Pericles Athenian statesman

Pericles,(born c. 495 bce, Athens—died 429, Athens), Athenian statesman largely responsible for the full development, in the later 5th century bce, of both the Athenian democracy and the Athenian empire, making Athens the political and cultural focus of Greece. His achievements included the construction of the Acropolis, begun in 447.

Why is Pericles important?

Pericles was an Athenian statesman. Under his leadership Athenian democracy and the Athenian empire flourished, making Athens the political and cultural focus of Greece between the Greco-Persian and Peloponnesian wars. His position rested on his continual reelection to the generalship and on his prestige, based, according to Thucydides, on his intelligence and incorruptibility.

What was Pericles’ family like?

Pericles was born into the Athenian aristocracy. His father, Xanthippus, began his political career by a dynastic marriage to Agariste of the controversial Alcmaeonid family. From him Pericles may have inherited a leaning toward the people, along with landed property just north of Athens, which made him quite wealthy by Athenian standards.

Was Pericles married?

Pericles married in his late 20s but divorced some 10 years later. Approaching 50, he began a relationship with Aspasia of Miletus. Because of a law he supported restricting Athenian citizenship to those of Athenian parentage on both sides, marriage was impossible. When his two legitimate sons died, their son Pericles had to be legitimated.

What is Pericles remembered for?

Pericles is perhaps best remembered for a building program centred on the Acropolis which included the Parthenon and for a funeral oration he gave early in the Peloponnesian War, as recorded by Thucydides. In the speech he honoured the fallen and held up Athenian democracy as an example to the rest of Greece.

How did Pericles die?

In the second year of the Peloponnesian War a plague struck Athens, which was crowded with evacuees from the countryside, killing perhaps a quarter of the city’s inhabitants. Pericles was among its victims. Scientists and historians have tried to identify the disease responsible based on the descriptions of Thucydides, but no consensus exists.

Background and education

Knowledge of the life of Pericles derives largely from two sources. The historian Thucydides admired him profoundly and refused to criticize him. His account suffers from the fact that, 40 years younger, he had no firsthand knowledge of Pericles’ early career; it suffers also from his approach, which concentrates exclusively on Pericles’ intellectual capacity and his war leadership, omitting biographical details, which Thucydides thought irrelevant to his theme. The gaps are partly filled by the Greek writer Plutarch, who, 500 years later, began writing the life of Pericles to illustrate a man of unchallengeable virtue and greatness at grips with the fickleness of the mob and finished rather puzzled by the picture he found in his sources of Pericles’ responsibility for a needless war. These sources are not all ascertainable, but they certainly preserve an invaluable amount of fact and contemporary gossip, which is sometimes nearly as useful.

Pericles was born into the first generation able to use the new weapon of the popular vote against the old power of family politics. His father, Xanthippus, a typical member of this generation, almost certainly of an old family, began his political career by a dynastic marriage into the controversial family of the Alcmaeonids. He soon left their political camp, probably on the question of relations with Persia, and took the then new path of legal prosecution as a political weapon.

Perhaps outbid in his search for popular support, Xanthippus was ostracized in 484 bce, though he returned in 480 to command the Athenian force at Mycale in 479, probably dying soon after. From him Pericles may have inherited a leaning toward the people, along with landed property at Cholargus, just north of Athens, which put him high, though not quite at the highest level, on the Athenian pyramid of wealth.

His Alcmaeonid mother, Agariste, provided him with relationships of sharply diminishing political value and her family curse, a religious defilement that was occasionally used against him by his enemies. A few days before Pericles’ birth, according to the Greek historian Herodotus, Agariste dreamed she bore a lion. The symbolism, although ambiguous, is most likely to be unfavourable. That Pericles’ skull was of unusual shape seems well attested, but one can hardly speculate about the possible psychological consequences.

The only name associated with his early education is that of the musical theorist Damon, whose influence, it is said, was not just confined to music. The arrival of the Sophist philosophers in Athens occurred during his middle life, and he seems to have taken full advantage of the society of Zeno and particularly Anaxagoras, from whom he is said to have learned impassivity in the face of trouble and insult and skepticism about alleged divine phenomena.

The first known date in his life is 472 bce, when he paid for the production of the playwright Aeschylus’ Persian trilogy. Nothing further is known until 463, when he unsuccessfully prosecuted Cimon, the leading general and statesman of the day, on a charge of having neglected a chance to conquer Macedonia; this implies that Pericles advocated an aggressive policy of expansion for Athens. Only rumour associates him directly with the political convulsion of the next two years, which drove Cimon into exile, swung Athens away from its alignment with Sparta, and decisively strengthened the democratic elements in the Athenian constitution; but he probably did support the democratic leader Ephialtes in this period, and his introduction of pay for juries, unfortunately undatable, is a logical consequence of Ephialtes’ reforms.