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[2] Consequently, when the Assembly convened to consider the affair, the enemies of Pericles persuaded the people to arrest Pheidias and lodged a charge against Pericles himself of stealing sacred property. Furthermore, they falsely accused the sophist1 Anaxagoras, who was Pericles' teacher, of impiety against the gods2; and they involved Pericles in their accusations and malicious charges, since jealousy made them eager to discredit the eminence as well as the fame of the man.3

1 The general name given the teachers of advanced education in the fifth century.

2 Anaxagoras was one of the most distinguished physical philosophers of Greece, who maintained that the universe was directed by unchangeable Mind and tried to give a natural explanation of eclipses, rainbows, the heavenly bodies, of which he said the sun was a mass of blazing metal larger than the Peloponnesus, and other phenomena of nature. Of course such teaching ran counter to the popular polytheism of the day.

3 It is more than likely that the accusations against these two friends of Pericles fell some years before the outbreak of the war (cp. Adcock in Camb. Anc. Hist. 5, pp. 477-480). At any rate Thucydides' account of the causes of the war makes no mention of either Pheidias or Anaxagoras.

Diodorus Siculus. Diodorus of Sicily in Twelve Volumes with an English Translation by C. H. Oldfather. Vol. 4-8. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd. 1989.

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