which consists the main difficulty and on which | duced them to such habitudes of close reflection, depend the main advantages in the science of war) must subsist on whatever they can seize; and men without regular government (by which I can intend no other than of magistrates chosen by the people) would, if we consider the bean as employed in ballot, be ignorant of the lax and foreign interpretation. As the fountains of the most celebrated rivers are neither easily discoverable nor large, so it often happens that things of the greatest moment, in the political and moral world, are derived from an obscure, from a remote, and from a slender origin. I have given you my opinion on the cause of the supposition; but having heard another, however less probable, I will report it.* In the south of Italy, where Pythagoras resided, are several cities, Tarentum in particular, of Lacedæmonian foundation. One festival of this people, whose ancestors were distinguished for frugality, was nevertheless, even in the midst of primitive Lacedæmon, even in the bosom of Temperance herself, deformed with foul excess. It was called The Feast of the Nurses. They carried male infants to the Temple of Diana, and, after exposing themselves among the tents where the populace was assembled, fed them with the entrails of swine, which had been sacrificed, and with figs, vetches, and beans. Their morals, we may believe, were not rendered more austere by the fertility and invitations of a delicious climate. At a distance from Taygetos and Citharon, they were (allow me the expression) beyond the latitudes of checking breezes from the headlands of bluff morality; and the voice of the Syrens sounded in ears sealed only to the call of reprehension and reproof. The hunter of Laconia would have smiled to hear them imitate his shout, and tell the trembling Sybarite, their neighbour, that such were the shouts of Spartans. He would have wondered that terror should be excited in another by that which excited only ridicule in himself; he would have stared not a little at the start from the couch, and the rustle of roses on the marble floor. Pythagoras could not say, Abstain from the city, abstain from the fellowship of the Tarentines; it would have exasperated them against him; but he might have heard related to him some instance of sensuality which happened at this festival, and might have said briefly, yet significantly, Abstain from beans. Ordinances have often been observed and commemorated far beyond the intent and expectation of their founder. Certain it is that, formerly as at present, in the popular states of Italy, the election and rejection of magistrates were signified by beans; and no less evidently was it the interest of the philosophical stranger to dissuade his auditors from the concerns of state. This, while it procured toleration and conciliated esteem, intro as withheld them from being the agitators, and fitted them to become, by just degrees, the leaders of the commonwealth. After all, if they pursued any other line of conduct, he at least would escape uncensured, and might complete without juridical, or, what he would more have deprecated, popular molestation, his scheme of general reform. 'Abstain from beans' we have considered in a moral and political, but also in a religious point; it may easily be defended, by high authorities. However, I must express my doubts whether in the lifetime of Pythagoras his followers abstained from this article of food. Is it not probable that those who came after him took the letter for the spirit, as we know it to have happened in some other doctrines, and within a century from the founder's death? To abstain with rigour from things indifferent (and from some indeed they did abstain), may not appear consistent with the exercise of reason. Arrogant it may be thought in him who commanded, and infantine in those who obeyed. But, in the religions which have continued the longest, certain foods (it is said) are prohibited; and the observance of such prohibition is the moral cause of their duration. He who will not obey in what is easy, will not obey in what is difficult: but the subjects of these theocratical governments are every day refreshed with the exercise of salutary compliance. At the moment when a sense of duty is liable to be extinguished in others, in them it is sure to be excited: there is piety if they fast; if they satisfy their hunger there is piety. It appears to me, that the wisest and most provident of oriental legislators are in nothing more worthy of our esteem and veneration, than in the ordinance of these prohibitions. Can we ascertain what nations have, or what nations have not, been cannibals? Why does it revolt more strongly against our senses to eat a man than to kill one? The crime in itself is surely not so great. Nature has fixed certain barriers, of which many seem fancifully chosen and arranged, against the irruption of our appetites. There are animals never brought upon our tables, although the flesh is said to be wholesome and the flavour grateful. It is needless to seek how first it happened that man violated the semblance of