What Kind of Person Was Pericres According to Prurarch? Review Questions
The and then-called gilt age of Athenian civilisation flourished under the leadership of Pericles (495-429 B.C.), a brilliant general, orator, patron of the arts and pol—"the showtime denizen" of democratic Athens, according to the historian Thucydides. Pericles transformed his city's alliances into an empire and graced its Acropolis with the famous Parthenon. His policies and strategies also prepare the stage for the devastating Peloponnesian State of war, which would embroil all Hellenic republic in the decades following his decease.
Pericles: Ascension to Power
Pericles was born into i of Athens' leading families in the heyday of classical Greece. His begetter Xanthippus was a hero of the Farsi State of war and his mother belonged to the culturally powerful Alcmaeonidae family. He grew up in the company of artists and philosophers—his friends included Protagoras, Zeno and the pioneering Athenian philosopher Anaxagoras.
Pericles' primeval recorded act, the financial sponsorship of a play past Aeschylus in 472 B.C., foreshadowed the hereafter leader's wealth, artistic gustation and political savvy. The play expressed support for Athens' embattled populist leader Themistocles over Pericles' future archrival, the aristocrat Cimon.
Between 463 and 461, Pericles worked to prosecute and somewhen ostracize Cimon for allegedly betraying Athens and emerged every bit the leader of Athens' democratic party. In 454 he led a successful military machine campaign in Corinth and sponsored the establishment of Athenian colonies in Thrace and on the Blackness Body of water coast. In 443 he was elected strategos (i of Athens' leading generals), a position he held, with ane short interruption, for the rest of his life.
Pericles and the Athenian Gilded Age
The aureate historic period of Athenian civilisation is usually dated from 449 to 431 B.C., the years of relative peace between the Persian and Peloponnesian wars. After the 2d Western farsi invasion of Greece in 479, Athens and its allies throughout the Aegean formed the Delian League, a military alliance focused on the Persian threat.
Ringlet to Go along
Following a failed Athenian attack on the Persians in Egypt in 454, Athens' leaders pushed to transfer the League's treasury from Delos to Athens. Three years afterwards, a coinage decree imposed Athenian weights and measures throughout the league. Past the time Pericles was elected strategos, the league was well on its way to becoming an Athenian empire.
During the 440s and 430s Pericles tapped the league'due south treasury to fund vast cultural projects in Athens, most notably a series of structures on the city's hilltop Acropolis: the temple of Athena Nike, the Erechtheum and the towering Parthenon. Built to the highest standards of aesthetics, engineering and mathematics, these white marble structures were decorated with intricate statues and friezes carved by the era's greatest sculptors.
Pericles' social innovations were as important to the era. He worked to democratize the fine arts by subsidizing theater admission for poorer citizens and enabled civic participation by offering pay for jury duty and other civil service. Pericles maintained close friendships with the leading intellects of his time. The playwright Sophocles and the sculptor Phidias were amongst his friends. Pericles' espoused Aspasia, ane of the best-known women of aboriginal Greece, taught rhetoric to the immature philosopher Socrates. Pericles himself was a master orator.
His speeches and elegies (as recorded and possibly interpreted by Thucydides) celebrate the greatness of a autonomous Athens at its peak. The most famous amongst them is his "Funeral Oration," a speech given after the first year of the Peloponnesian War to commemorate the war dead. Thucydides records him as maxim: "Make upwardly your minds that happiness depends on existence free, and freedom depends on being courageous."
The Peloponnesian War and the Expiry of Pericles
Every bit Athens grew in power under Pericles, Sparta felt more than and more threatened and began to demand concessions from the Athenians. Pericles refused, and in 431 B.C. conflict betwixt Athens and Sparta's ally Corinth pushed the Spartan male monarch Archidamus Two to invade Attica near Athens. Pericles adopted a strategy that played to the Athenians' reward as a naval force by evacuating the Attic countryside to deny the superior Spartan armies anyone to fight.
When the Spartans arrived at Attica, they establish it empty. With all his people nerveless inside the walls of Athens, Pericles was free to make opportunistic seaborne attacks on Sparta's allies. This financially plush strategy worked well during the state of war'due south early years, but a plague hit the full-bodied Athenian population, taking many lives and stirring discontent. Pericles was briefly deposed in 430, just subsequently the Athenians' efforts to negotiate with Sparta failed, he was apace reinstated.
In 429 Pericles' two legitimate sons died of the plague. A few months later, Pericles himself succumbed. His death was, according to Thucydides, disastrous for Athens. His strategies were quickly abandoned and the leaders who followed lacked Pericles' foresight and forbearance, instead "committing even the conduct of land affairs to the whims of the multitude." The glory of ancient Greece was far from over—Plato was born a year after Pericles' decease—but the gilt age slid abroad.
Source: https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-history/pericles
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