Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are standing
at what I think is the absolute precipice of
Western history. That's a big claim, but I think
you're right. You know, usually when we talk
about history, we talk about eras, the Bronze
Age, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution,
these broad sweeps of time. But sometimes an
entire era, an entire golden age, is practically
engineered by a single human being. It is rare,
but in this specific case, it's undeniably true.
The shadow this man casts is so enormous that
even now, 2 ,500 years later, we are, well, we're
arguably still living in it. We are talking about
Athens in the 5th century BC. If you close your
eyes and picture ancient Greece, you know, the
white marble columns of the Parthenon, the philosophers
debating in the Agora, the radical idea that
people should vote on their own laws. Right.
You are basically picturing the vision of one
man. Pericles. Pericles. Roughly 495 to 429 BC.
He is the titan of the era. But the mission for
this deep dive, I think, is to shatter that marble
statue. We have this idea of him largely from
school books as the stoic, perfect father of
democracy. But when you actually read the source
materials, specifically Thucydides, Plutarch,
and the comic playwrights of the time, you find
a figure who is so much more contradictory. And
that's the tension I really want to explore today.
Thucydides. the great historian. He famously
called Pericles the first citizen of Athens.
Which sounds so noble, doesn't it? It sounds
noble. It sounds like a compliment. But then
you have his critics, both ancient and modern,
who paint him as a populist manipulator, an imperialist
hawk, and this is my personal favorite detail,
a man with a very strangely shaped head. The
Squill Head. We absolutely have to get into the
Squill Head. But we will. We're going to unpack
all of it. So our goal today is to answer a fundamental
question. Was Pericles the benevolent genius
who gifted us democracy and art? Or was he, you
know, the first great demagogue who bought the
people's loyalty with stolen money and led them
into a war that destroyed them? It is the ultimate
great man history debate. And to answer it, we
have to understand that Pericles... Well, he
didn't start as a man of the people. He wasn't
some grassroots organizer. He started as the
ultimate insider. Okay, let's do the origin story.
Because if you look at his family tree, this
is not a rags -to -riches story. This is more
like a Kennedy or a Roosevelt. It is actually
even more intense than that. He was born into
the Alkmeonid family on his mother's side. And
to understand Pericles, you have to understand
the Alcmeonids. What's their story? They were
powerful, incredibly wealthy, and they were considered
accursed. Accursed, like just historically unlucky
or something? No, I mean religiously cursed.
Generations before Pericles, the family had been
involved in a coup attempt, the Salonian affair,
and they killed their rivals who had taken sanctuary
at a holy altar. Oh, that's a huge no -no in
Greek religion. It's a massive sacrilege. It's
a stain on the soul of the family. So Pericles
enters the world with this stain on his lineage.
His political enemies would literally throw the
word pollution around whenever his name came
up. That's a heavy backpack to carry into public
life. But his mother... She was also kind of
royalty in a democratic sense. She was. She was
the niece of Cleisthenes. And Cleisthenes is
the man who, a generation earlier, basically
invented the framework of Athenian democracy.
So Pericles has this dual inheritance, political
genius on one hand and a religious curse on the
other. And his birth itself comes with a legend.
The sources mention a specific dream his mother
had right before he was born. Yes, Herodotus
and Plutarch both record this. A few days before
Pericles was born, Agares dreamed she gave birth
to a lion. Now, in Greek culture, a lion is usually
a good omen, right? Strength. Royalty, courage,
all that. Generally, yes. It connects him to
figures like Alexander the Great. Legends say
Philip II of Macedon had a similar dream before
Alexander was born. It's like the universe is
announcing a heavy hitter is arriving. It implies
he'll be a king among men. Exactly. But knowing
the Greeks, and especially knowing Herodotus,
there's usually a double edge to these prophecies,
isn't there? Precisely. There is a much more
subversive reading of the lion dream. A lion
is dangerous. A lion cannot be domesticated.
A lion in a city is a threat to the safety of
the herd. So Herodotus might be hinting that
Pericles would become a tyrant. A lion that would
eat up the democracy from the inside. Exactly.
