#Plutarch #ParallelLives #Pericles 17/

Pericles did not accede to the vain impulses of the citizens, nor was he swept along with the tide when they were eager, from a sense of their great power and good fortune, to lay hands again upon Egypt and molest the realms of the King which lay along the sea.

Many also were possessed already with that inordinate and inauspicious passion for Sicily which was afterwards kindled into flame by such orators as Alcibiades. And some there were who actually dreamed of Tuscany and Carthage, and that not without a measure of hope, in view of the magnitude of their present supremacy and the full-flowing tide of success in their undertakings.

But Pericles was ever trying to restrain this extravagance of the citizens, to lop off their expansive meddlesomeness, and to divert the greatest part of their forces to the guarding and securing of what they had already won.

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