That he may have gone a step too far in the encouragement of pleasure and the peaceful virtues among a people of warlike antecedents and a future before them of foreordained defence and conquest, if not final defeat, may be a subject for speculation; but that he gave an impetus to literature and art, and by the fervent warmth of his patronage fostered the growth of genius in a way that had not been equalled before his time, and which has never been excelled since, is the principal reason, doubtless, for his immortality. His head was abnormally long, a defect which the artists of his time invariably corrected with a helmet when painting or sculpturing his portrait, and the contemporaneous comic poets and satirists as continually ridiculed in verse and jest. Speaking of his eloquence and powers of persuasion, Thucydides relates a pleasant story in respect to his dexterity in this regard. When Archidamus, king of the Lacedæmonians, asked Thucydides whether he or Pericles was the better wrestler, he replied: “When I have thrown him and given him a fair fall, he, by persisting that he had no fall, gets the better of me, and makes the bystanders, in spite of their own eyes, believe him.” But in other respects his physique was well proportioned and his bearing noble and commanding. His manner was dignified and reserved, his eloquence strong, fearless and convincing, and his general appearance such as to inspire the people to compliment him with the name “Olympian Zeus,” a character in which his portrait was also painted by his favorite, Phidias. An English writer well says that the age of Pericles was “the milky way of great men,” for it was certainly clouded to whiteness with intellectual stars. The names associated with this era are not only among the most celebrated in all Grecian history, but among the most renowned that have sprung forward in the history of all the world. Poets, philosophers, dramatists, musicians, sculptors, painters, architects, not only arose in great numbers under his fostering encouragement, but to the highest eminence in their respective avocations. In fact, it seems as though the human plant that had long been growing, strengthening and broadening upon Hellenic soil had suddenly sprung into the fullest flower and enveloped itself in intellectual beauty. The Athens which we so frequently see pictured in all her restored architectural grace and grandeur, the Athens which from her Acropolis of chiselled white so proudly surveys the Ægean sea and surrounding plains, is the Athens of Pericles, noblest of all cities in the pursuits of virtue, of beauty and contentment, and in the pure realization of that happiness which the practice of the arts alone can afford.