r the wealthiest citizen of Athens; and he continued to use his
wealth to cement his power. His intercourse with other nations, his
familiarity with the oriental polish and magnificence, served to
elevate his manners from their early rudeness, and to give splendour
to his tastes. If he had spent his youth among the wild soldiers of
Miltiades, the leisure of his maturer years was cultivated by an
intercourse with sages and poets. His passion for the sex, which even
in its excesses tends to refine and to soften, made his only vice. He
was the friend of every genius and every art; and, the link between
the lavish ostentation of Themistocles and the intellectual grace of
Pericles, he conducted, as it were, the insensible transition from the
age of warlike glory to that of civil pre-eminence. He may be said to
have contributed greatly to diffuse that atmosphere of poetry and of
pleasure which even the meanest of the free Athenians afterward
delighted to respire. He led the citizens more and more from the
recesses of private life; and carried out that social policy commenced
by Pisistratus, according to which all individual habits became merged
into one animated, complex, and excited public. Thus, himself gay and
convivial, addicted to company, wine, and women, he encouraged shows
and spectacles, and invested them with new magnificence; he
embellished the city with public buildings, and was the first to erect
at Athens those long colonnades--beneath the shade of which, sheltered
from the western suns, that graceful people were accustomed to
assemble and converse. The Agora, that universal home of the
citizens, was planted by him with the oriental planes; and the groves
of Academe, the immortal haunt of Plato, were his work. That
celebrated garden, associated with the grateful and bright
remembrances of all which poetry can lend to wisdom, was, before the
time of Cimon, a waste and uncultivated spot. It was his hand that
intersected it with walks and alleys, and that poured through its
green retreats the ornamental waters so refreshing in those climes,
and not common in the dry Attic soil, which now meandered in living
streams, and now sparkled into fountains. Besides these works to
embellish, he formed others to fortify the city. He completed the
citadel, hitherto unguarded on the south side; and it was from the
barbarian spoils deposited in the treasury that the expenses of
founding the Long Walls, afterward compl