Pericles

Pericles (c. 495–429 BCE) was an Athenian statesman and general who dominated the city's politics for roughly three decades, from about 461 BCE until his death during the early years of the Peloponnesian War. He belonged to the aristocratic Alcmaeonid family, but he built his authority by championing radical democracy and by leading the popular faction against the conservative Areopagus council and its supporters. His position rested on repeated election as general (strategos), on his personal prestige, and on his skill in persuading the Assembly. Ancient writers, above all Thucydides, present him as a man of intelligence and incorruptibility who nonetheless ruled Athens in practice. The period from about 461 to 429 BCE is traditionally called the Periclean Age, and it is associated with the consolidation of Athenian democratic institutions, the management of the Delian League as an Athenian empire, and the construction of the Parthenon and other monuments on the Acropolis. These achievements made Athens the cultural centre of the ancient Greek world.

This entry examines Pericles in the context of his family background, education, and early rise through the law courts and the Assembly. It then covers the institutional reforms and offices through which he exercised power, the Athenian empire and the financing of its building program, and his foreign policy, including the wars and treaties that shaped relations with Sparta. Later sections address the funeral oration attributed to him, his private life and family, and his final years, including the plague that killed him and the political trials he faced during the war. The entry concludes with a discussion of the ancient sources and their reliability, the modern debate over how to judge his leadership, and his lasting place in Western political and cultural memory.

Family and aristocratic origins

Birth and dating

Pericles was born around 495 BCE, probably in Athens or its immediate hinterland. Most modern accounts place his home in the deme of Cholargos, just north of the city, which some sources write as Holargos. Smith's nineteenth-century dictionary of Greek and Roman biography stated that the exact date of his birth was unknown, and the 1911 Britannica moved it to about 490 BCE. Any date in the 490s is therefore an estimate built from his later career rather than from a recorded birth.

Father and mother

His father, Xanthippus, was a wealthy politician and military commander from an aristocratic background. Xanthippus was ostracized in the mid-480s BCE, probably because of rivalry with Themistocles, but he was recalled when Persia invaded again. He then commanded the Athenian contingent at Mycale in 479 BCE, a victory that gave the family lasting prestige.

His mother, Agariste, belonged to the Alcmaeonidae, a wealthy and prominent clan whose reputation was contested. She was a niece of the reformer Cleisthenes, who had given Athens a more democratic constitution in 508 BCE, and she was also a great-granddaughter of Cleisthenes, tyrant of Sicyon. Through her, Pericles was linked both to Athenian constitutional reform and to the ruling families of a neighbouring Peloponnesian city.

The Alcmaeonid inheritance

The Alcmaeonidae were among the most famous families of archaic Athens. Their standing rested on wealth and ancestry, but it was also clouded by a notorious earlier episode in which the family was accused of sacrilege, and by repeated periods of exile. Their connections were nonetheless essential to Xanthippus' career, and Agariste's kinship helped open political doors for him. For Pericles, the family's mixed fortunes meant that a political leader could not rely on inherited prestige alone. He would need popular support and had to guard against rivals who could use the family's past against him. This lesson is usually read back into his later conduct in the Assembly, although the ancient sources say little about his youth directly.

Childhood during the Persian Wars

Pericles was a small child when the Persians under Darius invaded mainland Greece and were defeated at Marathon in 490 BCE. He grew up as the Greek cities mobilized again during the invasion of Xerxes in 480–479 BCE, and his father's service at Mycale made the war a family matter. Ancient authors also preserved a story that his mother dreamed before his birth of bearing a lion. Herodotus and Plutarch both record it, and the dream was taken as a sign of his strength and eminence. Later anecdotes, such as Plutarch's account of his unusually elongated head, which became a target for comic poets, show that his appearance was remembered and mocked long after his death.

The Persian wars thus formed the background to his youth, but they are also the setting in which his family's status was tested and confirmed. The subsequent political rise of the Alcmaeonid-linked household, and the prosecutions and reforms that followed, belong to the later sections of this article.

Education and intellectual formation

Pericles' schooling is known mainly from later Greek writers, and they do not agree on who taught him what. His family's standing and wealth gave him access to home tutors with several specialists, so he was not educated in a public school. Pericles received an excellent education from private tutors.

The musician Damon is the teacher most often linked with him. The Attic orator Isocrates calls Damon his teacher (didaskalos). Damon taught Pericles the moral and political influence of music, according to a standard reference summary. Plutarch reads the relationship differently: Pericles learned sophistry from Damon under the guise of music. The musical lessons, in this account, served as cover for training in clever argument. Aristotle, by contrast, reportedly named a different music teacher, the musical sophist Pythocleides, who not only taught him the art of the lyre but also the art of debate. A dialogue attributed to Plato or his school, set in 432 or 431 BCE, has Alcibiades say that Pericles became wise through association with several sophists, including Pythocleides and Anaxagoras, and that he studies with Damon for this very purpose even in his later years. These are literary testimonies, and the Hellenistic reports on teacher-pupil relationships are regarded with suspicion, so the sequence of his teachers cannot be reconstructed with confidence.

The best-documented intellectual influence is Anaxagoras of Clazomenae. Born like Damon c.500, Anaxagoras was Perikles' best-known teacher and wise counsellor. Anaxagoras offered a natural philosophy in which mind (nous) ordered the cosmos, and in the ancient tradition this training shaped Pericles' method of argument: From this Pericles drew what applies to the art of speech. Later writers also connected his caution about religious explanations with Anaxagoras, since the reports of Perikles' scepticism toward religion echo Anaxagoras. Plutarch credits the philosopher with shaping Pericles' bearing, and in another passage calls him a "counsellor in government". The friendship did not last indefinitely; a Thucydidean note records that Pericles lived in the most intimate friendship with Anaxagoras until the philosopher was forced to leave Athens. Zeno of Elea is also listed among the teachers who gave him instruction in argument and the natural world.

The sophist Protagoras is the most tangible link to Pericles' wider circle. Protagoras sojourned at least twice in Athens in Pericles' time, establishing with him personal ties. Whether this produced direct involvement in politics is harder to establish. In 444 BCE, Pericles entrusted him with drafting the constitution of the new pan-Hellenic colony of Thurii in South Italy, and the Stanford Encyclopedia reads this commission as evidence of shared political outlook. That reading is an inference from one appointment rather than proof of a shared programme.

The historian Herodotus is a weaker case. Herodotus of Halicarnassus, who was somewhat younger than Pericles, is generally placed around 485 BCE. He is known to have participated in the colony in southern Italy at the new city of Thurii, which Pericles supported, but there is little firm evidence that either man was directly involved with Pericles' intellectual circle. Older encyclopedia entries list Herodotus among Pericles' friends, but such lists rest on later tradition and cannot be checked against contemporary evidence.

Ancient authors also describe the young Pericles as reserved and carefully controlled. One popular biography reports that as a youth, Pericles did not enjoy speaking in public and, instead, focused on his military career. Plutarch's portrait links his composure to Anaxagoras' teaching, and the nickname "Olympian" later suggested a similar aloofness. These traits are known largely through later literary portraits, which present his youth as a preparation for his later authority rather than as a documented record.

Early political career and the prosecution of Cimon

Pericles entered public life through the law courts rather than through military command or the Assembly. In this period, rivals often brought charges against one another to damage a man's prestige, and a conviction could end a career. The first recorded act of Pericles' political life is his part in the prosecution of Cimon, the son of Miltiades and the most prominent Athenian general of the 460s. Greek politics of the time therefore depended heavily on legal proceedings as well as on elections.

