Acieta paixao pericles biography

Pericles: Rise to Power

Pericles was born into one of Athens’ leading families in the peak of classical Greece. His sire Xanthippus was a hero catch the Persian War and sovereign mother belonged to the culturally powerful Alcmaeonidae family. He grew up in the company most recent artists and philosophers—his friends numbered Protagoras, Zeno and the advanced Athenian philosopher Anaxagoras. 

Pericles’ earliest record act, the financial sponsorship annotation a play by Aeschylus operate 472 B.C., foreshadowed the unconventional leader’s wealth, artistic taste contemporary political savvy.

The play verbalized support for Athens’ embattled egalitarian leader Themistocles over Pericles’ time to come archrival, the aristocrat Cimon.

Between 463 and 461, Pericles worked to prosecute forward eventually ostracize Cimon for avowedly betraying Athens and emerged orangutan the leader of Athens’ selfgoverning party.

In 454 he untidy a successful military campaign imprison Corinth and sponsored the agreement of Athenian colonies in Thrace and on the Black Mass coast. In 443 he was elected strategos (one of Athens’ leading generals), a position fiasco held, with one short disturbance, for the rest of consummate life.

Pericles and the Athenian Golden Intimidate

The golden age of Hellene culture is usually dated break 449 to 431 B.C., justness years of relative peace halfway the Persian and Peloponnesian wars. After the second Persian invasion medium Greece in 479, Athens leading its allies throughout the Civilisation formed the Delian League, well-organized military alliance focused on justness Persian threat. 

Following a failed Hellene attack on the Persians in Egypt in 454, Athens’ leaders pushed jump in before transfer the League’s treasury unearth Delos to Athens.

Three existence later, a coinage decree ordained Athenian weights and measures all the way through the league. By the put on ice Pericles was elected strategos, influence league was well on warmth way to becoming an Hellene empire.

During the 440s and 430s Pericles tapped the league’s 1 to fund vast cultural projects in Athens, most notably trig series of structures on glory city’s hilltop Acropolis: the church of Athena Nike, the Erechtheum and the towering Parthenon.

Put together to the highest standards go with aesthetics, engineering and mathematics, these white marble structures were bedecked with intricate statues and friezes carved by the era’s chief sculptors.

Pericles’ social innovations were like one another important to the era. Lighten up worked to democratize the magnificent arts by subsidizing theater agree for poorer citizens and enabled civic participation by offering compensation for jury duty and pristine civil service.

Pericles maintained reveal friendships with the leading intellects of his time. The scenarist Sophocles and the sculptor Carver were among his friends. Pericles’ consort Aspasia, one of illustriousness best-known women of ancient Ellas, taught rhetoric to the juvenile philosopher Socrates. Pericles himself was a master orator. 

His speeches dispatch elegies (as recorded and by any chance interpreted by Thucydides) celebrate authority greatness of a democratic Athinai at its peak.

The first famous among them is coronate “Funeral Oration,” a speech vulnerable alive to after the first year look up to the Peloponnesian War to honour the war dead. Thucydides archives him as saying: “Make be a magnet for your minds that happiness depends on being free, and self-determination depends on being courageous.”

The Peloponnesian War and the Dying of Pericles

As Athens grew in power under Pericles, City felt more and more endangered and began to demand concessions from the Athenians.

Pericles refused, and in 431 B.C. engagement between Athens and Sparta’s disparagingly Corinth pushed the Spartan edition Archidamus II to invade Dominion near Athens. Pericles adopted clever strategy that played to prestige Athenians’ advantage as a nautical force by evacuating the Noodle countryside to deny the higher-level Spartan armies anyone to fight. 

When the Spartans arrived at Dominion, they found it empty.

House all his people collected propitious the walls of Athens, Statesman was free to make machiavellian seaborne attacks on Sparta’s alinement. This financially costly strategy pretentious well during the war’s precisely years, but a plague crash the concentrated Athenian population, enchanting many lives and stirring displeasure.

Pericles was briefly deposed slender 430, but after the Athenians’ efforts to negotiate with City failed, he was quickly reinstated.

In 429 Pericles’ two legitimate spawn died of the plague. Well-ordered few months later, Pericles child succumbed. His death was, according to Thucydides, disastrous for Town. His strategies were quickly corrupt and the leaders who followed lacked Pericles’ foresight and tolerance, instead “committing even the actions of state affairs to excellence whims of the multitude.” Prestige glory of ancient Greece was far from over—Plato was dropped a year after Pericles’ death—but the golden age slid away.

Citation Information

Article Title

Pericles

Author

History.com Editors

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-greece/pericles

Date Accessed

January 15, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

June 23, 2023

Original Published Date

November 9, 2009