Pericles

Early years

Pericles was born c. 495 BC, in Athens, Greece. He was the son of the politician Xanthippus, who, though ostracised in 485–484 BC, returned to Athens to command the Athenian contingent in the Greek victory at Mycale just five years later. Pericles's mother, Agariste, was a member of the powerful and controversial noble family of the Alcmaeonidae, and her familial connections played a crucial role in helping start his political career. Agariste was the great-granddaughter of the tyrant of Sicyon, Cleisthenes, and the niece of the Athenian reformer Cleisthenes. Pericles belonged to the Attic phyle (clan) of Acamantis. His early years were quiet; the introverted young Pericles avoided public appearances, instead preferring to devote his time to his studies.

According to Herodotus and Plutarch, Agariste dreamed, a few nights before Pericles's birth, that she had borne a lion. Legends say that Philip II of Macedon had a similar dream before the birth of his son, Alexander the Great. One interpretation of the dream treats the lion as a traditional symbol of greatness, but the story may also allude to the unusually large size of Pericles's skull, which became a popular target of contemporary comedians (who called him "Squill-head", after the squill or sea-onion). Although Plutarch claims that this deformity was the reason that Pericles was always depicted wearing a helmet, this is not the case; the helmet was actually the symbol of his official rank as strategos (general).

His family's nobility and wealth allowed him to fully pursue his inclination toward education. He learned music from the masters of the time (Damon or Pythocleides could have been his teacher) and he is considered to have been the first politician to attribute importance to philosophy. He enjoyed the company of the philosophers Protagoras, Zeno of Elea, and Anaxagoras. Anaxagoras, in particular, became a close friend and influenced him greatly.

Pericles's manner of thought and rhetorical charisma may have possibly been in part products of Anaxagoras's emphasis on emotional calm in the face of trouble, and scepticism about divine phenomena. His proverbial calmness and self-control are also often regarded as products of Anaxagoras's influence.

Political career until 431 BC

Entering politics

In the spring of 472 BC, Pericles presented The Persians of Aeschylus at the Greater Dionysia as a liturgy, demonstrating that he was one of the wealthier men of Athens. Simon Hornblower has argued that Pericles's selection of this play, which presents a nostalgic picture of Themistocles's famous victory at Salamis, shows that the young politician was supporting Themistocles against his political opponent Cimon, whose faction succeeded in having Themistocles ostracised shortly afterward.

Plutarch says that Pericles stood first among the Athenians for forty years. If this was so, Pericles must have taken up a position of leadership by the early 460s BC, which would be in his early or mid-thirties. Throughout these years he endeavoured to protect his privacy and to present himself as a model for his fellow citizens. For example, he would often avoid banquets, trying to be frugal.

In 463 BC, Pericles was the leading prosecutor of Cimon, the leader of the conservative faction who was accused of neglecting Athens's vital interests in Macedon. Although Cimon was acquitted, this confrontation proved that Pericles's major political opponent was vulnerable.

Ostracising Cimon

Around 461 BC, the leadership of the democratic party decided it was time to take aim at the Areopagus, a traditional council controlled by the Athenian aristocracy, which had once been the most powerful body in the state. The leader of the party and mentor of Pericles, Ephialtes, proposed a reduction of the Areopagus's powers. The Ecclesia (the Athenian Assembly) adopted Ephialtes's proposal without opposition. This reform signalled the beginning of a new era of "radical democracy".

The democratic party gradually became dominant in Athenian politics, and Pericles seemed willing to follow a populist policy to cajole the public. According to Aristotle, Pericles's stance can be explained by the fact that his principal political opponent, Cimon, was both rich and generous, and was able to gain public favour by lavishly handing out portions of his sizeable personal fortune. The historian Loren J. Samons II argues, however, that Pericles had enough resources to make a political mark by private means, had he so chosen.

In 461 BC, Pericles achieved the political elimination of this opponent using ostracism. The accusation was that Cimon betrayed his city by aiding Sparta.

After Cimon's ostracism, Pericles continued to promote a populist social policy. He first proposed a decree that permitted the poor to watch theatrical plays without paying, with the state covering the cost of their admission. With other decrees he lowered the property requirement for the archonship in 458–457 BC and bestowed generous wages on all citizens who served as jurymen in the Heliaia (the supreme court of Athens) some time just after 454 BC. His most controversial measure, however, was a law of 451 BC limiting Athenian citizenship to those of Athenian parentage on both sides.