Before that point the evidence is thin. The earliest datable event in his life is his financing of a theatrical production in 472 BCE, when he paid for the staging of Aeschylus' Persians. Funding a chorus in this way was a liturgy, a public expense borne by wealthy citizens, which brought prestige and visibility before the audience and the city. The sponsorship shows that a rich young man could build a public profile through theatrical generosity, but it does not show that he held any office. Ancient biographers tend to fill the gap between 472 and the 460s with anecdote, and modern historians treat much of that material with caution.

The first securely attested political act is the case of 463 BCE. Cimon had returned from a campaign against Thasos and had earlier operated in Thrace and the Chersonese. He was charged with accepting bribes from the Macedonian king so that he would not attack Macedon. Plutarch names Pericles among the accusers, and the charge implies that Pericles favoured an assertive policy of expansion. Accounts differ on how serious his role was. The Encyclopaedia Iranica notes that he dropped out once it became clear that Cimon could not be convicted, while the 1911 Britannica suggests he may have been a figurehead, since the accusation could hardly have been meant seriously. Cimon was acquitted.

The dating of this early career rests on a few fixed points. The 463 prosecution is traditionally treated as the first secure record of Pericles, and the earlier sponsorship of 472 is the only other dated entry. The problem is that the years between these points are poorly documented, and later writers tended to attach him to events without evidence for his exact role. Even Pericles' birth date is given as about 495 BCE in modern reference works and as about 490 BCE in older ones, which affects how old he was when he first appears in the record.

The prosecution was followed by the collapse of Cimon's position. His policy of friendship with Sparta was unpopular, and in 462 BCE Sparta asked Athens for help against helots who had fortified Mount Ithome in Messenia. Cimon persuaded the Athenians to send a force, but the Spartans then dismissed it, which humiliated him and his supporters at home. In 461 BCE he was ostracized and exiled for ten years. Ostracism was not a legal punishment in the usual sense; it was a procedure for removing a politically dangerous figure from the city, and it became possible only once his enemies controlled the Assembly. The sequence of the 463 prosecution, the Messenian episode, and the ostracism is the conventional account, and it rests mainly on Thucydides. Modern scholars debate how far the disgrace of Cimon was itself shaped by the democratic faction that Pericles and Ephialtes led, a question that belongs to the account of the reforms of the early 460s BCE.

Reforms with Ephialtes and the curbing of the Areopagus

Partnership with Ephialtes

Pericles' first documented political program was carried out alongside Ephialtes, a democratic politician whom the sources present as the leading figure of the early 460s BCE. Later tradition treats Pericles as his junior partner and deputy. Modern scholars disagree about who held the initiative: some see Ephialtes as the real author of the measures, while others argue that Pericles, already a figure of standing, supplied much of the political weight. The circumstances around the Ephialtic reforms and what they amounted to still remain unclear today. Similarly, the roles of Pericles and Ephialtes are unclear.

The Areopagus before the reform

The Areopagus was a council made up of former archons, the chief magistrates of the city. Its authority rested on what the sources call guardianship: it oversaw magistrates, tried political offenders, and watched over the laws. This gave an aristocratic body a durable role in the state even after the Cleisthenic reforms had opened the political system more widely. The archonship was elective and effectively confined to the wealthier classes. Aristotle and some modern historians describe the period before the reform as a kind of informal "Areopagite constitution" under Cimon's leadership, a label that is itself disputed.

The reform and its content

According to Aristotle's account, Ephialtes first attacked the council through prosecutions of individual Areopagites for corruption, a method that weakened the body's standing case by case. The legislation that followed moved most of the council's political functions elsewhere. Ephialtes introduced legislation in 462/1 BC that fundamentally reformed the Areopagus by depriving it of its authority to oversee magistrates, enforce the laws, and protect the constitution, and the powers were redistributed to the popular courts, the Council of Five Hundred, and the Assembly. Scrutiny of officials went to the Council of 500, and political trials passed to the jury courts. The council was limited to judging cases of homicide and religious crimes. Some later scholars regard its remaining judicial role as a more limited survival than a full dismantling, and the precise scope of the change is still debated.

Timing and circumstances

The reform is traditionally dated to 462/461 BCE, and its timing was linked to foreign affairs. In 462/461 B.C.E., as a partisan of Pericles, Ephialtes took advantage of the absence of the conservative politician Cimon, who had been sent to help Sparta against a helot revolt. Sparta then dismissed the Athenian contingent, which weakened Cimon's prestige at home and shifted opinion toward Ephialtes. Aristotle places the reform in 462, while a version in Plutarch associates it with the Cyprus expedition of 463/2, and modern chronologies have to choose between these accounts. The two dates are close enough that the difference matters mainly for reconstructing the sequence of events in the years around Cimon's fall.

Interpretation and the assassination of Ephialtes

Ancient critics were not uniformly favourable. Diodorus, for instance, presents the measure as the destruction of ancestral customs, reflecting the view of the conservative aristocracy. Modern historians often treat the reform as the start of what is called "radical democracy", though this label has been questioned as an oversimplification. When Ephialtes was assassinated for overthrowing the elitist Council of the Aeropagus, his deputy Pericles stepped in. Ephialtes' death, whose circumstances and perpetrators remain obscure, left Pericles as the leading voice of the democratic faction. Plutarch suggests that his popularity with the people made it possible for him to lead a successful party against the Areopagus, a claim that makes personal authority rather than formal office the key to his rise.

Extension of democratic institutions

Pericles' period in power saw several measures that widened the practical reach of Athenian democratic institutions, along with one law that narrowed the definition of who belonged to the citizen body. The most consequential of the first kind was the introduction of pay for jury service. The Aristotelian Athenian Constitution credits Pericles with making service in the jury-courts a paid office, as a popular counter-measure to Cimon's wealth. The same account links the decision to advice from Damonides of Oea, and it reports that critics later blamed the measure for lowering the quality of juries, since ordinary people put themselves forward for selection as jurors more readily than men of better position.

The rate of pay is uncertain. Some sources put the original sum at two obols per day, while others argue that the first payment was one obol, based on a joke in Aristophanes' Knights, and that the rate was raised to three obols by about 421 BCE. The purpose, however, is consistently described: the payment was meant to let men of limited means serve without losing a day's wages. Jurors were paid so that poorer citizens would not be excluded from juries by their need to work. Scholars also note that this pay formed part of a wider system of state payments, which some historians describe as a way for ordinary citizens to take part in public life without depending on wealthy patrons. Under Ephialtes and Pericles, the courts themselves expanded, and jurors became the primary decision makers, with magistrates mainly presiding.

The law of 451/450 BCE pointed in the opposite direction. In 451 or 450 Pericles carried a law confining Athenian citizenship to those of Athenian parentage on both sides. Before this, a child needed only an Athenian father to qualify, so the law's effect was to exclude many children of mixed marriages from the political community. The ancient explanations are varied. One account, transmitted in the Athenian Constitution, says that the law was passed because of the large number of citizens, and it links the measure to a gift of 40,000 medimnoi of grain from the king of Egypt, which had to be distributed among the citizens. Plutarch, by contrast, presents the law as a rule that Pericles himself later relaxed after he lost his legitimate sons, which allowed his son by Aspasia to be recognized. Modern historians dispute the motive. One view holds that no source provides any background to this proposal, and it is not even clear whether it was retrospective. Another suggests that the law was a political weapon against Cimon, who had a foreign mother, while a more recent reading argues that the law aimed at enhancing communal identity and morale after significant war losses rather than restricting citizenship as such.

