
of their public services in numerous campaigns; the last of which had
been against the Sabines, which they undertook upon a promise made by
their rich creditors that they would treat them with more gentleness for
the future, Marcus Valerius, the consul, having, by order from the
senate, engaged also for the performance of it. But when, after they
had fought courageously and beaten the enemy, there was, nevertheless,
no moderation or forbearance used, and the senate also professed to
remember nothing of that agreement, and sat without testifying the least
concern to see them dragged away like slaves and their goods seized upon
as formerly, there began now to be open disorders and dangerous meetings
in the city; and the enemy, also, aware of the popular confusion,
invaded and laid waste the country. And when the consuls now gave
notice, that all who were of an age to bear arms should make their
personal appearance, but found no one regard the summons, the members of
the government, then coming to consult what course should be taken,
were themselves again divided in opinion: some thought it most
advisable to comply a little in favor of the poor, by relaxing their
overstrained rights, and mitigating the extreme rigor of the law, while
others withstood this proposal; Marcius in particular, with more
vehemence than the rest, alleging that the business of money on either
side was not the main thing in question, urged that this disorderly
proceeding was but the first insolent step towards open revolt against
the laws, which it would become the wisdom of the government to check at
the earliest moment.

There had been frequent assemblies of the whole senate, within a small
compass of time, about this difficulty, but without any certain issue;
the poor commonalty, therefore, perceiving there was likely to be no
redress of their grievances, on a sudden collected in a body, and,
encouraging each other in their resolution, forsook the city with one
accord and seizing the hill which is now called the Holy Mount, sat down
by the river Anio, without committing any sort of violence or seditious
outrage, but merely exclaiming, as they went along, that they had this
long time past been, in fact, expelled and excluded from the city by the
cruelty of the rich; that Italy would everywhere afford them the benefit
of air and water and a place of burial, which was all they could expect
in the city, unless it were, perhaps, the privilege of being wounded and
killed in time of war for the defense of their creditors. The senate,
apprehending the consequences, sent the most moderate and popular men of
their own order to treat with them.

Menenius Agrippa, their chief spokesman, after much entreaty to the
people, and much plain speaking on behalf of the senate, concluded, at
length, with the celebrated fable. "It once happened," he said, "that
all the other members of a man mutinied against the stomach, which they
accused as the only idle, uncontributing part in the whole body, while
the rest were put to hardships and the expense of much labor to supply
and minister to its appetites. The stomach, however, merely ridiculed
the silliness of the members, who appeared not to be aware that the
stomach certainly does receive the general nourishment, but only to
return it again, and redistribute it amongst the rest. Such is the
case," he said, "ye citizens, between you and the senate. The counsels
and plans that are there duly digested, convey and secure to all of you,
your proper benefit and support."

A reconciliation ensued, the senate acceding to the request of the
people for the annual election of five protectors for those in need of
succor, the same that are now called the tribunes of the people; and the
first two they pitched upon were Junius Brutus and Sicinnius Vellutus,
their leaders in the secession.

The city being thus united, the commons stood presently to their arms,
and followed their commanders to the war with great alacrity. As for
Marcius, though he was not a little vexed himself to see the populace
prevail so far and gain ground of the senators, and might observe many
other patricians have the same dislike of the late concessions, he yet
besought them not to yield at least to the common people in the zeal and
forwardness they now allowed for their country's service, but to prove
that they were superior to them, not so much in power and riches as in
merit and worth.

The Romans were now at war with the Volscian nation, whose principal
city was Corioli; when, therefore, Cominius the consul had invested this
important place, the rest of the Volscians, fearing it would be taken,
mustered up whatever force they could from all parts, to relieve it,
designing to give the Romans battle before the city, and so attack them
on both sides. Cominius, to avoid this inconvenience, divided his army,
marching himself with one body to encounter the Volscians on their
approach from without, and leaving Titus Lartius, one of the bravest
Romans of his time, to command the other and continue the siege. Those
within Corioli, despising now the smallness of their number, made a
sally upon them, and prevailed at first, and pursued the Romans into
their trenches. Here it was that Marcius, flying out with a slender
company, and cutting those in pieces that first engaged him, obliged the
other assailants to slacken their speed; and then, with loud cries,
called upon the Romans to renew the battle. For he had, what Cato
thought a great point in a soldier, not only strength of hand and
stroke, but also a voice and look that of themselves were a terror to an
enemy. Divers of his own party now rallying and making up to him, the
enemies soon retreated; but Marcius, not content to see them draw off
and retire, pressed hard upon the rear, and drove them, as they fled
away in haste, to the very gates of their city; where, perceiving the
Romans to fall back from their pursuit, beaten off by the multitude of
darts poured in upon them from the walls, and that none of his followers
had the hardiness to think of falling in pellmell among the fugitives
and so entering a city full of enemies in arms, he, nevertheless, stood
and urged them to the attempt, crying out, that fortune had now set open
Corioli, not so much to shelter the vanquished, as to receive the
conquerors. Seconded by a few that were willing to venture with him, he
bore along through the crowd, made good his passage, and thrust himself
into the gate through the midst of them, nobody at first daring to
resist him. But when the citizens, on looking about, saw that a very
small number had entered, they now took courage, and came up and
attacked them. A combat ensued of the most extraordinary description,
in which Marcius, by strength of hand, and swiftness of foot, and daring
of soul, overpowering every one that he assailed, succeeded in driving
the enemy to seek refuge, for the most part, in the interior of the
town, while the remainder submitted, and threw down their arms; thus
affording Lartius abundant opportunity to bring in the rest of the
Romans with ease and safety.

Corioli being thus surprised and taken, the greater part of the soldiers
employed themselves in spoiling and pillaging it, while Marcius
indignantly reproached them, and exclaimed that it was a dishonorable
and unworthy thing, when the consul and their fellow-citizens had now
perhaps encountered the other Volscians, and were hazarding their lives
in battle, basely to misspend the time in running up and down for booty,
and, under a pretense of enriching themselves, keep out of danger. Few
paid him any attention, but, putting himself at the head of these, he
took the road by which the consul's army had marched before him,
encouraging his companions, and beseeching them, as they went along, not
to give up, and praying often to the gods, too, that he might be so happy
as to arrive before the fight was over, and come seasonably up to assist
Cominius, and partake in the peril of the action.

It was customary with the Romans of that age, when they were moving into
battle array, and were on the point of taking up their bucklers, and
girding their coats about them, to make at the same time an unwritten
will, or verbal testament, and to name who should be their heirs, in the
hearing of three or four witnesses. In this precise posture Marcius
found them at his arrival, the enemy being advanced within view.

They were not a little disturbed by his first appearance, seeing him
covered with blood and sweat, and attended with a small train; but when
he hastily made up to the consul with gladness in his looks, giving him
his hand, and recounting to him how the city had been taken, and when
they saw Cominius also embrace and salute him, every one took fresh
heart; those that were near enough hearing, and those that were at a
distance guessing, what had happened; and all cried out to be led to
battle. First, however, Marcius desired to know of him how the
Volscians had arrayed their army, and where they had placed their best
men, and on his answering that he took the troops of the Antiates in the
center to be their prime warriors, that would yield to none in bravery,
"Let me then demand and obtain of you," said Marcius, "that we may be
posted against them."  The consul granted the request, with much
admiration of his gallantry. And when the conflict began by the
soldiers darting at each other, and Marcius sallied out before the rest,
the Volscians opposed to him were not able to make head against him;
wherever he fell in, he broke their ranks, and made a lane through them;
but the parties turning again, and enclosing him on each side with their
weapons, the consul, who observed the danger he was in, dispatched some
of the choicest men he had for his rescue. The conflict then growing
warm and sharp about Marcius, and many falling dead in a little space,
the Romans bore so hard upon the enemies, and pressed them with such
violence, that they forced them at length to abandon their ground, and
to quit the field. And, going now to prosecute the victory, they
besought Marcius, tired out with his toils, and faint and heavy through
the loss of blood, that he would retire to the camp. He replied,
however, that weariness was not for conquerors, and joined with them in
the pursuit. The rest of the Volscian army was in like manner defeated,
great numbers killed, and no less taken captive.