Such measures impelled Pericles's critics to hold him responsible for the gradual degeneration of the Athenian democracy. The 19th century Greek historian Constantine Paparrigopoulos, argued that Pericles sought for the expansion and stabilisation of all democratic institutions. Accordingly, he enacted legislation granting the lower classes access to the political system and the public offices, from which they had previously been barred.

According to Samons, Pericles believed that it was necessary to raise the demos, in which he saw an untapped source of Athenian power and the crucial element of Athenian military dominance. (The fleet, backbone of Athenian power since the days of Themistocles, was manned almost entirely by members of the lower classes).

Leading Athens

Ephialtes's murder in 461 BC paved the way for Pericles to consolidate his authority. Without opposition after the expulsion of Cimon, the unchallengeable leader of the democratic party became the unchallengeable ruler of Athens. He remained in power until his death in 429 BC.

Pericles made his first military excursions during the First Peloponnesian War, which was caused in part by Athens's alliance with Megara and Argos and the subsequent reaction of Sparta. In 454 BC he attacked Sicyon and Acarnania. He then unsuccessfully tried to conquer Oeniadea on the Corinthian gulf, before returning to Athens. In 451 BC, Cimon returned from exile and negotiated a five years' truce with Sparta after a proposal of Pericles, an event which indicates a shift in Pericles's political strategy. Pericles may have realized the importance of Cimon's contribution during the ongoing conflicts against the Peloponnesians and the Persians. Anthony Podlecki argues, however, that Pericles's alleged change of position was invented by ancient writers to support "a tendentious view of Pericles' shiftiness".

Plutarch states that Cimon struck a power-sharing deal with his opponents, according to which Pericles would carry through the interior affairs and Cimon would be the leader of the Athenian army, campaigning abroad. If it were actually made, this bargain would constitute a concession on Pericles's part that he was not a great strategist. Kagan's view is that Cimon adapted himself to the new conditions and promoted a political marriage between Periclean liberals and Cimonian conservatives.

In the mid-450s the Athenians launched an unsuccessful attempt to aid an Egyptian revolt against Persia, which led to a prolonged siege of a Persian fortress in the Nile Delta. The campaign culminated in disaster; the besieging force was defeated and destroyed. In 451–450 BC the Athenians sent troops to Cyprus. Cimon defeated the Persians in the Battle of Salamis-in-Cyprus, but died of disease in 449 BC. Pericles is said to have initiated both expeditions in Egypt and Cyprus, although some researchers, such as Karl Julius Beloch, argue that the dispatch of such a great fleet conforms with the spirit of Cimon's policy.

Complicating the account of this period is the issue of the Peace of Callias, which allegedly ended hostilities between the Greeks and the Persians. The very existence of the treaty is hotly disputed, and its particulars and negotiation are ambiguous. Ernst Badian believes that a peace between Athens and Persia was first ratified in 463 BC (making the Athenian interventions in Egypt and Cyprus violations of the peace), and renegotiated at the conclusion of the campaign in Cyprus, taking force again by 449–448 BC.

Peloponnesian War

The causes of the Peloponnesian War have been much debated, but many ancient historians lay the blame on Pericles and Athens. Plutarch seems to believe that Pericles and the Athenians incited the war, scrambling to implement their belligerent tactics "with a sort of arrogance and a love of strife". Thucydides hints at the same thing, believing the reason for the war was Sparta's fear of Athenian power and growth. However, as he is generally regarded as an admirer of Pericles, Thucydides has been criticised for bias against Sparta.

Prelude to the war

Pericles was convinced that the war against Sparta, which could not conceal its envy of Athens's pre-eminence, was inevitable if unfortunate. Therefore, he did not hesitate to send troops to Corcyra to reinforce the Corcyraean fleet, which was fighting against Corinth. In 433 BC the enemy fleets confronted each other at the Battle of Sybota and a year later the Athenians fought Corinthian colonists at the Battle of Potidaea; these two events contributed greatly to Corinth's lasting hatred of Athens. During the same period, Pericles proposed the Megarian decree, which resembled a modern trade embargo. According to the provisions of the decree, Megarian merchants were excluded from the market of Athens and the ports in its empire. This ban strangled the Megarian economy and strained the fragile peace between Athens and Sparta, which was allied with Megara. According to George Cawkwell, a praelector in ancient history, with this decree Pericles breached the Thirty Years' Peace "but, perhaps, not without the semblance of an excuse". The Athenians' justification was that the Megarians had cultivated the sacred land consecrated to Demeter and had given refuge to runaway slaves, a behaviour which the Athenians considered to be impious.

