The fortitude of the Athenians was put to a still severer test in the following summer, when to the horrors of war (the Peloponnesians had again invaded Attica) were added the horrors of the plague, which spread havoc in the crowded city. Pericles himself escaped the scourge, but many of his relations and best friends, amongst them his sister and his two sons Xanthippus and Paralus, were struck down. With the elder of his sons, Xanthippus, a worthless young man, the father had been on bad terms, but the death of his surviving son, at an interval of a few days, affected him deeply, and when he came to lay the wreath upon the corpse, though he struggled hard to maintain his habitual calm, he broke down, and for the first time in his public life burst into a passion of weeping. But neither private grief nor public calamity shook for a moment the lofty courage and resolution with which he continued to the last to oppose a firm front alike to enemies without and to cravens within. While refusing as before to risk a battle in Attica, which he allowed the Peloponnesians to devastate at pleasure, he led in person a powerful fleet against Peloponnese, ravaged the coast, and destroyed the town of Prasiae in Laconia. But the Athenians were greatly disheartened; they sued for peace, and when their suit was rejected by Sparta they vented their ill-humour on Pericles, as the author of the war, by subjecting him to a fine. However, they soon repented of this burst of petulance, and atoned for it by re-electing him general and placing the government once more in his hands. Further, they allowed him to legitimate his son by Aspasia, that his house might not be without an heir. He survived this reconciliation about a year, but his name is not again mentioned in connexion with public affairs. In the autumn of 429 he died. We may well believe that the philosophy which had been the recreation of his happier days supported and consoled him in the clouded evening of his life. To his clement nature it was a peculiar consolation to reflect that he had never carried political differences to the shedding of blood. Indeed, his extraordinary, almost fatherly, tenderness for the life of every Athenian citizen is attested by various of his sayings. On his deathbed, when the friends about him were telling his long roll of glory, rousing himself from a lethargy into which he had fallen, he reminded them of his fairest title to honour: “No Athenian,” he said, “ever put on black through me.” He was buried amongst the illustrious dead in the Ceramicus, and in after years Phormio, Thrasybulus, and Chabrias slept beside him. In person he was graceful and well made, save for an unusual height of head, which the comic poets were never weary of ridiculing. In the busts of him which we possess, his regular features, with the straight Greek nose and full lips, still preserve an expression of Olympian repose. THE END _Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.