Conflicting forces rose at once. Oligarchs and democrats, headed by Nikias and Kleon, contended for the prize the dead leader had abandoned. Nikias, representing the rich old families, and supported by them, was of high birth and wealthy. He was timid, cautious, safe and superstitious, narrow-minded, honest, and respectable. Kleon was of the middle, trading class. Many of this sort, during the last thirty years of prosperity, had become wealthy. He was the first who presumed to bid for power. It is one of the strange phenomena of nature that after pestilence comes great fecundity. This has often been observed, especially after the plague which ravaged Europe in 1348 and 1349 of our era. The air is cleared, as it were, by the storm which has passed over. Those who survive, too, get to themselves such courage they begin to imagine they are exempt from ordinary dangers. They become rich with the wealth of those who have died, and rejoice in a new and opulent existence. At Athens life burst out anew in the fulness of enjoyment. None knew how to enjoy it more than Alkibiades. We need not dwell upon the life he led for the next few years. His mind, his ambition, was expanding. He was nearing the age when he should take his share in the government of the Athenian empire. He had enriched his mind with all the knowledge of the Greeks at the highest period of their culture. Nature had endowed him with a genius to discover the right course to take in every emergency, as if by intuition; so that, apparently without effort, he divined the course events would take. In him she joined courage and resource with a circumspect solicitude seldom found together with promptness in action. She had given him besides a body of so much strength and beauty, and withal of so great grace, that sculptors, who, while he was a boy, had realized at sight of him the face and form of Eros, God of Love, now took him as their model when they strove to mould a Hermes, the wise, quick, strong, radiant messenger of Heaven. If we dare not linger on the life he led at this time, if we can only speculate on some of the motives of his conduct, neither can we venture to describe his outward form, the perfect oval of his face, the thickly curling hair he allowed to grow so long, the large voluptuous eyes, now gazing with half-closed indolence, now flashing with the latent fire within, the faultless classic profile, the clean-cut nose, with nostrils that would sometimes dilate and tremble with excitement, above a mouth which often stayed half opened, careless in repose, and sometimes withering in its contempt.