Pericles

Pericles was born in Athens in 494 BCE into two of the city's most influential families. His father, Xanthippus, was a politician and military commander who led Athenian forces to victory over the Persians at Mycale in 479 BCE. His mother, Agariste, belonged to the Alcmaeonid clan, the powerful and controversial family that had produced Cleisthenes, the reformer credited with founding the Athenian democracy at the end of the sixth century BCE ^[1].

His childhood coincided with the Persian Wars, the defining crisis of his generation. He was a boy when the Athenians won at Marathon in 490 BCE, and still a youth when the city was evacuated and burned during Xerxes' invasion of 480 BCE. The rebuilt Athens that emerged from those wars, confident and increasingly powerful at sea, formed the world in which he came of age ^[2].

Unlike many aristocratic Athenians, Pericles received an education shaped by the new intellectual currents of the fifth century. Ancient sources name the musical theorist Damon among his teachers and record his long association with the philosopher Anaxagoras, who taught that the cosmos was ordered by mind rather than by the whims of the gods. Plutarch, writing centuries later, connected this training to the composure and elevated public manner for which Pericles became known ^[1].

The first securely dated public act of Pericles came in 472 BCE, when he served as choregos, the wealthy sponsor, for the production of Aeschylus' tragedy The Persians at the festival of Dionysus. Financing a prize-winning play by the city's leading dramatist was a conventional way for a rich young Athenian to build a reputation, and the choice of a play celebrating the victory at Salamis carried an obvious political charge ^[3].

His rise through politics accelerated in the late 460s BCE, when he aligned himself with the radical democrat Ephialtes against Cimon, the conservative aristocrat who then dominated Athenian public life. In 462 and 461 BCE, Ephialtes and his allies stripped the Areopagus, the old aristocratic council, of most of its political powers and transferred them to the popular courts, the council of five hundred, and the assembly. Cimon was ostracized, Ephialtes was assassinated shortly afterward, and Pericles emerged as the leading figure of the democratic movement ^[2].

Over the following decade he consolidated that position through a run of reforms that opened public life to ordinary citizens. The best attested is the introduction of pay for jurors, which allowed poorer Athenians to serve in the large popular courts without losing a day's income. In 451 BCE he sponsored a citizenship law restricting Athenian citizenship to those with two Athenian parents, a measure that sharpened the boundary around the privileges citizens enjoyed ^[4]. From roughly 443 BCE until his death he was elected strategos, one of the city's ten generals, almost every year, a record of continuous electoral success without parallel in Athenian history ^[1].

Any account of Pericles achievements begins on the Acropolis. From the early 440s BCE he championed a monumental building program on the sacred hill that the Persians had burned decades earlier. Its centerpiece was the Parthenon, the marble temple of Athena begun in 447 BCE and structurally complete by 438 BCE, housing a colossal gold and ivory statue of the goddess by the sculptor Phidias. The Propylaea, the grand gateway to the Acropolis, followed, along with the Odeon, a covered concert hall at the foot of the hill ^[5].

The program was funded in part from the treasury of the Delian League, the alliance of Aegean states formed after the Persian Wars under Athenian leadership. The league's treasury had been moved from the island of Delos to Athens in 454 BCE, and critics ancient and modern have charged that Pericles used allied tribute to adorn his own city. Whatever the ethics, the results employed thousands of craftsmen and produced buildings that still define the image of ancient Greece ^[5].

His military and imperial record was substantial. He led campaigns in the Corinthian Gulf, suppressed the revolt of Euboea in 446 BCE, and in 440 to 439 BCE directed the long siege that ended the rebellion of Samos, one of the most powerful allied states. He also promoted Athenian settlements abroad and, according to Plutarch, led an expedition into the Black Sea to display Athenian power to the cities there ^[2]. Under his guidance Athens completed the Long Walls linking the city to its harbor at Piraeus, a defensive corridor that made Athens effectively an island, supplied by sea and safe from invasion by land ^[4].

His oratory was itself an achievement. Comic poets nicknamed him "the Olympian" for the force of his speaking, and Thucydides preserved, in his own reconstruction, the celebrated Funeral Oration delivered over the Athenian dead in the war's first winter, a speech that presented Athens as an open, democratic society and an education to all of Greece ^[6].

Pericles married an Athenian woman, a close relative whose name is not preserved, and had two sons with her, Xanthippus and Paralus. The marriage ended in divorce, apparently by mutual consent, and she remarried ^[1].

His later companion was Aspasia of Miletus, one of the most discussed women of the classical world. As a foreigner she could not be his wife under the citizenship law he had himself proposed, but the two lived together openly and had a son, also named Pericles. Ancient writers credited Aspasia with intelligence and rhetorical skill, and comic playwrights attacked her relentlessly as a way of attacking Pericles. Socrates and his circle are said to have visited her, though much of what was written about her mixes fact with slander ^[7].

Contemporaries described Pericles as reserved and deliberately aloof, a man who avoided dinner parties and social rounds and confined himself to the routes between his home and the public buildings where business was done. Plutarch records that he was mocked for the unusual elongated shape of his head, which is why portrait sculptors showed him wearing a helmet. The same tradition stresses his incorruptibility with public money, a reputation rare among Athenian politicians ^[1].

By the 430s BCE the rivalry between Athens and Sparta, uneasy since a first round of fighting had ended with the Thirty Years Peace of 446 BCE, was breaking down. Disputes over Corcyra, Potidaea, and the Megarian Decree, an Athenian measure excluding the neighboring city of Megara from the ports and markets of the empire, brought matters to a head. Pericles urged the assembly to make no concessions under threat, and in 431 BCE the Peloponnesian War began ^[6].

His strategy was patient and unheroic. Athens could not match the Spartan army in the field, so he brought the rural population inside the Long Walls, let the invaders ravage the countryside of Attica, and relied on the fleet and the tribute of the empire to strike back by sea and outlast the enemy. The policy was militarily sound but painful for citizens watching their farms burn from the ramparts ^[6].

In 430 BCE a devastating epidemic, remembered as the Plague of Athens, broke out in the crowded city and killed a large portion of the population. Public anger turned on Pericles; he was deposed from office and fined, though the Athenians soon re-elected him general. The plague took both of his legitimate sons, and the assembly granted a special exemption so that his son by Aspasia could become a citizen. In 429 BCE Pericles himself died, most likely of the same disease, in the third year of a war that would drag on until 404 BCE and end in Athenian defeat ^[2].

The era of Pericles gave its name to an age. Historians still speak of Periclean Athens to describe the decades when the city produced the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, the histories of Herodotus, the sculpture of Phidias, and the beginnings of the philosophical tradition that led to Socrates and Plato. Pericles did not create that flowering by himself, but his patronage, his building program, and the confident public culture he encouraged provided its setting ^[5].

His political legacy is argued over to this day. Thucydides, who admired him, wrote that Athens under Pericles was in theory a democracy but in fact ruled by its foremost man, and blamed the city's eventual ruin on the lesser successors who abandoned his cautious strategy. Plato, by contrast, charged that Pericles had made the Athenians lazy, greedy, and talkative by paying them for public service. Modern historians debate whether he was democracy's greatest champion or the manager of an empire that taxed its allies to beautify one city ^[6].

For anyone asking who was Pericles, the shortest honest answer is that he was the individual most responsible for the shape of classical Athens: its radical democracy, its maritime empire, its marble monuments, and its fatal war. The Parthenon still stands above the city as the most visible reminder of his leadership, and his Funeral Oration remains one of the most quoted statements of democratic ideals ever composed, studied wherever the history of self-government is taught ^[5].