Pericles c.490-429BC
Athenian statesman

Pericles was born into the aristocratic Alcmaeonid family in Athens. He was the son of Xanthippus, who had won the naval victory over the Persians at Mycale in 479BC, and of Agariste, a niece of the Alcmaeonid reformer Cleisthenes. He was choregos (provider of the chorus) in 472BC, when Aeschylus's Persae was produced. He came rapidly to the fore as a supporter of the new democracy. He helped prosecute the conservative Cimon in 463, who was subsequently ostracized, and with Ephialtes in 462/1, he brought in measures limiting the power of the old aristocratic Areopagus. When Ephialtes was murdered, Pericles became the dominant figure in Athenian politics, being elected 15 times to the office of strategos (general, but with political functions) between 451 (when he introduced a popular law which restricted citizenship) and his death.

Athens under Pericles followed an expansionist policy, in which the Delian League, founded to keep the defeated Persians away from Greece, was turned into an Athenian empire. Tribute was exacted from the former allies, and attempts to secede were crushed by force (notably Samos in 439). Colonies and other settlements were founded in the Thracian Chersonese (notably Amphipolis, after two failed attempts) and in southern Italy at Thurii (433). According to some accounts (but not Thucydides, the principal source), Pericles planned a grand Hellenic confederation to put an end to mutually destructive wars, which was frustrated by Spartan opposition but the Spartan aristocrats brought the scheme to nothing. However, the historicity of this event is doubtful.

Athens and Sparta were almost continuously at war during these years, culminating in the Peloponnesian War which broke out in 431. In 446 there was a peace (the so-called Thirty Years' Peace) in which Sparta recognized much of Athens' imperial ambition. During the respite that followed, Pericles undertook a major building programme which glorified Athens with the Parthenon, the Propylaea, and other buildings on the Acropolis. He was opposed for a time by Thucydides son of Melesias (not to be confused with the historian), who was ostracized in 433, leaving Pericles virtually unopposed. What opposition there was found its expression at the expense of Pericles' associates, such as Pheidias, the sculptor of the statue of Athena, who was accused of embezzlement and impiety and died in prison.

When war broke out again with Sparta in 431, Pericles advocated a policy of caution on land, allowing the invading Spartans to destroy the fields while the population was concentrated behind the strong city walls and the city's supply lines could be protected by the powerful Athenian navy. Thucydides puts into Pericles' mouth the famous funeral oration commemorating the victims of the first year of fighting. In 430 plague broke out in the city; the Athenians' patience broke and Pericles was removed from office. He was again elected strategos, but he died soon afterwards, a victim himself of the plague.

Thucydides the historian said of Athens under Pericles that it was in fact a democracy but was in practice ruled by its first citizen. No other Athenian statesman before or since achieved such a dominant position. He had an imposing visage, as the surviving busts of him (always helmeted) show, and he enjoyed the company of the poets and intellectuals of the day, including Sophocles, whose personal friend he was. He divorced his wife, and took as his mistress Aspasia, a noted hetaera (courtesan).

Bibliography: There is a life by Plutarch, which supplements the information in Book I of Thucydides' history. See also J K Davies, Classical Greece (Fontana History of the Ancient World, 2nd edn, 1993); A R Burn, Pericles and Athens (1970).

Other biographies from Periclean Athens: playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides; historians Herodotus, Thucydides; philosophers Anaxagoras, Zeno, Protagoras, Socrates, artists and architects Ictinus, Myron, Phidias.