“Nibbled at Euboea, like a horse that spurns the rein,
    And wantonly would leap upon the islands in the main.”

VIII.  Wishing to adopt a style of speaking consonant with his haughty manner and lofty spirit, Perikles made free use of the instrument which Anaxagoras as it were put into his hand, and often tinged his oratory with natural philosophy.  He far surpassed all others by using this “lofty intelligence and power of universal consummation,” as the divine Plato calls it;[A] in addition to his natural advantages, adorning his oratory with apt illustrations drawn from physical science.

[Footnote A:  Plato, Phaedrus.]

For this reason some think that he was nicknamed the Olympian; though some refer this to his improvement of the city by new and beautiful buildings, and others from his power both as a politician and a general.  It is not by any means unlikely that these causes all combined to produce the name.  Yet the comedies of that time, when they allude to him, either in jest or earnest, always appear to think that this name was given him because of his manner of speaking, as they speak of him as “thundering and lightening,” and “rolling fateful thunders from his tongue.”  A saying of Thucydides, the son of Melesias, has been preserved, which jestingly testifies to the power of Perikles’s eloquence.  Thucydides was the leader of the conservative party, and for a long time struggled to hold his own against Perikles in debate.  One day Archidamus, the King of Sparta, asked him whether he or Perikles was the best wrestler.  “When I throw him in wrestling,” Thucydides answered, “he beats me by proving that he never was down, and making the spectators believe him.”  For all this Perikles was very cautious about his words, and whenever he ascended the tribune to speak, used first to pray to the gods that nothing unfitted for the present occasion might fall from his lips.  He left no writings, except the measures which he brought forward, and very few of his sayings are recorded.  One of these was, that he called Aegina “the eyesore of the Peiraeus,” and that “he saw war coming upon Athens from Peloponnesus.”  Stesimbrotus tells us that when he was pronouncing a public funeral oration over those who fell in Samos, he said that they had become immortal, even as the gods:  for we do not see the gods, but we conceive them to be immortal by the respect which we pay them, and the blessings which we receive from them; and the same is the case with those who die for their country.

IX.  Thucydides represents the constitution under Perikles as a democracy in name, but really an aristocracy, because the government was all in the hands of one leading citizen.  But as many other writers tell us that during his administration the people received grants of land abroad, and were indulged with dramatic entertainments, and payments for their services, in consequence of which they fell into bad habits, and