That's fascinating. The dream basically sets
up the central question of his life from day
one. Is he a protector or a predator? But then
there's the third interpretation. The biological
one, which is just hilarious. Right. The lion
dream might have just been a post hoc explanation
for a physical deformity. Pericles was born with
an unusually large, elongated skull. A big head.
A massive head. We think it was a condition called
scaphocephaly, where the skull plates fuse too
early and so the head grows long instead of round.
And the Athenian public, who were never shy about
roasting their leaders, absolutely destroyed
him for it. Oh, ruthlessly. You have to understand,
Athenian democracy wasn't polite. It was rowdy.
The comic poets of the day, Kratonis, Tillichlides,
they nicknamed him Squill Head. Squill. That's
a sea onion, right? It's this big, bulbous, layered
plant. So imagine the most powerful man in the
Western world walking into the assembly and the
hecklers are yelling, here comes old Onion Head.
It really humanizes him. I mean, we see these
marble busts and think godlike, but his contemporaries
saw a guy with a funny head. Plutarch actually
mentions that in almost all the statues we have
of Pericles, he is wearing a helmet. Plutarch
thought this was vanity, that the sculptors were
trying to hide his onion head. Is that true?
It's a great story, but it is probably a misunderstanding
by Plutarch, who is writing, you know, hundreds
of years later. So it's not about the head shape.
Probably not. The helmet he wears on the bus
is a Corinthian helmet. But notice how it's worn.
It's pushed back on his head, resting on the
forehead, revealing his face. Right. He's not
actually wearing it for protection in the statue.
Exactly. That wasn't a hat. It was the specific
insignia of the rank of Strategos. We should
probably define that term because it's going
to come up a lot. Strategos. Strategos translates
literally to general. But in Athens, it wasn't
just a military rank like we think of a general
today. It was an elected political office. So,
like Secretary of Defense, but also more? Much
more. There were 10 Strategos elected every year,
one from each of the 10 tribes. They commanded
the armies, yes, but they also guided foreign
policy. They were the executive branch, really.
Pericles held this title for decades, elected
year after year. So wearing the helmet and a
statue is like a modern president being painted
with the presidential seal. It's about authority.
It's about his office, not vanity. Though I'm
sure he didn't complain if the helmet happened
to cover the, you know, the peak of the squill
head. I'm sure it was a convenient side effect.
But let's look at the mind inside that large
head. He wasn't a rabble rouser initially, was
he? He was an introvert. Very much so. As a young
man, the sources tell us he avoided the marketplace.
He didn't go to dinner parties. He wasn't out
drinking with the boys. He's a serious kid. He
focused entirely on his education. And this is
crucial. Pericles was really the first politician
to be trained by philosophers. His mentor was
a man named Anaxagoras. And Axigoras. Now this
is the guy who brings science, or at least rationalism.
into the picture. Exactly. And Akseggers was
a natural philosopher. He believed that the world
was governed by nous, which means mind or intellect,
not just the whimsical emotional outbursts of
the gods on Olympus. He taught Pericles to look
for rational explanations for natural phenomena.
There's that famous story about the ram's horn
that I love. It really illustrates the clash
between the old superstitious world and Pericles'
new world. It captures their dynamic perfectly.
So a ram was born on Pericles' estate with one
single horn growing out of the center of its
forehead. Like a unicorn. Pretty much. A soothsayer,
a seer named Lampon, saw it and immediately said,
this is a sign from the gods. It means power
will be concentrated in one man Pericles. It
was the supernatural validation of his authority.
And Magsagoras. wasn't having any of it. No.
Anaxagoras took the ram's skull, cut it open
right there in front of everyone, and showed
the audience the brain. He explained scientifically
that the deformity was caused by the brain not
filling the cavity correctly, which forced the
horn to grow in the center. He debunked the miracle
with anatomy? He ruined the magic trick. But
Plutarch notes that Pericles learned something
valuable from this. He learned to be unflappable.
He learned what he called his proverbial calmness.
