attested the sense entertained of the value of his conquest. He
pronounced upon those who had fallen in the war a funeral oration.
[318] When he descended from the rostrum, the women crowded round and
showered fillets and chaplets on the eloquent victor. Elpinice, the
sister of Cimon, alone shared not the general enthusiasm. "Are these
actions," she said to Pericles, "worthy of chaplets and garlands?
actions purchased by the loss of many gallant citizens--not won
against the Phoenician and the Mede, like those of Cimon, but by the
ruin of a city united with ourselves in amity and origin." The ready
minister replied to the invective of Elpinice by a line from
Archilochus, which, in alluding to the age and coquetry of the lady,
probably answered the oratorical purpose of securing the laugh on his
own side. [319]

While these events confirmed the authority of Athens and the Athenian
government, a power had grown up within the city that assumed a right,
the grave assertion of which without the walls would have been deeply
felt and bitterly resented--a power that sat in severe and derisive
judgment upon Athens herself, her laws, her liberties, her mighty
generals, her learned statesmen, her poets, her sages, and her
arrogant democracy--a power that has come down to foreign nations and
distant ages as armed with irresistible weapons--which now is
permitted to give testimony, not only against individuals, but nations
themselves, but which, in that time, was not more effective in
practical results than at this day a caricature in St. James's-street,
or a squib in a weekly newspaper--a power which exposed to relentless
ridicule, before the most susceptible and numerous tribunal, the
loftiest names in rank, in wisdom, and in genius--and which could not
have deprived a beggar of his obol or a scavenger of his office: THE
POWER OF THE COMIC MUSE.