The day after, when Marcius, with the rest of the army, presented
themselves at the consul's tent, Cominius rose, and having rendered all
due acknowledgment to the gods for the success of that enterprise,
turned next to Marcius, and first of all delivered the strongest
encomium upon his rare exploits, which he had partly been an eyewitness
of himself, in the late battle, and had partly learned from the
testimony of Lartius. And then he required him to choose a tenth part
of all the treasure and horses and captives that had fallen into their
hands, before any division should be made to others; besides which, he
made him the special present of a horse with trappings and ornaments, in
honor of his actions. The whole army applauded; Marcius, however,
stepped forth, and declaring his thankful acceptance of the horse, and
his gratification at the praises of his general, said, that all other
things, which he could only regard rather as mercenary advantages than
any significations of honor, he must waive, and should be content with
the ordinary proportion of such rewards. "I have only," said he; "one
special grace to beg, and this I hope you will not deny me. There was a
certain hospitable friend of mine among the Volscians, a man of probity
and virtue, who is become a prisoner, and from former wealth and freedom
is now reduced to servitude. Among his many misfortunes let my
intercession redeem him from the one of being sold as a common slave."
Such a refusal and such a request on the part of Marcius were followed
with yet louder acclamations; and he had many more admirers of this
generous superiority to avarice, than of the bravery he had shown in
battle. The very persons who conceived some envy and despite to see him
so specially honored, could not but acknowledge, that one who so nobly
could refuse reward, was beyond others worthy to receive it; and were
more charmed with that virtue which made him despise advantage, than
with any of those former actions that had gained him his title to it.
It is the hither accomplishment to use money well than to use arms; but
not to need it is more noble than to use it.

When the noise of approbation and applause ceased, Cominius, resuming,
said, "It is idle, fellow-soldiers, to force and obtrude those other
gifts of ours on one who is unwilling to accept them ; let us,
therefore, give him one of such a kind that he cannot well reject it;
let us pass a vote, I mean, that he shall hereafter be called
Coriolanus, unless you think that his performance at Corioli has itself
anticipated any such resolution."  Hence, therefore, he had his third
name of Coriolanus, making it all the plainer that Caius was a personal
proper name, and the second, or surname, Marcius, one common to his
house and family; the third being a subsequent addition which used to be
imposed either from some particular act or fortune, bodily
characteristic, or good quality of the bearer. Just as the Greeks, too,
gave additional names in old time, in some cases from some achievement,
Soter, for example, and Callinicus; or personal appearance, as Physcon
and Grypus; good qualities, Euergetes and Philadelphus; good fortune,
Eudaemon, the title of the second Battus. Several monarchs have also
had names given them in mockery, as Antigonus was called Doson, and
Ptolemy, Lathyrus. This sort of title was yet more common among the
Romans. One of the Metelli was surnamed Diadematus, because he walked
about for a long time with a bandage on his head, to conceal a scar; and
another, of the same family, got the name of Celer, from the rapidity he
displayed in giving a funeral entertainment of gladiators within a few
days after his father's death, his speed and energy in doing which was
thought extraordinary. There are some, too, who even at this day take
names from certain casual incidents at their nativity; a child that is
born when his father is away from home is called Proculus; or Postumus,
if after his decease; and when twins come into the world, and one dies
at the birth, the survivor has the name of Vopiscus. From bodily
peculiarities they derive not only their Syllas and Nigers, but their
Caeci and Claudii; wisely endeavoring to accustom their people not to
reckon either the loss of sight, or any other bodily misfortune, as a
matter of disgrace to them, but to answer to such names without shame,
as if they were really their own. But this discussion better befits
another place.

The war against the Volscians was no sooner at an end, than the popular
orators revived domestic troubles, and raised another sedition, without
any new cause of complaint or just grievance to proceed upon, but
merely turning the very mischiefs that unavoidably ensued from their
former contests into a pretext against the patricians. The greatest
part of their arable land had been left unsown and without tillage, and
the time of war allowing them no means or leisure to import provision
from other countries, there was an extreme scarcity. The movers of the
people then observing, that there was no corn to be bought, and that, if
there had been, they had no money to buy it, began to calumniate the
wealthy with false stories, and whisper it about, as if they, out of
malice, had purposely contrived the famine. Meanwhile, there came an
embassy from the Velitrani, proposing to deliver up their city to the
Romans, and desiring they would send some new inhabitants to people it,
as a late pestilential disease had swept away so many of the natives,
that there was hardly a tenth part remaining of their whole community.
This necessity of the Velitrani was considered by all more prudent
people as most opportune in the present state of affairs; since the
dearth made it needful to ease the city of its superfluous members, and
they were in hope also, at the same time, to dissipate the gathering
sedition by ridding themselves of the more violent and heated partisans,
and discharging, so to say, the elements of disease and disorder in the
state. The consuls, therefore, singled out such citizens to supply the
desolation at Velitrae, and gave notice to others, that they should be
ready to march against the Volscians, with the politic design of
preventing intestine broils by employment abroad, and in the hope, that
when rich as well as poor, plebeians and patricians, should be mingled
again in the same army and the same camp, and engage in one common
service for the public, it would mutually dispose them to reconciliation
and friendship.

But Sicinnius and Brutus, the popular orators, interposed, crying out,
that the consuls disguised the most cruel and barbarous action in the
world under that mild and plausible name of a colony, and were simply
precipitating so many poor citizens into a mere pit of destruction,
bidding them settle down in a country where the air was charged with
disease, and the ground covered with dead bodies, and expose themselves
to the evil influence of a strange and angered deity. And then, as if
it would not satisfy their hatred to destroy some by hunger, and offer
others to the mercy of a plague, they must proceed to involve them also
in a needless war of their own making, that no calamity might be
wanting to complete the punishment of the citizens for refusing to
submit to that of slavery to the rich.

By such addresses, the people were so possessed, that none of them would
appear upon the consular summons to be enlisted for the war; and they
showed entire aversion to the proposal for a new plantation; so that the
senate was at a loss what to say or do. But Marcius, who began now to
bear himself higher and to feel confidence in his past actions,
conscious, too, of the admiration of the best and greatest men of Rome,
openly took the lead in opposing the favorers of the people. The colony
was dispatched to Velitrae, those that were chosen by lot being
compelled to depart upon high penalties; and when they obstinately
persisted in refusing to enroll themselves for the Volscian service, he
mustered up his own clients, and as many others as could be wrought upon
by persuasion, and with these made an inroad into the territories of the
Antiates, where, finding a considerable quantity of corn, and collecting
much booty, both of cattle and prisoners, he reserved nothing for
himself in private, but returned safe to Rome, while those that ventured
out with him were seen laden with pillage, and driving their prey before
them. This sight filled those that had stayed at home with regret for
their perverseness, with envy at their fortunate fellow-citizens, and
with feelings of dislike to Marcius, and hostility to his growing
reputation and power, which might probably be used against the popular
interest.

Not long after he stood for the consulship; when, however, the people
began to relent and incline to favor him, being sensible what a shame it
would be to repulse and affront a man of his birth and merit, after he
had done them so many signal services. It was usual for those who stood
for offices among them to solicit and address themselves personally to
the citizens, presenting themselves in the forum with the toga on alone,
and no tunic under it; either to promote their supplications by the
humility of their dress, or that such as had received wounds might more
readily display those marks of their fortitude. Certainly, it was not
out of suspicion of bribery and corruption that they required all such
petitioners for their favor to appear ungirt and open, without any close
garment; as it was much later, and many ages after this, that buying and
selling crept in at their elections, and money became an ingredient in
the public suffrages; proceeding thence to attempt their tribunals, and
even attack their camps, till, by hiring the valiant, and enslaving iron
to silver, it grew master of the state, and turned their commonwealth
into a monarchy. For it was well and truly said that the first
destroyer of the liberties of a people is he who first gave them
bounties and largesses. At Rome the mischief seems to have stolen
secretly in, and by little and little, not being at once discerned and
taken notice of. It is not certainly known who the man was that did
there first either bribe the citizens, or corrupt the courts; whereas,
in Athens, Anytus, the son of Anthemion, is said to have been the first
that gave money to the judges, when on his trial, toward the latter end
of the Peloponnesian war, for letting the fort of Pylos fall into the
hands of the enemy; in a period while the pure and golden race of men
were still in possession of the Roman forum.