Institutionally, the democracy rested on three bodies. The Assembly was the main forum for debate and voting, and it met regularly; one source puts its meetings at about forty per year. The Council of Five Hundred, the Boule, was chosen by lot, with 50 citizens from each of the ten tribes serving for a year. The Council prepared the agenda for the Assembly and supervised administration. Large juries drawn from the citizen body decided legal cases, and these juries sometimes numbered several hundred people. Jurors had to be over thirty, a higher age threshold than the eighteen required for Assembly participation.

The limits of this system were considerable. Political rights belonged to a small minority of the population. Women, slaves, and resident foreigners, known as metics, were excluded from politics. One estimate suggests that only about 5–10% of Attica's inhabitants could participate, although estimates of the total population vary considerably. The 451/450 law made the boundary of the citizen body stricter, so that even families with long Athenian residence could lose their standing if one parent was foreign. Women could not hold office or speak in the Assembly, and enslaved people had no civil standing at all. Pay for jury service and public office widened participation among adult male citizens, but it did not extend the franchise beyond them.

Authority as strategos and the politics of election

Pericles' formal power came from the generalship. Unlike most Athenian magistracies, which were filled by lot, the strategoi were chosen by election, and the generalship was the only office an Athenian could hold for several consecutive terms. The office of "General", or Strategos, was one of the few in the Athenian democracy that was elected, rather than chosen randomly by lot. Each year the people elected ten generals, who were given duties which included planning military expeditions, receiving envoys of other states and directing diplomatic affairs. Votes were taken by show of hands in the Assembly. The board's power went further than its military remit: because the generals commanded the army and navy and worked closely with the Boule, and could compel the council to call special meetings of the assembly, they could shape domestic and foreign policy alike.

Pericles was never more than one of the ten, and the office mattered to him chiefly as a platform. Its holders could address the Assembly on matters they considered important and try to win support for their own proposals. Pericles was elected repeatedly to the office of Strategos during the period from 454 to 429 BCE, though not in every year. Many accounts treat his nearly unbroken tenure as beginning in 443: from 443 he held the office almost continuously until his death in 429. His authority therefore rested on repeated re-election rather than on any fixed prerogative. His position rested on his continual reelection to the generalship and on his prestige, based, according to the historian Thucydides, on his manifest intelligence and incorruptibility.

Thucydides' account of Pericles' leadership is the principal ancient testimony. In his version, Pericles' rank, ability and recognised integrity allowed him to exercise independent control over the people, leading them rather than being led by them; since he did not seek power by improper means, he had no need to flatter the crowd, and he could even oppose them when they were wrong. Athens was, Thucydides says, in name a democracy but, in fact, governed by its first man. The same independence drew hostility. Opponents resented his oratorical skill, his family's wealth, and his political successes. His reserved manner was also read by enemies as signs of haughtiness and arrogance. This combination of formal office, personal prestige and oratory produced the tension at the heart of his position: his authority depended on continually persuading a sovereign Assembly, which could still reject him at any time.

The chief organised opposition came from Thucydides son of Melesias. He was an aristocrat, connected by marriage with Cimon. After the death of Cimon he succeeded him as the leading conservative opponent of Pericles, and he was said to have objected particularly to the building programme and to have organised his supporters as a bloc in the Assembly. According to Plutarch, Pericles proposed to pay for all the construction from his own purse, under the term that all these monuments would belong to him and not to Athens. The public applauded his stance and Thucydides suffered an unexpected defeat; some modern scholars doubt the details of this account. Thucydides was ostracised around 443, and the date is sometimes given as 442. Thucydides went into exile for 10 years, leaving Pericles unchallenged. After Thucydides' ostracism, Pericles had little domestic opposition. Ostracism was used as a means of removing a rival from the political field, and its outcome left the rest of the leadership with no comparable counterweight.

The episode shows how far Pericles' position depended on the Assembly's continuing consent, even though it was rarely challenged in this period. Thucydides' later comments on the leaders who followed, who had to cater to the crowd to hold their own power, are often read as an implicit contrast with Pericles' record. Though Athenian democracy never gave more than severely limited powers to the executive, the assembly gave Pericles what he wanted. Whether that arrangement reflected a stable democratic settlement or a personal ascendancy that only his prestige could sustain is a question on which ancient and modern readers have differed.

The Delian League and the Athenian empire

The Delian League took shape in 478 BCE, when the league was formed to liberate eastern Greek cities from Persian rule. Its purpose was defensive: its members aimed to deter any Persian attempt to return to the Aegean after the Persian Wars. Allies could supply warships and crews or pay a sum into a common fund. The arrangement was probably built on equality, since each city-state likely had an equal vote in meetings held on Delos. Over the following decades, however, Athens steadily converted this voluntary structure into a hierarchy. Some allies were reduced to the status of tribute-paying subjects, and by the mid-5th century the league had effectively become an Athenian empire.

The early stages of this shift are visible in a series of episodes. When Naxos attempted to leave the alliance around 467 BCE, Athens besieged the island, dismantled its walls, and forced it to continue paying tribute. A revolt by Thasos in 465 BCE, which arose from disputes over trade and mining rights in Thrace, was likewise crushed after a long siege. Such cases showed that membership in the League had become compulsory under Athenian direction.

The treasury's location was a key step in this process. It had originally been kept on Delos, a sacred island of Apollo considered neutral ground. In 454 or 454/3 BCE it was moved to Athens, a change whose exact date remains debated. Once the funds were in the city, they were controlled by Athenian officials; the treasury was controlled by Athenian treasurers, the ten Hellenotamiae. The ancient justification for the move was protection. Pericles defended the use of League money for these projects on the grounds that Athens provided protection for all members. Tribute itself was assessed on a large scale. The initial total was set at 460 talents, a figure traditionally attributed to Aristides, and it rose sharply later in the century. The Athenian Tribute List of 442/1 BCE, which was displayed on the Acropolis, recorded one-sixtieth of the tribute paid by each League member, which was given as an offering to Athena.

Money and ships were used for purposes that served Athens directly. Funds from the tribute supported ambitious building projects, including the Parthenon, and financed the growing power of the Athenian state. The Athenian navy was maintained with league resources, and allies that had once contributed their own fleets were gradually pressed into paying cash instead. Chios, Lesbos, and Samos were among the few that continued to provide their own fleets.

Control was enforced through a combination of threats, garrisons, and punitive settlements. The clearest example is the Samian revolt of 440–439 BCE. The conflict was initiated by Athens's intervention in a dispute between Samos and Miletus. When the Samians refused to halt their attacks, Athens easily drove out the oligarchic government of Samos and installed a garrison in the city, but the oligarchs soon returned, with Persian support. A larger Athenian fleet, led by Pericles, returned to besiege the island. The siege lasted 9 months, at the end of which the Samians surrendered, tore down their walls, converted their government to a democracy, gave up their fleet, and agreed to pay Athens a war indemnity of 1,300 talents over a period of 26 years. The settlement made the point clearly, and the wider revolt elsewhere in the empire ended soon afterwards.

