of great thoughts, but never to irritation, even when the provocation was sorest. Hegel says of him: 'To be the first man in the State, among this noble, free, and cultivated people of Athens, was the good fortune of Pericles. Of all that is great for humanity the greatest thing is to dominate the wills of men who have wills of their own.'
At the time when Pericles became thus virtually supreme, Athens had reached a position wholly different from that which she had held before the Persian wars. Then, she was merely the chief town of Attica, a small district, of little natural wealth. But in the course of the last thirty years she had become an Imperial city, the head of a great confederacy which embraced the islands and coasts of the Aegean Sea. The common treasury of the league had been removed from the island of Delos to Athens, and located in the temple of Athena on the Acropolis. This transfer,—a bold step which Pericles had strongly advocated,—was a formal recognition of Athens as the capital of a wide empire. Almost all the cities which had originally been her free allies had now become her subjects; year by year their tribute flowed to the temple on her citadel. And these revenues were administered by Athenian officials, subject to the authority of Athens. The revenues proper to Athens herself had been greatly enlarged by the development of the silver mines of Laurium in Attica, and by the acquisition of gold mines in Thrace. Thus the organisation of finance had assumed a new political importance. It should
