Knowledge of the basic structure of Athenian government is necessary for any understanding of Pericles’ political career and policies. Sometime after the reforms of Cleisthenes (ca. 507), the Athenians began to refer to their government as demokratia, a word that combines the ideas of “the people” (demos) with “power” (kratos), and thus is parallel to words like aristokratia (power in the hands of the “best,” or aristoi) and oligarchia (“rule,” or arche, in the hands of the “few,” or oligoi). Despite the fact that a Greek might refer to Athens’ regime as demokratia and Sparta's as either oligarchia or aristokratia (since the Spartans restricted full citizenship to those who owned a certain amount of property), both city-states were ruled by assemblies of citizens. The citizen assembly (called the ekklesia in Athens) was the heart of any Greek polis and usually acted as the sovereign body, making decisions on issues like war and peace and often serving as a court for certain kinds of cases.

Athens’ sovereign assembly was different because even Athenian men without property could attend the assembly and cast their ballots. In addition, by the middle of the fifth century (after the reforms of Ephialtes, in 462/1), Athenians with little (or perhaps no) property could serve on the Athenian Council of 500 (the boule). This important government organ set the agenda for assembly meetings and comprised 500 citizens chosen by lot who served for one year. (The use of the lottery to choose officials for important offices constituted another important difference between demokratia and the polis government practiced in some other Greek city-states.) This council could and did also serve as a court for certain issues.

Athens had another, older council – the so-called Areopagus, named for the “hill of Ares” on which it met. Although it apparently played a major role in predemocratic and early democratic government, after 462/1 it served primarily as a court for particular kinds of homicide cases. The members of the Areopagus were all former Athenian archons, the executive officers of the state, who were elected from wealthier families for yearly terms before 487 but chosen by lot thereafter.

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.

I have argued that we should accept ideas that appear in Pericles’ speeches in Thucydides as “Periclean” if they comport with our knowledge of Athenian history and Pericles’ biography, and especially if Pericles is made to repeat these ideas in Thucydides’ work. We should add to this potentially Periclean material those views or ideas that Thucydides attributes to Pericles in his narrative rather than in a speech. (For example, in 2.13 Thucydides tells us things that Pericles said in a speech, but he does not actually attempt to re-create the address. This passage thus provides a useful example of the kind of facts Thucydides might have gathered before reproducing a speech for one of the figures in his history.)

Utilizing this procedure, something like the following picture of Periclean ideas emerges:

War with Sparta is necessary and the best policy: 1.127.3 and all three speeches.

My (Pericles’) policy has not changed: 1.140.1, 2.61.2; 3.38.1 (echoed by Cleon).

Any concession to Sparta is tantamount to slavery: 1.141.1, 2.61.1, 2.62.3, 2.63.1, 2.63.3; cf. 1.140.5–141.1 (even a small concession is problematic).

Peloponnesians are inferior to Athenians at sea: 1.141.4–5, 1.142.4–9, 1.143.2, 1.143.4–5, 2.62.2.

Great honor comes from great risk/danger: 1.144.3, 2.42.4, 2.43.5.

It is important to achieve undying praise/fame/reputation: 2.43.2–3, 2.64.3–6; cf. 2.45.2 (possibly relevant negative example concerning kleos of women).

Service to the state and the state itself are more important than individual well-being: 2.43.1, 2.60.2–4, 2.61.4, 2.63.1; cf. 2.42.3.

Athenians are special and deserve to rule: 2.39.4, 2.40.4–41.4, 2.61.4.

The future will remember Athens for its power: 2.41.2–4, 2.64.3 (cf. 1.144.4).

Athenians’ land/farms/houses are not important; real power lies in the fleet/empire: 1.143.5, 2.13.2, 2.62.3; 3.46.3 (echoed by Diodotos).

Athens’ financial resources are superior to Sparta's and sufficient for the war: 1.142.1, 1.143.1, 2.13.3–6, 2.65.13.