Marcius, therefore, as the fashion of candidates was showing the scars
and gashes that were still visible on his body, from the many conflicts
in which he had signalized himself during a service of seventeen years
together they were, so to say, put out of countenance at this display of
merit, and told one another that they ought in common modesty to create
him consul. But when the day of election was now come, and Marcius
appeared in the forum, with a pompous train of senators attending him;
and the patricians all manifested greater concern, and seemed to be
exerting greater efforts, than they had ever done before on the like
occasion, the commons then fell off again from the kindness they had
conceived for him, and in the place of their late benevolence, began to
feel something of indignation and envy; passions assisted by the fear
they entertained, that if a man of such aristocratic temper, and so
influential among the patricians, should be invested with the power
which that office would give him, he might employ it to deprive the
people of all that liberty which was yet left them. In conclusion, they
rejected Marcius. Two other names were announced, to the great
mortification of the senators, who felt as if the indignity reflected
rather upon themselves than on Marcius. He, for his part, could not
bear the affront with any patience. He had always indulged his temper,
and had regarded the proud and contentious element of human nature as a
sort of nobleness and magnanimity; reason and discipline had not imbued
him with that solidity and equanimity which enters so largely into the
virtues of the statesman. He had never learned how essential it is for
any one who undertakes public business, and desires to deal with
mankind, to avoid above all things that self-will, which, as Plato says,
belongs to the family of solitude; and to pursue, above all things, that
capacity so generally ridiculed, of submission to ill treatment.
Marcius, straightforward and direct, and possessed with the idea that to
vanquish and overbear all apposition is the true part of bravery, and
never imagining that it was the weakness and womanishness of his nature
that broke out, so to say, in these ulcerations of anger, retired, full
of fury and bitterness against the people. The young patricians, too,
all that were proudest and most conscious of their noble birth, had
always been devoted to his interest, and, adhering to him now, with a
fidelity that did him no good, aggravated his resentment with the
expression of their indignation and condolence. He had been their
captain, and their willing instructor in the arts of war, when out upon
expeditions, and their model in that true emulation and love of
excellence which makes men extol, without envy or jealousy, each other's
brave achievements.

In the midst of these distempers, a large quantity of corn reached Rome,
a great part bought up in Italy, but an equal amount sent as a present
from Syracuse, from Gelo, then reigning there. Many began now to hope
well of their affairs, supposing the city, by this means, would be
delivered at once, both of its want and discord. A council, therefore,
being presently held, the people came flocking about the senate-house,
eagerly awaiting the issue of that deliberation, expecting that the
market prices would now be less cruel, and that what had come as a gift
would be distributed as such. There were some within who so advised the
senate; but Marcius, standing up, sharply inveighed against those who
spoke in favor of the multitude, calling them flatterers of the rabble
traitors to the nobility, and alleging, that, by such gratifications,
they did but cherish those ill seeds of boldness and petulance that had
been sown among the people, to their own prejudice, which they should
have done well to observe and stifle at their first appearance, and not
have suffered the plebeians to grow so strong, by granting them
magistrates of such authority as the tribunes. They were, indeed, even
now formidable to the state, since everything they desired was granted
them; no constraint was put on their will; they refused obedience to the
consuls, and, overthrowing all law and magistracy, gave the title of
magistrate to their private factious leaders. "When things are come to
such a pass, for us to sit here and decree largesses and bounties for
them, like those Greeks where the populace is supreme and absolute, what
would it be else," said he, "but to take their disobedience into pay,
and maintain it for the common ruin of us all? They certainly cannot
look upon these liberalities as a reward of public service, which they
know they have so often deserted; nor yet of those secessions, by which
they openly renounced their country; much less of the calumnies and
slanders they have been always so ready to entertain against the senate;
but will rather conclude that a bounty which seems to have no other
visible cause or reason, must needs be the effect of our fear and
flattery; and will, therefore, set no limit to their disobedience, nor
ever cease from disturbances and sedition. Concession is mere madness;
if we have any wisdom and resolution at all, we shall, on the contrary,
never rest till we have recovered from them that tribunician power they
have extorted from us; as being a plain subversion of the consulship,
and a perpetual ground of separation in our city, that is no longer one,
as heretofore, but has in this received such a wound and rupture, as is
never likely to close and unite again, or suffer us to be of one mind,
and to give over inflaming our distempers, and being a torment to each
other."

Marcius, with much more to this purpose, succeeded, to an extraordinary
degree, in inspiring the younger men with the same furious sentiments,
and had almost all the wealthy on his side, who cried him up as the only
person their city had, superior alike to force and flattery; some of the
older men, however, opposed him, suspecting the consequences. As,
indeed, there came no good of it; for the tribunes, who were present,
perceiving how the proposal of Marcius took, ran out into the crowd with
exclamations, calling on the plebeians to stand together, and come in to
their assistance. The assembly met, and soon became tumultuous. The
sum of what Marcius had spoken, having been reported to the people,
excited them to such fury, that they were ready to break in upon the
senate. The tribunes prevented this, by laying all the blame on
Coriolanus, whom, therefore, they cited by their messengers to come
before them, and defend himself. And when he contemptuously repulsed
the officers who brought him the summons, they came themselves, with the
Aediles, or overseers of the market, proposing to carry him away by
force, and, accordingly, began to lay hold on his person. The
patricians, however, coming to his rescue, not only thrust off the
tribunes, but also beat the Aediles, that were their seconds in the
quarrel; night, approaching, put an end to the contest. But, as soon as
it was day, the consuls, observing the people to be highly exasperated,
and that they ran from all quarters and gathered in the forum, were
afraid for the whole city, so that, convening the senate afresh, they
desired them to advise how they might best compose and pacify the
incensed multitude by equitable language and indulgent decrees; since,
if they wisely considered the state of things, they would find that it
was no time to stand upon terms of honor, and a mere point of glory;
such a critical conjuncture called for gentle methods, and for temperate
and humane counsels. The majority, therefore, of the senators giving
way, the consuls proceeded to pacify the people in the best manner they
were able, answering gently to such imputations and charges as had been
cast upon the senate, and using much tenderness and moderation in the
admonitions and reproof they gave them. On the point of the price of
provisions, they said, there should be no difference at all between
them. When a great part of the commonalty was grown cool, and it
appeared from their orderly and peaceful behavior that they had been
very much appeased by what they had heard, the tribunes, standing up,
declared, in the name of the people, that since the senate was pleased
to act soberly and do them reason, they, likewise, should be ready to
yield in all that was fair and equitable on their side; they must
insist, however, that Marcius should give in his answer to the several
charges as follows: first, could he deny that he instigated the senate
to overthrow the government and annul the privileges of the people? and,
in the next place, when called to account for it, did he not disobey
their summons? and, lastly, by the blows and other public affronts to
the Aediles, had he not done all he could to commence a civil war?

These articles were brought in against him, with a design either to
humble Marcius, and show his submission if, contrary to his nature, he
should now court and sue the people; or, if he should follow his natural
disposition, which they rather expected from their judgment of his
character, then that he might thus make the breach final between himself
and the people.

He came, therefore, as it were, to make his apology, and clear himself;
in which belief the people kept silence, and gave him a quiet hearing.
But when, instead of the submissive and deprecatory language expected
from him, he began to use not only an offensive kind of freedom, seeming
rather to accuse than apologize, but, as well by the tone of his voice
as the air of his countenance, displayed a security that was not far
from disdain and contempt of them, the whole multitude then became
angry, and gave evident signs of impatience and disgust; and Sicinnius,
the most violent of the tribunes, after a little private conference with
his colleagues, proceeded solemnly to pronounce before them all, that
Marcius was condemned to die by the tribunes of the people, and bid the
Aediles take him to the Tarpeian rock, and without delay throw him
headlong from the precipice. When they, however, in compliance with the
order, came to seize upon his body, many, even of the plebeian party,
felt it to be a horrible and extravagant act; the patricians, meantime,
wholly beside themselves with distress and horror, hurried up with cries
to the rescue; and while some made actual use of their hands to hinder
the arrest, and, surrounding Marcius, got him in among them, others, as
in so great a tumult no good could be done by words, stretched out
theirs, beseeching the multitude that they would not proceed to such
furious extremities; and at length, the friends and acquaintance of the
tribunes, wisely perceiving how impossible it would be to carry off
Marcius to punishment without much bloodshed and slaughter of the
nobility, persuaded them to forbear everything unusual and odious; not
to dispatch him by any sudden violence, or without regular process, but
refer the cause to the general suffrage of the people. Sicinnius then,
after a little pause, turning to the patricians, demanded what their
meaning was, thus forcibly to rescue Marcius out of the people's hands,
as they were going to punish him; when it was replied by them, on the
other side, and the question put, "Rather, how came it into your minds,
and what is it you design, thus to drag one of the worthiest men of
Rome, without trial, to a barbarous and illegal execution?"  "Very
well," said Sicinnius, "you shall have no ground in this respect for
quarrel or complaint against the people. The people grant your request,
and your partisan shall be tried. We appoint you, Marcius," directing
his speech to him, "the third market-day ensuing, to appear and defend
yourself, and to try if you can satisfy the Roman citizens of your
innocence, who will then judge your case by vote."  The patricians were
content with such a truce and respite for that time, and gladly returned
home, having for the present brought off Marcius in safety.

