in Greece by force of arms; and island after island of the Ægean yielded to her sway, while her colonies peopled the winding shores of Thrace and Macedon. The other states and cities of Greece could not behold her rapid, and apparently permanent, growth in power without great dissatisfaction and anxiety. When the Persian war was at its height, a sense of common danger had caused many of them to seek an alliance with Athens, the result of what is known as the Confederacy of Delos; but, now that the danger was virtually passed, long existing jealousies broke out, which led to political dissensions, and, finally, to the civil wars that caused the ruin of the Grecian republics. Sparta, especially, had long viewed with indignation the growing resources of Athens and was preparing to check them by an invasion of Attica, when sudden and complicated disasters forced her to abandon her designs, and turn her attention to her own dominions. In 464 B.C. the city was visited by an earthquake that laid it in ruins and buried not less than twenty thousand of its chosen citizens; and this calamity was immediately followed by a general revolt of the Helots. BULWER'S description of this terrible earthquake, and of the memorable conduct of the Laconian government in opposing, under such trying circumstances, the dreadful revolt that occurred, has been greatly admired for its eloquence and its strict adherence to facts.

The Earthquake at Sparta and the Revolt of the Helots.

"An earthquake, unprecedented in its violence, occurred in Sparta. In many places throughout Laconia the rocky soil was rent asunder. From Mount Ta-yg'e-tus, which overhung the city, and on which the women of Lacedæmon were wont to hold their bacchanalian orgies, huge fragments rolled into the suburbs. The greater portion of the city was absolutely overthrown; and it is said, probably with exaggeration, that only five houses wholly escaped disaster from the shock. This terrible calamity did not cease suddenly as it came; its concussions were repeated; it buried alike men and treasure: could we credit Diodorus, no less than twenty thousand persons perished in the shock. Thus depopulated, impoverished, and distressed, the enemies whom the cruelty of Sparta nursed within her bosom resolved to seize the moment to execute their vengeance and consummate her destruction. Under Pausanias the Helots were ready for revolt; and the death of that conspirator checked, but did not crush, their designs of freedom. Now was the moment, when Sparta lay in ruins--now was the moment to realize their dreams. From field to field, from village to village, the news of the earthquake became the watchword of revolt. Up rose the Helots--they armed themselves, they poured on--a wild and gathering and relentless multitude resolved to slay, by the wrath of man, all whom that of nature had yet spared. The earthquake that leveled Sparta rent their chains; nor did the shock create one chasm so dark and wide as that between the master and the slave.

"It is one of the sublimest and most awful spectacles in history --that city in ruins--the earth still trembling, the grim and dauntless soldiery collected amid piles of death and ruin; and in such a time, and such a scene, the multitude sensible not of danger, but of wrong, and rising not to succor, but to revenge--all that should have disarmed a feebler enmity giving fire to theirs; the dreadest calamity their blessing--dismay their hope. It was as if the Great Mother herself had summoned her children to vindicate the long-abused, the all-inalienable heritage derived from her; and the stir of the angry elements was but the announcement of an armed and solemn union between nature and the oppressed.

"Fortunately for Sparta, the danger was not altogether unforeseen. After the confusion and the horror of the earthquake, and while the people, dispersed, were seeking to save their effects, Archida'mus, who, four years before, had succeeded to the throne of Lacedæmon, ordered the trumpets to sound as to arms. That wonderful superiority of man over matter which habit and discipline can effect, and which was ever so visible among the Spartans, constituted their safety at that hour. Forsaking the care of their property, the Spartans seized their arms, flocked around their king, and drew up in disciplined array. In her most imminent crisis Sparta was thus saved. The Helots approached, wild, disorderly, and tumultuous; they came intent only to plunder and to slay; they expected to find scattered and affrighted foes --they found a formidable army; their tyrants were still their lords. They saw, paused, and fled, scattering themselves over the country, exciting all they met to rebellion, and soon joined with the Messenians, kindred to them by blood and ancient reminiscences of heroic struggles; they seized that same Ithome which their hereditary Aristodemus had before occupied with unforgotten valor. This they fortified, and, occupying also the neighboring lands, declared open war upon their lords." [Footnote: "Athens: Its Rise and Fall," pp. 176, 177.]

"The incident here related of the King of Sparta," says ALISON, "amid the yawning of the earthquake and the ruin of his capital, sounding the trumpets to arms, and the Lacedæmonians assembling in disciplined array around him, is one of the sublimest recorded in history. We need not wonder that a people capable of such conduct in such a moment, and trained by discipline and habit to such docility in danger, should subsequently acquire and maintain supreme dominion in Greece." The general insurrection of the Helots is known in history as the THIRD MESSENIAN WAR. After two or three years had passed in vain attempts to capture Ithome, the Spartans were obliged to call for aid on the Athenians, with whom they were still in avowed alliance. The friends of Pericles, the rival of Cimon and the leader of the democratic party at Athens, opposed granting the desired relief; but Cimon, after some difficulty, persuaded his countrymen to assist the Lacedæmonians, and he himself marched with four thousand men to Ithome. The aid of the Athenians was solicited on account of their acknowledged skill in capturing fortified places; but as Cimon did not succeed in taking Ithome, the Spartans became suspicious of his designs, and summarily sent him back to Athens.

