Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- List of Figures and Maps
- Preface
- Important Dates
- INTRODUCTION Biography and History
- ONE To Be an Athenian
- TWO Curses, Tyrants, and Persians (ca. 500–479)
- THREE Early Career: The Dominance of Kimon (ca. 479–462/1)
- FOUR The Democratic Revolution (ca. 462/1–444/3)
- FIVE A Greek Empire (ca. 460–445)
- SIX Pericles and Sparta: The Outbreak of the Great War (444/3–431)
- SEVEN Pericles and Athenian Nationalism: The Conquest of History
- EIGHT Athenian Culture and the Intellectual Revolution: Pericles and the People
- Epilogue The Periclean Tradition
- Appendices
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
EIGHT - Athenian Culture and the Intellectual Revolution: Pericles and the People
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2015
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- List of Figures and Maps
- Preface
- Important Dates
- INTRODUCTION Biography and History
- ONE To Be an Athenian
- TWO Curses, Tyrants, and Persians (ca. 500–479)
- THREE Early Career: The Dominance of Kimon (ca. 479–462/1)
- FOUR The Democratic Revolution (ca. 462/1–444/3)
- FIVE A Greek Empire (ca. 460–445)
- SIX Pericles and Sparta: The Outbreak of the Great War (444/3–431)
- SEVEN Pericles and Athenian Nationalism: The Conquest of History
- EIGHT Athenian Culture and the Intellectual Revolution: Pericles and the People
- Epilogue The Periclean Tradition
- Appendices
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Wealth, democracy, empire, Athens’ national character, and the intellectual heat of fifth-century Greece combined to make Pericles’ environment unique. Both an exponent of and a catalyst for this fervor, Pericles’ relations with other thinkers and artists of the fifth century demand our attention even as they frustrate our comprehension. Often portrayed as a friend of intellectuals like Anaxagoras, poets like Sophocles, or scholars like Herodotus, Pericles in fact represents a very different strain of thought from all three, one which renders the state or collective itself and the future opinions of men the most important factors in determining policy and making moral valuations. Pericles’ precise philosophical and religious views cannot be recovered, but analysis of his career, his ideas in Thucydides, and the details Plutarch provides suggest that he combined orthodox religious practice with a certain skepticism about divine causation. Both a radical and a conservative, Pericles emphasized the need to respect society's norms even as he asked his fellow citizens to reshape those norms in the service of Athens’ place in history. Pericles’ most important intellectual, political, and perhaps even personal relationship proved to be that with the Athenian people.
The popular image of “Periclean Athens” evokes a picture of intellectual and cultural fervor in an aesthetic environment dominated by monuments like the Parthenon, Sophoclean masterpieces like Ajax and Oedipus Rex, and debates involving scientists and philosophers of the rank of Protagoras, Anaxagoras, and Socrates. Yet the reality of mid-fifth-century Athens probably struck the visitor as something closer to a Middle Eastern bazaar than the Greek antiquities exhibition at a modern museum – more a farmers’ market than philosophical academy. Strolling through the city's Dipylon Gate along a route just north of the Sacred Way (which connected the city center with Eleusis to the northwest) and heading through the Kerameikos district toward the center of town, a visitor ca. 431 could see toward the southeast the acropolis and the massive and elaborate Parthenon temple surmounting it. The city itself boasted many other beautiful new buildings, some constructed while Kimon held sway in Athens but more deriving from the building program sponsored by Pericles: a new music hall beneath the acropolis, a new springhouse where water could be drawn, various temples, and other constructions. A new wall had been built to help secure access to the Peiraeus harbor about four miles from the city proper.
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- Pericles and the Conquest of HistoryA Political Biography, pp. 182 - 210Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016