He regained his position the following year, but was now suffering from a slower but still deadly strain of the plague himself. Two of his sons had already died. When the end was near, in the autumn of 429 BC, Aspasia put a protective charm around his neck, and he observed with amusement that he must be very sick indeed to put up with such a superstition. His chamber was crowded with government officials, generals and friends, who reminisced about his great accomplishments and military victories. Pericles hushed them, saying that those things were not true victory. His life’s work had been to govern by persuasion rather than force, and to honor what Athens had achieved as a democracy rather than a dictatorship. “My real triumph,” he said, “was that no Athenian wore mourning because of me.”2929 They were reported to be his final words.
Plutarch, Pericles 38.
After Pericles
The successors of Pericles, less skillful and less dedicated to democratic principles, exploited the democratic process to enhance their own power. The Peloponnesian War dragged on for many more years, punctuated by an uneasy truce, but the tide was turning against the Athenians – especially after a calamitous attempt to conquer Sicily in 415 BC severely debilitated the city’s capacity to fight. Many allies revolted after a disastrous naval battle at Aegospotami. The Spartans besieged Athens, finally breaching the city walls in 404 BC.
Sparta imposed a new governing authority of thirty conservative aristocrats, the sort of men who had been so resistant to the democratic reforms of Ephialtes and Pericles in the 460s. The Athenians called this group “tyrants,” and eventually a popular uprising restored the democratic system, but it was not long-lived. As the fourth century unfolded, new powers emerged to challenge the Greeks – first Philip of Macedon and then his son Alexander the Great, who dominated the Greek world and beyond during his brief life (356–323 BC). Farther afield, a city on the Italian peninsula was consolidating power and extending its sway. Rome would conquer Greece in 146 BC, and Athens would begin its long history of being a noted cultural center but not a political power.
There is no evidence that Pericles ever met the outstandingly curious – and ugly – young man who was born in Athens right around the time that Aeschylus introduced The Persians, but there are strong indications that Aspasia may have. Socrates was not a quiet, reflective sort of philosopher but rather a self-described “gadfly” who constantly asked impertinent and inconvenient questions in his pursuit of the truth.3030 Many people undoubtedly found him irritating, but Aspasia enjoyed the companionship of free spirits. Socrates was rumored to be a visitor to her house, some said for conversation, others said for different reasons.
Plato, Apology.
Shortly after the Spartan-imposed tyrants had been expelled from Athens, the city’s democratic government sentenced Socrates to death on charges of having corrupted the youth of Athens – those pure and perfect creatures immortalized on the Parthenon frieze. As Athens found itself in a precarious state economically and politically, the sort of questions that would previously have been tolerated were now considered seditious. Socrates accepted the death sentence on the grounds that he loved Athens and believed its government to be just, and he calmly drank the poison hemlock when it was brought to him.
His followers were less accepting. Plato, most notably, developed a skepticism of democracy after his teacher’s execution. In The Republic, Plato ranks democracy near the bottom of his list of government types. He argues that the blind pursuit of freedom can become a kind of slavery when the city is governed by those who know how to win elections, not those with the people’s best interests at heart.3131 In Plato’s ideal system, government would be guided by a constitution that guarantees justice for all citizens, but power would be wielded by a benign monarch with a vested interest in the long-term success and stability of the state.
Plato, The Republic VIII.555b–IX.580b.
Plato took up Pericles’ posthumous reputation directly in his less well-known dialogue Menexenus. The piece is a conversation between Socrates and Menexenus, a young Athenian, about the now-annual oration for the war dead. In a none-too-gentle mockery of Pericles, Socrates delivers a speech he claims was composed by Aspasia, and even suggests that Pericles’ famous funeral oration was also written by his mistress. Whereas Pericles made a bold assertion of Athenian exceptionalism in his speech, Socrates focuses on praising the deceased and suggests that Athenians, instead of trying to reshape the world, need to accept their place in it, for “[a] mortal man cannot expect to have everything in his own life turning out according to his will . . . .”3232
Plato, Menexenus.
Athens’s greatest philosopher thus reflected on the legacy of its greatest statesman with more irony than reverence. But while Plato may well have been right in noting the flaws of Athenian democracy, fortunately for Western civilization he had a pupil of his own named Aristotle who would leave a far more favorable record of it.3333 The city’s political and cultural achievements in the Periclean age remain no less impressive for having been fleeting. Indeed, what was created there during those brief decades inspired each of the following chapters of this book, and it remains a powerful – if controversial – legacy to this day.
For the tension between the Platonic and Aristotelian schools of thought, see Arthur Herman, The Cave and the Light: Plato vs. Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization (Random House, 2014).
1 Plutarch, Pericles 12.
2 Plutarch, Pericles 12.
3 Plutarch, Pericles 8. Pericles’ chief political opponent was named Thucydides (possibly related to the historian of the same name).
4 Stephen V. Tracy, Pericles: A Sourcebook and Reader (University of California, 2009), 15, 22. Of the three tragedies that Aeschylus presented at this festival, only The Persians survives. The first play, Phineas, and the third, Glaucus, apparently both dealt with more traditional, mythological subjects.
5 Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution 3.17; see also Peter J. Brand, “Athens and Sparta: Democracy vs. Dictatorship,” Ancient World Online, available via https://umdrive.memphis.edu/pbrand/public/.
6 This sentiment is expressed by the goddess herself when she appears in the final act of Aeschylus’s Eumenides, the third in his trio of plays about the curse on the house of Agamemnon.
7 Herodotus, The Histories 7.34–36.
8 Aeschylus, The Persians, trans. Robert Potter, available at http://classics.mit.edu/Aeschylus/persians.html.
9 Herodotus, The Histories 5.97–105.
10 In his account of the Battle of Marathon, Herodotus mentions a courier going to Sparta and Athens, but not this fabled run, which first appears in Plutarch. Herodotus, The Histories 6.105; and Plutarch, De gloria Atheniensium 3 (available at the Perseus Digital Library).
11 Herodotus, The Histories 6.102–18.
12 Herodotus, The Histories 7.8.
13 Plutarch, Pericles 7.
14 Pausanius, Description of Greece 1.28.2 (available at the Perseus Digital Library).
15 The design of the Parthenon was so complex that Ictinus wrote a mathematical treatise on its intricacies, which is now lost.
16 This pediment was severely damaged in the seventeenth century and is almost impossible to reconstruct.
17 The Panathenaic Stadium still exists; it hosted the 2004 Olympiad.
18 According to legend, this rather homely but extremely venerable statue had fallen out of the sky shortly after the foundation of Athens. It