During the interval before the appointed time (for the Romans hold their
sessions every ninth day, which from that cause are called nundinae in
Latin), a war fell out with the Antiates, likely to be of some
continuance, which gave them hope they might one way or other elude the
judgment. The people, they presumed, would become tractable, and their
indignation lessen and languish by degrees in so long a space, if
occupation and war did not wholly put it out of their mind. But when,
contrary to expectation, they made a speedy agreement with the people of
Antium, and the army came back to Rome, the patricians were again in
great perplexity, and had frequent meetings to consider how things might
be arranged, without either abandoning Marcius, or yet giving occasion
to the popular orators to create new disorders. Appius Claudius, whom
they counted among the senators most averse to the popular interest,
made a solemn declaration, and told them beforehand, that the senate
would utterly destroy itself and betray the government, if they should
once suffer the people to assume the authority of pronouncing sentence
upon any of the patricians; but the oldest senators and most favorable
to the people maintained, on the other side, that the people would not
be so harsh and severe upon them, as some were pleased to imagine, but
rather become more gentle and humane upon the concession of that power,
since it was not contempt of the senate, but the impression of being
contemned by it, which made them pretend to such a prerogative. Let
that be once allowed them as a mark of respect and kind feeling, and the
mere possession of this power of voting would at once dispossess them of
their animosity.

When, therefore, Marcius saw that the senate was in pain and suspense
upon his account, divided, as it were, betwixt their kindness for him
and their apprehensions from the people, he desired to know of the
tribunes what the crimes were they intended to charge him with, and what
the heads of the indictment they would oblige him to plead to before the
people; and being told by them that he was to be impeached for
attempting usurpation, and that they would prove him guilty of designing
to establish arbitrary government, stepping forth upon this, "Let me go
then," he said, "to clear myself from that imputation before an assembly
of them; I freely offer myself to any sort of trial, nor do I refuse any
kind of punishment whatsoever; only," he continued, "let what you now
mention be really made my accusation, and do not you play false with the
senate."  On their consenting to these terms, he came to his trial. But
when the people met together, the tribunes, contrary to all former
practice, extorted first, that votes should be taken, not by centuries,
but tribes; a change, by which the indigent and factious rabble, that
had no respect for honesty and justice, would be sure to carry it
against those who were rich and well known, and accustomed to serve the
state in war. In the next place, whereas they had engaged to prosecute
Marcius upon no other head but that of tyranny, which could never be
made out against him, they relinquished this plea, and urged instead,
his language in the senate against an abatement of the price of corn,
and for the overthrow of the tribunician power; adding further, as a new
impeachment, the distribution that was made by him of the spoil and
booty he had taken from the Antiates, when he overran their country,
which he had divided among those that had followed him, whereas it ought
rather to have been brought into the public treasury; which last
accusation did, they say, more discompose Marcius than all the rest, as
he had not anticipated he should ever be questioned on that subject,
and, therefore, was less provided with any satisfactory answer to it on
the sudden. And when, by way of excuse, he began to magnify the merits
of those who had been partakers with him in the action, those that had
stayed at home, being more numerous than the other, interrupted him with
outcries. In conclusion, when they came to vote, a majority of three
tribes condemned him; the penalty being perpetual banishment. The
sentence of his condemnation being pronounced, the people went away with
greater triumph and exultation than they had ever shown for any victory
over enemies; while the senate was in grief and deep dejection,
repenting now and vexed to the soul that they had not done and suffered
all things rather than give way to the insolence of the people, and
permit them to assume and abuse so great an authority. There was no need
then to look at men's dresses, or other marks of distinction, to know
one from another: any one who was glad was, beyond all doubt, a
plebeian; any one who looked sorrowful, a patrician.

Marcius alone, himself, was neither stunned nor humiliated. In mien,
carriage, and countenance, he bore the appearance of entire composure,
and while all his friends were full of distress, seemed the only man
that was not touched with his misfortune. Not that either reflection
taught him, or gentleness of temper made it natural for him, to submit:
he was wholly possessed, on the contrary, with a profound and deep-
seated fury, which passes with many for no pain at all. And pain, it is
true, transmuted, so to say, by its own fiery heat into anger, loses
every appearance of depression and feebleness; the angry man makes a
show of energy, as the man in a high fever does of natural heat, while,
in fact, all this action of the soul is but mere diseased palpitation,
distention, and inflammation. That such was his distempered state
appeared presently plainly enough in his actions. On his return home,
after saluting his mother and his wife, who were all in tears and full
of loud lamentations, and exhorting them to moderate the sense they had
of his calamity, he proceeded at once to the city gates, whither all the
nobility came to attend him; and so, not so much as taking anything
with him, or making any request to the company, he departed from them,
having only three or four clients with him. He continued solitary for a
few days in a place in the country, distracted with a variety of
counsels, such as rage and indignation suggested to him; and proposing
to himself no honorable or useful end, but only how he might best
satisfy his revenge on the Romans, he resolved at length to raise up a
heavy war against them from their nearest neighbors. He determined,
first to make trial of the Volscians, whom he knew to be still vigorous
and flourishing, both in men and treasure, and he imagined their force
and power was not so much abated, as their spite and auger increased, by
the late overthrows they had received from the Romans.

There was a man of Antium, called Tullus Aufidius, who, for his wealth
and bravery and the splendor of his family, had the respect and
privilege of a king among the Volscians, but whom Marcius knew to have a
particular hostility to himself, above all other Romans. Frequent
menaces and challenges had passed in battle between them, and those
exchanges of defiance to which their hot and eager emulation is apt to
prompt young soldiers had added private animosity to their national
feelings of opposition. Yet for all this, considering Tullus to have a
certain generosity of temper, and knowing that no Volscian, so much as
he, desired an occasion to requite upon the Romans the evils they had
done, he did what much confirms the saying, that

Hard and unequal is with wrath the strife,
Which makes us buy its pleasure with our life.

Putting on such a dress as would make him appear to any whom he might
meet most unlike what he really was, thus, like Ulysses, --

The town he entered of his mortal foes.

His arrival at Antium was about evening, and though several met him in
the streets, yet he passed along without being known to any, and went
directly to the house of Tullus, and, entering undiscovered, went up to
the fire-hearth, and seated himself there without speaking a word,
covering up his head. Those of the family could not but wonder, and yet
they were afraid either to raise or question him, for there was a
certain air of majesty both in his posture and silence, but they
recounted to Tullus, being then at supper, the strangeness of this
accident. He immediately rose from table and came in, and asked him who
he was, and for what business he came thither; and then Marcius,
unmuffling himself, and pausing awhile, "If," said he, "you cannot yet
call me to mind, Tullus, or do not believe your eyes concerning me, I
must of necessity be my own accuser. I am Caius Marcius, the author of
so much mischief to the Volscians; of which, were I seeking to deny it,
the surname of Coriolanus I now bear would be a sufficient evidence
against me. The one recompense I received for all the hardships and
perils I have gone through, was the title that proclaims my enmity to
your nation, and this is the only thing which is still left me. Of all
other advantages, I have been stripped and deprived by the envy and
outrage of the Roman people, and the cowardice and treachery of the
magistrates and those of my own order. I am driven out as an exile, and
become an humble suppliant at your hearth, not so much for safety and
protection (should I have come hither, had I been afraid to die?), as to
seek vengeance against those that expelled me; which, methinks, I have
already obtained, by putting myself into your hands. If, therefore, you
have really a mind to attack your enemies, come then, make use of that
affliction you see me in to assist the enterprise, and convert my
personal infelicity into a common blessing to the Volscians; as, indeed,
I am likely to be more serviceable in fighting for than against you,
with the advantage, which I now possess, of knowing all the secrets of
the enemy that I am attacking. But if you decline to make any further
attempts, I am neither desirous to live myself, nor will it be well in
you to preserve a person who has been your rival and adversary of old,
and now, when he offers you his service, appears unprofitable and
useless to you."

