Just before passing to the fourth period of comparative decline, we may halt a moment to contemplate the man who represents this age of full maturity. Pericles, called half in derision by the comic poets the Zeus of Athens, called afterwards, with reverence, by Plutarch, the Olympian--Pericles expresses in himself the spirit of this age. He is the typical Athenian who governed Athens during the years in which Athens governed Greece, who formed the taste of the Athenians at the time when they were educating the world by the production of immortal works of beauty. We have seen that the conquest of the Persians was the triumph of the spirit, and that after the conquest the spirit of humanity found itself for the first time absolutely and consciously free in Athens. This spirit was, so to speak, incarnated in Pericles. The Greek genius was made flesh in him, and dwelt at Athens. In obedience to its dictates, he extended the political liberties of the Athenians to the utmost, while he controlled those liberties with the laws of his own reason. In obedience to the same spirit, he expended the treasures of the Ionian League upon the public works which formed the subsequent glory of Hellas, and made her august even in humiliation. "That," says Plutarch, "which now is Greece's only evidence that the power she boasts of and her ancient wealth are no romance or idle story was his construction of the public and sacred buildings." It was, again, by the same inspiration that Pericles divined the true ideal of the Athenian commonwealth. In the Funeral Oration he says: "We love the beautiful, but without ostentation or extravagance; we philosophize without being seduced into effeminacy; we are bold and daring, but this energy in action does not prevent us from giving to ourselves a strict account of what we undertake. Among other nations, on the contrary, martial courage has its foundation in deficiency of culture. We know best how to distinguish between the agreeable and the irksome; notwithstanding which we do not shrink from perils." In this panegyric of the national character, Pericles has rightly expressed the real spirit of Athens as distinguished from Sparta. The courage and activity of the Athenians were the result of open-eyed wisdom, and not of mere gymnastic training. Athens knew that the arts of life and the pleasures of the intellect were superior to merely physical exercises, to drill, and to discipline.