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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 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 squillhead, from the squill, or sea-onion. One of the comedywriters, Cratinus, in the Chirons, tells us that ancient Time took Sedition to wife,

And with her brought to life
That tyrant far-famed,

Whom the gods the supreme skull-compeller* have named.

And in the Nemesis addresses him, Come, Jove, great god-head, come. Teleclides, another, says, that now, in embarrassment with political difficulties, he sits in the city fainting underneath the weight of his head, and now again from his huge gallery of a head sends forth trouble to the state. And a third, Eupolis, in the co

* Nephelegereta is in Homer's verse the continual epithet of Zeus, or Jove, the god of thunder, the gatherer and accumulator of the clouds, the cloud-compelling, (compellere being the Latin for gathering cattle,) and Kephalegéreta (from képhale, a head) is Cratinus's slight variation. Cratinus is the comic poet of the time of Pericles; he lived from before the Persian some way on into the Peloponnesian War; Eupolis is later, and Plato later still, both cotemporary with Aristophanes. They are rather of the generation of Alcibiades. Teleclides and Hermippus are earlier, and write in his lifetime.

medy 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.

4 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 well practised in all accomplishments of this kind by Pythoclides. Damon, it is not unlikely, being a consummate sophist, out of policy sheltered himself under the profession of music to conceal from people in general his skill in other things, and in reality attended Pericles, the young athlete of politics, so to say, as his training-master in exercises of that sort. 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 favourer of arbitrary power, and became an object for the jests of the stage. As, for instance, Plato, the comic poet, introduces a character who questions him

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Tell me, if you please,

Since you're the Chiron who taught Pericles.

Pericles was also a hearer of Zeno the Eleatic, who treated of natural philosophy in the same manner as Parmenides, but had likewise perfected himself in an

*Music is in Greek the literary, as opposed to Gymnastic, the bodily training; meaning all that has to do with the Muses, and including general reading and writing, and the elements of science.

art of his own for refuting and silencing opponents in argument by making them contradict themselves, as Timon of Phlius describes it,

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 Clazomena; whom the men of those times called by the name of 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 yet 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 5 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, far removed from the base and dishonest buffooneries of mob-eloquence, but besides this a composure of countenance, and a serenity and quietness in his postures and movementst, which no

*Nous in Greek.

The orators in the next generation gesticulated and threw their arms about, and walked up and down the speaker's stand. Pericles kept rigidly to the old custom: that the speaker should not so much as move his right hand out of the folds of his dress.

occurrence whilst he was speaking could distu sustained and even tone of voice; and various oth vantages of a similar kind, which produced the gr effect on his hearers. Once, while being reviled a spoken of all day long in his own hearing by som and abandoned fellow in the open city-place, he was engaged in the despatch of some urgent he continued his business in perfect silence, and i evening returned home composedly, the man still ging him at the heels, and assailing him all th with abuse and foul language; and stepping in house, it being by this time dark, he ordered one servants to take a light and to go along with the and see him home. Ion, it is true, the dramatic says that Pericles's manner in company was som pretentious and pompous; and that into his high b there entered a good deal of slightingness and sc others; he reserves his commendations for Cimon' and pliancy and natural grace in society. Upo however, who must needs make virtue, like a sh tragedies, include some comic scenes*, we sha altogether rely. Zeno used to bid those who Pericles's gravity the affectation of an impostor and affect the like themselves; inasmuch as this counterfeiting might in time insensibly instil into a real love and knowledge of these noble qualities

Plutarch's words allude to this, which he mentions mc tinctly elsewhere.

*Three tragedies represented in succession were follo a burlesque, the so-called satyric drama, which has no con it must be remembered, with the moral satire of the R but takes its name from the grotesque satyr of the Greek

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, ready to believe anything to be 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 observing how the horn had grown strong and solid out of the middle of the forehead, gave it as his judgment, that, there being at that time two potent 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 this token had shown itself. But that Anaxagoras, cleaving the skull in sunder, showed the standersby 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, I think, 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

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