After consultations with its allies, Sparta sent a deputation to Athens demanding certain concessions, such as the immediate expulsion of the Alcmaeonidae family including Pericles and the retraction of the Megarian Decree, threatening war if the demands were not met. The obvious purpose of these proposals was the instigation of a confrontation between Pericles and the people; this event, indeed, would come about a few years later. At that time, the Athenians unhesitatingly followed Pericles's instructions. In the first legendary oration Thucydides puts in his mouth, Pericles advised the Athenians not to yield to their opponents' demands, since they were militarily stronger. Pericles was not prepared to make unilateral concessions, believing that "if Athens conceded on that issue, then Sparta was sure to come up with further demands". Consequently, Pericles asked the Spartans to offer a quid pro quo. In exchange for retracting the Megarian Decree, the Athenians demanded from Sparta to abandon their practice of periodic expulsion of foreigners from their territory (xenelasia) and to recognise the autonomy of its allied cities, a request implying that Sparta's hegemony was also ruthless. The terms were rejected by the Spartans, and with neither side willing to back down, the two cities prepared for war. According to Athanasios G. Platias and Constantinos Koliopoulos, professors of strategic studies and international politics, "rather than to submit to coercive demands, Pericles chose war". Another consideration that may well have influenced Pericles's stance was the concern that revolts in the empire might spread if Athens showed itself weak.

First year of the war (431 BC)

In 431 BC, while peace already was precarious, Archidamus II, Sparta's king, sent a new delegation to Athens, demanding that the Athenians submit to Sparta's demands. This deputation was not allowed to enter Athens, as Pericles had already passed a resolution according to which no Spartan deputation would be welcomed if the Spartans had previously initiated any hostile military actions. The Spartan army was at this time gathered at Corinth, and, citing this as a hostile action, the Athenians refused to admit their emissaries. With his last attempt at negotiation thus declined, Archidamus invaded Attica, but found no Athenians there; Pericles, aware that Sparta's strategy would be to invade and ravage Athenian territory, had previously arranged to evacuate the entire population of the region to within the walls of Athens.

No definite record exists of how exactly Pericles managed to convince the residents of Attica to agree to move into the crowded urban areas. For most, the move meant abandoning their land and ancestral shrines and completely changing their lifestyle. Therefore, although they agreed to leave, many rural residents were far from happy with Pericles's decision. Pericles also gave his compatriots some advice on their present affairs and reassured them that, if the enemy did not plunder his farms, he would offer his property to the city. This promise was prompted by his concern that Archidamus, who was a friend of his, might pass by his estate without ravaging it, either as a gesture of friendship or as a calculated political move aimed to alienate Pericles from his constituents.

In any case, seeing the pillage of their farms, the Athenians were outraged, and they soon began to indirectly express their discontent towards their leader, who many of them considered to have drawn them into the war. Even when in the face of mounting pressure, Pericles did not give in to the demands for immediate action against the enemy or revise his initial strategy. He also avoided convening the ecclesia, fearing that the populace, outraged by the unopposed ravaging of their farms, might rashly decide to challenge the vaunted Spartan army in the field. As meetings of the assembly were called at the discretion of its rotating presidents, the "prytani" (singular, "prytaneis"), Pericles had no formal control over their scheduling; rather, the respect in which Pericles was held by the prytanies was apparently sufficient to persuade them to do as he wished. While the Spartan army remained in Attica, Pericles sent a fleet of 100 ships to loot the coasts of the Peloponnese and charged the cavalry to guard the ravaged farms close to the walls of the city. When the enemy retired and the pillaging came to an end, Pericles proposed a decree according to which the authorities of the city should put aside 1,000 talents and 100 ships, in case Athens was attacked by naval forces. According to the most stringent provision of the decree, even proposing a different use of the money or ships would entail the penalty of death. During the autumn of 431 BC, Pericles led the Athenian forces that invaded Megara and a few months later (winter of 431–430 BC) he delivered his monumental and emotional Funeral Oration, honouring the Athenians who died for their city.