Historians disagree about how to characterize the empire. One reading stresses security: the league was built to protect the Aegean, and Athens could argue that it provided protection in return for contributions. A second reading stresses revenue and coercion. Here, the change from voluntary contributions to compulsory payments is central, and the Samian indemnity and the forced transfer of the treasury are seen as signs that allied states had lost their autonomy. A third approach treats the empire as a form of rule over subject allies, in which fiscal extraction, legal intervention, and military force were inseparable. The debate is still active, partly because the surviving evidence is uneven. Ancient authors such as Thucydides give figures that do not always match inscriptions, and the scale of the tribute is uncertain. Modern accounts, therefore, differ on how much the Athenians intended to build an empire from the start and how much the empire developed through a sequence of reactions to crises.

Foreign policy and the wars with Sparta

Pericles' foreign policy was shaped by the rivalry between Athens and Sparta, which had become open conflict by the 460s BCE. Athens relied on sea power, while Sparta's strength lay on land. In the First Peloponnesian War (460–445 BCE), Athens fought Corinth, Aegina and their allies. Aegina was besieged and forced to pay tribute to Athens, and Athenian fleets raided the Peloponnesian coast. In 454 BCE Pericles himself led a naval expedition into the Corinthian Gulf. Athens could take and hold islands and coastal towns, but it struggled to consolidate gains on land. At Tanagra in 457 BCE a Spartan-led force defeated an Athenian army, and that result deterred Sparta from marching on Athens at once.

The decisive setback came in 447–446 BCE, when several dependencies rose at once. Athenian power in Boeotia collapsed, Euboea revolted, and Megara broke away from Athenian control. The loss of Megara opened the route into Attica, and a Spartan army under King Pleistoanax entered Attica in 446 BCE, the first such invasion in about twelve years. Pericles crossed to Euboea with an army, crushed the revolt there, and then returned to Attica. Some ancient sources claim that he bribed the Spartan king to withdraw, but this rests on hostile or unverified reports and cannot be confirmed. Shortly afterwards Athens made peace.

The Thirty Years' Peace and its limits

The Thirty Years' Peace, agreed in the winter of 446–445 BCE, recognized two spheres of influence. Sparta controlled the Peloponnese and the land, while Athens kept its maritime empire. Athens gave up its possessions on the Peloponnese, including the Megarian ports, and Megara returned to the Peloponnesian League. Aegina stayed in the Delian League as an autonomous tributary, and Athens still kept its gains in the Aegean. The Long Walls linking the city to Piraeus were strengthened to protect the route to the port.

The peace proved fragile. Its terms left room for disputes over allies and colonies, and Athens repeatedly acted in ways that Corinth and its allies regarded as breaches. In 440 BCE Samos, a member of the Delian League, revolted, and Pericles led the Athenian fleet in suppressing it during 440–439 BCE. Athens intervened in the dispute between Corcyra and Corinth in 433 BCE by making a defensive alliance with Corcyra. Contemporaries and later writers noted that this alliance respected the wording of the treaty but not its spirit. Athens then imposed trade sanctions on Megara and attacked Potidaea, a Corinthian colony, in 432 BCE. Sparta judged that Athens had violated the treaty, and war began in 431 BCE.

Naval operations and the Aegean empire

Pericles' naval policy aimed at keeping the Aegean and the sea lanes under Athenian control. Athenian fleets protected grain supplies from the Black Sea, supported allies, and raided the coasts of Sparta's allies. The Delian League's tribute gave Athens the resources to maintain these forces, and tribute was enforced by threat of military action. Pericles' use of the fleet to suppress allied revolts, most clearly at Samos, shows how naval power and imperial control were linked.

Historiographical debate

Historians disagree about Pericles' long-term judgment. Thucydides presents him as a firm advocate of resisting Spartan demands in 432 BCE, rejecting an ultimatum and proposing arbitration instead, and as a leader who expected Athens' naval strength to outlast a Spartan land campaign. Some scholars read this as a deliberate strategy of deterrence and attrition that accepted the risk of war, while others see Pericles as responding to pressure from allies and from Athenian commercial and imperial interests. A further question is whether he wanted war at all, or whether he hoped to consolidate Athenian sea power while avoiding a decisive confrontation. Because Thucydides was an Athenian officer with his own views, and because the speeches he attributes to Pericles are reconstructions, judgments on the wisdom of these confrontations remain contested.

The Acropolis building program and the Parthenon

The most visible result of Pericles' public works was the rebuilding of the Acropolis, the rock that held Athens' oldest sanctuaries. Persian forces had taken Athens in 480 BCE and destroyed most of the buildings on the hill. The Acropolis was rebuilt after its destruction by the Persians in 480 BCE, with Pericles leading a major construction program that included the Parthenon, the Propylaea, the Erechtheum, and the Temple of Athena Nike. Dates for the start of the programme vary between sources. One reconstruction places its beginning in 447, instigated by Pericles, supervised by Pheidias, and funded by surplus from the war treasury of the Delian League. Other accounts date the start to around 450 BCE. Work on the hilltop continued in the decades after Pericles' initial commission and was not completed until the late 5th century.

The Parthenon

The Parthenon was the centrepiece of the scheme, and it was built as a temple to Athena Parthenos, the city's patron goddess. The Parthenon was to be the chief shrine to Athena and also the treasury of the Delian League, which shows that its function as a sanctuary and as a storehouse for imperial money was planned together. Work on the Parthenon began in 447 bce under the architects Ictinus and Callicrates with the supervision of the sculptor Phidias. The building was completed by 438, and that same year a great gold and ivory statue of Athena, made by Phidias for the interior, was dedicated. Work on the exterior decoration of the building continued until 432 bce.

The temple combined architectural forms. It was in the Doric order but included Ionic architectural features such as the continuous frieze. The division of labour attributed to Phidias is also worth noting: the sculptor Phidias was responsible for the design and composition of its decorative reliefs and statuary, while the architects handled the building's form and layout. Modern accounts usually take this division as the normal arrangement for a monument of this scale, but the ancient evidence for the precise roles is limited.

Other monuments and their civic purpose

The Propylaea, the monumental gateway to the sacred precinct, was built between 437 and 432 BCE. Its architect was Mnesikles, the architect of the Erechtheion, as identified by Plutarch. The gateway regulated access to the hilltop and also made the sacred site look more impressive to visitors; the Propylaea did this by marking a threshold between the city and the sanctuary. For one, it drew attention to the extraordinary nature of the Acropolis, and secondly, it helped keep people out.

The Erechtheion was begun later. The final piece to complete the magnificent complex of temples on the acropolis was the Erechtheion, begun in 421 BCE during the so-called Peace of Nikias. It was built as an Ionic temple to Athena Polias and Poseidon-Erechtheus, and it occupied the sacred part of the hill associated with the contest between the two deities for the city. The Temple of Athena Nike, a small temple celebrating victory, also belongs to this programme. Because the Erechtheion and the Nike temple were finished after Pericles' death, they show that the programme continued under other leaders and reflects a wider civic outlook rather than one man's personal project.

The buildings served several purposes at once. They honoured Athena, restored a sanctuary that the Persians had destroyed, and displayed Athens' prosperity and power to Greeks and visitors. Ancient writers also linked the building work to employment. Plutarch, writing centuries after the events, reported that the scheme provided work for large numbers of craftsmen and labourers, and that it addressed economic need as well as religious and civic goals.