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III. THE ACCESSION OF PERICLES TO POWER.

The ill success of the expedition of Cimon gave Pericles the opportunity to place himself and the popular party in power at Athens; for the constitutional reforms that had been gradually weakening the power of the aristocracy were now made available to sweep it almost entirely away. The following extract from BULWER'S Athens briefly yet fully tells what was accomplished in this direction:

"The Constitution previous to Solon was an oligarchy of birth. Solon rendered it an aristocracy of property. Clisthenes widened its basis from property to population; and it was also Clisthenes, in all probability, who weakened the more illicit and oppressive influences of wealth by establishing the ballot of secret suffrage, instead of the open voting which was common in the time of Solon. The Areop'agus was designed by Solon as the aristocratic balance to the popular assembly. This constitutional bulwark of the aristocratic party of Athens became more and more invidious to the people, and when Cimon resisted every innovation on that assembly he only insured his own destruction, while he expedited the policy he denounced. Ephial'tes, the friend and spokesman of Pericles, directed all the force of the popular opinion against this venerable senate; and at length, though not openly assisted by Pericles, who took no prominent part in the contention, that influential statesman succeeded in crippling its functions and limiting its authority."

With regard to the nature of the constitutional changes effected, the same writer adds: "It appears to me most probable that the Areopagus retained the right of adjudging cases of homicide, and little besides of its ancient constitutional authority; that it lost altogether its most dangerous power in the indefinite police it had formerly exercised over the habits and morals of the people; that any control of the finances was wisely transferred to the popular senate; that its irresponsible character was abolished, and that it was henceforth rendered accountable to the people." The struggle between the contending parties was long and bitter, and the fall of Cimon was one of the necessary consequences of the political change. Charged, among other things, with too great friendship for Sparta, he was driven into exile. Pericles now persuaded the Athenians to renounce the alliance with Sparta, and he increased the power of Athens by alliances with Argos and other cities. He also continued the construction of the long walls from Athens to the Piræus and Phalerum--a project that Themistocles had advised and that Cimon had commenced.

The long existing jealousy of Sparta at last broke out in open hostilities. While the siege of Ithome was in progress, Sparta, still powerful in her alliances, sent her allied forces into Boeotia to counteract the growing influence of the Athenians in that quarter. The indignant Athenians, led by Pericles, marched out to meet them, but were worsted in the battle of Tan'agra. Before this conflict began, Cimon, the banished commander, appeared in the Athenian camp and begged permission to enter the ranks against the enemy. His request being refused, he left his armor with his friends, of whom there were one hundred among the Athenians, with the charge to refute, by their valor, the accusation that he and they were the friends of Sparta. Everyone of the one hundred fell in the conflict. About two months after, in the early part of the year 456 B.C., the Athenians wiped off the stain of their defeat at Tanagra by a victory over the combined Theban and Boeotian forces, then in alliance with Sparta; whereby the authority and influence of Sparta were again confined to the Peloponnesus.

The Athenians were now masters of Greece, from the Gulf of Corinth to the Pass of Thermopylæ, and in the following year they sent an expedition round the Peloponnesus, which captured, among other cities, Naupactus, on the Corinthian Gulf. The third and last Messenian war had just been concluded by the surrender of Ithome, on terms which permitted the Messenians and their families to retire from the Peloponnesus, and they joined the colony which Athens planted at Naupactus. But the successes of Athens in Greece were counterbalanced, in the same year, by reverses in Egypt, where the Athenians were fighting Persia in aid of In'arus, a Libyan prince. These, with some other minor disasters, and the state of bitter feeling that existed between the two parties at Athens, induced Pericles to recall Cimon from exile and put him in command of an expedition against Cyprus and Egypt. In 449, however, Cimon was taken ill, and he died in the harbor of Ci'tium, to which place he was laying siege.

Before the death of Cimon, and through his intervention, a five years' truce had been concluded with Sparta, and soon after his death peace was made with Persia. From this time the empire of Athens began to decline. In the year 447 B.C. a revolt in Boeotia resulted in the overthrow of Athenian supremacy there, while the expulsion of the Athenians from Pho'cis and Lo'cris, and the revolt of Euboea and Megara, followed soon after. The revolt of Euboea was soon quelled, but this was the only success that Athens