and the exhibitions of individual nobles. He lavished the superfluous
treasures of the state upon public festivals, stately processions, and
theatrical pageants. As if desirous of elevating the commons to be
themselves a nobility, all by which he appealed to their favour served
to refine their taste and to inspire the meanest Athenian with a sense
of the Athenian grandeur. It was said by his enemies, and the old
tale has been credulously repeated, that his own private fortune not
allowing him to vie with the wealthy nobles whom he opposed, it was to
supply his deficiencies from the public stock that he directed some
part of the national wealth to the encouragement of the national arts
and the display of the national magnificence. But it is more than
probable that it was rather from principle than personal ambition that
Pericles desired to discountenance and eclipse the interested bribes
to public favour with which Cimon and others had sought to corrupt the
populace. Nor was Pericles without the means or the spirit to devote
his private fortune to proper objects of generosity. "It was his
wealth and his prudence," says Plutarch, when, blaming the
improvidence of Anaxagoras, "that enabled him to relieve the
distressed." What he spent in charity he might perhaps have spent
more profitably in display, had he not conceived that charity was the
province of the citizen, magnificence the privilege of the state. It
was in perfect consonance with the philosophy that now began to spread
throughout Greece, and with which the mind of this great political
artist was so deeply imbued, to consider that the graces ennobled the
city they adorned, and that the glory of a state was intimately
connected with the polish of the people.

II. While, at home, the divisions of the state were progressing to
that point in which the struggle between the opposing leaders must
finally terminate in the ordeal of the ostracism--abroad, new causes