Tullus, on hearing this, was extremely rejoiced, and giving him his
right hand, exclaimed, "Rise, Marcius, and be of good courage; it is a
great happiness you bring to Antium, in the present you make us of
yourself; expect everything that is good from the Volscians."  He then
proceeded to feast and entertain him with every display of kindness, and
for several days after they were in close deliberation together on the
prospects of a war.

While this design was forming, there were great troubles and commotions
at Rome, from the animosity of the senators against the people,
heightened just now by the late condemnation of Marcius. Besides that,
their soothsayers and priests, and even private persons, reported
signs and prodigies not to be neglected; one of which is stated to have
occurred as follows: Titus Latinus, a man of ordinary condition, but
of a quiet and virtuous character, free from all superstitious fancies,
and yet more from vanity and exaggeration, had an apparition in his
sleep, as if Jupiter came and bade him tell the senate, that it was with
a bad and unacceptable dancer that they had headed his procession.
Having beheld the vision, he said, he did not much attend to it at the
first appearance; but after he had seen and slighted it a second and
third time, he had lost a hopeful son, and was himself struck with
palsy. He was brought into the senate on a litter to tell this, and the
story goes, that he had no sooner delivered his message there, but he at
once felt his strength return, and got upon his legs, and went home
alone, without need of any support. The senators, in wonder and
surprise, made a diligent search into the matter. That which his dream
alluded to was this: some citizen had, for some heinous offense, given
up a servant of his to the rest of his fellows, with charge to whip him
first through the market, and then to kill him; and while they were
executing this command, and scourging the wretch, who screwed and turned
himself into all manner of shapes and unseemly motions, through the pain
he was in, the solemn procession in honor of Jupiter chanced to follow
at their heels. Several of the attendants on which were, indeed,
scandalized at the sight, yet no one of them interfered, or acted
further in the matter than merely to utter some common reproaches and
execrations on a master who inflicted so cruel a punishment. For the
Romans treated their slaves with great humanity in these times, when,
working and laboring themselves, and living together among them, they
naturally were more gentle and familiar with them. It was one of the
severest punishments for a slave who had committed a fault, to have to
take the piece of wood which supports the pole of a wagon, and carry it
about through the neighborhood; a slave who had once undergone the shame
of this, and been thus seen by the household and the neighbors, had no
longer any trust or credit among them, and had the name of furcifer;
furca being the Latin word for a prop, or support.

When, therefore, Latinus had related his dream, and the senators were
considering who this disagreeable and ungainly dancer could be, some of
the company, having been struck with the strangeness of the punishment,
called to mind and mentioned the miserable slave who was lashed through
the streets and afterward put to death. The priests, when consulted,
confirmed the conjecture; the master was punished; and orders given for
a new celebration of the procession and the spectacles in honor of the
god. Numa, in other respects also a wise arranger of religious offices,
would seem to have been especially judicious in his direction, with a
view to the attentiveness of the people, that, when the magistrates or
priests performed any divine worship, a herald should go before, and
proclaim with a loud voice, Hoc age, Do this you are about, and so warn
them to mind whatever sacred action they were engaged in, and not suffer
any business or worldly avocation to disturb and interrupt it; most of
the things which men do of this kind, being in a manner forced from
them, and effected by constraint. It is usual with the Romans to
recommence their sacrifices and processions and spectacles, not only
upon such a cause as this, but for any slighter reason. If but one of
the horses which drew the chariots called Tensae, upon which the images
of their gods were placed, happened to fail and falter, or if the driver
took hold of the reins with his left hand, they would decree that the
whole operation should commence anew; and, in latter ages, one and the
same sacrifice was performed thirty times over, because of the
occurrence of some defect or mistake or accident in the service. Such
was the Roman reverence and caution in religious matters.

Marcius and Tullus were now secretly discoursing of their project with
the chief men of Antium, advising them to invade the Romans while they
were at variance among themselves. And when shame appeared to hinder
them from embracing the motion, as they had sworn to a truce and
cessation of arms for the space of two years, the Romans themselves soon
furnished them with a pretense, by making proclamation, out of some
jealousy or slanderous report, in the midst of the spectacles, that all
the Volscians who had come to see them should depart the city before
sunset. Some affirm that this was a contrivance of Marcius, who sent a
man privately to the consuls, falsely to accuse the Volscians of
intending to fall upon the Romans during the games, and to set the city
on fire. This public affront roused and inflamed their hostility to the
Romans, and Tullus, perceiving it, made his advantage of it, aggravating
the fact, and working on their indignation, till he persuaded them, at
last, to dispatch ambassadors to Rome, requiring the Romans to restore
that part of their country and those towns which they had taken from the
Volscians in the late war. When the Romans heard the message, they
indignantly replied, that the Volscians were the first that took up
arms, but the Romans would be the last to lay them down. This answer
being brought back, Tullus called a general assembly of the Volscians;
and the vote passing for a war, he then proposed that they should call
in Marcius, laying aside the remembrance of former grudges, and
assuring themselves that the services they should now receive from him
as a friend and associate, would abundantly outweigh any harm or damage
he had done them when he was their enemy. Marcius was accordingly
summoned, and having made his entrance, and spoken to the people, won
their good opinion of his capacity, his skill, counsel, and boldness,
not less by his present words than by his past actions. They joined him
in commission with Tullus, to have full power as general of their forces
in all that related to the war. And he, fearing lest the time that
would be requisite to bring all the Volscians together in full
preparation might be so long as to lose him the opportunity of action,
left order with the chief persons and magistrates of the city to provide
other things, while he himself, prevailing upon the most forward to
assemble and march out with him as volunteers without staying to be
enrolled, made a sudden inroad into the Roman confines, when nobody
expected him, and possessed himself of so much booty, that the Volscians
found they had more than they could either carry away or use in the
camp. The abundance of provision which he gained, and the waste and
havoc of the country which he made, were, however, of themselves and in
his account, the smallest results of that invasion; the great mischief
he intended, and his special object in all, was to increase at Rome the
suspicions entertained of the patricians, and to make them upon worse
terms with the people. With this view, while spoiling all the fields
and destroying the property of other men, he took special care to
preserve their farms and lands untouched, and would not allow his
soldiers to ravage there, or seize upon anything which belonged to
them. From hence their invectives and quarrels against one another
broke out afresh, and rose to a greater height than ever; the senators
reproaching those of the commonalty with their late injustice to
Marcius; while the plebeians, on their side, did not hesitate to accuse
them of having, out of spite and revenge, solicited him to this
enterprise, and thus, when others were involved in the miseries of a war
by their means, they sat like unconcerned spectators, as being furnished
with a guardian and protector abroad of their wealth and fortunes, in
the very person of the public enemy. After this incursion and exploit,
which was of great advantage to the Volscians, as they learned by it to
grow more hardy and to contemn their enemy, Marcius drew them off, and
returned in safety.

But when the whole strength of the Volscians was brought together into
the field, with great expedition and alacrity, it appeared so
considerable a body, that they agreed to leave part in garrison, for the
security of their towns, and with the other part to march against the
Romans. Marcius now desired Tullus to choose which of the two charges
would be most agreeable to him. Tullus answered, that since he knew
Marcius to be equally valiant with himself, and far more fortunate, he
would have him take the command of those that were going out to the war,
while he made it his care to defend their cities at home, and provide
all conveniences for the army abroad. Marcius thus reinforced, and much
stronger than before, moved first towards the city called Circaeum, a
Roman colony. He received its surrender, and did the inhabitants no
injury; passing thence, he entered and laid waste the country of the
Latins, where he expected the Romans would meet him, as the Latins were
their confederates and allies, and had often sent to demand succors from
them. The people, however, on their part, showing little inclination
for the service, and the consuls themselves being unwilling to run the
hazard of a battle, when the time of their office was almost ready to
expire, they dismissed the Latin ambassadors without any effect; so that
Marcius, finding no army to oppose him, marched up to their cities, and,
having taken by force Toleria, Lavici, Peda, and Bola, all of which
offered resistance, not only plundered their houses, but made a prey
likewise of their persons. Meantime, he showed particular regard for
all such as came over to his party, and, for fear they might sustain any
damage against his will, encamped at the greatest distance he could, and
wholly abstained from the lands of their property.

