The outpouring of genius in the "Age of Pericles" is one of the great
mysteries in history. It sent a path of light down through centuries of
darkness, and that light shines just as brightly to-day, uneclipsed and
even undimmed by anything the world has done since.

Pericles drew all this radiant genius into Athens, and made it beautiful
and great. But he did still more than that. Athens, which had first been a
monarchy, then under the rule of a few wise men in the Areopagus, had then
lost all her liberties under the "Tyrants." Pericles created a Democracy.
He believed the true ideal was a government by the people. That if Athens
governed Greece, then the Athenians should govern Athens. And that the
power of a state should rest, not with one, nor a few, but with the many!

During a period of fifty years free Athens was the acknowledged head of
the Greek states, and in those years Greece had reached the meridian of
her glory. But Sparta was jealous of the dazzling splendor of her rival;
and she hated this new democracy which was spreading through all the
states. She believed in the good old idea of one despotic king, and a
people cowed into submission by his authority.

Two parties were thus created in the Greek states, and in a dispute which
occurred about 420 B.C., the friends of the Spartans or
Aristocratic ideal ranged themselves on the one side, and those of the
Athenian or Democratic on the other.

From this arose the long conflict known as the Peloponnesian War, which
lasted for twenty-seven years, its real cause being that Sparta was
determined to lead Greece.

It was in vain that the Athenians fought with the energy of despair. Their