In an era where politicians would scream, cry,
tear their clothes, and invoke the wrath of Zeus
to get a reaction, Pericles was Spock. He was
ice cold. He used logic and rhetoric, not hysteria.
That must have been terrifying for his opponents.
You can't get a rise out of him. It was. They
couldn't provoke him. If someone insulted him,
called him a tyrant or an onion head, head, he
wouldn't react. He would just dismantle their
argument with logic. So we have this intellectual,
wealthy, slightly odd -looking aristocrat entering
the political arena in the 460s BC, but he has
a problem. The political lane for aristocratic
leader is already taken. Enter Simon. Simon.
This guy seems like the archetype of the good
old days leader. Simon was everything Pericles
wasn't. He was a war hero. He was gregarious,
outgoing, and incredibly rich. But his leadership
style was, well, it was futile. What do you mean
by that? He would literally take the fences down
around his orchards and let the public come in
and eat his fruit. He would pay for dinners for
his neighbors. If he saw a poor man with threadbare
clothes in the street, he'd order one of his
slaves to swap clothes with the man right there
on the spot. So he's buying popularity with his
personal fortune. It was patronage. I take care
of you. You vote for me. It's a very old conservative
model of power. And he was also very pro -Sparta,
which appealed to the conservatives. So Pericles
wants to challenge him. But Pericles, despite
being rich, isn't Simon Rich. He can't outspend
Zion personally, so he needs a new strategy.
And this is the pivot point for Athenian democracy.
Aristotle analyzes this shift. He says Pericles
was advised by a man named Daemonides, and the
advice was essentially this. Pericles, if you
cannot beat Simon with your own money, beat him
with the public's money. I can't buy you dinner,
but I can pass a law that says the state buys
you dinner. Precisely. This is the birth of radical
populism. Pericles begins systematically transferring
wealth from the state treasury directly to the
citizens to buy their loyalty. Let's break down
the mechanics of this because it's not just welfare
in the modern sense. It was structural, right?
Absolutely. The biggest change was jury pay.
In Athens, juries were huge. I mean, 201, 501,
sometimes over a thousand people. Wow. Before
Pericles, you didn't get paid to serve. And that
meant only the wealthy or the retired elderly
could afford to sit on a jury. The working poor,
the farmers, the rowers, the potters, they couldn't
just take a day off work. So the justice system
was inherently biased toward the rich because
they were the only ones who could show up. Exactly.
Pericles introduced a wage two or three obols
a day for jurymen. Now, it wasn't a fortune,
but it was enough to cover food for a family.
Suddenly, the demos, the common people, flooded
the courts. And they controlled the justice system.
They controlled it. Which, of course, effectively
meant Pericles controlled the justice system
because those jurors knew who was signing their
paychecks. That's the cynical view, and it's
probably true. Simon couldn't compete with the
state treasury. Pericles also introduced the
theoric fund subsidies, which paid for the poor
to attend the theater festivals. Democratizing
culture. He was democratizing culture and law,
but it was also building a political machine.
But then in 451 BC, he passes a law that seems
to completely contradict this man of the people
vibe, the citizenship law. This is one of the
most controversial things he ever did. And it's
really telling. Before 451 BC, to be an Athenian
citizen, you just needed an Athenian father.
Your mother could be from another city, Sparta,
Corinth, Miletus. Which makes sense. Aristocrats
marry foreigners all the time to build alliances.
Pericles' own ancestors had done it. But Pericles
changed the rules. The new law stated, you are
only a citizen if both your mother and your father
are Athenian born. Why restrict it? If you're
a populist, don't you want more people on your
side? Not if you were running a welfare state.
Think about it. If you're handing out jury pay,
festival tickets and eventually grain subsidies,
every new citizen is a new cost. Right. By restricting
citizenship, Pericles was protecting the value
of the share that each citizen received. He was
making the club more exclusive so the benefits
would be higher for the existing members. That
is incredibly cynical. It's basically we're going
to share the wealth. But first, let's make sure
there aren't too many of us to share it with.