After, however, that he had made himself master of Bola, a town not
above ten miles from Rome, where he found great treasure, and put almost
all the adults to the sword; and when, on this, the other Volscians that
were ordered to stay behind and protect their cities, hearing of his
achievements and success, had not patience to remain any longer at home,
but came hastening in their arms to Marcius, saying that he alone was
their general and the sole commander they would own; with all this, his
name and renown spread throughout all Italy, and universal wonder
prevailed at the sudden and mighty revolution in the fortunes of two
nations which the loss and the accession of a single man had effected.

All at Rome was in great disorder; they were utterly averse from
fighting, and spent their whole time in cabals and disputes and
reproaches against each other; until news was brought that the enemy had
laid close siege to Lavinium, where were the images and sacred things of
their tutelar gods, and from whence they derived the origin of their
nation, that being the first city which Aeneas built in Italy. These
tidings produced a change as universal as it was extraordinary in the
thoughts inclinations of the people, but occasioned a yet stranger
revulsion of feeling among the patricians. The people now were for
repealing the sentence against Marcius, an calling him back into the
city; whereas the senate, being assembled to preconsider the decree,
opposed and finally rejected the proposal, either out of the mere humor
of contradicting and withstanding the people in whatever they should
desire, or because they were unwilling, perhaps, that he should owe his
restoration to their kindness or having now conceived a displeasure
against Marcius himself, who was bringing distress upon all alike,
though he had not been ill treated by all, and was become, declared
enemy to his whole country, though he knew well enough that the
principal and all the better men condoled with him, and suffered in his
injuries.

This resolution of theirs being made public, the people could proceed no
further, having no authority to pass anything by suffrage, and enact it
for a law, without a previous decree from the senate. When Marcius
heard of this, he was more exasperated than ever, and, quitting the
seige of Lavinium, marched furiously towards Rome, and encamped at a
place called the Cluilian ditches, about five miles from the city. The
nearness of his approach did, indeed, create much terror and
disturbance, yet it also ended their dissensions for the present; as
nobody now, whether consul or senator, durst any longer contradict the
people in their design of recalling Marcius but, seeing their women
running affrighted up and down the streets, and the old men at prayer in
every temple with tears and supplications, and that, in short, there was
a general absence among them both of courage and wisdom to provide for
their own safety, they came at last to be all of one mind, that the
people had been in the right to propose as they did a reconciliation
with Marcius, and that the senate was guilty of a fatal error to begin a
quarrel with him when it was a time to forget offenses, and they should
have studied rather to appease him. It was, therefore, unanimously
agreed by all parties, that ambassadors should be dispatched, offering
him return to his country, and desiring he would free them from the
terrors and distresses of the war. The persons sent by the senate with
this message were chosen out of his kindred and acquaintance, who
naturally expected a very kind reception at their first interview, upon
the score of that relation and their old familiarity and friendship with
him; in which, however, they were much mistaken. Being led through the
enemy's camp, they found him sitting in state amidst the chief men of
the Volscians, looking insupportably proud and arrogant. He bade them
declare the cause of their coming, which they did in the most gentle and
tender terms, and with a behavior suitable to their language. When they
had made an end of speaking, he returned them a sharp answer, full of
bitterness and angry resentment, as to what concerned himself, and the
ill usage he had received from them; but as general of the Volscians, he
demanded restitution of the cities and the lands which had been seized
upon during the late war, and that the same rights and franchises should
be granted them at Rome, which had been before accorded to the Latins;
since there could be no assurance that a peace would be firm and
lasting, without fair and just conditions on both sides. He allowed
them thirty days to consider and resolve.

The ambassadors being departed, he withdrew his forces out of the Roman
territory. This, those of the Volscians who had long envied his
reputation, and could not endure to see the influence he had with the
people laid hold of, as the first matter of complaint against him. Among
them was also Tullus himself, not for any wrong done him personally by
Marcius, but through the weakness incident to human nature. He could
not help feeling mortified to find his own glory thus totally obscured,
and himself overlooked and neglected now by the Volscians, who had so
great an opinion of their new leader that he alone was all to them,
while other captains, they thought, should be content with that share of
power, which he might think fit to accord. From hence the first seeds
of complaint and accusation were scattered about in secret, and the
malcontents met and heightened each other's indignation, saying, that to
retreat as he did was in effect to betray and deliver up, though not
their cities and their arms, yet what was as bad, the critical times and
opportunities for action, on which depend the preservation or the loss
of everything else; since in less than thirty days' space, for which he
had given a respite from the war, there might happen the greatest
changes in the world. Yet Marcius spent not any part of the time idly,
but attacked the confederates of the enemy ravaged their land, and took
from them seven great and populous cities in that interval. The Romans,
in the meanwhile, durst not venture out to their relief; but were
utterly fearful, and showed no more disposition or capacity for action,
than if their bodies had been struck with a palsy, and become destitute
of sense and motion. But when the thirty days were expired, and Marcius
appeared again with his whole army, they sent another embassy- to
beseech him that he would moderate his displeasure, and would withdraw
the Volscian army, and then make any proposals he thought best for both
parties; the Romans would make no concessions to menaces, but if it
were his opinion that the Volscians ought to have any favor shown them,
upon laying down their arms they might obtain all they could in reason
desire.

The reply of Marcius was, that he should make no answer to this as
general of the Volscians, but, in the quality still of a Roman citizen,
he would advise and exhort them, as the case stood, not to carry it so
high, but think rather of just compliance, and return to him, before
three days were at an end, with a ratification of his previous demands;
otherwise, they must understand that they could not have any further
freedom of passing through his camp upon idle errands.

When the ambassadors were come back, and had acquainted the senate with
the answer, seeing the whole state now threatened as it were by a
tempest, and the waves ready to overwhelm them, they were forced, as we
say in extreme perils, to let down the sacred anchor. A decree was
made, that the whole order of their priests, those who initiated in the
mysteries or had the custody of them, and those who, according to the
ancient practice of the country, divined from birds, should all and
every one of them go in full procession to Marcius with their pontifical
array, and the dress and habit which they respectively used in their
several functions, and should urge him, as before, to withdraw his
forces, and then treat with his countrymen in favor of the Volscians.
He consented so far, indeed, as to give the deputation an admittance
into his camp, but granted nothing at all, nor so much as expressed
himself more mildly; but, without capitulating or receding, bade them
once for all choose whether they would yield or fight, since the old
terms were the only terms of peace. When this solemn application proved
ineffectual, the priests, too, returning unsuccessful, they determined to
sit still within the city, and keep watch about their walls, intending
only to repulse the enemy, should he offer to attack them, and placing
their hopes chiefly in time and in extraordinary accidents of fortune;
as to themselves, they felt incapable of doing any thing for their own
deliverance; mere confusion and terror and ill-boding reports possessed
the whole city; till at last a thing happened not unlike what we so
often find represented, without, however, being accepted as true by
people in general, in Homer. On some great and unusual occasion we find
him say: --

But him the blue-eyed goddess did inspire;

and elsewhere: --

But some immortal turned my mind away,
To think what others of the deed would say;

and again: --

Were 't his own thought or were 't a god's command.

People are apt, in such passages, to censure and disregard the poet, as
if, by the introduction of mere impossibilities and idle fictions, he
were denying the action of a man's own deliberate thought and free
choice; which is not, in the least, the case in Homer's representation,
where the ordinary, probable, and habitual conclusions that common
reason leads to are continually ascribed to our own direct agency. He
certainly says frequently enough: --

But I consulted with my own great soul;

or, as in another passage: --

He spoke. Achilles, with quick pain possessed,
Revolved two purposes in his strong breast;

and in a third: --

-- Yet never to her wishes won
The just mind of the brave Bellerophon.

But where the act is something out of the way and extraordinary, and
seems in a manner to demand some impulse of divine possession and sudden
inspiration to account for it here he does introduce divine agency, not
to destroy, but to prompt the human will; not to create in us another
agency, but offering images to stimulate our own; images that in no sort
or kind make our action involuntary, but give occasion rather to
spontaneous action, aided and sustained by feelings of confidence and
hope. For either we must totally dismiss and exclude divine influences
from every kind of causality and origination in what we do, or else what
other way can we conceive in which divine aid and cooperation can act?
Certainly we cannot suppose that the divine beings actually and
literally turn our bodies and direct our hands and our feet this way or
that, to do what is right: it is obvious that they must actuate the
practical and elective element of our nature, by certain initial
occasions, by images presented to the imagination, and thoughts
suggested to the mind, such either as to excite it to, or avert and
withhold it from, any particular course.

