PERICLES. 349

practices, and expelled from Sparta for it. But this we have told at large in the account of Lysander. When Pericles, in giving up his accounts of this expe- dition, stated a disbursement of ten talents, as laid out upon fit occasion, the people, without any question, nor troubling themselves to investigate the mystery, freely allowed of it. And some historians, in which number is Theophrastus the philosopher, have given it as a truth that Pericles every year used to send privately the sum of ten talents to Sparta, with which he complimented those in office, to keep off the war; not to purchase peace neither, but time, that he might prepare at leisure, and be the better able to carry on war hereafter. Immediately after this, turning his forces against the revolters, and passing over into the island of Euboea with fifty sail of ships and five thousand men in arms, he reduced their cities, and drove out the citizens of the Chalcidians, called Hippobotae, horse-feeders, the chief persons for wealth and reputation among them ; and removing all the Histiseans out of the country, brought in a plantation of Athenians in their room ; making them his one exam- ple of severity, because they had captured an Attic ship and killed all on board. After this, having made a truce between the Athenians and Lacedaemonians for thirty years, he ordered, by pub- lic decree, the expedition against the Isle of Samos, on the ground, that, when they were bid to leave off their war with the Milesians, they had not complied. And as these measures against the Samians are thought to have been taken to please Aspasia, this may be a fit point for in- quiry about the woman, what art or charming faculty she had that enabled her to captivate, as she did, the greatest statesmen, and to give the philosophers occasion to speak so much about her, and that, too, not to her disparage-

ment. That she was a Milesian by birth, the daughter