Financing and the charges of misuse

The Parthenon's cost is usually put at about 469 silver talents, although some sources give 470. The construction project was funded by the Delian League's treasury, underscoring Athens' leadership among Greek city-states. The Parthenon was constructed using funds from the Delian League treasury, which was originally intended for defense against Persia. The treasury had been moved to Athens in 454 BCE, which made the funds more readily available to the Athenian government. A decree known from a commentary on Demosthenes' speech Against Androtion, preserved on a papyrus of around 100 CE, provided for the Parthenon and Propylaea to be paid from the league treasury.

The use of allied money for Athenian purposes was contested in antiquity. The conservative aristocratic politician Thucydides, son of Melesias, censured the transfer of the allied treasury to Athens and the use of the money to extravagantly adorn the city of Athens. According to Plutarch, Pericles answered that the expenditure was a fair return for services, and he offered to meet the cost from his own property if the people wished, on condition that the dedicatory inscriptions carried his name.

The charge of embezzlement was not settled by the evidence. Embezzlement, indeed, was not proven, for the gold of the statue, from the very start, had been so wrought upon and cast about it by Pheidias, at the wise suggestion of Pericles, that it could all be taken off and weighed, according to Plutarch. The affair also reached Phidias. Upon completing the Athena Parthenos, Phidias was accused of embezzlement. Specifically, he was charged with shortchanging the amount of gold that was supposed to be used for the statue and keeping the extra for himself. It seems that the charge was politically motivated – a result of his friendship with Pericles, who had many enemies in Athens. Later in his career Pericles himself was tried for embezzlement, convicted, and fined, he was soon elected strategos once again.

The ancient evidence for these charges is uneven. Plutarch wrote roughly five centuries after the events and drew on earlier material, and the surviving financial records of the programme are fragmentary. The accusations therefore cannot be checked in full, and modern historians disagree on how far the use of league money amounted to misuse rather than an accepted practice of the time.

The Funeral Oration and Athenian self-image

At the end of the first winter of the Peloponnesian War, Athens held its annual state funeral for the dead, and Pericles was chosen to speak over them. The war dead were given an equal burial at public expense, and the orator's task was to honour them in a funeral oration that commemorated the Athenians who died in battle that year, giving them an equal burial at the expense of the state. The text that survives comes from Thucydides' second book, and the ceremony is usually placed at the Kerameikos cemetery in Athens, in the winter of 431–430 BCE (Date: Winter of 431–430 BC; Location: Kerameikos, Athens).

The speech argues that the dead deserve praise mainly because they died for a city worth defending. Pericles presents Athens' constitution as a democracy, because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people. Public life is governed by equality before the law, while private life is left free; the speech notes that Athenians live exactly as we please, and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate danger. Athens also claims a distinct political identity, one that does not copy neighbouring states but serves as a pattern for them ("Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighboring states; we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves."). The speech's climax calls Athens "the school of Hellas", a claim that Athenians could handle emergencies with a versatility no other people matched. Alongside politics, the speech praises a love of beauty without extravagance and a cultivation of the mind without loss of vigour; the city is described as one that loves beauty, which extends praise to Athens, the city of "beauty" and the reason for the soldiers' deaths.

Scholarly doubts about the text

Thucydides states early in his work that speeches in his history render the general sense of what was said and what the situation required, not verbatim reports. Although Thucydides records the speech in the first person as if it were a word-for-word record of what Pericles said, there can be little doubt that he edited the speech. Scholars therefore separate two questions: whether Pericles spoke at this ceremony, and how closely Thucydides' version reflects his words. The first is generally accepted, but there is no consensus as to what degree Thucydides's record resembles Pericles's actual speech. Some argue that the speech is largely Thucydides' composition, with Periclean mannerisms preserved within it, while others, such as Nicole Loraux, treat it as reconstituted or recomposed by Thucydides yet closely tied to Pericles' argument. Pericles is also known to have given another funeral oration, in 440 BCE after the Samian War, and it is possible that elements of both speeches are represented in Thucydides's version.

Interpretations also differ on the speech's purpose. One reading treats it as a reply to critics who questioned the war's early returns, with the general purport of the oration aimed at those who might mock the meagre gains of the first year. A more critical reading stresses what the speech leaves out. Its idealised picture of unity passes over internal disputes, the exclusion of women, slaves and foreigners, and the wealth-based tensions in Athenian society. Thucydides' wider narrative, which records civil strife and corruption, is seen as contradicting the idealism of the oration. Thus the speech can be read both as a sincere statement of civic values and as an effective instrument of persuasion.

Later influence

The speech became one of the most copied models of public mourning. In the nineteenth century, especially through the influence of the British historian George Grote and his friend the philosopher John Stuart Mill, democracy was seen as a good thing, and Pericles' speech became its most powerful celebration. In the United States, Edward Everett opened his Gettysburg oration of 1863 by describing the Athenian rite and comparing it with the ceremony for the Union dead. Whether Abraham Lincoln drew directly on Pericles is uncertain, and the parallel is mainly one of form: both speeches honour the fallen, praise the community they died for, and call the living to continue their work. The idea that Athens invented the public eulogy is also influential; Loraux argued that the oration invented Athens as much as Athens invented the oration. The speech's continued use in discussions of civic commemoration and patriotism rests on this combination of a democratic self-image and an idealised account of sacrifice, which later writers have repeatedly adapted to their own democratic settings and cultural traditions.

Aspasia, family, and private life

Pericles' private life is known mainly from scattered and often hostile testimony. Its best-known element is his companion Aspasia, a woman from Miletus, the Ionian city, who lived in Athens as a metic and became his partner rather than his lawful wife. Sources disagree on when the relationship began: some put her arrival around 445 BCE, while others place its start between 452 and 441 BCE. Nothing secure is known about her birth or death, and no writing of hers survives. Because the citizenship law Pericles had sponsored barred a non-citizen from a legal marriage to a citizen, the union had no legal standing.

Pericles' earlier marriage, to a close relative, produced two legitimate sons, Xanthippus and Paralus. The marriage was dissolved around 445 BCE, and the former wife was given to another husband. Both sons died in the plague of 429 BCE, and Pericles himself died shortly afterwards. Beyond these facts, little is recorded about their lives. Later anecdotes portray Xanthippus as a critic of his father's conduct and finances, but such stories come from sources written long after the events and cannot be checked.

Aspasia in ancient reputation

Aspasia's reputation was shaped largely by her enemies and by literary playfulness. Aristophanes, in Acharnians (425 BCE), blamed the Megarian decree that helped bring on the Peloponnesian War on prostitutes said to have been abducted from Aspasia's household, and other comic poets attacked her as well. Plutarch repeats the tradition that she ran a house of courtesans, a claim modern scholars regard as derived from comedy rather than from reliable record. Comic writers also cast Pericles as a Heracles under the sway of an Omphale-like woman, which shows how her presence was used to mock him.

Philosophical treatments were more ambivalent. In Plato's Menexenus, Socrates claims to have learned rhetoric from Aspasia and says she composed the funeral speech attributed to Pericles. Most readers take the dialogue as satire, and its irony is directed at Aspasia and Pericles alike, not as a biographical record. Aeschines and Antisthenes, both pupils of Socrates, also wrote dialogues titled Aspasia, which survive only in fragments. The idea that Aspasia shaped Pericles' rhetoric therefore rests on literary testimony, not documentary evidence.

