76 Facts About Pericles

Pericles was a Greek politician and general during the Golden Age of Athens.

Pericles was prominent and influential in Athenian politics, particularly between the Greco-Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian War, and was acclaimed by Thucydides, a contemporary historian, as "the first citizen of Athens".

Pericles turned the Delian League into an Athenian empire and led his countrymen during the first two years of the Peloponnesian War.

Pericles promoted the arts and literature, and it is principally through his efforts that Athens acquired the reputation of being the educational and cultural center of the ancient Greek world.

Pericles started an ambitious project that generated most of the surviving structures on the Acropolis, including the Parthenon.

Pericles fostered Athenian democracy to such an extent that critics called him a populist.

Pericles was descended, through his mother, from the powerful and historically-influential Alcmaeonid family.

Pericles' mother, Agariste, was a member of the powerful and controversial noble family of the Alcmaeonidae, and her familial connections played a crucial role in helping start Xanthippus' political career.

Pericles learned music from the masters of the time and he is considered to have been the first politician to attribute importance to philosophy.

Pericles enjoyed the company of the philosophers Protagoras, Zeno of Elea, and Anaxagoras.

Plutarch says that Pericles stood first among the Athenians for forty years.

In 463 BC, Pericles was the leading prosecutor of Cimon, the leader of the conservative faction who was accused of neglecting Athens' vital interests in Macedon.

The leader of the party and mentor of Pericles, Ephialtes, proposed a reduction of the Areopagus' powers.

The democratic party gradually became dominant in Athenian politics, and Pericles seemed willing to follow a populist policy to cajole the public.

The historian Loren J Samons II argues that Pericles had enough resources to make a political mark by private means, had he so chosen.

In 461 BC, Pericles achieved the political elimination of this opponent using ostracism.

Pericles first proposed a decree that permitted the poor to watch theatrical plays without paying, with the state covering the cost of their admission.

Pericles's most controversial measure was a law of 451 BC limiting Athenian citizenship to those of Athenian parentage on both sides.

Constantine Paparrigopoulos, a major modern Greek historian, argues that Pericles sought for the expansion and stabilization of all democratic institutions.

Pericles was certain that democracy had reached its peak and Pericles' reforms were leading to the stalemate of populism.

In contrast, Donald Kagan asserts that the democratic measures Pericles put into effect provided the basis for an unassailable political strength.

Ephialtes' murder in 461 BC paved the way for Pericles to consolidate his authority.

Pericles made his first military excursions during the First Peloponnesian War, which was caused in part by Athens' alliance with Megara and Argos and the subsequent reaction of Sparta.

Anthony J Podlecki argues that Pericles' alleged change of position was invented by ancient writers to support "a tendentious view of Pericles' shiftiness".

Plutarch states that Cimon struck a power-sharing deal with his opponents, according to which Pericles would carry through the interior affairs and Cimon would be the leader of the Athenian army, campaigning abroad.

Pericles is said to have initiated both expeditions in Egypt and Cyprus, although some researchers, such as Karl Julius Beloch, argue that the dispatch of such a great fleet conforms with the spirit of Cimon's policy.

Kagan believes that Pericles used Callias, a brother-in-law of Cimon, as a symbol of unity and employed him several times to negotiate important agreements.

The Congress failed because of Sparta's stance, but Pericles' intentions remain unclear.

In 447 BC Pericles engaged in his most admired excursion, the expulsion of barbarians from the Thracian peninsula of Gallipoli, to establish Athenian colonists in the region.

The Athenians demanded their immediate surrender, but after the Battle of Coronea, Pericles was forced to concede the loss of Boeotia to recover the prisoners taken in that battle.

Pericles crossed over to Euboea with his troops, but was forced to return when the Spartan army invaded Attica.

When Pericles was later audited for the handling of public money, an expenditure of 10 talents was not sufficiently justified, since the official documents just referred that the money was spent for a "very serious purpose".

Pericles then punished the landowners of Chalcis, who lost their properties.

However, when Pericles took the floor, his resolute arguments put Thucydides and the conservatives firmly on the defensive.

Finally, Pericles proposed to reimburse the city for all questionable expenses from his private property, with the proviso that he would make the inscriptions of dedication in his own name.

Pericles's stance was greeted with applause, and Thucydides was soundly, if unexpectedly, defeated.

Pericles wanted to stabilize Athens' dominance over its alliance and to enforce its pre-eminence in Greece.

In 449 BC Pericles proposed a decree allowing the use of 9,000 talents to finance the major rebuilding program of Athenian temples.

Pericles then quelled a revolt in Byzantium and, when he returned to Athens, gave a funeral oration to honor the soldiers who died in the expedition.

Between 438 and 436 BC Pericles led Athens' fleet in Pontus and established friendly relations with the Greek cities of the region.

Pericles focused on internal projects, such as the fortification of Athens, and on the creation of new cleruchies, such as Andros, Naxos and Thurii as well as Amphipolis.