himself and of his Gods. Was it war, was it fanaticism, or was it famine, that impelled him to the accursed sacrifice? Pisander! Pisander! he had tasted the fatness of the lamb that he carried in his bosom: he had tempted the fawn by caresses from afar : it had licked his hand, and he had shed its blood! Cannibals have been found where food was plentiful: and the savage does not loathe for its ugliness the hugest serpent. There must be something, and it must be in the brute creation, which he shall fear to consume for the impiety of the deed. The sacrifice of a human victim can only be per*Qu. whether any author now extant, excepting formed with the concurrence of prince or magisPsyllos in his epistle, mentions this. tracy. Of course Pythagoras could not oppose it, We have not two factions; aristocracy has kept aloof from Lampsacos. The people find themselves so secure and comfortable under the ancient laws, that they would no more hazard any innovation, than they would alter their course at sea when they were sailing with a favourable wind. They hardly can be brought to believe that any consistently with his profession of abstaining from their concerns. Nevertheless he was at liberty to introduce a doctrine which, as the day of cultivation advanced, would undermine the pyre and release the victim. The Druids were, and are, and always will be, barbarous. Their order has not existed long, and will soon terminate, the Gauls being not only the most ferocious of man-nation hath abrogated two laws in twenty or thirty kind, but the most suspicious and acute; they are also the most versatile, the most inconstant, and (what makes sad work with solemnities), on the detection of halt or blemish, men of irrepressible mimicry and unquenchable derision. Those in the vicinity of Massilia are free already from the furies of fanaticism. Intercourse with the Tyrrhenians and Ligurians has humanised them greatly, and the softer voice of Ionia has now persuaded them, that the Gods can take us when they want us, without wicker baskets; and that the harp and dance are as pleasant to them as the cries and agonies of dying men." Thus ends the epistle of Psyllos; and at least in the end of it I think we shall agree. His comfits will sweeten my pomegranate. CLXXXII. ASPASIA TO ANAXAGORAS. Whatever may be the partiality of your Massilian to Pythagoras, it is evident enough that the philosopher of Samos, possessing great acquired intelligence and gifted with extraordinary powers of mind, was an intriguer and an impostor. And truly, O Anaxagoras, it is much to be desired that others now living were exempt from a certain part of such an imputation. Our friend Socrates, I am sorry to say, intimates to his friends in private that he has a kind of Genius always at his ear, who forewarns him in affairs apparently the most indifferent. If we consider it well, we shall be of opinion that there are few things so indifferent as they seem to us; few, the consequence of which may not, visibly or invisibly, act with grave importance on the future. But if a Genius, a superhuman power, were to influence the actions of any man, surely it would be those which must necessarily put in motion the levers and regulators of a commonwealth. We are all under the guidance of a Deity if we will let him act on us; but it is as easy to slip from under his guidance, as it is difficult to escape from the penalties of our error. Already there are some who are jealous of Socrates and his Genius; and who perhaps may try hereafter whether the Genius will help him to elude the laws. For novelties in religion, as you know, are not held guiltless; and a Genius that renders a man wiser or better is indeed an innovator. As they can not catch him, I fear they may lay their hands upon our Socrates. CLXXXIII. ANAXAGORAS TO PERICLES. It is easier to answer the questions than the kindnesses of your letter. I will begin then, years, or hath been obliged by prosperity or adversity to enact so many in so brief a space of time. Miletus was always just to her colonies. She has founded more than sixty; and not a single one has ever had reason to complain of her exactions or restrictions. All the great empires that have existed in the world, Chaldæa, Babylonia, Media, Persia, all these taken together, have not sent out the hundredth part of what has gone forth from the bosom of Miletus. Surely, of political glory this is the highest: to rear carefully a numerous family, educate it honestly, protect it bravely, and provide for it plenteously and independently. Her citizens have more reason to be proud of this section in their polity, than some others who are much powerfuller. Would not every mother wish to see her own features in her daughter? her own constitutional strength, her own character, her own prosperity? What inconsistency then, what folly, what madness, for the metropolis to wish. otherwise in regard to her colony! Is the right arm stronger by rendering the left weaker? Gain we any vantage-ground against our enemy by standing on the prostrate body of our child? To whom am I writing? to Pericles? yes, to him; to the man who best knows