Last military operations and death

In 430 BC, the army of Sparta looted Attica for a second time, but Pericles was not daunted and refused to revise his initial strategy. Unwilling to engage the Spartan army in battle, he again led a naval expedition to plunder the coasts of the Peloponnese, this time taking 100 Athenian ships with him. According to Plutarch, just before the sailing of the ships an eclipse of the sun frightened the crews, but Pericles used the astronomical knowledge he had acquired from Anaxagoras to calm them. In the summer of the same year an epidemic broke out and devastated the Athenians. The exact identity of the disease is uncertain; typhus or typhoid fever are suspected, but this has been the source of much debate. In any case, the city's plight, caused by the epidemic, triggered a new wave of public uproar, and Pericles was forced to defend himself in an emotional final speech, a rendition of which is presented by Thucydides. This is considered to be a monumental oration, revealing Pericles's virtues but also his bitterness towards his compatriots' ingratitude. Temporarily, he managed to tame the people's resentment and to ride out the storm, but his internal enemies' final bid to undermine him came off; they managed to deprive him of the generalship and to fine him at an amount estimated between 15 and 50 talents. Ancient sources mention Cleon, a rising and dynamic protagonist of the Athenian political scene during the war, as the public prosecutor in Pericles's trial.

Nevertheless, within just a year, in 429 BC, the Athenians not only forgave Pericles but also re-elected him as strategos. He was reinstated in command of the Athenian army and led all its military operations during 429 BC, having once again under his control the levers of power. In that year, however, Pericles witnessed in the epidemic the death of both Paralus and Xanthippus, his legitimate sons from his first wife. According to Plutarch, Pericles was overwhelmed with grief and wept copiously for his loss. He himself died of the plague later in the year.

Just before his death, Pericles's friends were concentrated around his bed, enumerating his virtues during peace and underscoring his nine war trophies. Pericles, though moribund, heard them and interrupted them, pointing out that they forgot to mention his fairest and greatest title to their admiration; "for", said he, "no living Athenian ever put on mourning because of me". Pericles lived during the first two and a half years of the Peloponnesian War and, according to Thucydides, his death was a disaster for Athens, since his successors were inferior to him; they preferred to incite all the bad habits of the rabble and followed an unstable policy, endeavouring to be popular rather than useful. With these bitter comments, Thucydides not only laments the loss of a man he admired, but he also heralds the flickering of Athens's unique glory and grandeur.

Personal life

Pericles, following Athenian custom, was first married to one of his closest relatives, with whom he had two sons, Paralus and Xanthippus, but around 445 BC, Pericles divorced his wife. He offered her to another husband, with the agreement of her male relatives. The name of his first wife is not known; the only information about her is that she was the wife of Hipponicus, before being married to Pericles, and the mother of Callias from this first marriage.

After Pericles divorced his wife, he had a long-term relationship with Aspasia of Miletus, with whom he had a son, Pericles the Younger. While Aspasia was held in high regard by many of Athens's socialites, her status as a non-Athenian led many to attack their relationship. Even Pericles's son, Xanthippus, who had political ambitions, did not hesitate to slander his father. Nonetheless, such objections did not greatly undermine the popularity of the couple and Pericles readily fought back against accusations that his relationship with Aspasia was corrupting of Athenian society.

His sister and both his legitimate sons, Xanthippus and Paralus, died during the Plague of Athens. Just before his death, the Athenians allowed a change in the law of 451 BC that made his half-Athenian son with Aspasia, Pericles the Younger, a citizen, and legitimate heir, a striking decision considering that Pericles himself had proposed the law confining citizenship to those of Athenian parentage on both sides.

Pericles also acted as guardian to Alcibiades, a young distant relative, after the death of Alcibiades's father, Cleinias, at the Battle of Coronea in 447 BC.

Assessments

Pericles marked a whole era and inspired conflicting judgments about his significant decisions. The fact that he was at the same time a vigorous statesman, general and orator only tends to make an objective assessment of his actions more difficult.

Political leadership

Some contemporary scholars call Pericles a populist, a demagogue and a hawk, while other scholars admire his charismatic leadership. According to Plutarch, after assuming the leadership of Athens, "he was no longer the same man as before, nor alike submissive to the people and ready to yield and give in to the desires of the multitude as a steersman to the breezes". It is told that when his political opponent, Thucydides, was asked by Sparta's king, Archidamus, whether he or Pericles was the better fighter, Thucydides answered without any hesitation that Pericles was better, because even when he was defeated, he managed to convince the audience that he had won. In matters of character, Pericles was above reproach in the eyes of the ancient historians, since "he kept himself untainted by corruption, although he was not altogether indifferent to money-making".