Phidias, who had been in charge of all building projects, was first accused of embezzling gold meant for the statue of Athena and then of impiety, because, when he wrought the battle of the Amazons on the shield of Athena, he carved out a figure that suggested himself as a bald old man, and inserted a very fine likeness of Pericles fighting with an Amazon.

Beloch believes that Pericles deliberately brought on the war to protect his political position at home.

However, as he is generally regarded as an admirer of Pericles, Thucydides has been criticized for bias against Sparta.

Pericles was convinced that the war against Sparta, which could not conceal its envy of Athens' pre-eminence, was inevitable if unfortunate.

Pericles was not prepared to make unilateral concessions, believing that "if Athens conceded on that issue, then Sparta was sure to come up with further demands".

Consequently, Pericles asked the Spartans to offer a quid pro quo.

Pericles gave his compatriots some advice on their present affairs and reassured them that, if the enemy did not plunder his farms, he would offer his property to the city.

Pericles avoided convening the ecclesia, fearing that the populace, outraged by the unopposed ravaging of their farms, might rashly decide to challenge the vaunted Spartan army in the field.

In 430 BC, the army of Sparta looted Attica for a second time, but Pericles was not daunted and refused to revise his initial strategy.

Nevertheless, within just a year, in 429 BC, the Athenians not only forgave Pericles but re-elected him as strategos.

Pericles was reinstated in command of the Athenian army and led all its military operations during 429 BC, having under his control the levers of power.

In that year Pericles witnessed in the epidemic the death of both Paralus and Xanthippus, his legitimate sons from his first wife.

Pericles's morale undermined, overwhelmed with grief, Pericles wept copiously for his loss and not even the companionship of Aspasia could console him.

Pericles himself died of the plague later in the year.

Just before his death, Pericles' friends were concentrated around his bed, enumerating his virtues during peace and underscoring his nine war trophies.

Pericles offered her to another husband, with the agreement of her male relatives.

Nonetheless, such objections did not greatly undermine the popularity of the couple and Pericles readily fought back against accusations that his relationship with Aspasia was corrupting of Athenian society.

Pericles marked a whole era and inspired conflicting judgments about his significant decisions.

In matters of character, Pericles was above reproach in the eyes of the ancient historians, since "he kept himself untainted by corruption, although he was not altogether indifferent to money-making".

Thucydides, an admirer of Pericles, maintains that Athens was "in name a democracy but, in fact, governed by its first citizen".

Thucydides argues that Pericles "was not carried away by the people, but he was the one guiding the people".

For more than 20 years Pericles led many expeditions, mainly naval ones.

Pericles based his military policy on Themistocles' principle that Athens' predominance depends on its superior naval power and believed that the Peloponnesians were near-invincible on land.

Pericles tried to minimize the advantages of Sparta by rebuilding the walls of Athens, which, it has been suggested, radically altered the use of force in Greek international relations.

Pericles's strategy is said to have been "inherently unpopular", but Pericles managed to persuade the Athenian public to follow it.

Critics of Pericles' strategy have been just as numerous as its supporters.

Donald Kagan called the Periclean strategy "a form of wishful thinking that failed", Barry S Strauss and Josiah Ober have stated that "as strategist he was a failure and deserves a share of the blame for Athens' great defeat", and Victor Davis Hanson believes that Pericles had not worked out a clear strategy for an effective offensive action that could possibly force Thebes or Sparta to stop the war.

Pericles asserts that since Pericles must have known about these limitations he probably planned for a much shorter war.

Since Pericles never wrote down or distributed his orations, no historians are able to answer this with certainty; Thucydides recreated three of them from memory and, thereby, it cannot be ascertained that he did not add his own notions and thoughts.

Kakridis proposes that it is impossible to imagine Pericles deviating away from the expected funeral orator addressing the mourning audience of 430 after the Peloponnesian war.

Kagan states that Pericles adopted "an elevated mode of speech, free from the vulgar and knavish tricks of mob-orators" and, according to Diodorus Siculus, he "excelled all his fellow citizens in skill of oratory".

The biographer points out that the poet Ion reported that Pericles' speaking style was "a presumptuous and somewhat arrogant manner of address, and that into his haughtiness there entered a good deal of disdain and contempt for others".

Sir Richard C Jebb concludes that "unique as an Athenian statesman, Pericles must have been in two respects unique as an Athenian orator; first, because he occupied such a position of personal ascendancy as no man before or after him attained; secondly, because his thoughts and his moral force won him such renown for eloquence as no one else ever got from Athenians".

In politics, Victor L Ehrenberg argues that a basic element of Pericles' legacy is Athenian imperialism, which denies true democracy and freedom to the people of all but the ruling state.

Pericles is lauded as "the ideal type of the perfect statesman in ancient Greece" and his Funeral Oration isadays synonymous with the struggle for participatory democracy and civic pride.