that the strongest reasons of state proceed from the mouth of justice. And now let me loose again. Seldom have I written, and never have I spoken, so long at a time on such a subject. Could you ever draw from me even an opinion on these matters, in a city where (excepting myself) you alone preserved in them your calmness, equanimity, and composure! Even Aspasia, who unites the wisdom of the heart to the wisdom of the understanding, and has more in both than anyone else in either, was sometimes in perturbation at politics, and sometimes in grief. A while since I sent her a dozen or more of such verses as our young people, and others who should know better, are idle enough to compose in the open air. My neighbour, Proxenos the Massilian, has been employed in making a collection from the gardens round about. The greater part, he tells me, are upon love and flowers, dews and suns, stars and moons, evenings and mornings, springs and autumns. He observes that summer is rather out of favour with the poets; and that where winter is mentioned, he has often found the whole composition scored across with a nail, or with a piece of tile, or defaced in some other way as nigh at hand. Proxenos is no poet, and therefore it is the more amusing to hear him discourse on poetry. "I am sated with flowers," said he. "The of retirement in the little isle of Tenos. He lisMuses ought to keep out of the market: if they tened to my entreaty with his usual attention and must come into it, let them not come as green- interest, and soon began to expatiate on the grocers. See, what a large proportion in my col- charms, on the benefits, on the necessity, of relection is upon flowers and foliage, with here and tirement. Without a question I fancied I had there a solitary turtle-dove, and a nightingale persuaded him to compliance, when, with an air deplorably belimed. A few pious men indeed of sadness so attempered with sweetness as it have written in reverence of the tutelary God, and never was in any other man, he said to me, "Ashave done all they could to repress the licentious- pasia! you can create in me as many wishes as ness of the young and thoughtless. The best spring up in the bosom of a child; and it is inscription I have found among them is in the partly by planting the slips of your own in mine, garden of Mnestheus; and this perhaps is worth and partly by the warmth of your eloquence. preservation rather for its grave admonition and What then must be my sense of duty to my religious sentiment than its poetry." country, if, after all these representations, and after all my fatigues and injuries, my determination is fixed to remain some time longer in the city. Hereafter we may visit Tenos: hereafter I may drink of the limpid brook, before the house, whose cold water has reddened this hand when you were little. We will build our navies on it: we will follow them along the bank, and applaud them as they clash. Even I foresee a perfidy in Aspasia she will pretend to run as fast as she can, and yet let Pericles outrun her. No, no; that kiss shall not obviate such duplicity. Have I no reason for the suspicion, when you often have let me get the better of you in argument? Another and easier life may await us there, when this political one is uncoiled from us. But our child must associate with the children of the Athenians: So far Proxenos. I do not remember what were those verses I sent to Aspasia ; there may be more good sense in these, INSCRIPTION ON A PLINTH IN THE GARDEN OF MNESTHEUS Youngsters! who write false names, and slink behind I would not chide severely; nor would he, That every God sees every man.. but one. CLXXXIV. ASPASIA TO ANAXAGORAS. The style of your Psyllos is, I presume, Massilian. He walks heavily through high-stemmed leafy flowers. Does he not deserve now this little piece of imitation? Forbear to call it mockery; for mockery is always rude and inhumane. Our friend Socrates has taken a wife. In every danger he has been thought singularly brave; and, if she is what she is represented, the action proves it. He retains his custom of sitting in the porticoes, and beckoning to passers, and conversing on loveliness, and commending equanimity, and driving the schoolmen mad. Yet among the Epithalamions, the cleverest is one which celebrates him for the quality most remote from his character. Thales and Pherecydes and Pythagoras, and some few more, would really have made Philosophy domestic. Our epithalamiast, intending nothing satirical, tells Socrates (whom neither celibacy nor marriage have detained at home, and who never could resist an opportunity of wrangling, while a sophist or a straw was before him) that he first brought Philosophy from heaven into private houses! I hope he will find her in his own as often as he wants her: but if he is resolved to bring her down into ours, such as we have seen her lately, the city will be all in a bustle with the double-bolting of doors. Let the archons look to it. CLXXXV. ASPASIA TO CLEONE. I have been exhorting Pericles to leave Attica for a while, and to enjoy with me the pleasures VOL. II. he must love his father's friends; he must