Pericles built the Parthenon and argued Athens into radical democracy
Comic playwrights mocked his oversized skull as a sea onion, but for roughly three decades Pericles was the man Athens listened to. He turned an alliance into an empire, paid poor citizens to sit on juries, filled the Acropolis with marble, and died of the plague early in the war with Sparta.
Born around 495 BC, he was the son of Xanthippus, a politician who was ostracised and then came back to lead Athenian forces to victory at Mycale. His mother Agariste came from the Alcmaeonidae, a noble and controversial clan, and was niece to the reformer Cleisthenes. Herodotus and Plutarch say she dreamed before his birth that she had borne a lion. As a youth he kept out of public view, studying music and seeking out thinkers such as Protagoras, Zeno of Elea and above all Anaxagoras, whose calm scepticism may explain his famous composure. His ever-present helmet, often blamed on the odd head, actually marked his rank as a general.
His entry into politics was theatrical: in 472 BC he funded Aeschylus's The Persians, a play celebrating Themistocles at a time when that hero's rival Cimon was gaining ground. In 463 BC Pericles prosecuted Cimon, who was acquitted. Two years later his mentor Ephialtes stripped the aristocratic Areopagus council of power, and Cimon himself was ostracised on a charge of helping Sparta. After Ephialtes was murdered, Pericles had no serious rival and led the city until his death in 429 BC.
The reforms came quickly. The state paid theatre admission for the poor, the property bar for the archonship dropped in 458–457 BC, and jurors in the supreme court began drawing wages. Most controversial was his law of 451 BC restricting citizenship to people with two Athenian parents. Admirers such as Donald Kagan see a lasting source of strength; critics, among them the historian Constantine Paparrigopoulos, blamed him for the demagogy that followed.
Abroad his results were mixed. A campaign supporting an Egyptian revolt against Persia ended in the destruction of the Athenian force, while Cimon, back from exile, won in Cyprus before dying of disease in 449 BC. At home, the building programme that produced the Parthenon gave Athenians work and made the city the cultural capital of Greece.
Source: Pericles