In the perplexity which I have described, the Roman women went, some to
other temples, but the greater part, and the ladies of highest rank, to
the altar of Jupiter Capitolinus. Among these suppliants was Valeria,
sister to the great Poplicola, who did the Romans eminent service both
in peace and war. Poplicola himself was now deceased, as is told in the
history of his life; but Valeria lived still, and enjoyed great respect
and honor at Rome, her life and conduct no way disparaging her birth.
She, suddenly seized with the sort of instinct or emotion of mind which
I have described, and happily lighting, not without divine guidance,
on the right expedient, both rose herself, and bade the others rise,
and went directly with them to the house of Volumnia, the mother of
Marcius. And coming in and finding her sitting with her daughter-in-
law, and with her little grandchildren on her lap, Valeria, then
surrounded by her female companions, spoke in the name of them all:--

"We that now make our appearance, O Volumnia, and you, Vergilia, are
come as mere women to women, not by direction of the senate, or an order
from the consuls, or the appointment of any other magistrate; but the
divine being himself, as I conceive, moved to compassion by prayers,
prompted us to visit you in a body, and request a thing on which our own
and the common safety depends, and which, if you consent to it, will
raise your glory above that of the daughters of the Sabines, who won
over their fathers and their husbands from mortal enmity to peace and
friendship. Arise and come with us to Marcius; join in our
supplication, and bear for your country this true and just testimony on
her behalf: that, notwithstanding the many mischiefs that have been
done her, yet she has never outraged you, nor so much as thought of
treating you ill, in all her resentment, but does now restore you safe
into his hands, though there be small likelihood she should obtain from
him any equitable terms."

The words of Valeria were seconded by the acclamations of the other
women, to which Volumnia made answer:--

"I and Vergilia, my countrywomen, have an equal share with you all in
the common miseries, and we have the additional sorrow, which is wholly
ours, that we have lost the merit and good fame of Marcius, and see his
person confined, rather than protected, by the arms of the enemy. Yet I
account this the greatest of all misfortunes, if indeed the affairs of
Rome be sunk to so feeble a state as to have their last dependence upon
us. For it is hardly imaginable he should have any consideration left
for us, when he has no regard for the country which he was wont to
prefer before his mother and wife and children. Make use, however, of
our service; and lead us, if you please, to him; we are able, if nothing
more, at least to spend our last breath in making suit to him for our
country."

Having spoken thus, she took Vergilia by the hand, and the young
children, and so accompanied them to the Volscian camp. So lamentable a
sight much affected the enemies themselves, who viewed them in
respectful silence. Marcius was then sitting in his place, with his
chief officers about him, and, seeing the party of women advance toward
them, wondered what should be the matter; but perceiving at length that
his mother was at the head of them, he would fain have hardened himself
in his former inexorable temper, but, overcome by his feelings, and
confounded at what he saw, he did not endure they should approach him
sitting in state, but came down hastily to meet them, saluting his
mother first, and embracing her a long time, and then his wife and
children, sparing neither tears nor caresses, but suffering himself to
be borne away and carried headlong, as it were, by the impetuous
violence of his passion.

When he had satisfied himself, and observed that his mother Volumnia was
desirous to say something, the Volscian council being first called in,
he heard her to the following effect: "Our dress and our very persons,
my son, might tell you, though we should say nothing ourselves, in how
forlorn a condition we have lived at home since your banishment and
absence from us; and now consider with yourself, whether we may not pass
for the most unfortunate of all women, to have that sight, which should
be the sweetest that we could see, converted, through I know not what
fatality, to one of all others the most formidable and dreadful, --
Volumnia to behold her son, and Vergilia her husband, in arms against
the walls of Rome. Even prayer itself, whence others gain comfort and
relief in all manner of misfortunes, is that which most adds to our
confusion and distress; since our best wishes are inconsistent with
themselves, nor can we at the same time petition the gods for Rome's
victory and your preservation, but what the worst of our enemies would
imprecate as a curse, is the very object of our vows. Your wife and
children are under the sad necessity, that they must either be deprived
of you, or of their native soil. As for myself, I am resolved not to
wait till war shall determine this alternative for me; but if I cannot
prevail with you to prefer amity and concord to quarrel and hostility,
and to be the benefactor to both parties, rather than the destroyer of
one of them, be assured of this from me, and reckon steadfastly upon it,
that you shall not be able to reach your country, unless you trample
first upon the corpse of her that brought you into life. For it will be
ill in me to wait and loiter in the world till the day come wherein I
shall see a child of mine, either led in triumph by his own countrymen,
or triumphing over them. Did I require you to save your country by
ruining the Volscians, then, I confess, my son, the case would be hard
for you to solve. It is base to bring destitution on our fellow-
citizens; it is unjust to betray those who have placed their confidence
in us. But, as it is, we do but desire a deliverance equally expedient
for them and us; only more glorious and honorable on the Volscian side,
who, as superior in arms, will be thought freely to bestow the two
greatest of blessings, peace and friendship, even when they themselves
receive the same. If we obtain these, the common thanks will be chiefly
due to you as the principal cause; but if they be not granted, you alone
must expect to bear the blame from both nations. The chance of all war
is uncertain, yet thus much is certain in the present, that you, by
conquering Rome, will only get the reputation of having undone your
country; but if the Volscians happen to be defeated under your conduct,
then the world will say, that, to satisfy a revengeful humor, you
brought misery on your friends and patrons."

Marcius listened to his mother while she spoke, without answering her a
word; and Volumnia, seeing him stand mute also for a long time after she
had ceased, resumed: "O my son," said she, "what is the meaning of this
silence? Is it a duty to postpone everything to a sense of injuries,
and wrong to gratify a mother in a request like this? Is it the
characteristic of a great man to remember wrongs that have been done
him, and not the part of a great and good man to remember benefits such
as those that children receive from parents, and to requite them with
honor and respect? You, methinks, who are so relentless in the
punishment of the ungrateful, should not be more careless than others to
be grateful yourself. You have punished your country already; you have
not yet paid your debt to me. Nature and religion, surely, unattended
by any constraint, should have won your consent to petitions so worthy
and so just as these; but if it must be so, I will even use my last
resource."  Having said this, she threw herself down at his feet, as did
also his wife and children; upon which Marcius, crying out, "O mother!
what is it you have done to me?" raised her up from the ground, and
pressing her right hand with more than ordinary vehemence, "You have
gained a victory," said he, "fortunate enough for the Romans, but
destructive to your son; whom you, though none else, have defeated."
After which, and a little private conference with his mother and his
wife, he sent them back again to Rome, as they desired of him.

The next morning, he broke up his camp, and led the Volscians homeward,
variously affected with what he had done; some of them complaining of
him and condemning his act, others, who were inclined to a peaceful
conclusion, unfavorable to neither. A third party, while much disliking
his proceedings, yet could not look upon Marcius as a treacherous
person, but thought it pardonable in him to be thus shaken and driven to
surrender at last, under such compulsion. None, however, opposed his
commands; they all obediently followed him, though rather from
admiration of his virtue, than any regard they now had to his authority.
The Roman people, meantime, more effectually manifested how much fear
and danger they had been in while the war lasted, by their deportment
after they were freed from it. Those that guarded the walls had no
sooner given notice that the Volscians were dislodged and drawn off, but
they set open all their temples in a moment, and began to crown
themselves with garlands and prepare for sacrifice, as they were wont to
do upon tidings brought of any signal victory. But the joy and
transport of the whole city was chiefly remarkable in the honors and
marks of affection paid to the women, as well by the senate as the
people in general; every one declaring that they were, beyond all
question, the instruments of the public safety. And the senate having
passed a decree that whatsoever they would ask in the way of any favor
or honor should be allowed and done for them by the magistrates, they
demanded simply that a temple might be erected to Female Fortune, the
expense of which they offered to defray out of their own contributions,
if the city would be at the cost of sacrifices, and other matters
pertaining to the due honor of the gods, out of the common treasury.
The senate, much commending their public spirit, caused the temple to be
built and a statue set up in it at the public charge; they, however,
made up a sum among themselves, for a second image of Fortune, which
the Romans say uttered, as it was putting up, words to this effect,
"Blessed of the gods, O women, is your gift."