Citizenship and the son by Aspasia

The citizenship law of 451/0 BCE, which required citizen parentage on both sides, excluded Pericles' son by Aspasia, Pericles the Younger, who was probably born in the 440s. The traditional account holds that after the plague killed his legitimate sons, Pericles asked the Assembly for an exception, and the boy was admitted to citizenship as a special case. Edwin Carawan argues instead that the law was amended in 430/29 BCE, allowing a father to adopt an illegitimate son when no legitimate heirs survived, and that the change was later overshadowed and then reversed. The two accounts differ on whether the measure was a one-off privilege or a general rule. Pericles the Younger later served as a general and was executed after the battle of Arginusae in 406 BCE.

Limits of the evidence

Thucydides, the most authoritative source for the period, says almost nothing about Pericles' domestic life or about Aspasia, so most of what is known comes from comedy, satire, and Plato's dialogues. Plutarch, writing several centuries later, drew on earlier material that is often anecdotal and sometimes legendary. Readers therefore have to separate the verifiable facts of Pericles' household (the marriages, the sons, the plague deaths, and the citizenship arrangements) from the stories built around Aspasia, whose literary afterlife was far more extensive than her documented life.

The outbreak of war and the defensive strategy

The war that began in 431 BCE was the long conflict between Athens, leader of the Delian League, and Sparta, leader of the Peloponnesian League. Its immediate causes lay in disputes over Athenian measures against Megara, a Spartan ally, and over Athens' pressure on the rebellious Corinthian colony of Potidaea. Sparta demanded that Athens revoke these measures, and the Athenian assembly, on Pericles' advice, refused. The first large-scale fighting, however, came from Thebes' attack on Plataea, an Athenian ally, and it was in that same year that King Archidamus II led a Peloponnesian army into Attica.

Sparta's strategy rested on its superiority on land. Its armies entered Attica each year, burning crops and cutting down olive and vine trees, in the hope of provoking a decisive battle of hoplites or forcing Athens to negotiate. Spartan forces entered Attica five times between 431 and 425 BCE. The campaign of Archidamus gave its name to the first phase of the war, the Archidamian War, which lasted until 421 BCE.

Pericles answered with a strategy that accepted the loss of the countryside in exchange for control of the sea. Rural Athenians were moved into the city, which was linked to its harbour at Piraeus by the Long Walls, so that the population could be fed by sea. Cattle were sent to Euboea. Pericles refused to meet the Spartan army in pitched battle, but the Athenian fleet raided the coasts of the Peloponnese, and cavalry sorties were used to harass Spartan foragers and maintain morale. The strategy therefore combined fortification, naval supply, and limited offensive action. Its logic was that Athens could endure a long war because its revenues, its tribute from the empire, and its command of the sea outlasted Sparta's capacity to keep an army in the field.

The strategy created serious tensions. Thucydides reports that many Athenians, who had been born and raised in the countryside, resented abandoning their households and ancestral land, and that they could watch the smoke rising from their farms from the city walls. Those who had lost their property were angry at Pericles, who was widely held responsible for the decision to avoid battle. The overcrowding of the city also created economic strain and sanitary problems, and it coincided with the epidemic of 430 BCE, which made the strategy's costs impossible to ignore. Pericles was removed from the generalship and fined that year, a development that shows how far the Assembly's support for his plan had weakened under pressure, though later sections of this entry describe his recovery of office.

Ancient and modern historians have offered sharply different judgements of the strategy. Thucydides presents it as coherent and wise, and he attributes to Pericles the expectation that Athens' greater resources in money and men would win a war of attrition. Some modern scholars have accepted this reading, arguing that the Spartan invasions could not seriously threaten a city that could import its food, and that Athens' naval superiority made the Spartan approach self-defeating. Others have questioned how much the Spartan raids actually damaged the Athenian economy, since the city was supplied by sea. A further criticism concerns the ambiguity of the aim itself. The Greek word that described the Athenian goal could mean either victory or survival, and the strategy seemed more suited to enduring than to defeating Sparta. Its success depended on Athenian discipline and on the absence of a catastrophe such as the plague, and the later Spartan occupation of Decelea and the defeat in Sicily showed how fragile the approach could be. Historians therefore continue to debate whether the strategy was sound in principle, flawed in execution, or sound only as a means of avoiding defeat.

The plague and death in 429 BCE

The epidemic later called the Plague of Athens reached the city in 430 BCE, during the second year of the Peloponnesian War. It is believed to have entered Athens through Piraeus, the city's port and sole source of food and supplies. The disease spread through a population that Pericles' strategy had already packed together. Pericles' strategy was to shelter the whole of Attica's population within the protecting walls of Athens and Piraeus and the long walls connecting the two cities, while the Spartans ravaged Attica during the summer months. The result was a tremendous overcrowding in the two cities. The death toll is uncertain. One widely cited estimate gives 75,000 to 100,000 people, around 25% of the population, while other estimates put the losses at 25% to 33% of the city's inhabitants. Some accounts instead count over 30,000 citizens, sailors, and soldiers among the dead, and these figures cannot be reconciled with certainty.

Thucydides, who caught the disease and survived, is the main witness. He describes the illness as beginning in the head, with patients experiencing eyes that burned, throats that swelled, and fever. As the disease progressed, symptoms included violent coughing, vomiting, intense thirst, and open sores. His account is equally concerned with the social collapse. People stopped burying the dead and abandoned religious customs, and despair and lawlessness spread through the city. Thucydides also notes that physicians had no earlier experience that could guide them.

Modern scholars have not agreed on the disease's identity. Over 30 potential diagnoses, including bubonic plague, epidemic typhus, measles, typhoid fever, and smallpox, have been proposed. In the older literature, two diagnoses dominated: smallpox and typhus. Some later readings of Thucydides' rash, which he describes as livid and spreading from the head downward, align with measles but not with typhoid fever's typical faint rose spots or the characteristics of smallpox or bubonic plague. The archaeological evidence is more recent. In 2001, a mass grave was discovered that belonged to the plague years. Ancient microbial typhoid (Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi) DNA was extracted from 3 skeletons. The 2006 study that drew on this material was contested, and critics argue that the sequences obtained do not implicate typhoid as the cause of the plague. The epidemic's course is also difficult to pin down. There were two major waves: the first from 430 to 429 BCE, which resulted in many deaths, including Pericles, and the second in 427 BCE. Thucydides later gave military losses of 4,400 hoplites (citizen-soldiers), 300 cavalrymen and an unknown number of ordinary people.

Pericles' own family was hit hard. His second son, Paralus, also fell ill and died, a tragedy that ended up breaking the legendary self-control of Pericles, who died from the plague himself in fall 429 B.C. His elder legitimate son, Xanthippus, also died in the epidemic, which left Pericles without the heirs to his household that he had expected. The death of Pericles in 429 BCE thus followed the loss of his legitimate sons within a short period.

The political consequences were immediate. When the Spartans again invaded Attica and once more laid waste to the fields in the spring of 429 B.C.E., public opinion began to turn against Pericles. The Athenians claimed it was his fault that no crops could be planted for two years and that the city was sufficiently crowded to spread the plague. Thucydides records a final speech in which Pericles defended himself against this public anger. After his death, the leader whose strategy had guided Athens in the war was gone, and the Assembly descended into factionalism. One prominent figure who rose in influence after Pericles' death was Cleon, who promoted more confrontational policies.