overcome and pardon his father's adversaries. We ought never to buy happiness with our children's fortunes but happiness is not the commodity; it is desertion, it is evasion, it is sloth. However, there is at last a time when we may hang up our armour, and claim the stipend of retirement and repose. Meanwhile let us fix our eyes on Tenos.” Whether, O Cleone, we regard the moral or the material world, there is a silent serenity in the highest elevation. Pericles appears the greater when seen on his solitary eminence against the sky. Power has rendered him only more gracious and compliant, more calm and taciturn. If it is true that there can be no calumny without malice, it is equally so that there can be no malice without some desirable quality to excite it. Make up your mind, Aspasia, to pay the double rate of rank and genius. It is much to be the wife of Pericles; it is more to be Aspasia. Names that lie upon the ground are not easily set on fire by the torch of Envy, but those quickly catch it which are raised up by fame, or wave to the breeze of prosperity. Everyone that passes is ready to give them a shake and a rip; for there are few either so busy or so idle as not to lend a hand at undoing. FF You, Pericles, and myself, have a world of our in the assemblies of the people, and among the own, into which no Athenian can enter without consultations to regulate (as far as might be) the our permission. Study, philosophise, write poetry. burial and burning of the dead. His temperance These things I know are difficult when there is a and courage, the most efficacious preservatives noise in the brain; but begin, and the noise against contagion, failed at length in the effect. ceases. The mind, slow in its ascent at first, The fever seized him, and although he has risen accelerates every moment, and is soon above the from his bed free from all symptoms of the dishearing of frogs and the sight of brambles. temper, his strength is impaired, and many years (he tells me) seem to have crowded into a few days. CLXXXVII. ASPASIA TO CLEONE. A pestilence has broken out in the city, so virulent in its character, so rapid in its progress, so intractable to medicine, that Pericles, in despite of my remonstrances and prayers, insisted on my departure. He told me that, if I delayed it a single day, his influence might be insufficient to obtain me a reception in any town, or any hamlet, throughout the whole of Greece. He has promised to write to me daily, but he declared he could not assure me that his letters would come regularly, although he purposes to send them secretly by the shepherds, fumigated and dipped in oil before they depart from Athens. He has several farms in Thessaly under Mount Ossa, near Sicurion. Here I am, a few stadions from the walls. Never did I breathe so pure an air, so refreshing in the midst of summer. And the lips of my little Pericles are ruddier and softer and sweeter than before. Nothing is wanting, but that he were less like me, and more like his father. He would have all my thoughts to himself, were Pericles not absent. CLXXXVIII. CLEONE TO ASPASIA. Aspasia! I will not allow either the little Pericles, or the great one, or both together, to possess all your thoughts. Nay, your letter itself contradicts you. Cleone and the plague must intercept and divide them occasionally. Pestilences are maladies that rage with more violence than others, but, like all violent things, soon pass away. The worst effects of them are the seditions, and other sad irregularities, that always burst forth when the banner of Death is unfurled in a populous city. But it is mostly the intemperate that are swept away. Alas! I must not dissemble the magnitude of the danger; for I know your resolution, I might say rashness. What I have written is true; but I am most afraid that you will not fear enough. Keep up your courage where you are; do not exert it anywhere else. CLXXXIX. ASPASIA TO CLEONE. Cleone! Cleone! if you could but see Athens, you would find it a ditch to throw all your dogmas into. The pestilence has not only seized the intemperate, but, like that which Chryses imprecated on the Greeks before Troy, smitten nobler heads after the viler. Pericles himself has not escaped it. He refused to abstain from appearing CXC. ANAXAGORAS TO ASPASIA. Behold, O Aspasia! I send you verses. They certainly are less valuable than some in your collection, but, to make up the difference, I inclose a ¦ cockle-shell. Beauty! thou art a wanderer on the earth, And now are manifold and now are none. I have call'd, panting, after thee, and thou And telling me none ever was preferr'd. All the verbiage which you will find below I I have some merit too, old man! I always took what Beauty gave, ... Nor, when she snatch'd it back, look'd grave. CXCI. ASPASIA TO ANAXAGORAS. It is really odd enough that no temple or altar was ever dedicated to Beauty. Vengeance and struggles. Moroseness is the evening of turbuother such personages, whom we, Anaxagoras, lence. Every man after a while begins to think venture occasionally to call allegorical, have altars enow, and more than enow of worshippers. Whatever, in