Pericles

Pericles is one of the Personalities in their Times options in Section III (25 marks). You answer one question on your personality, with two or three parts, at least one worth 10–15 marks. The syllabus asks you to study:

• Historical context: Athens after the Persian Wars; the democracy and its institutions; the Delian League; relations with Sparta.
• Background and rise to prominence: his family; his education; his early political career and the reforms of Ephialtes.
• Career: his political leadership and methods; his domestic policies; the empire and foreign policy; the building program; his role in the Peloponnesian War; his relationships with associates and opponents; his death.
• Evaluation: his impact and legacy; ancient and modern images and interpretations.

All dates are BC. Pericles was born about 495 and died in 429.

• Democracy: Cleisthenes' reforms (508/507) created ten tribes and the council of 500. The ekklesia (assembly of all adult male citizens) made decisions, the boule prepared business, juries in the law courts were large panels of citizens, and most officials were chosen by lot. The ten strategoi (generals) were elected and could be re-elected every year.
• The Persian Wars (490, 480–479) left Athens with a powerful navy, rowed by the poorest citizens, the thetes.
• The Delian League (478/477), an alliance against Persia led by Athens, was turning into an Athenian empire: Naxos (about 470) and Thasos (465–463) were forced to stay in.
• Sparta led the Peloponnesian League and feared Athens' growing power.

• Family: father Xanthippus (ostracised 484; commander at Mycale 479); mother Agariste, an Alcmaeonid, niece of Cleisthenes.
• Education: taught by Damon (music and politics) and influenced by the philosophers Zeno and Anaxagoras, who explained natural events by reason.
• 472: choregos (sponsor) for Aeschylus' The Persians.
• 463: one of the prosecutors of Cimon, the leading conservative politician.
• 462/461: supported (according to Plutarch) Ephialtes' reforms, which took most powers from the Areopagus (former archons, for life) and gave them to the boule, assembly and courts. Ephialtes was murdered and Cimon ostracised in 461, leaving Pericles a leading figure of the democratic side.

• Jury pay (probably 450s): allowed poorer citizens to serve. The Constitution of the Athenians says he introduced it to compete with Cimon's private generosity.
• The citizenship law (451/450): citizens had to have two Athenian parents.
• The archonship was opened to the zeugitai (third property class) in 457, during his rise.
• Rivalry with Thucydides son of Melesias, who opposed the use of tribute for buildings; he was ostracised in about 443. Plutarch says Pericles was then elected general every year for fifteen years.

• The treasury moved from Delos to Athens (about 454); one-sixtieth of tribute to Athena, recorded on the Athenian Tribute Lists.
• Cleruchies (settlements of Athenian citizens) on allied land, such as the Chersonese, Naxos and Andros; colonies at Thurii (444/443) and Amphipolis (437/436).
• The First Peloponnesian War (about 460–446): the Long Walls to the Piraeus; defeat in Egypt (454); fighting ended with the Thirty Years' Peace (446/445), which recognised the two alliances.
• Persia: fighting ended about 449; a formal Peace of Callias is reported by later writers but its existence is debated. Plutarch reports a Congress Decree inviting all Greeks to Athens (authenticity debated).
• Force: Pericles reconquered Euboea (446) and commanded the siege of Samos (440–439).
• The 430s: the Black Sea expedition; alliance with Corcyra (433); the siege of Potidaea; the Megarian Decree excluding Megara from the empire's ports.

• The Parthenon (447–432), designed by Ictinus and Callicrates under the supervision of the sculptor Pheidias, with the gold-and-ivory Athena Parthenos (438).
• The Propylaia (437–432), the Odeion, the Telesterion at Eleusis and other temples.
• Funded partly by the allies' tribute — the cause of fierce debate. Plutarch says Pericles also intended the works to give employment.

• Pericles refused Sparta's demands, especially to repeal the Megarian Decree.
• Strategy: abandon the countryside, bring everyone inside the Long Walls, rely on the fleet, imports and financial reserves (Thucydides 2.13: about 600 talents of tribute a year and 6,000 talents in reserve), raid the Peloponnese by sea, do not expand the empire.
• The funeral speech (431/430), as reported by Thucydides, praised Athens as ‘an education to Greece’.
• The plague (430): killed perhaps a quarter or more of the population, spread by overcrowding. The Athenians fined Pericles (Plutarch adds that they deposed him), then re-elected him.
• Death (429): he died — of the plague, according to Plutarch — after losing his two legitimate sons. His son by Aspasia of Miletus, Pericles the Younger, was granted citizenship.

Pericles' circle included Aspasia, his partner, a highly educated woman from Miletus; Pheidias; Anaxagoras; and Damon. In the 430s his opponents attacked him through them: Plutarch reports charges against Pheidias (embezzlement), Anaxagoras (impiety) and Aspasia (impiety). The details are uncertain, and some may be later inventions.

Modern views: Donald Kagan (1991) admired him as a champion of democracy but criticised his war strategy as too passive; Vincent Azoulay (2010) examines how Athenians both followed and distrusted him; Loren Samons (2016) is critical of his imperialism and of the myth built around him.

You do not have to name historians to reach the top band, but using an interpretation accurately to support your argument is credited.

• Achievements: deepening democracy; leading Athens for about thirty years through persuasion and election; consolidating the empire; the building program.
• Criticisms: imperial exploitation of the allies; narrowing citizenship; leading Athens into a war it eventually lost; a strategy that worsened the plague.
• Legacy: the image of Periclean Athens as a golden age, created largely by Thucydides and Plutarch, and the monuments of the Acropolis.

A model paragraph

Here is how one paragraph might use evidence and evaluation (on his leadership style, not one of our bank questions):

‘Pericles' power rested on persuasion, which made it strong but never secure. He held no permanent office, and his fifteen consecutive years as general depended on the assembly re-electing him. Thucydides praises him for leading the people rather than following them, yet the same historian records that in 430 BC the people fined him and removed him from office. His authority was therefore great but conditional — a sign of the democracy's strength as much as of his own.’

• Saying Pericles founded the democracy. Cleisthenes did; Pericles developed it.
• Confusing Thucydides son of Melesias (politician) with Thucydides son of Olorus (historian).
• Taking Thucydides' funeral speech or his phrase ‘rule of the first man’ as exact quotations or constitutional facts.
• Treating Plutarch's stories of trials of Aspasia and Pheidias as certain.
• Forgetting that the Peace of Callias and Congress Decree are debated.

• 10-mark parts often ask you to explain one aspect: his rise, his domestic policies, the empire, the building program, or his war strategy.
• 15-mark parts usually ask you to assess his leadership, achievements or legacy. Balance Thucydides' admiration against critics.
• Say who wrote each source, when, and why: Thucydides the admirer writing after defeat; Plutarch the moralist centuries later.
• Useful terms: demos, strategos, ostracism, Areopagus, misthos (pay), cleruchy, tribute, hegemony, demagogue.

• Athenian society in the time of Pericles: the institutions, economy, religion and daily life of the city he led.
• Spartan society: the rival whose fear of Athens led to war.
• Alexander the Great: another Greek leader judged very differently by admirers and critics.