Athens’ military resources are abundant and should encourage the Athenians to expect victory: first speech (1.143.3, etc.), 2.13.3–9, 2.65.13.

Wealth from sacred resources (treasuries, statues, etc.) is available for war but must be paid back: 2.13.3–6.

Success in war depends on surplus funds: 1.141.3–5, 1.142.1, 2.13.2–6.

Success in war depends on thoughtful planning (gnome): 2.13.2, 2.62.5.

Pericles and his political opponents apparently shared the belief that Athens deserved to rule other Greeks, although they seem to have differed on attitudes toward Persia and Sparta. During the years from about 461 to 446/5, the Athenians would reverse their foreign policy toward the Spartans, engaging in a long, desultory conflict that historians call the First Peloponnesian War (to differentiate it from the great Peloponnesian War beginning in 431). During the same period, the Athenians launched a major offensive into Persian-controlled Egypt, only to retrench after a disaster there. A few years later (and after another anti-Persian expedition), the Athenians sought some kind of accommodation or treaty with their former Persian enemies. In the early 440s, other Greeks thus witnessed or suspected the anomaly of an Athens making war on the allies who had helped the Greeks fight Persia while negotiating for peace with the Persians themselves. This situation provoked a crisis in the Athenian empire and led to even harsher measures of reprisal and control by the Athenians.

The end of the Persian Wars created two superstars in Greece. In Sparta, the regent Pausanias, acting as one of Sparta's two kings in the place of his underaged cousin, had gained unprecedented prestige after his victory over the Persians at Plataea (just north of Attica) in 479. The Athenians and Spartans alike recognized Athens’ general Themistocles as a hero of the war against the invaders, since he was credited with the naval strategy that led to the Persians’ defeat at Salamis just off the cost of Attica in 480.

In 479 any observer would have predicted that Pausanias and Themistocles were likely to influence the political scenes in Sparta and Athens respectively for the foreseeable future. However, this was not to be. Although Pausanias continued to command the Greek allies in their mopping-up efforts against any remaining Persian outposts in the Aegean (and as far away as Cyprus) in the year 478, by the next year he had been replaced. It is likely that he had come under suspicion for treason: some believed Pausanias had undertaken illicit negotiations with the Persian Great King and eventually some alleged that he had offered to help the Persians bring Greece under his control.

Athens produced no other Pericles. No political figure in the century of independent, democratic government after his death in 429 ever approached the influence, impact, and reputation of Pericles son of Xanthippus. True, no Athenian statesman after Pericles’ death possessed the resources Athens enjoyed in the 440s and 430s BC. By 428 the Athenians had expended most of the monetary reserves Pericles’ policies had socked away for future needs. So far as we can tell, Athens never possessed more than a few thousand talents of reserves in the later fifth century (and this only briefly, ca. 415), and its resources in the fourth century were far reduced even from those levels.

The Peloponnesian War ground to a halt in 404, when the Spartans cut off Athens and starved its citizens into submission after destroying most of the Athenian fleet in the previous year. Athens lost its empire and was temporarily reduced to the status of a Spartan dependency. Many Athenians in these years apparently took a dim view of Pericles’ policies and leadership. Thucydides composed his defense of the leader (2.65) in part to answer all-too-common criticisms of Pericles’ conduct in leading Athens into an ultimately disastrous war.

Subsequent Athenian leaders rarely called on Pericles’ memory even as they attempted to revive some of his policies. True, the comic poet Eupolis brought Pericles onto the stage in 412 as an example of a great statesman who could help Athens face the Sicilian disaster of the previous year, when the entire Athenian invasion force had been destroyed. But in 412 the war in Greece had not yet been lost.

One wonders about the mood in Athens as the Spartans marched northeast toward Attica in the early summer of 431. We know that the playwright Euripides produced his Medea in that spring, and its story of a mother driven to murder her own children might strike us as reflective of a particularly disturbing moment in Athenian history were the tale not a traditional feature of Greek mythology. Still, Euripides felt compelled to choose this story and present it in the way he did as Athens prepared for war with the other great power in Hellas. It is more than possible that some Athenians who watched the play in the spring that year felt a discomfort amplified both by the approaching war and by the cries of infuriated Medea.