These words they profess were repeated a second time, expecting our
belief for what seems pretty nearly an impossibility. It may be
possible enough, that statues may seem to sweat, and to run with tears,
and to stand with certain dewy drops of a sanguine color; for timber and
stones are frequently known to contract a kind of scurf and rottenness,
productive of moisture; and various tints may form on the surfaces, both
from within and from the action of the air outside; and by these signs
it is not absurd to imagine that the deity may forewarn us. It may
happen, also, that images and statues may sometimes make a noise not
unlike that of a moan or groan, through a rupture or violent internal
separation of the parts; but that an articulate voice, and such express
words, and language so clear and exact and elaborate, should proceed
from inanimate things, is, in my judgment, a thing utterly out of
possibility. For it was never known that either the soul of man, or the
deity himself, uttered vocal sounds and language, alone, without an
organized body and members fitted for speech. But where history seems
in a manner to force our assent by the concurrence of numerous and
credible witnesses, we are to conclude that an impression distinct from
sensation affects the imaginative part of our nature, and then carries
away the judgment, so as to believe it to be a sensation: just as in
sleep we fancy we see and hear, without really doing either. Persons,
however, whose strong feelings of reverence to the deity, and tenderness
for religion, will not allow them to deny or invalidate anything of
this kind, have certainly a strong argument for their faith, in the
wonderful and transcendent character of the divine power; which admits
no manner of comparison with ours, either in its nature or its action,
the modes or the strength of its operations. It is no contradiction to
reason that it should do things that we cannot do, and effect what for
us is impracticable: differing from us in all respects, in its acts yet
more than in other points we may well believe it to be unlike us and
remote from us. Knowledge of divine things for the most part, as
Heraclitus says, is lost to us by incredulity.

When Marcius came back to Antium, Tullus, who thoroughly hated and
greatly feared him, proceeded at once to contrive how he might
immediately dispatch him; as, if he escaped now, he was never likely to
give him such another advantage. Having, therefore, got together and
suborned several partisans against him, he required Marcius to resign
his charge, and give the Volscians all account of his administration.
He, apprehending the danger of a private condition, while Tullus held
the office of general and exercised the greatest power among his fellow-
citizens, made answer, that he was ready to lay down his commission,
whenever those from whose common authority he had received it, should
think fit to recall it; and that in the meantime he was ready to give
the Antiates satisfaction, as to all particulars of his conduct, if they
were desirous of it.

An assembly was called, and popular speakers, as had been concerted,
came forward to exasperate and incense the multitude; but when Marcius
stood up to answer, the more unruly and tumultuous part of the people
became quiet on a sudden, and out of reverence allowed him to speak
without the least disturbance; while all the better people, and such as
were satisfied with a peace, made it evident by their whole behavior,
that they would give him a favorable hearing, and judge and pronounce
according to equity.

Tullus, therefore, began to dread the issue of the defense he was going
to make for himself; for he was an admirable speaker, and the former
services he had done the Volscians had procured and still preserved for
him greater kindness than could be outweighed by any blame for his late
conduct. Indeed, the very accusation itself was a proof and testimony
of the greatness of his merits, since people could never have complained
or thought themselves wronged, because Rome was not brought into their
power, but that by his means they had come so near to taking it. For
these reasons, the conspirators judged it prudent not to make any
further delays, nor to test the general feeling; but the boldest of
their faction, crying out that they ought not to listen to a traitor,
nor allow him still to retain office and play the tyrant among them,
fell upon Marcius in a body, and slew him there, none of those that were
present offering to defend him. But it quickly appeared that the action
was in nowise approved by the majority of the Volscians, who hurried out
of their several cities to show respect to his corpse; to which they
gave honorable interment, adorning his sepulchre with arms and trophies,
as the monument of a noble hero and a famous general. When the Romans
heard tidings of his death, they gave no other signification either of
honor or of anger towards him, but simply granted the request of the
women, that they might put themselves into mourning and bewail him for
ten months, as the usage was upon the loss of a father or a son or a
brother; that being the period fixed for the longest lamentation by the
laws of Numa Pompilius, as is more amply told in the account of him.

Marcius was no sooner deceased, but the Volscians felt the need of his
assistance. They quarreled first with the Aequians, their confederates
and their friends, about the appointment of the general of their joint
forces, and carried their dispute to the length of bloodshed and
slaughter; and were then defeated by the Romans in a pitched battle,
where not only Tullus lost his life, but the principal flower of their
whole army was cut in pieces; so that they were forced to submit and
accept of peace upon very dishonorable terms, becoming subjects of Rome,
and pledging themselves to submission.

COMPARISON OF ALCIBIADES WITH CORIOLANUS

Having described all their actions that seem to deserve commemoration,
their military ones, we may say, incline the balance very decidedly upon
neither side. They both, in pretty equal measure, displayed on numerous
occasions the daring and courage of the soldier, and the skill and
foresight of the general; unless, indeed, the fact that Alcibiades was
victorious and successful in many contests both by sea and land, ought
to gain him the title of a more complete commander. That so long as
they remained and held command in their respective countries, they
eminently sustained, and when they were driven into exile, yet more
eminently damaged the fortunes of those countries, is common to both.
All the sober citizens felt disgust at the petulance, the low flattery,
and base seductions which Alcibiades, in his public life, allowed
himself to employ with the view of winning the people's favor; and the
ungraciousness, pride, and oligarchical haughtiness which Marcius, on
the other hand, displayed in his, were the abhorrence of the Roman
populace. Neither of these courses can be called commendable; but a man
who ingratiates himself by indulgence and flattery, is hardly so
censurable as one who, to avoid the appearance of flattering, insults.
To seek power by servility to the people is a disgrace, but to maintain
it by terror, violence, and oppression, is not a disgrace only, but an
injustice.

Marcius, according to our common conceptions of his character, was
undoubtedly simple and straightforward; Alcibiades, unscrupulous as a
public man, and false. He is more especially blamed for the
dishonorable and treacherous way in which, as Thucydides relates, he
imposed upon the Lacedaemonian ambassadors, and disturbed the
continuance of the peace. Yet this policy, which engaged the city again
in war, nevertheless placed it in a powerful and formidable position, by
the accession, which Alcibiades obtained for it, of the alliance of
Argos and Mantinea. And Coriolanus also, Dionysius relates, used unfair
means to excite war between the Romans and the Volscians, in the false
report which he spread about the visitors at the Games; and the motive
of this action seems to make it the worse of the two; since it was not
done, like the other, out of ordinary political jealousy, strife, and
competition. Simply to gratify anger, from which, as Ion says, no one
ever yet got any return, he threw whole districts of Italy into
confusion, and sacrificed to his passion against his country numerous
innocent cities. It is true, indeed, that Alcibiades also, by his
resentment, was the occasion of great disasters to his country, but he
relented as soon as he found their feelings to be changed; and after he
was driven out a second time, so far from taking pleasure in the errors
and inadvertencies of their commanders, or being indifferent to the
danger they were thus incurring, he did the very thing that Aristides is
so highly commended for doing to Themistocles: he came to the generals
who were his enemies, and pointed out to them what they ought to do.
Coriolanus, on the other hand, first of all attacked the whole body of
his countrymen, though only one portion of them had done him any wrong,
while the other, the better and nobler portion, had actually suffered,
as well as sympathized, with him. And, secondly, by the obduracy with
which he resisted numerous embassies and supplications, addressed in
propitiation of his single anger and offense, he showed that it had been
to destroy and overthrow, not to recover and regain his country, that he
had excited bitter and implacable hostilities against it. There is,
indeed, one distinction that may be drawn. Alcibiades, it may be said,
was not safe among the Spartans, and had the inducements at once of fear
and of hatred to lead him again to Athens; whereas Marcius could not
honorably have left the Volscians, when they were behaving so well to
him: he, in the command of their forces and the enjoyment of their
entire confidence, was in a very different position from Alcibiades,
whom the Lacedaemonians did not so much wish to adopt into their
service, as to use, and then abandon. Driven about from house to house
in the city, and from general to general in the camp, the latter had no
resort but to place himself in the hands of Tisaphernes; unless, indeed,
we are to suppose that his object in courting favor with him was to
avert the e