And so we have thought fit to spend our time and pains in writing of
the lives of famous persons; and have composed this tenth book upon that
subject, containing the life of Pericles, and that of Fabius Maximus,
who carried on the war against Hannibal, men alike, as in their other
virtues and good parts, so especially in their mild and upright temper
and demeanor, and in that capacity to bear the cross-grained humors of
their fellow-citizens and colleagues in office which made them both most
useful and serviceable to the interests of their countries. Whether we
take a right aim at our intended purpose, it is left to the reader to
judge by what he shall find here.
Pericles was of the tribe of Acamantis, and the township Cholargus, of
the noblest birth both on his father's and mother's side. Xanthippus,
his father, who defeated the king of Persia's generals in the battle at
Mycale, took to Wife Agariste, the grandchild of Clisthenes, who drove
out the sons of Pisistratus, and nobly put and end to their tyrannical
usurpation, and moreover made a body of laws, and settled a model of
government admirably tempered and suited for the harmony and safety of
the people.
Pericles in other respects was perfectly formed physically, only his
head was somewhat longish and out of proportion. For which reason almost
all the images and statues that were made of him have the head covered
with a helmet, the workmen not apparently being willing to expose him.
The poets of Athens called him "Schinocephalos," or squill-head, from
"schinos," a squill, or sea-onion.
Pericles was a hearer of Zeno, the Eliatic, who treated of natural
philosophy in the same manner as Parmenides did, but had also perfected
himself in an art of his own for refuting and silencing opponents in
argument; as Timon of Phlius describes it,--
Also the two-edged tongue of mighty Zeno, who,
Say what one would, could argue it untrue.
But he saw most of Pericles, and furnished him most especially with a
weight and grandeur of sense, superior to all arts of popularity, and
in general gave him his elevation and sublimity of purpose and of
character, was Anaxagoras of Clazomenae; whom the men of those times
called by the name of Nous, that is mind, or intelligence, whether in
admiration of the great and extraordinary gift he displayed for the
science of nature, or because he was the first of the philosophers who
did not refer the first ordering of the world to fortune or chance, nor
to necessity or compulsion, but to a pure, unadulterated intelligence,
which in all other existing mixed and compound things acts as a
principle of discrimination, and of combination of like with like.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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