I imagine the events to have passed as follows: The stratêgi, with most other officers of the commonwealth, were changed or reëlected at the beginning of Hekatombæon, the first month of the Attic year; that is, somewhere about midsummer. Now the Peloponnesian army, invading Attica about the end of March or beginning of April, and remaining forty days, would leave the country about the first week in May. Periklês returned from his expedition against Peloponnesus shortly after they left Attica; that is, about the middle of May (Thucyd. ii, 57): there still remained, therefore, a month or six weeks before his office of stratêgus naturally expired, and required renewal. It was during this interval (which Thucydidês expresses by the words ἔτι δ᾽ ἐστρατήγει, ii, 59) that he convoked the assembly and delivered the harangue recently mentioned. But when the time for a new election of stratêgi arrived, the enemies of Periklês opposed his reëlection, and brought a charge against him, in that trial of accountability to which every magistrate at Athens was exposed, after his period of office. They alleged against him some official misconduct in reference to the public money, and the dikastery visited him with a fine. His reëlection was thus prevented, and with a man who had been so often reëlected, this might be loosely called “taking away the office of general:” so that the language of Plutarch and Diodorus, as well as the silence of Thucydidês, would, on this supposition, be justified. [298] Thucyd. ii, 65. 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 Periklês 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. Amidst 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 garland on the dead body, his grief became uncontrollable, and he burst out, for the first time of his life, into profuse tears and sobbing.[299]