Download Pericles Biography

Pericles – Biography
Name:_______________________________
History 10
Date:____________________
Source: http://www.ancient.eu/pericles/
Opening Question: What makes a good political leader?
Pericles (495–429 BCE, whose name means "surrounded by glory") was a prominent statesman,
famous orator, and general (in Greek 'Strategos’) of Athens during the Golden Age of Athens.
So profound was his influence that the period in which he led Athens has been called the 'Age of
Pericles’.
This statesman’s influence on Athenian society was so great that Thucydides, his contemporary
admirer and historian, called him "the first citizen of Athens". Pericles led the Delian
League forward to form the Athenian empire and guided his countrymen during the first two
years of the Peloponnesian Wars.
Pericles promoted the arts, literature, and philosophy and gave free reign to some of the most
inspired writers and thinkers of his time. During the Age of Pericles, Athens blossomed as a
center of education, art, culture, and democracy. Artists and sculptors, playwrights and poets,
architects and philosophers all found Athens an exciting and enlivening atmosphere for their
work. Athens under Pericles saw the building of the Acropolis and the glory of the Parthenon.
The playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes (in short, all of the great
Greek writers for the stage) invented theater as it is known in the modern-day. Hippocrates (who
inspired the Hippocratic Oath still taken by physicians today) practiced medicine in Athens then
while sculptors like the famous Phidias (who created the statue of Zeus at Olympia, considered
one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, as well as the statue of Athena Parthenos for
the Parthenon) and Myron (who produced the masterpiece Discus Thrower) worked in their
marble and stone. The great philosophers Protagoras, Zeno of Elea, and Anaxagoras were all
personal friends of Pericles (Anaxagoras especially, who influenced Pericles’ public demeanor
and acceptance of fate, especially after the death of Pericles’ sons) and Socrates, the man
considered the 'father of western philosophy', all lived in Athens at the time.
Pericles family's nobility, prestige, and wealth allowed him to pursue his inclination toward
education, and he is recognized as the first politician to attribute great importance to philosophy
as a practical discipline which could help guide and direct one’s thought and actions rather than a
mere speculative past-time…
…
At the beginning of 431 BCE Athens entered into the long, drawn-out Peloponnesian Wars
with Sparta. Thucydides recorded Pericles’ famous Funeral Oration given at the service for the
Athenian dead in which he said, in part, “Grief is felt not so much for the want of what we have
never known as for the loss of that to which we have been long accustomed.” It was shortly after
this speech that Athens itself would lose what it was accustomed to as the tide of the war turned
against it. In 429 BCE the plague struck the city and Pericles was among the victims.
Bereft of his leadership, the Athenians made mistake after mistake in their military decisions
leading eventually to their defeat by the Spartans in 404 BCE, the destruction of their city’s
walls, and their occupation and rule by Sparta. In his histories, Thucydides makes abundantly
clear what a disaster Pericles’ death was for Athens in that those who came after him desired to
be popular rather than effective, and in so doing doomed the city to ruin. With the death of
Pericles, his 'age’ ended and Athens fell into an intellectual, cultural, and spiritual darkness
which the Athenians would struggle with over the next 30 years. It culminated in the execution
of Socrates in the year 399 BCE.
Closing Question: Does Pericles have any of the traits that we identified as important traits for a
leader?