It was democracy for the Athenians, exclusion
for everyone else. It solidified his base, but
it created a very rigid and some would say xenophobic
society. And ironically, as we'll see, this law
would eventually come back to destroy Pericles'
own family line. The ultimate tragic irony. We
will definitely get to that. But first, the strategy
worked. Pericles was destroyed politically. Completely.
In 461 BC. Pericles and his allies managed to
ostracize Simon. We need to explain ostracism
because it's such a foreign concept to us. It
wasn't a criminal trial, was it? No, not at all.
It was a popularity contest in reverse. Once
a year, the assembly would vote on whether to
hold an ostracism. If they said yes, everyone
would take a piece of broken pottery, an ostracon,
and scratch the name of the person they wanted
to leave the city. A literal piece of pottery.
Yeah, that's where the word comes from. If you
got 6 ,000 votes against you, you were exiled
for 10 years. You didn't lose your property.
You weren't charged with a crime. You just had
to go. It was a political timeout for politicians
who were getting too powerful. Or just too inconvenient.
Simon was ostracized for being too pro -Sparta
and for opposing the democratic reforms. Shortly
after that, Pericles' co -leader, a man named
Ephialtes, was assassinated, murdered in the
night. Do we know who did it? It's still a cold
case, but the result was clear. That left Pericles
standing alone at the top of the hill. Precisely.
By 460 D .C., the rival is gone. The mentor is
gone. The people are loyal because the state
is paying them. But now Pericles has a cash flow
problem. These programs and the incredible buildings
he wants to build are expensive. Athens doesn't
have income tax. So where does the money come
from? This is where the story shifts from democracy
to empire. It comes from the Delian League. This
is the dark engine of the Golden Age. To understand
the Parthenon, you have to understand the Delian
League. The Delian League started as a kind of
NATO -style alliance against Persia, right? After
the big wars. Correct. After the Persian Wars,
the Greek cities formed a league. They kept the
treasury on the sacred island of Delos. Everyone
chipped in money or ships to keep the Persian
navy away. Athens was the leader, but it was
supposed to be a partnership of equals. But by
Pericles' time... The Persians weren't really
a serious threat anymore. The threat had receded,
but the payments hadn't. In 454 BC, Pericles
orchestrated the transfer of the League's treasury
from Delos to Athens. And the excuse was? He
claimed it was for security, because Delos was
vulnerable to pirates or Persians, but the reality
was control. Once the money was in Athens, Pericles
started treating it like Athens' personal bank
account. And he also imposed the coinage decree,
right? What was that about? Yes, around 447 BC.
He forced all the allies to use Athenian silver
coins, weights and measures. It's economic imperialism
101. You standardize the economy to benefit the
central power. So if you were a merchant in,
say, Naxos, you had to use Athenian coin. Which
meant Athens controlled the exchange rate and
the flow of trade. It was another layer of control.
But the big controversy was what he did with
that cash. He didn't just use it for ships. He
used it for marble. Massive amounts of it. Pericles
proposed a decree allowing the use of 9 ,000
talents of silver from the alliance treasury
to fund his building program. This is the money
that built the Parthenon, the Propylaia, the
Odeon, the gold and ivory statue of Athena. Help
us visualize 9 ,000 talents. What kind of money
are we talking about here? To give you some context,
one talent was enough to pay the entire crew
of a warship, that's 200 rowers, for a full month.
A skilled worker earned maybe 1 ,300th of a talent
in a year. 9 ,000 talenses. It's billions of
dollars in modern purchasing power. It was an
astronomical sum. And this wasn't Athenian money.
This was money from allies, from Naxos, from
Lesbos, who thought they were paying for defense
against Persia. Instead, they were paying for
Pericles to beautify his own city. It was blatant
embezzlement on a state level. And his enemies
called him out on it. A new conservative leader.
Thucydides, not the historian, but a politician
of the same name, stood up in the assembly and
accused Pericles of profligacy. I love the specific
insult he used. Something about a woman and jewels.
Yes, Thucydides said, we are disgracing ourselves.