Political trials and the final years

The deposition and fine of 430 BCE

By 430 BCE the strategy of withdrawing the rural population behind the walls of Athens had produced hardship, and the Spartan invasions had not been checked. Pericles' answer was a large naval expedition against Epidaurus. It was essentially ineffectual, merely plundering along the coast and sacking a small town. At this point the Athenian fleet had won no victories, and Pericles was deposed from office and fined. Thucydides gives Pericles a long defence speech, but despite that speech, the people briefly escaped from his spell and deposed and fined him. The shortage of visible success was the central grievance. No obvious success counterbalanced the discomforts of war. The plague, which had killed a large part of the population in the overcrowded city, deepened the resentment. Ancient accounts do not give a consistent figure for the fine, and the sources agree only that it was imposed.

Re-election and death in 429 BCE

The reversal came quickly. The Assembly had no obvious alternative leader of comparable standing, and finding no one to replace him, they soon reelected him. Plutarch's account, which is used by Iranica for this period, adds that Pericles had been chosen as general every year for roughly fifteen years after the ostracism of Thucydides son of Melesias, so the re-election fits a long pattern of annual trust. He was soon re-elected, but took no new initiatives before his death in autumn 429 BC. He died of the plague that year, after losing two legitimate sons to the same epidemic.

Charges against associates: Phidias

The attacks on Pericles were also directed at people close to him. The sculptor Phidias, who supervised much of the artistic work on the Acropolis, was the most prominent case. Upon completing the Athena Parthenos, Phidias was accused of embezzlement. Specifically, he was charged with shortchanging the amount of gold that was supposed to be used for the statue and keeping the extra for himself. The defence rested on the construction of the statue: on the Parthenos the gold was detachable and valued at 44 talents. Phidias reportedly weighed the removable gold before the court and was cleared on the embezzlement charge. His detractors then turned to charges of impiety, alleging that he had sculpted portraits of himself and Pericles as two of the figures depicted on Athena's shield. The impiety charge was apparently true, according to one modern summary, although the accounts of what followed diverge. Plutarch records that Phidias was imprisoned and died in jail. Others argue that he went into exile and later made the statue of Zeus at Olympia. Scholars regard the death in prison as doubtful, and the chronology of his final years is much disputed and the ancient testimony is conflicting.

Pericles himself was also exposed to accusations of financial misconduct. Several of his colleagues were accused of embezzling funds and Pericles himself was accused of maladministration of the public funds. The historicity of these charges is hard to establish. The historical value of the account, as well as the legend about accusations against the 'Periclean circle', is debatable, and the sources for this period are largely later and partisan, so the trials are better read as evidence of political hostility than as proof of wrongdoing.

Interpretations of the final years

Historians have read the last years in two main ways. The first treats the recall in 429 as a vindication of Pericles' authority: the Assembly, despite its anger, could not do without him, and his prestige outlasted a single defeat. The second reads the same events as a sign of decline. On this view, the fine and the loss of popular support showed that the political structure he had built was fragile once the war went badly, and the lack of new initiatives in his last months points the same way. Some modern writers have gone further and suggested that Pericles kept the war going partly to escape prosecution at home, although this is a speculative reading of the motives behind his strategy rather than something the sources state directly. Given how much of the biography rests on later reconstruction, the scale of his authority in these years remains a matter of interpretation.

Ancient sources and historiographical problems

Almost everything known about Pericles comes from authors who wrote long after his death. Each of them shapes the picture in a different way, so historians weigh the evidence against each author's position, genre and date rather than taking it at face value.

Thucydides

Thucydides is the most important witness. Because he served as an Athenian general in the war, he personally heard some of the speeches he reports. Being an Athenian general in the war, Thucydides heard some of these speeches himself. For the others he depended on eyewitness accounts, and his method leaves room for editorial shaping. He states that his speeches are not verbatim records but reconstructions meant to fit each occasion, so the words given to Pericles are at least partly Thucydides' own composition. The author informs readers that his record of speeches included in his History are not verbatim accounts, but rather as near to, and in the spirit of, what was demanded by the various occasions.

His portrait is also filtered through his own judgement. Thucydides presents Pericles as the leading figure of the age, wielding greatest influence both in speech and in action, yet modern readers disagree about what he thought of that influence. One reading holds that Thucydides did not share Pericles' imperial outlook and used narrative passages to undercut the speeches. Thucydides composed Pericles' speeches to expose his character and views to the reader, and he both introduced and surrounded them with narrative illustrations that contrast Pericles' claims. Other interpreters emphasise the admiration, and see Pericles as a leader whose eloquence and popularity could conceal the power he wielded. Thucydides' own career, including his exile after the loss of Amphipolis in 424 BCE, is often cited as a factor in his critical distance from the Athenian leadership.

Plutarch

Plutarch wrote his Life of Pericles in the early second century CE, roughly half a millennium after the statesman's death, and he assembled material from earlier writers and anecdotal traditions. Many of the vivid stories in the Life are therefore of uncertain reliability. One concerns a ram's head with a single horn, which a diviner, Lampon, interpreted as a sign that power would pass to whichever faction the omen had appeared on. There is a story, that once Pericles had brought to him from a country farm of his, a ram's head with one horn, and that Lampon, the diviner, upon seeing the horn grow strong and solid out of the midst of the forehead, gave it as his judgment. Another reports that Pericles rebuked his fellow general Sophocles for admiring a handsome youth, insisting that a commander's eyes also need discipline. Again, when on a time Sophocles, who was his fellow-commissioner in the generalship, was going on board with him, and praised the beauty of a youth they met with in the way to the ship.

Plutarch also shows the uneven quality of his sources. He cites Ephorus for the claim that Pericles used siege engines in a campaign, with the engineer Artemon present, but the anecdote was challenged by Heraclides Ponticus. But Heraclides Ponticus disproves this out of Anacreon's poems, where mention is made of this Artemon Periphoretus several ages before the Samian war. For Pericles' manner in company, Plutarch draws on the tragic poet Ion of Chios, whose judgement was unflattering. Ion, it is true, the dramatic poet, says that Pericles's manner in company was somewhat over-assuming and pompous. Historians generally treat such material as evidence for how later Greeks remembered Pericles, not as a record of what happened.

Comic writers

Old Comedy provides the most direct contemporary evidence of how Pericles was perceived, but it is also the most partisan. Aristophanes' Acharnians is the earliest surviving complete comedy, produced at the Lenaea in 425 BC, and its satire of the war is aimed at the political climate rather than at Pericles, who had died in 429 BCE. Pericles appears in it mainly through mockery: one speaker derides the statesman as a thunderer who strikes like Olympian Zeus and provokes war over trivial quarrels. Our neighbors kidnap two girls from us, and the mighty Pericles, forsooth, must bring out his thunder and lightning, for all the world like Olympian Zeus The scholarly question of whether the comic hero Dicaeopolis is a disguised portrait of Pericles remains open. Some of the traits attributed to him, such as early arrival at the Pnyx, admiration for Aeschylus, concern over his accounts, the enmity of the Acharnians, may be read as allusions to the statesman, while others may simply be generic comic features.

