Pericles

Biography

Pericles dominated Athenian politics for over thirty years, transforming the city into the cultural and imperial capital of the Greek world. He funded the Parthenon and the Propylaea with Delian League tribute, extended democratic rights to the poorest Athenian citizens, and championed Athenian imperial expansion with a combination of democratic rhetoric and hard-headed realism. His strategy at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War was to abandon Attica to Spartan devastation, concentrate resources on the fleet, and wear Sparta down through naval superiority and financial attrition — betting that Sparta would run out of money before Athens ran out of ships. The strategy was working when the Plague of Athens struck in 430 BC, killing perhaps a quarter of the city's population — including Pericles himself in 429 BC. He died having watched his strategy vindicated in naval terms but undermined by an epidemic no military planning could have anticipated. His Funeral Oration, delivered over the dead of the first year of war, remains the most celebrated defence of democracy ever written. Pericles left Athens both its golden cultural legacy and its fatal strategic overextension. The empire he built required constant expansion to maintain; the Sicilian Expedition that destroyed Athens was the logical continuation of Periclean imperial logic. He was, Thucydides wrote, 'the first citizen of Athens' — but also the architect of a system that Athens could not survive its own ambitions.