Greek Leaders

Introduction

The debt which the modern world owes to the best age of ancient Greece is well summed up in some words which the late Professor Green wrote in his "Prolegomena to Ethics":—"When we come to ask ourselves what are the essential forms in which, however otherwise modified, the will for true good—which is the will to be good—must appear, our answer follows the outlines of the Greek classification of the virtues. It is the will to know what is true; to make what is beautiful; to endure pain or fear; to resist the allurements of pleasure (i.e., to be brave and temperate),—if not, as the Greek would have said, in the service of the State, yet in some form of human society;—to take for oneself, and to give to others, of those things which admit of being given and taken, not what one is inclined to give or take, but what is due." Accepting this as a concise description of the Hellenic ideal, we find that the period during which it was most fully realised was that which we are accustomed to call the age of Pericles. The period so named may be roughly defined as extending from 460 to 430 B.C. Within those thirty years the political power of Athens culminated; the Athenians developed that civic life which, as sketched in the great oration attributed to Pericles by Thucydides, made Athens, as the orator says, the school of Greece, and, as we moderns might add, the teacher of posterity; within those thirty years were created works of art, in literature, in architecture, and in sculpture, which the world has ever since regarded as unapproachable masterpieces. This period, so relatively short and yet so prolific in varied excellence, followed closely on the war in which united Greece repelled the Persian invasion. It immediately preceded the war of the two leading Greek cities against each other, in which Sparta ultimately humbled Athens. Athens, as it appears in the national struggle against Persia, is not yet the acknowledged head of Hellas. The formal leadership belongs, by common consent, to Sparta; and though Athens is already pre-eminent in moral qualities,—in unselfish devotion to the national cause, and in a spirit which no reverses can break,—these qualities appear as they are embodied in a few chosen men, in a Themistocles and an Aristeides; the mass of Athenians whom they lead is still a comparatively rude multitude, not yet quickened into the full energy of conscious citizenship. If, on the other hand, we look to the close of the Age of Pericles—if we pass to the opening years of the Peloponnesian war—we find that the Athenian democracy already bears within it the seeds of decay. The process of degeneration has already begun, though a century is still to elapse before Philip of Macedon shall overthrow the liberties of Greece at Chaeronea.

Pericles as a celebrated leader

Probably the best known Athenian statesman that ever was, Pericles was the son of the army commander Xanthippus who had ...