XIII	THE     PEOPLE    AND     THE     STATE	355
gogue, he was bound to take a much higher view than the
rest of the irresponsible crowd of orators. This is obvious in
the case of Penkles, to whose discretion everything was left:
'the tribute of the cities and the cities themselves, to be bound
or unleashed , the walls of stone, to be built or cast down again ;
treaties, power, dominion, peace, wealth and happiness^5.^1
Again and again Penkles is called king, tyrant, Zeus, and his
domineering power becomes the target of grim attacks as well
as of good-natured jokes.^2 The later prostatat_y on the other
hand, were largely the heirs of Penkles. It comes perhaps
from a saying of Kleon himself that he is ridiculed as a sort of
Helios who sees everything.^3 A comparison between the
speeches of Penkles and Kleon, as Thucydides records them,
makes it very clear how strongly the later man tried to follow
his great predecessor This argument is the more convincing
since Thucydides with equal strength of feeling admires
Perikles and hates Kleon.
If we see the Paphlagoman and the sausage-seller as the
poet wishes us to see them, that is as caricatures of real states-
men, the extraordinary power and importance of the prostates
can easily be deduced. It is significant that his position is
described with old-fashioned and high-sounding names like
tagos and archelas, or that he is called simply "the great* or 'the
greatest man'.^4 He is the man who almost alone looks after
the whole of Athenian trade, ruling like Poseidon, as the
'greatest of the Greeks', over a seabound empire.^5 Everything
is full of Kleon's boldness and insolence : country and assembly,
offices and courts and archives, in a word, the whole State.^8
He is seen surrounded by loathsome sycophants, cheating and
controlling the people by means of oracles and many other
tricks.^7 It may not be easy to decide whether it is really true
that the rich and stupid were exploited by Kleon, or whether
on the contrary, at least part of the people were clever enough
to use and exploit the dishonest f restates* In any case, behind
*	TclekL 42
^2	A $3of, Kratmos 56, 71, 1 1 1, 240, 241, 38 P, i jff (cf dJP LXVI, 1945*
120, note 2 3), Telekl 1 7, Hermipp 41 , 46, adesp. 60
^3	K 74f, 862f, cf Eupolis 290.
*	K 1 59, 164, 1 78, 1 80	^5 K 176,
^8 K 26 iff   The persecution of the wealthy Laches (W 24of) was perhaps
Kleon's work. — K 1 1 2 iff, cf, PI 920,