The thirty years’ peace, concluded soon afterwards with Sparta, was probably in large measure the work of Pericles. The Athenians had evacuated Boeotia immediately after the battle of Coronea, and by the terms of the peace they now renounced their other continental possessions—Achaia, Troezen, Nisaea, and Pegae. The peace left Pericles at liberty to develop his schemes for promoting the internal welfare of Athens, and for making it the centre of the intellectual and artistic life of Greece. But first he had to settle accounts with his political rival Thucydides; the struggle was soon decided by the ostracism of the latter in 444. Thenceforward to the end of his life Pericles guided the destinies of Athens alone; in the words of the historian Thucydides, the government was in name a democracy, but in fact it was the rule of the first citizen. The unparalleled ascendency which he wielded so long over the fickle people is one of the best proofs of his extraordinary genius. He owed it entirely to his personal character, and he used it for the wisest and purest purposes. He was neither a vulgar demagogue to truckle to the passions and caprices of the mob, nor a vulgar despot to cow it by a hireling soldiery; he was a citizen among citizens, who obeyed him because they trusted him, because they knew that in his hands the honour and interests of Athens were safe. The period during which he ruled Athens was the happiest and greatest in her history, as it was one of the greatest ages of the world. Other ages have had their bright particular stars; the age of Pericles is the Milky Way of great men. In his lifetime there lived and worked at Athens the poets Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Cratinus, Crates, the philosophers Anaxagoras, Zeno, Protagoras, Socrates, the astronomer Meton, the painter Polygnotus, and the sculptors Myron and Phidias. Contemporary with these, though not resident at Athens, were Herodotus, the father of history; Hippocrates, the father of medicine; Pindar, “the Theban eagle”; the sculptor Polyclitus; and the philosophers Empedocles and Democritus, the latter joint author with Leucippus of the atomic theory. When Pericles died, other stars were rising or soon to rise above the horizon—the historians Thucydides and Xenophon, the poets Eupolis and Aristophanes, the orators Lysias and Isocrates, and the gifted but unscrupulous Alcibiades. Plato was born shortly before or after the death of Pericles. Of this brilliant circle Pericles was the centre. His generous and richly-endowed nature responded to all that was beautiful and noble not only in literature and art but in life, and it is with justice that the age of Pericles has received its name from the man in whom, more than in any other, all the various lines of Greek culture met and were harmonised. In this perfect harmony and completeness of nature, and in the classic calm which was the fruit of it, Pericles is the type