Themistocles, the hero of Salamis, was ostracized from Athens within eight years of the great sea-fight, but his spirit still animated his countrymen, and his policies were afterwards revived or expanded. His rival Aristides guided affairs at home, and Cimon, the son of Miltiades, sailed with the conquering Athenian navy. His victory at Eurymedon in 468 B. C. made it possible to fortify Athens and Piræus and to merge the Confederacy of Delos in the Athenian Empire. In seven years more Cimon in turn was ostracized, but at the end of another seven years the rich treasure of Delos could be transferred to Athens and the empire formally established. It was to last until the disaster at Ægospotami, in 405 B. C. Pericles, after successfully competing with the reactionary patriotism of statesmen like Thucydides, obtained, at the ostracism of the latter in 442 B. C., the controlling power at Athens, which he guided by his regal persuasion for the next fifteen years. The imperialism of Pericles realized the policy of Themistocles on the seas, reaped the harvest of the great Cimon’s victories, and transmuted the treasure of Delos into the sinews of war and the monuments of the glorified Acropolis. He reshaped the civic life, even curtailing the sacred powers of the Areopagus, and by popular changes in the complexion of Council, Assembly, and Law Courts, prepared the way for the uneven rule of demagogues after his own strong hand should be withdrawn. He had great odds to contend with. After the renewal of the Peloponnesian wars in 431 B. C., with the succession of victories and reverses, the Great Plague came to assert an unlooked-for hegemony. On the suffering and disasters of the city followed the trial and condemnation of Pericles himself. He was indeed reinstated as indispensable, but his death in the following year left Athens at the mercy of the demagogues—with Alcibiades to follow. The Sicilian expedition, the crowning venture of imperialism, issued—as was to be expected with no real successor of Pericles to direct it—in the disaster of 413 B. C., when the brave Syracusans, with the willing help of Sparta, dissipated the Athenian dream of vast colonial expansion.