Thucydides (the historian), an admirer of Pericles, maintains that Athens was "in name a democracy but, in fact, governed by its first citizen". Through this comment, the historian illustrates what he perceives as Pericles's charisma to lead, convince and, sometimes, to manipulate. Although Thucydides mentions the fining of Pericles, he does not mention the accusations against Pericles but instead focuses on Pericles's integrity. On the other hand, in one of his dialogues, Plato rejects the glorification of Pericles and declares: "as I know, Pericles made the Athenians slothful, garrulous and avaricious, by starting the system of public fees".

Plutarch mentions other criticism of Pericles's leadership: "many others say that the people were first led on by him into allotments of public lands, festival-grants, and distributions of fees for public services, thereby falling into bad habits, and becoming luxurious and wanton under the influence of his public measures, instead of frugal and self-sufficing".

Thucydides argues that Pericles "was not carried away by the people, but he was the one guiding the people". His judgement is not unquestioned; some 20th-century critics, such as Malcolm F. McGregor and John S. Morrison, proposed that he may have been a charismatic public face acting as an advocate on the proposals of advisors, or the people themselves. According to King, by increasing the power of the people, the Athenians left themselves with no authoritative leader. During the Peloponnesian War, Pericles's dependence on popular support to govern was obvious.

Military achievements

For more than 20 years Pericles led many expeditions, mainly naval ones. Being always cautious, he never undertook of his own accord a battle involving much uncertainty and peril and he did not accede to the "vain impulses of the citizens". He based his military policy on Themistocles's principle that Athens's predominance depends on its superior naval power and believed that the Peloponnesians were near-invincible on land. Pericles also tried to minimise the advantages of Sparta by rebuilding the walls of Athens, which, it has been suggested, radically altered the use of force in Greek international relations.

During the Peloponnesian War, Pericles initiated a defensive "grand strategy" whose aim was the exhaustion of the enemy and the preservation of the status quo. According to Platias and Koliopoulos, Athens as the strongest party did not have to beat Sparta in military terms and "chose to foil the Spartan plan for victory". The two basic principles of the "Periclean Grand Strategy" were the rejection of appeasement (in accordance with which he urged the Athenians not to revoke the Megarian Decree) and the avoidance of overextension. According to Kagan, Pericles's vehement insistence that there should be no diversionary expeditions may well have resulted from the bitter memory of the Egyptian campaign, which he had allegedly supported. His strategy is said to have been "inherently unpopular", but Pericles managed to persuade the Athenian public to follow it. It is for that reason that Hans Delbrück called him one of the greatest statesmen and military leaders in history. Although his countrymen engaged in several aggressive actions soon after his death, Platias and Koliopoulos argue that the Athenians remained true to the larger Periclean strategy of seeking to preserve, not expand, the empire, and did not depart from it until the Sicilian Expedition. For his part, Ben X. de Wet concludes his strategy would have succeeded had he lived longer.

Critics of Pericles's strategy, however, have been just as numerous as its supporters. A common criticism is that Pericles was always a better politician and orator than strategist. Donald Kagan called the Periclean strategy "a form of wishful thinking that failed", Barry S. Strauss and Josiah Ober have stated that "as strategist he was a failure and deserves a share of the blame for Athens' great defeat", and Victor Davis Hanson believes that Pericles had not worked out a clear strategy for an effective offensive action that could possibly force Thebes or Sparta to stop the war. Kagan criticises the Periclean strategy on four counts: first that by rejecting minor concessions it brought about war; second, that it was unforeseen by the enemy and hence lacked credibility; third, that it was too feeble to exploit any opportunities; and fourth, that it depended on Pericles for its execution and thus was bound to be abandoned after his death. Kagan estimates Pericles's expenditure on his military strategy in the Peloponnesian War to be about 2,000 talents annually, and based on this figure concludes that he would have only enough money to keep the war going for three years. He asserts that since Pericles must have known about these limitations he probably planned for a much shorter war. Others, such as Donald W. Knight, conclude that the strategy was too defensive and would not succeed.

Oratorical skill

Modern commentators of Thucydides, with other modern historians and writers, take varying stances on the issue of how much of the speeches of Pericles, as given by this historian, do actually represent Pericles's own words and how much of them is free literary creation or paraphrase by Thucydides. Since Pericles never wrote down or distributed his orations, no historians are able to answer this with certainty; Thucydides recreated three of them from memory and, thereby, it cannot be ascertained that he did not add his own notions and thoughts.

