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 was evacuated from Athens during the Persian invasion, and thus survived the sack of the city.
19 As quoted in Richard Neer, The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture (University of Chicago, 2010), 103.
20 Pausanius, Description of Greece 1.24.5–7.
21 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.13.5. According to some sources, this ingenious plan was put into action in 300 BC when the tyrant Lachares melted down the detachable gold plates to pay his mercenary army. They were replaced with bronze replicas, rather than with the gold as Pericles specified. Pausanius, Description of Greece 1.25.7. The Athena Parthenos disappeared without a trace in late antiquity.
22 Pliny the Elder, Natural History 36.4.5 (available at the Perseus Digital Library).
23 Plutarch, Pericles 31.
24 Plutarch, Pericles 24.
25 Plutarch, Pericles 32.
26 Aristophanes, Peace 605–11; and Acharnians 515ff; see also Anthony J. Podlecki, Perikles and His Circle (Routledge, 1998), 104–5, 112–13.
27 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.34.5.
28 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.35–46.
29 Plutarch, Pericles 38.
30 Plato, Apology.
31 Plato, The Republic VIII.555b–IX.580b.
32 Plato, Menexenus.
33 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).
Brutus (so-called), c. 300 BC.
