We know from Thucydides the extent of his influence over the people. He was no demagogue in the vulgar sense; they knew him to be sincere and incorruptible. He was never deterred by the unpopularity of his policy; he would lead the people rather than submit to be led by them; he could abase their spirits when they were unduly elated, or raise them to confidence when unseasonably disheartened.[18] At the height of his career his eloquence was the more effective because it was rarely displayed; minor matters in the assembly were transacted by his subordinates; when Pericles himself arose to speak it was a signal that a matter of national importance was to be debated, and his appearance roused a confident expectation that the treatment would be worthy of the subject.[19] The epithet ‘Olympian,’ applied to him originally in sarcasm, was felt to be more truly applicable than its originator, perhaps, intended. His eloquence was a noble exposition of the fine intelligence and high character which first claimed a hearing. Though we have no verbal record of his speeches, a few of his phrases stuck in the memory of chroniclers. Aegina was to him ‘the eye-sore of the Piraeus’—it spoiled the view from the Athenian harbour.[20] The Samians, who submitted very reluctantly to the blessings of Athenian civilization, are like ‘babies that cry when you give them their pap, but take it all the same’;[21] and Boeotia, disintegrated by civil war, is like an oak split by oaken wedges.[22] His finest simile—not, perhaps, original, since Herodotus attributes a similar phrase to Gelon, when Greece refused his invaluable assistance—occurred, according to Aristotle, in a funeral speech: ‘The city has lost its Youth; it is as though the year had lost its Spring.’[23] § 4 The eloquence of these earlier statesmen, though significant of the tendency of the Attic genius, is an isolated phenomenon. It has no bearing on the development of Athenian oratory. We have now to consider two direct influences, that of the Sophists and that of the early rhetoricians of Sicily.