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
TWO - Curses, Tyrants, and Persians (ca. 500–479)
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
Analysis of Pericles’ career demands attention to his family background as well as the periods just before and after his birth. Pericles’ ancestors on his mother's side had incurred a religious curse in the late seventh century BC but then enjoyed (and suffered from) close relations with the tyrant family of the Peisistratrids, who ruled Athens from about 546 to 510 BC. Pericles’ maternal family also produced the reformer Cleisthenes, who around 507 passed the measures establishing Athenian democratic government – a more liberalized form of Greek polis government, which typically embraced popular sovereignty. This family, however, fell out of favor with the Athenians, and Pericles’ father was ostracized (exiled for ten years) by the Athenians when Pericles was a youth, returning only in the general recall of exiles before the great war with Persia in 480–479. Pericles’ father Xanthippus went on to play a leading role in that war, but Pericles inherited a checkered family history and, through that history, complicated relations with his fellow aristocrats, Sparta, Persia, and the Athenian people.
A few years after the glorious Athenian victory over the invading Persians at Marathon (490 BC), the young Pericles – perhaps in his early to mid-teens – learned that the Athenians had voted to ostracize his father, Xanthippus (485/4). Such a vote meant that his father, and undoubtedly Pericles and his mother, would have to leave their home and remain outside of Athens and Attica for the next ten years. Between 485/4 and 481/0, when the Athenians recalled those who had been ostracized, Xanthippus and his family lived as exiles in parts unknown.
We should recall that it was not “the government” that forced Xanthippus to flee his homeland. Athenian ostracism occurred because a majority of the regular Athenian citizens meeting in a special assembly voted that an individual should be forced to leave. The Athenians voting in favor of ostracism needed no reason for the expulsion beyond suspicion, jealousy, or mere distaste. At this assembly each Athenian wrote a name on an ostrakon (the piece of broken pottery that gives ostracism its name: see Figure III), and occasionally the voters would add a word or two to suggest their personal motivation for the expulsion (“the accursed,” “the Mede,” etc.).
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- Pericles and the Conquest of HistoryA Political Biography, pp. 32 - 52Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016