Before Salamis, again, the revenue drawn from the leases of the silver mines of Laurium had been equally divided among the enfranchised citizens--an arrangement which had yielded only a small sum to each, but which represented a notable adumbration of a communal system, with the fatal implication of a basis in slavery.[261] The devotion of this fund[262] to the building of a navy was the making of the Athenian maritime power; whence in turn came the ability of Athens to extort tribute from the allied States, and therewith to achieve relatively the greatest and most effective expenditure on public works[263] ever attempted by any government. It was this specially created demand for and endowment of the arts and the drama that raised Athens to the artistic and literary supremacy of the ancient world, and, by so creating a special intellectual soil, prepared the ensuing supremacy of Athenian philosophy.[264] But the Periclean policy of endowment went far beyond even the employment of labour by the State on the largest scale; it set up the principle of supplying something like an income to multitudes of poorer free citizens--an experiment unique in history. The main features of the system were: (1) Payments for service to the members of the Council of Five Hundred; (2) payments to all jurors, an order numbering some six thousand; (3) the _theorikon_ or allowance of theatre money to all the poorer citizens; (4) regular payments to the soldiers and sailors; (5) largesses of corn, or sales at reduced prices; (6) sacrificial banquets, shared in by the common people; (7) the sending out of "kleruchies," or bodies of quasi-colonists, who were billeted on the confederate cities, to the number of five or six thousand in ten years. Without taking the _a priori_ hostile view of the aristocratic faction, who bitterly opposed all this--a view endorsed later by Plato and Socrates--the common-sense politician must note the utter insecurity of the whole development, depending as it did absolutely on military predominance.[265] The mere cessation of the expenditure on public works at the fall of Athens in the Peloponnesian war was bound to affect class relations seriously; and parties, already bitter, were henceforth more decisively so divided.[266]