8.1
Moreover, by way of providing himself with a style of discourse which was adapted, like a musical instrument, to his mode of life and the grandeur of his sentiments, he often made an auxiliary string of Anaxagoras, subtly mingling, as it were, with his rhetoric the dye of natural science. It was from natural science, as the divine Plato says, Plat. Phaedrus 270a that he acquired his loftiness of thought and perfectness of execution, in addition to his natural gifts, and by applying what he learned to the art of speaking, he far excelled all other speakers.
8.2
It was thus, they say, that he got his surname; though some suppose it was from the structures with which he adorned the city, and others from his ability as a statesman and a general, that he was called Olympian. It is not at all unlikely that his reputation was the result of the blending in him of many high qualities.
8.3
But the comic poets of that day who let fly, both in earnest and in jest, many shafts of speech against him, make it plain that he got this surname chiefly because of his diction; they spoke of him as thundering and lightening when he harangued his audience,Cf. Aristoph. Ach. 528-531. and as wielding a dread thunderbolt in his tongue. There is on record also a certain saying of Thucydides, the son of Melesias, touching the clever persuasiveness of Pericles, a saying uttered in jest.
