A source-book of ancient history - The Search For Mecca

i86 The Age of Pericles
The money
for the
buildings.
Plutarch,
Pericles, 12.
They furnish
the people
with work.
tales of the ancient power and glory of Greece are no fables,
was what particularly excited the spleen of the opposite
faction, who inveighed against him in the public assembly,
declaring that the Athenians had disgraced themselves
by transferring the common treasury of the Greeks from
the island of Delos to their own custody.
"Pericles himself,"
they urged, "has taken away the only possible
excuse for such an act—the fear that it might be exposed to
the attacks of the Persians when at Delos, whereas it
would be safe at Athens.
Greece has been outraged, and
feels itself openly tyrannised over, when it sees us using
the funds which we extorted from it for the war against
the Persians, for gilding and beautifying our city, as if
were a vain woman, and adorning it with precious marbles,
and statues, and temples, worth a thousand talents."
To this Pericles replied, that the allies had no right to
consider how their money was spent, so long as Athens
defended them from the Persians; while they supplied
neither horses, ships, nor men, but merely money, which
the Athenians had a right to spend as they pleased, provided
they afiforded them that security which it purchased.
It was right, he argued, that after the city had provided
all that was necessary for war, it should devote its surplus
money to the erection of buildings which would be a glory
to it for all ages.
At the same time these works would create plenty by
leaving no man unemployed, and encouraging all sorts
of handicraft, so that nearly the whole city would earn
wages, and thus derive both its beauty and its profit
from itself. For those who were in the flower of their
age, miHtary service offered a means of earning money
from the common stock; while as he did not wish
the mechanics and the lower classes to be without their
it