your satirical mood, you may think about the cockle-shell, I shall always value it, as much nearly as the verses, and I have ordered it to be made into a clasp for them. Taunt me then as often as you please: it will be like girls pelting with roses : if there is any harm done, it is only to the fingers of the pelter. CXCII. ASPASIA TO PERICLES. Now the fever is raging, and we are separated, my comfort and delight is in our little Pericles. The letters you send me come less frequently, but I know you write whenever your duties will allow you, and whenever men are found courageous enough to take charge of them. Although you preserved with little care the speeches you delivered formerly, yet you promised me a copy of the latter, and as many of the earlier as you could collect among your friends. Let me have them as soon as possible. Whatever bears the traces of your hand, is precious to me: how greatly more precious what is imprest with your genius, what you have meditated and spoken! I shall see your calm thoughtful face while I am reading, and will be cautious not to read aloud lest I lose the illusion of your voice. CXCIII. PERICLES TO ASPASIA. Aspasia! do you know what you have asked of me? Would you accept it, if you thought it might make you love me less? Must your affections be thus loosened from me, that the separation, which the pestilence may render an eternal one, may be somewhat mitigated? I send you the papers. The value will be small to you, and indeed would be small to others, were it possible that they could fall into any hands but yours. Remember the situation in which my birth and breeding and bent of mind have placed me: remember the powerful rivals I have had to contend with, their celebrity, their popularity, their genius, and their perseverance. You know how often I have regretted the necessity of obtaining the banishment of Cimon, a man more similar to myself than any other. I doubt whether he had quite the same management of his thoughts and words, but he was adorned with every grace, every virtue, and invested by Nature with every high function of the soul. We happened to be placed by our fellow-citizens at the head of two adverse factions. Son of the greatest man in our annals, he was courted and promoted by the aristocracy: I, of a family no less distinguished, was opposed to him by the body of the people. You must have observed, Aspasia, that although one of the populace may in turbulent times be the possessor of great power, it rarely has happened that he retained it long, or without many sanguinary himself as capable of governing as one (whoever he may be) taken from his own rank. Amid all the claims and pretensions of the ignorant and discontented, the eyes of a few begin to be turned complacently toward the more courteous demeanour of some well-born citizen, who presently has an opportunity of conciliating many more, by affability, liberality, eloquence, commiseration, diffidence, and disinterestedness. Part of these must be real, part may not be. Shortly afterward he gains nearly all the rest of the citizens by deserting his order for theirs: his own party will not be left behind, but adheres to him bravely, to prove they are not ashamed of their choice, and to avoid the imputation of inconsistency. Aspasia! I have done with these cares, with these reflections. Little of life is remaining, but my happiness will be coetaneous with it, and my renown will survive it for there is no example of any who has governed a state so long, without a single act of revenge or malice, of cruelty or severity. In the thirty-seven years of my administration I have caused no citizen to put on mourning. On this rock, O Aspasia ! stand my Propylæa and my Parthenon. CXCIV. ASPASIA TO PERICLES. Gratitude to the immortal Gods overpowers every other impulse of my breast. You are safe. Pericles! O my Pericles! come into this purer air! live life over again in the smiles of your child, in the devotion of your Aspasia! Why did you fear for me the plague within the city, the Spartans round it? why did you exact the vow at parting, that nothing but your command should recall me again to Athens? Why did I ever make it? Cruel! to refuse me the full enjoyment of your recovered health! crueller to keep me in ignorance of its decline! The happiest of pillows is not that which Love first presses; it is that which Death has frowned on and past over. CXCV. ANAXAGORAS TO ASPASIA. Have you never observed, O most observant Aspasia, that there are many things which we can say in writing, and which we can not so well deliver in speech, even to our nearest friend? During all the time of my residence with you and Pericles, intimate as was our familiarity from the commencement, never once did either of you express a wish to hear the reason why I left my countrymen for strangers. The dislike I always had to relate my concerns, and to present my features for inspection, withheld me from the narrative and delicacy withheld you from inquiry. Come, I will live over with you now that portion of my life which I did not live with you before. I would not escape for refuge into crowds: |