By the money paid for public
spectacles, for citizens acting as jurymen and other paid offices, and
largesses, he soon won over the people to his side, so that he was able
to use them in his attack upon the Senate of the Areopagus, of which he
himself was not a member, never having been chosen Archon, or
Thesmothete, or King Archon, or Polemarch. These offices had from
ancient times been obtained by lot, and it was only through them that
those who had approved themselves in the discharge of them were advanced
to the Areopagus. For this reason it was that Perikles, when he gained
strength with the populace, destroyed this Senate, making Ephialtes
bring forward a bill which restricted its judicial powers, while he
himself succeeded in getting Kimon banished by ostracism, as a friend of
Sparta and a hater of the people, although he was second to no Athenian
in birth or fortune, had won most brilliant victories over the Persians,
and had filled Athens with plunder and spoils of war, as will be found
related in his life. So great was the power of Perikles with the common
people.
X. One of the provisions of ostracism was that the person banished
should remain in exile for ten years. But during this period the
Lacedaemonians with a great force invaded the territory of Tanagra, and,
as the Athenians at once marched out to attack them, Kimon came back
from exile, took his place in full armour among the ranks of his own
tribe, and hoped by distinguishing himself in the battle amongst his
fellow citizens to prove the falsehood of the Laconian sympathies with
which he had been charged.
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