Pericles of Athens

P
ERICLES OF
A
THENS

P
ERICLES
OF ATHENS

Vincent Azoulay

TRANSLATED BY JANET LLOYD
FOREWORD BY PAUL CARTLEDGE

Princeton University Press

Princeton and Oxford

With the support of the CNL

www.centrenationaldulivre.fr

Originally published in France as
Périclès: La démocratie athénienne à l’épreuve du grand homme
© Armand Colin, 2010

Copyright © 2014 by Princeton University Press
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Jacket image: Bronze helmet of Corinthian type, 1873.0910.1. © Trustees of the British
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L
IBRARY OF
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ONGRESS
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ATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION
D
ATA

Azoulay, Vincent.
[Périclès. English]
Pericles of Athens / Vincent Azoulay ; translated by Janet Lloyd ; foreword by Paul
Cartledge.
pages      cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-15459-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Pericles, approximately 495 B.C.–429
B.C.
2. Statesmen—Greece—Athens—Biography. 3. Athens (Greece)—Politics and government.
I. Title. DF228.P4A9613 2014 938’.505092—dc23
[B]
2013026887

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CONTENTS

FIGURES

FOREWORD
Introducing Azoulay’s
Pericles

Paul Cartledge

T
here is no shortage of would-be biographies of Pericles, son of Xanthippus of the
deme Cholargos (to give him his full, ancient Athenian democratic-citizen nomenclature).
But to be frank, not many of them are much good—and that includes the best surviving
ancient one, compiled by Plutarch of Chaeronea in about A.D. 100. One hint that Plutarch
was not perhaps on the very top of his form here is that the ancient Roman with whom
he saw fit to compare or rather contrast the Athenian Greek was Quintus Fabius Maximus
Verrucosus, later nicknamed Cunctator (“the Delayer”), the man tasked with rescuing
Republican Rome’s fortunes after the disastrous defeat inflicted by Hannibal at Cannae
in 216 B.C. The careers of Pericles and Fabius simply did not have enough points of
significant similarity to make the comparison at all helpful or even interesting.

On the other hand, the fact that pastmaster Plutarch could do no better suggests that
writing a good biography of Pericles would have been a pretty hopeless goal for any
ancient author. And since Plutarch did at least have at his disposal a large amount
of primary written source material not available to or used by any later author, the
lot of the modern would-be biographer is even more desperate. Yet this has not deterred
a seemingly endless succession of attempts at, if not strictly a Life of Pericles,
then at any rate a Life and Times. This latter at least is understandable. The times
Pericles lived in—from about 493 to 429 B.C.—and indeed helped to make and shape were
deeply interesting, and the family and the city of his birth lay at their very epicenter.

Pericles belonged to the same aristocratic family, the Alcmeonids of Athens, from
which had issued the man credited—by Herodotus, the father of Western historiography—with
introducing Greece’s first democracy, in 508/7 B.C. He lived through the Greco-Persian
Wars of 490 (Marathon) and 480–479 (Salamis and Plataea). He sponsored, at the tender
age of twenty or so, the earliest surviving tragic drama by Athens’s and Greece’s
first master of that evergreen theatrical genre: the
Persians
of Aeschylus first
staged in the Theater of Dionysus at the foot of the Athenian Acropolis in early 472.
He was intimately connected with the building program on top of the Acropolis that
witnessed the construction preeminently of the Parthenon (447–432). He hobnobbed with
leading intellectuals of the day, both Athenian and foreign. His private life—living
with a foreign Greek woman to whom he could not legally be married, thanks to a law
that he had himself sponsored in 451—was a scandal that writers of comic drama considered
a gift. Above all, so far as posterity is concerned, Pericles made such a huge—and
hugely favorable—impression on Herodotus’s principal successor as a writer of big
Greek history, Thucydides of Athens (ca. 455–400?), that Thucydides came near to calling
him the uncrowned monarch of Athens, and to writing his history of the Atheno-Peloponnesian
War (431–404) in terms of the Athenians’ adherence to or failure to adhere to the
policies and strategies advocated, so persuasively, by Pericles—as Thucydides understood
and presented them.