We are acting like a vain woman decking herself
out in stolen jewels. He argued that Athens was
becoming a tyrant city. And Pericles' response
to this is one of the greatest political maneuvers
I have ever read. It's pure arrogance, but it
worked. It is the ultimate gamble. Pericles stood
up in the assembly and asked the people, do you
think I'm spending too much money? And the crowd
wore back, yes, it's too much. So he's cornered.
The people agree with the critics. This should
be the end for him. You would think. But then
he plays his ace. He says, very well, I will
pay for all the buildings myself. I will write
the check from my own private estate. Was that
a bluff? Could he have actually afforded that?
Maybe some of it, but. Certainly not all. It
was a huge bluff. But he added a condition. He
said, but if I pay for them, I will not dedicate
them to the people of Athens. I will carve only
my name on the Parthenon. It will be Pericles'
monument, not yours. And the psychology of the
crowd just flipped instantly. Instantly. They
shouted back, no, spend the public money. Spend
as much as you want. They were so jealous of
the glory they couldn't bear the idea of him
taking the credit. He tricked them into approving
the embezzlement by threatening to take the credit
for himself. That is master manipulation. He
knew the Athenian ego was bigger than their conscience.
Exactly. Thucydides, the rival, was ostracized
in 442 BC and Pericles was left alone to build
his city. But it wasn't just building. Maintaining
this empire required, well, brutality. We have
to talk about the Samian War in 440 BC. This
wasn't a defense against Persia. This was Athens
crushing one of its own allies. This is the dark
underbelly of the Golden Age. Samos and Miletus,
two allies in the league, were fighting over
control of a small town. Athens intervened. Samos
revolted against the Athenian interference. And
Pericles didn't treat them like partners. He
treated them like subjects. He led the fleet,
besieged the city for eight months and forced
them to surrender. And penalties were harsh.
He tore down their walls, seized their fleet
and forced them to pay massive war reparations.
There are even accounts, though some historians
dispute them, that he branded the prisoners on
their foreheads with the mark of an owl, the
symbol of Athens. Wow. Marking them like cattle.
Marking them as state property. That's gruesome.
And there was a rumor about why he attacked Samos
so specifically. Because Samos was fighting Miletus.
And who was from Miletus? Aspasia. Let's pivot
to Aspasia. Because you cannot tell the story
of Pericles without her. She wasn't just a mistress
or some footnote. No, mistress completely diminishes
her. Aspasia was a hetera. In Athens, women were
generally secluded, uneducated, and kept out
of public life. A respectable wife stayed in
the women's quarters. But a hetero was different.
Very different. They were high -class courtesans,
yes, but they were also educated, independent,
and allowed to converse with men. She was an
intellectual partner. Socrates, the Socrates,
used to visit her house to learn rhetoric from
her. Plato even hints in his dialogue Menexenus
that she actually wrote Pericles' famous speeches
for him. She ran a salon where the greatest minds
of Athens gathered. Pericles actually divorced
his wife to be with her, right? Yes, around 440.
445 BC, the sources say he offered his wife to
another husband with the consent of her male
relatives, which was the custom, and then he
moved Aspasia into his home. But she must have
been a lightning rod for scandal. She was the
perfect target. She was foreigner from Aelitas,
she was a woman, and she had the ear of the leader.
The comic poets called her the new Amphal, referring
to the mythological queen who enslaved Hercules,
or sometimes just the whore. And remember that
citizenship law Pericles passed. The one that
said you couldn't be a citizen unless both parents
were Athenian. That law meant he could never
legally marry Aspatia. She could never be an
Athenian citizen. The irony is so thick. He created
the legal barrier that kept his own partner on
the outside. And his enemies used her to get
to him. They actually put her on trial. What
was the charge? Impiety and procuring. They accused
her of disrespecting the gods and of running
a brothel, supplying freeborn Athenian women
to satisfy Pericles' perversions. It was obviously
a political hit job. A show trial designed to
humiliate him. And this is the one moment where
that stoic, calm mask cracked. In court. Yes.
