circumstances, besides the recent fine, which tended to hasten as well
as to embitter its close. At the very moment when Pericles was preaching
to his countrymen, in a tone almost reproachful, the necessity of manful
and unabated devotion to the common country in the midst of private
suffering, he was himself among the greatest of sufferers, and most
hardly pressed to set the example of observing his own precepts. The
epidemic carried off not merely his two sons--the only two legitimate,
Xanthippus and Paralus--but also his sister, several other relatives,
and his best and most useful political friends. Amid this train of
domestic calamities, and in the funeral obsequies of so many of his
dearest friends, he remained master of his grief, and maintained his
habitual self-command, until the last misfortune--the death of his
favorite son Paralus, which left his house without any legitimate
representative to maintain the family and the hereditary sacred rites.
On this final blow, though he strove to command himself as before, yet
at the obsequies of the young man, when it became his duty to place a
wreath on the dead body, his grief became uncontrollable, and he burst
out, for the first time in his life, into profuse tears and sobbing.

In the midst of these several personal trials he received the
intimation, through Alcibiades and some other friends, of the restored
confidence of the people toward him, and of his reelection to the office
of strategus. But it was not without difficulty that he was persuaded to
present himself again at the public assembly and resume the direction of
affairs. The regret of the people was formally expressed to him for the
recent sentence--perhaps, indeed, the fine may have been repaid to him,
or some evasion of it permitted, saving the forms of law--in the present
temper of the city; which was further displayed toward him by the grant
of a remarkable exemption from a law of his own original proposition.