Athens’ Great Plague – 5

Today’s installment concludes The Great Plague at Athens,
our selection by George Grote.

If you have journeyed through all of the installments of this series, just one more to go and you will have completed a selection from the great works of five thousand words. Congratulations!

Previously in The Great Plague at Athens

Time: 430 BC
Place: Athens

But though the public resolution thus adopted showed the ancient habit of deference to the authority of Pericles, the sentiments of individuals taken separately were still those of anger against him as the author of that system which had brought them into so much distress. His political opponents — Cleon, Simmias or Lacratidas, perhaps all three in conjunction — took care to provide an opportunity for this prevalent irritation to manifest itself in act, by bringing an accusation against him before the dicastery. The accusation is said to have been preferred on the ground of pecuniary malversation and ended by his being sentenced to pay a considerable fine, the amount of which is differently reported — fifteen, fifty or eighty talents, by different authors. The accusing party thus appeared to have carried their point and to have disgraced, as well as excluded from reelection, the veteran statesman. The event, however, disappointed their expectations. The imposition of the fine not only satiated all the irritation of the people against him but even occasioned a serious reaction in his favor and brought back as strongly as ever the ancient sentiment of esteem and admiration. It was quickly found that those who had succeeded Pericles as generals neither possessed nor deserved in an equal degree the public confidence. He was accordingly soon reelected, with as much power and influence as he had ever in his life enjoyed.

But that life, long, honorable and useful, had already been prolonged considerably beyond the sixtieth year and there were but too many circumstances, besides the recent fine, which tended to hasten as well as to embitter its close. At the very moment when Pericles was preaching to his countrymen, in a tone almost reproachful, the necessity of manful and unabated devotion to the common country in the midst of private suffering, he was himself among the greatest of sufferers and most hardly pressed to set the example of observing his own precepts. The epidemic carried off not merely his two sons — the only two legitimate, Xanthippus and Paralus — but also his sister, several other relatives and his best and most useful political friends. Amid this train of domestic calamities and in the funeral obsequies of so many of his dearest friends, he remained master of his grief and maintained his habitual self-command, until the last misfortune — the death of his favorite son Paralus, which left his house without any legitimate representative to maintain the family and the hereditary sacred rites. On this final blow, though he strove to command himself as before, yet at the obsequies of the young man, when it became his duty to place a wreath on the dead body, his grief became uncontrollable and he burst out, for the first time in his life, into profuse tears and sobbing.

In the midst of these several personal trials he received the intimation, through Alcibiades and some other friends, of the restored confidence of the people toward him and of his reelection to the office of strategus. But it was not without difficulty that he was persuaded to present himself again at the public assembly and resume the direction of affairs. The regret of the people was formally expressed to him for the recent sentence — perhaps, indeed, the fine may have been repaid to him or some evasion of it permitted, saving the forms of law — in the present temper of the city; which was further displayed toward him by the grant of a remarkable exemption from a law of his own original proposition.

He had himself, some years before, been the author of that law whereby the citizenship of Athens was restricted to persons born both of Athenian fathers and Athenian mothers, under which restriction several thousand persons, illegitimate on the mother’s side, are said to have been deprived of the citizenship, on occasion of a public distribution of corn. Invidious as it appeared to grant, to Pericles singly, an exemption from a law which had been strictly enforced against so many others, the people were now moved not less by compassion than by anxiety to redress their own previous severity. Without a legitimate heir, the house of Pericles, one branch of the great Alcmaeonid gens by his mother’s side, would be left deserted and the continuity of the family sacred rites would be broken — a misfortune painfully felt by every Athenian family, as calculated to wrong all the deceased members and provoke their posthumous displeasure toward the city. Accordingly, permission was granted to Pericles to legitimize and to inscribe in his own gens and phratry, his natural son by Aspasia, who bore his own name.

It was thus that Pericles was reinstated in his post of strategus as well as in his ascendency over the public counsels — seemingly about August or September, B.C. 430. He lived about one year longer and seems to have maintained his influence as long as his health permitted. Yet we hear nothing of him after this moment and he fell a victim, not to the violent symptoms of the epidemic but to a slow and wearing fever, which undermined his strength as well as his capacity. To a friend who came to ask after him when in this disease, Pericles replied by showing a charm or amulet which his female relations had hung about his neck — a proof how low he was reduced and how completely he had become a passive subject in the hands of others.

And according to another anecdote which we read — yet more interesting and equally illustrative of his character — it was during his last moments, when he was lying apparently unconscious and insensible, that the friends around his bed were passing in review the acts of his life and the nine trophies which he had erected at different times for so many victories. He heard what they said, though they fancied that he was past hearing and interrupted them by remarking: “What you praise in my life belongs partly to good fortune — and is, at best, common to me with many other generals. But the peculiarity of which I am most proud, you have not noticed — no Athenian has ever put on mourning through any action of mine.”

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