here comes to be recognized by the Athenians. A prosaic point of view such as this, assumes that man has requirements quite different from those he formerly had; in this we find traces of the powerful, necessary conversion brought about in the ideas of man through the strengthening of thought, through knowledge of himself, and through Philosophy. The institution of charges of atheism, which we shall touch upon more fully in dealing with Socrates, is, in Anaxagoras’ case, quite comprehensible, from the specific reason that the Athenians, who were envious of Pericles, who contended with him for the first place, and who did not venture to proceed against him openly, took his favourites to law, and sought through charges against his friend, to injure him. Thus his friend Aspasia was brought under accusation, and the noble Pericles had, according to Plutarch (in Pericle, 32), in order to save her from condemnation, to beg the individual citizens of Athens with tears for her acquittal. The Athenian people in their freedom, demanded such acts of the potentates to whom they allowed supremacy, for thereby an acknowledgment was given of their subordination to the people; they thus made themselves the Nemesis in respect to the high place accorded to the great, for they placed themselves in a position of equality with these, while these again made evident their dependence, subjection and powerlessness before the others. What is told about the result of this charge against Anaxagoras is quite contradictory and uncertain: Pericles certainly saved him from condemnation to death. He was either, as some say, condemned only to banishment after Pericles had led him before the people, speaking and entreating for him, after, by reason of his age, attenuation and weakness the sympathy of the people had been aroused; or else, as others say, with the help of Pericles, he escaped from Athens and was in absence condemned to death, the judgment never being executed upon him. Others again say that he was liberated, but from the vexation that he felt respecting these charges, and from apprehension as to their repetition, he voluntarily left Athens. And at about sixty or seventy years of age, he died in Lampsacus in the 88th Olympiad (428 B.C.).[82]