One of the friends of Pericles was a man named Herodotus. He wrote in Greek the first history of the world. For this reason Herodotus is called the Father of History, and some day if you study Greek you may read what he wrote in his own language. Of course, at that time there was very little history to write. What has happened since _hadn’t_ happened then, and before his time little was known of what had taken place. So Herodotus’s history was chiefly a story of the wars with Persia, which I have just told you about. After that he had to stop; there was nothing more to write about. In those days every once in a while a terrible contagious disease, called a plague, would break out, and people would be taken sick and die by the thousands, for the doctors knew very little about the plague or how to cure it. Such a plague came upon Athens, and the Athenians died like poisoned flies. Pericles himself nursed the sick and did all he could for them, but finally he, too, was taken sick with the plague and died. So ended the Golden Age, which has been called in honor of its greatest man the Age of Pericles. [Illustration] 27 When Greek Meets Greek The Golden Age, when Athens was so wonderful, lasted for only fifty years. Why, do you suppose, did it stop at all? It stopped chiefly because of a fight. This time, however, the fight was not between Greece and some one outside, as in the Persian Wars. The fight was between two cities that had before this been more or less friendly--mostly less--between Sparta and Athens. It was a family quarrel between Greeks. And the fight was all because one of these cities--Sparta--was jealous of the other--Athens. The Spartans, as you know, were fine soldiers. The Athenians were fine soldiers, too. But ever since Themistocles with the ships he had built had beaten the Persians at Salamis, Athens had also a fine fleet, and Sparta had no fleet. Furthermore, Athens had become the most beautiful and most cultured city in the whole world. Sparta did not care much about Athens’s beautiful buildings and her education and culture and that sort of thing; that did not interest her. What did make her jealous was Athens’s fleet. Sparta was inland, not on nor near the sea-shore as Athens was; so she could not have a fleet at all. Sparta did not intend, however, to let Athens get ahead of her, and so on one excuse or another Sparta with all of _her_ neighbors started a war against Athens with all of _her_ neighbors. Sparta was in a part of Greece which was called by the hard name, the Peloponnesus. But in those days the boys did not think this a hard name, for they were as familiar with it as you are with such a name as Massachusetts, for instance, which would seem just as hard to a Greek as Peloponnesus does to you. This war between Athens and Sparta was therefore called the Peloponnesian War from the fact that it was not only Sparta but all of the Peloponnesus that fought against Athens.