he rein,
And wantonly would leap upon the islands in the main."

VIII. Wishing to adopt a style of speaking consonant with his haughty
manner and lofty spirit, Perikles made free use of the instrument which
Anaxagoras as it were put into his hand, and often tinged his oratory
with natural philosophy. He far surpassed all others by using this
"lofty intelligence and power of universal consummation," as the divine
Plato calls it;[A] in addition to his natural advantages, adorning his
oratory with apt illustrations drawn from physical science.

[Footnote A: Plato, Phaedrus.]

For this reason some think that he was nicknamed the Olympian; though
some refer this to his improvement of the city by new and beautiful
buildings, and others from his power both as a politician and a general.
It is not by any means unlikely that these causes all combined to
produce the name. Yet the comedies of that time, when they allude to
him, either in jest or earnest, always appear to think that this name
was given him because of his manner of speaking, as they speak of him as
"thundering and lightening," and "rolling fateful thunders from his
tongue." A saying of Thucydides, the son of Melesias, has been
preserved, which jestingly testifies to the power of Perikles's
eloquence. Thucydides was the leader of the conservative party, and for
a long time struggled to hold his own against Perikles in debate. One
day Archidamus, the King of Sparta, asked him whether he or Perikles was
the best wrestler. "When I throw him in wrestling," Thucydides answered,
"he beats me by proving that he never was down, and making the
spectators believe him." For all this Perikles was very cautious about
his words, and whenever he ascended the tribune to speak, used first to
pray to the gods that nothing unfitted for the present occasion might
fall from his lips. He left no writings, except the measures which he
brought forward, and very few of his sayings are recorded. One of these
was, that he called Aegina "the eyesore of the Peiraeus," and that "he
saw war coming upon Athens from Peloponnesus." Stesimbrotus tells us
that when he was pronouncing a public funeral oration over those who
fell in Samos, he said that they had become immortal, even as the gods:
for we do not see the gods, but we conceive them to be immortal by the
respect which we pay them, and the blessings which we receive from them;
and the same is the case with those who die for their country.