He had himself, some years before, been the author of that law whereby
the citizenship of Athens was restricted to persons born both of
Athenian fathers and Athenian mothers, under which restriction several
thousand persons, illegitimate on the mother's side, are said to have
been deprived of the citizenship, on occasion of a public distribution
of corn. Invidious as it appeared to grant, to Pericles singly, an
exemption from a law which had been strictly enforced against so many
others, the people were now moved not less by compassion than by anxiety
to redress their own previous severity. Without a legitimate heir, the
house of Pericles, one branch of the great Alcmaeonid gens by his
mother's side, would be left deserted, and the continuity of the family
sacred rites would be broken--a misfortune painfully felt by every
Athenian family, as calculated to wrong all the deceased members, and
provoke their posthumous displeasure toward the city. Accordingly,
permission was granted to Pericles to legitimize, and to inscribe in his
own gens and phratry, his natural son by Aspasia, who bore his own name.

It was thus that Pericles was reinstated in his post of strategus as
well as in his ascendency over the public counsels--seemingly about
August or September, B.C. 430. He lived about one year longer, and seems
to have maintained his influence as long as his health permitted. Yet we
hear nothing of him after this moment, and he fell a victim, not to the
violent symptoms of the epidemic, but to a slow and wearing fever, which
undermined his strength as well as his capacity. To a friend who came to
ask after him when in this disease, Pericles replied by showing a charm
or amulet which his female relations had hung about his neck--a proof
how low he was reduced, and how completely he had become a passive
subject in the hands of others.

And according to another anecdote which we read--yet more interesting