he Achaeans of Phthia and the Thessalians, urging them to
join the assembly and take part in the deliberations concerning the
peace and well-being of Greece. However, nothing was effected, and the
cities never assembled, in consequence it is said of the covert
hostility of the Lacedaemonians, and because the attempt was first made
in Peloponnesus and failed there: yet I have inserted an account of it
in order to show the lofty spirit and the magnificent designs of
Perikles.

XVIII. In his campaigns he was chiefly remarkable for caution, for he
would not, if he could help it, begin a battle of which the issue was
doubtful; nor did he wish to emulate those generals who have won
themselves a great reputation by running risks, and trusting to good
luck. But he ever used to say to his countrymen, that none of them
should come by their deaths through any act of his. Observing that
Tolmides, the son of Tolmaeus, elated by previous successes and by the
credit which he had gained as a general, was about to invade Boeotia in
a reckless manner, and had persuaded a thousand young men to follow him
without any support whatever, he endeavoured to stop him, and made that
memorable saying in the public assembly, that if Tolmides would not take
the advice of Perikles, he would at any rate do well to consult that
best of advisers, Time. This speech had but little success at the time;
but when, a few days afterwards, the news came that Tolmides had fallen
in action at Koronea, and many noble citizens with him, Perikles was
greatly respected and admired as a wise and patriotic man.

XIX. His most successful campaign was that in the Chersonesus, which
proved the salvation of the Greeks residing there: for he not only
settled a thousand colonists there, and thus increased the available
force of the cities, but built a continuous line of fortifications
reaching across the isthmus from one sea to the other, by which he shut
off the Thracians, who had previously ravaged the peninsula, and put an
end to a constant and harassing border warfare to which the settlers
were exposed, as they had for neighbours tribes of wild plundering
barbarians.

But that by which he obtained most glory and renown was when he started
from Pegae, in the Megarian territory, and sailed round the Peloponnesus
with a fleet of a hundred triremes; for he not only laid waste much of
the country near the coast, as Tolmides had previously done, but he
proceeded far inland,