Later writers, including Plutarch, report that comic poets had mocked Pericles' appearance and invented scandals about him. His head is disproportionately long – called "Onionhead" by contemporary comic authors. Plutarch also notes that the comic poets took up this story and bespattered Pericles with charges of abounding wantonness, a story that concerned his relationship with Aspasia and the sculptor Phidias. Such material belongs to the conventions of satire, and its value as evidence for Pericles' private conduct is slight.

Plato

Plato's dialogues present Pericles as a figure of intellectual importance, but not as a historian's source. In Gorgias, Socrates questions whether Pericles improved the Athenians at all, arguing that the pay introduced for public service encouraged idleness, cowardice and greed. In Phaedrus, Pericles' rhetorical power is attributed to his study of natural philosophy under Anaxagoras. In Menexenus, Socrates recites a funeral speech that he claims Aspasia composed, a passage whose irony makes it hard to read as a record of Periclean ideas. The result is that Pericles is often portrayed as a teacher of rhetoric. This portrait tells us more about Plato's critique of rhetoric and democratic leadership than about the statesman's actual methods, since Pericles left no written work and the dialogues are philosophical fictions rather than documents.

Modern interpretations and the concept of the Age of Pericles

The nineteenth-century idealization

Much of the modern image of Pericles as the statesman of a democratic Athens was shaped in the Victorian period. George Grote began publishing his history of Greece in 1846, and across twelve volumes he gave nineteenth-century readers a framework that later textbooks largely adopted. He was the first historian to give a high value to the Greek creation of democracy, a stance that gave his account of Athens its moral weight. His defence of Athenian democracy leaned heavily on the cultural achievements of the mid-fifth century. Grote and other historians rehabilitated democracy by highlighting the intellectual and artistic triumphs of Periclean Athens.

Organic imagery also shaped how the period was read. One version of the metaphor casts archaic Greece as the adolescent period of a civilisation, which reaches its maturity in the fifth century. In this framing, the fourth-century democracy appeared as a decline from the Periclean peak. Later commentators have argued that Grote judged that later democracy too harshly by comparison with the fifth century, a point that Cartledge suggests was typical of many writers of the period.

Critical reassessments

From the mid-twentieth century, historians shifted attention from the achievements of the age to its structures of domination. Scholars such as G. E. M. de Ste. Croix analysed the Athenian empire as a system that extracted tribute and labour from subject allies, and they asked who actually benefited from the democracy's pay for officials and jurors. On this reading, a political system that drew its finances from the empire was also restricted to a citizen minority, excluding women, slaves and resident foreigners. The contrast between the democratic vocabulary of the funeral oration and the coercive realities of empire has since become a standard point of debate.

The Age of Pericles as periodization

The label "Age of Pericles" is loosely defined. The period during which he led Athens, roughly from 461 to 429 BC, is sometimes known as the "Age of Pericles", though the period thus denoted can include times as early as the Persian Wars, or as late as the next century. Some popular treatments bracket it differently, from the Athenian capture of Samos in 439 BC to the Greek defeat at Chaeronea in 338 BC, which is a span that includes the period of Macedonian dominance. The name also rests on the premise that a single statesman shaped Athens and the wider Greek world in the fifth century. The period has been called the Age of Pericles due to his influence, not only on his city's fortunes, but on the whole of Greek history during the 5th century BCE and even after his death.

Critics of the label argue that it obscures continuities. The institutions that made Periclean politics possible, including the reforms of Cleisthenes and the curbing of the Areopagus, predate him, and the cultural flourishing associated with his name continued under leaders who followed him. Whether the label is useful as a periodization or misleading as a shorthand for a longer process remains an open question in the field of historiography.

Pericles in modern debates

Pericles remains a reference point for debates about political leadership and the government of a democracy. He has been criticised as a "populist" who appealed to the baser instincts of the people, and as a war-monger who encouraged wars with Sparta. Thucydides' description of him as the leading citizen of Athens acclaimed him as "the first citizen of Athens", and this phrase is still cited in discussions of how a leader can wield great influence without holding formal monarchical power.

Historians also question the sources themselves. Some historians have noted that the passionate and idealistic style of the speeches Thucydides attributes to Pericles sits uneasily with Thucydides' own cold and analytical manner. This tension bears directly on modern assessments of Pericles as a democratic exemplar. Debates over Athens and its empire frequently begin from his role in turning the Delian alliance into a system of imperial control, and they often use his career to test broader questions about the relationship between democracy and power.

Legacy in Western political and cultural tradition

Pericles' name became a shorthand for the ideal of democratic Athens and for the cultural flowering of the fifth century. That association owes much to how later generations read the sources. Athenian democracy itself declined after its defeat, but Pericles' influence endured in the memory of the city's ideals, and his image came to represent a model rather than a historical record of policy. Much of this reputation rests on Thucydides' Funeral Oration. Its nineteenth-century reception shifted sharply: through the influence of the British historian George Grote and his friend the philosopher John Stuart Mill, democracy was seen as a good thing, and Pericles' speech became its most powerful celebration. Modern commentators have qualified this reading. The citizens the speech describes are idealized images, and events would soon show the darker, less admirable side of Athenian society.

Renaissance humanism transmitted Pericles' image mainly through Plutarch rather than through Thucydides. The turning point came with the 1559 French translation by Amyot, the Abbot of Bellozane, which made the Parallel Lives widely read. Amyot's work was itself a major influence, and Montaigne admired it. In England, Thomas North, who published an English translation of the Lives in 1579, based his work not on Plutarch's Greek but on Amyot's French. That English text supplied material for Shakespeare's plays, and it would become an important source-material for Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra. Through these channels, a Greek statesman who had been known to Europeans mainly through fragments of narrative became a recognizable figure of public life, with his speeches and his conduct as a leader available to readers across the continent.

Enlightenment thinkers inherited this classical canon and gave it a more systematic form. Greek Revival architecture, which began in the middle of the 18th century but particularly flourished in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, predominantly in northern Europe, the United States, and Canada, as well as Greece following its independence in 1821. The movement drew on the sources that made Athens visible to European architects. The main reasons for its popularity were the general intellectual preoccupation with ancient Greek culture at the time, as well as a new awareness of the actual nature of Greek art brought about through widely circulated illustrations of notable ancient temples and the Elgin Marbles. The growing recognition of the Parthenon in Athens as a major monument helped secure the dominance of this Grecian form. The Parthenon was thus the principal model for neoclassical public buildings, though its architects and patrons were the craftsmen of the Periclean building programme rather than Pericles himself. In the United States, Strickland's temple-like structure, inspired by the Parthenon in Athens, Greece, is among the earliest Greek Revival buildings in the United States, and the style was attractive partly because, as Greek Revival buildings were regarded as being free from ecclesiastical and aristocratic associations, it fitted with emerging liberal political values.

The continuing use of Pericles in political discourse rests on the Funeral Oration's model of civic virtue: the idea that citizens who take no part in public affairs have no real place in the community, and that the city's cultural achievements justify its public sacrifices. Later orators and writers often drew on this rhetorical template, and the speech is frequently compared with Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, a link that remains a common subject of commentary. Pericles is also invoked in debates about the proper relationship between a leader and the people. His capacity to guide an assembly without simply following it, and the authority he derived from prestige and reasoned argument, make him a reference point for discussions of statesmanship. The same figure is also used in critical debates about imperial power, since the Athenian empire that financed his building programme remains a standard example in discussions of how democracy and domination can coexist.

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