There must be a special place in hell reserved for biographers. And in the lowest part of the inferno suffer the biographers of ancient figures.

Plutarch wisely informed his readers that he was not a historian but a biographer, and was therefore more interested in the chance remark or anecdote revealing the subject's character than in the narrative of battles and great events. But Plutarch should have gone further, admitting that even the best descriptions of jokes, personal demeanor, and physical appearance cannot capture a human being's actual nature. A biographer – a word derived from Greek roots meaning “life writer” – remains a kind of charlatan, presenting depictions that may gain credence more by verisimilitude than by accuracy. By contrast, a historian who seeks to describe (say) a battle may have accounts of dozens of eyewitnesses and the testimony of commanding officers as well as the battlefield topography to help him reconstruct his nonetheless imperfect account of the event. But his object of study – the battle itself – remains insensate, without its own will or purpose, unconflicted by emotions and morals, without lost loves, false hopes, or crushed dreams. While a battle can be misrepresented, it cannot be defamed, its character or reputation cruelly twisted by the caprice, malice, or incompetence of the historian.

Perhaps this very fact about biography – its willingness to attempt the impossible while running the risk of either maligning or deifying its subject – has made it such a popular genre from antiquity to the present. Every reader of a biography knows (or should know) that the figure in the volume he is reading cannot be the real person, that something essential has been lost in the process of reducing a human life to a few thousand words. And yet we eagerly read on, gauging the written “life” against our own experience and estimates of plausibility.

Pericles of Athens lived before the creation of biography. Certainly during his lifetime and shortly thereafter Greeks composed works that included biographical information, especially anecdotes (often unflattering) about famous Athenians or other Greeks. Such stories often reflected the very obvious biases of their ultimate sources, a fact that will be helpful to keep in mind when we attempt to analyze them.

The unique profile and history of Athens spawned Pericles and provided him with the raw material and tools with which he constructed his career. While sharing many characteristics with their Greek contemporaries, the fifth-century Athenians possessed unusual traits and traditions that would ultimately play considerable roles in Athens’ rise to political and cultural hegemony.

The Athenians’ heroic-age heritage was weak and suspect compared with the traditions of Thebes, Sparta, Argos, and even (by the classical age, relatively backward) Thessaly. The fame of the Athenians’ national hero Theseus rested largely on remedial feats that all too often mimicked those of the great Herakles, merely placed Athens on a more equal footing with other important Hellenic states, or transplanted classical Athenian accomplishments (especially democracy) to the heroic past. The Athenians’ claim to “autochthony” – the idea that they were Attica's original inhabitants, sprung from the very soil – perhaps bespeaks a recognition of their tenuous connection with the great Hellenic achievements and migrations of the late or just post-heroic age, including the return of the descendants of Herakles and the wanderings of the Ionian Greeks.

Ultimately the Athenians would make much of their claim to have offered organization, protection, and respite to the Ionian Greeks (who were on their way to Asia Minor and the islands). Their putative role as metropolis (“mother city”) to these Hellenes came to figure prominently in tyrannic and democratic imperial propaganda. Yet the Ionian connection cut two ways, and the Athenians appear to have been acutely aware of the disadvantages the connection transmitted when it came to their mainland (and often Dorian) Greek neighbors. The latter saw the Ionian branch of the Greek people as weak, effeminate, and inured to luxury and slavery.

Indeed, while inhabiting the largely Doric (and Aeolic) mainland, the Athenians had much in common with the Ionian islanders to their east. Athens’ external ambitions looked to the Aegean long before attempting major conquests on the mainland. The Athenians had already incorporated the nearby island of Salamis by the early sixth century, and not long after this they began a pursuit of interests in the northeastern Aegean and Hellespont that would not end until the age of Alexander.