This speech had but little success at the time;
but when, a few days afterward, the news came that Tolmides had fallen
in action at Coronea, and many noble citizens with him, Pericles was
greatly respected and admired as a wise and patriotic man.
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 neighbors 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, away from his ships, leading the troops who were
on board, and terrified the inhabitants so much that they shut
themselves up in their strongholds.
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