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
SEVEN - Pericles and Athenian Nationalism: The Conquest of History
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
At the urging of Pericles, Athens entered a war with Sparta in 431 BC. The statesman's strategy required the Athenians to refuse an infantry battle, withdrawing behind the city walls to watch the Spartans ravage their farms. Pericles’ status allowed him to convince the Athenians to accept this plan, and he remained popular enough in the first year of the war to be chosen to deliver the annual funeral oration. In this speech Pericles laid out his vision of the Athenians’ special qualities and their right to rule, as well as the need of individuals to sacrifice themselves in the service of their beloved Athens and of the city-state's current power and future glory.
As the war continued and a plague struck Athens, Pericles’ popularity waned. In his final speech in Thucydides he makes a bald case for the glory and advantages of rule over other Greeks and the dangers of letting that rule slip away. The Athenians took out their frustrations on Pericles even as they continued to fight the war he had promoted. Thucydides’ analysis of Pericles as a leader reflects the statesman's admirable qualities, the deficiencies of the leaders who followed him, and the criticisms of those who believed Pericles had corrupted the political process and led Athens into a disastrous war. Looking back on Pericles as an older man, Thucydides sought to defend the leader his own history had shown to be the principal cause of war in 431.
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.
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- Information
- Pericles and the Conquest of HistoryA Political Biography, pp. 154 - 181Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016