Although Pericles was a main source of his inspiration, some historians have noted that the passionate and idealistic literary style of the speeches Thucydides attributes to Pericles is completely at odds with Thucydides's own cold and analytical writing style. This might, however, be the result of the incorporation of the genre of rhetoric into the genre of historiography. That is to say, Thucydides could simply have used two different writing styles for two different purposes.

Ioannis Kakridis and Arnold Gomme were two scholars who debated the originality of Pericles's oratory and last speech. Kakridis believes that Thucydides altered Pericles words. Some of his strongest arguments included in the Introduction of the speech, (Thuc.11.35). Kakridis proposes that it is impossible to imagine Pericles deviating away from the expected funeral orator addressing the mourning audience of 430 after the Peloponnesian war. The two groups addressed were the ones who were prepared to believe him when he praised the dead, and the ones who did not. Gomme rejects Kakridis's position, defending the fact that "Nobody of men has ever been so conscious of envy and its workings as the Greeks, and that the Greeks and Thucydides in particular had a passion for covering all ground in their generalizations, not always relevantly."

Kagan states that Pericles adopted "an elevated mode of speech, free from the vulgar and knavish tricks of mob-orators" and, according to Diodorus Siculus, he "excelled all his fellow citizens in skill of oratory". According to Plutarch, he avoided using gimmicks in his speeches, unlike the passionate Demosthenes, and always spoke in a calm and tranquil manner. The biographer points out, however, that the poet Ion reported that Pericles's speaking style was "a presumptuous and somewhat arrogant manner of address, and that into his haughtiness there entered a good deal of disdain and contempt for others".

Pericles and the city gods

Nothing was more alien to the Greeks than the notion of a separation between church and state. In Athens, the community provided a tight framework for religious manifestations while, symmetrically, religion was deeply embedded in civic life. Within this context, participation in the rituals was an action highly political in the broadest sense of the term.

To analyse Pericles's relations with gods, one has to position oneself at the intersection of the general and the particular, where what was personal and what was shared by the whole community came together. On the one hand, the career of the strategos will illuminate the Athenians' collective relationship to all that was divine. As a reelected strategos and a persuasive orator, Pericles was the spokesman of a civic religion that was undergoing a mutation. He was implicated in a policy of making constant offerings and of launching huge architectural religious works not only on the Acropolis but also throughout Attica; and, furthermore, he was engaged in such activities at a time when city was introducing profound changes into its religious account of its origins—that is, autochthony—within a context of strained diplomatic relations.

On the other hand, the ancient sources made it possible to glimpse the personal relations that Pericles had developed with gods. These were relations of proximity in the first place: he was sometimes depicted as a protégé of goddess Athena, but in Attic comedies he was also assimilated to god Zeus, in an analogy that was in no way flattering. But then, there were also relations that emphasized distance: some philosophical accounts presented him as a man close to the sophists or even as a freethinker. Finally, there were relations involving irreverence: some later and less trustworthy sources made much of several trials for impiety in which those close to him were involved, and this raises the question of religious tolerance in fifth-century Athens and, in particular, how far individuals enjoyed freedom of thought when faced with the civic community.

Legacy

Pericles's most visible legacy can be found in the literary and artistic works of the Golden Age, much of which survive to this day. The Acropolis, though in ruins, still stands and is a symbol of modern Athens. Paparrigopoulos wrote that these masterpieces are "sufficient to render the name of Greece immortal in our world".

In politics, Victor L. Ehrenberg argues that a basic element of Pericles's legacy is Athenian imperialism, which denies true democracy and freedom to the people of all but the ruling state. The promotion of such an arrogant imperialism is said to have ruined Athens. Pericles and his "expansionary" policies have been at the centre of arguments promoting democracy in oppressed countries.

Other analysts maintain an Athenian humanism illustrated in the Golden Age. The freedom of expression is regarded as the lasting legacy deriving from this period. Pericles is lauded as "the ideal type of the perfect statesman in ancient Greece" and his Funeral Oration is nowadays synonymous with the struggle for participatory democracy and civic pride.

In 1932, botanist Albert Charles Smith published Periclesia, a monotypic genus of flowering plants from Ecuador belonging to the family Ericaceae and named after Pericles.