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The Lacedaemonians, perceiving that if he were deposed they would find the Athenians more pliant in their hands, ordered them to drive out the Cylonian pollution,1 in which the family of Pericles on his mother's side was involved, as Thucydides states.2 But the attempt brought a result the opposite of what its makers designed, for in place of suspicion and slander, Pericles won even greater confidence and honor among the citizens than before, because they saw that their enemies hated and feared him above all other men.

1 That is, members of the Alcmaeonid family, which was involved in the stain of bloodguiltiness when the archon Megacles, about 636 B.C., sacrilegiously slew the followers of Cylon. See Plut. Sol. 12.1-3; Thuc. 1.126.

2 Thuc. 1.127.1.

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