This answer for a time appeased the clamor of the opposition, which had been set up against what they would lead the people to believe was extravagance and wastefulness on the part of Pericles. But it soon broke out again. When finally it became no longer bearable, Pericles addressed his accusers and said: “If you think that I have expended too much let the money be charged to my account, not yours, _only let the new edifices be inscribed with my name and not that of the people of Athens_.” It is to the credit of the Athenians that their pride was touched by the words of their ruler and their cupidity restrained. They at once replied that Pericles might spend as much of their money as he pleased, and they even went further, and insisted that he should not spare the public treasury in the least. Like all great men, Pericles was assailed in a variety of ways. When his enemies did not accomplish their purpose in bringing him to public disgrace by one method of assault, they tried another. We have seen how they failed in one instance; another was similar in accusing him, in complicity with Phidias, of appropriating to his own use the public treasure, donated to pay for the golden plates on the chryselephantine statues of the latter’s creation. But this charge also not proving successful, they attacked his religious character, strange as it may appear, when it is remembered how deeply he was interested in erecting temples of pagan worship. But he survived the slanders of his time and continued his aims and purposes in life, content, doubtless, that posterity should judge him aright, as did the majority of the people of his own time. His last words are perhaps the best epitome of his life’s work: “No Athenian ever put on black through me.” Teleclides has put into verse the great surrender which the Athenian people appeared finally to make to Pericles of their rights in peace and war: “The tribute of the cities, and, with them, the cities too, To do with them as he pleases, and undo; To build up, if he likes, stone walls around a town; And, again, if so he likes, to pull them down; Their treaties and alliances, power, empire, peace and war, Their wealth and their success forevermore.”