Essencius Socraticus tells us that Pericles didn't
use his famous logic. He stood before the jury
and wept. He begged the jurors to acquit her,
not based on the facts, but as a personal favor
to them. The first citizen crying in court. It
really shows how precarious his position actually
was, despite all the power. It was a toxic atmosphere
just before the war. They also went after his
friend Phidias, the sculptor of the Parthenon.
They accused him of stealing gold from the statue
of Athena. How did they try to prove that? Well,
Pericles was smart. He had told Phidias, make
the gold plates on the statue removable. So when
the accusation came, they just took the gold
off, weighed it, and proved it was all there.
So the charge was bogus. So they changed the
charge. When the theft charge failed, they accused
Phidias of blasphemy. They said that on the shield
of Athena, amidst the carving of the Battle of
the Amazons, Phidias had carved a figure that
looked like himself. a bald old man, and another,
a very fine likeness of Pericles fighting in
Amazon. Inserting yourself and your boss into
a religious icon, that's a bold move. It cost
him his life. Phidias died in prison, and Anaxagoras,
his old teacher, He was attacked for his religious
beliefs, specifically for saying the sun was
just a hot rock and not a god, and had to flee
Athens. So Pericles is seeing his inner circle
just dismantled one by one. They're picking off
his friends to weaken him. So Pericles is standing
somewhat alone. His friends are dead or exiled.
His partner is being slandered. And on the horizon,
the biggest storm of all is gathering. The Peloponnesian
War. The war that would define and ultimately
destroy the Athenian Empire. Now, Thucydides,
the historian, famously says the real cause was
Sparta's fear of Athenian growth. You know, the
Thucydides trap. But there were specific triggers,
right? There were, and Pericles was right in
the middle of them. The most famous one is the
Megarian Decree. This sounds remarkably modern,
like something out of the WTO or the UN. It really
does. It was a trade embargo. Pericles passed
a law banning Megarian merchants from the market
of Athens and all the ports in its empire. Why?
What was the reason given? The official justification
was that Megarians had cultivated sacred land
and harbored runaway slaves. But the real effect
was economic strangulation. Modern scholars call
this the first economic sanction in history.
Pericles was trying to destroy a Spartan ally
without using an army. And Sparta, being allied
with Megara, took this personally. They did.
Sparta sent a deputation demanding the retraction
of the decree. They also demanded the expulsion
of the Alcmianidae, which was a direct shot at
Pericles' family curse. So they were basically
saying, fire Pericles and lift the sanctions
or it's war. That was the ultimatum. And Pericles
refused to yield. He believed that making concessions
would just lead to more demands. He told the
Athenians, if you give in on this, they will
think you are weak. You must hold the line. So
war begins in 431 B .C. And Pericles reveals
his grand strategy. And I have to say, if I were
an Athenian farmer. I would have hated this plan.
It was an incredibly counterintuitive strategy.
Pericles knew Athens' strengths and weaknesses.
Sparta had the best infantry in the world, the
hoplites. If Athens fought them in a land battle,
they would be crushed. But Athens had the navy.
The best navy and crucially strong walls. So
his plan was, run away. His plan was, evacuate.
He convinced the entire rural population of Attica,
thousands and thousands of people, to abandon
their farms, their homes, their ancestral lands,
and move inside the land. long walls of Athens.
Imagine the psychological cost of that. You are
an Athenian farmer. You are standing on the walls
looking down and watching the Spartan king Archidamus
burn your ancestral farm. You see your olive
trees, which take 20 years to grow, going up
in smoke. And Pericles is standing next to you
saying, don't worry, this is all part of the
plan. It must have been excruciating. Thucydides
describes the anger. The people were furious.
They wanted to go out and fight. They felt like
cowards hiding behind a wall. And there is a
weird personal twist here, too. King Archidamus
of Sparta was actually a personal friend of Pericles.
Yes, the guest friendship tradition, which was
a very serious bond. And Pericles was worried
about this. He thought, what if Archidamus burns
everyone else's farm but spares mine because
we're friends? That would look terrible politically.
It would look like collusion, like he's a traitor.
Exactly. So Pericles preempted it. He stood up
in the assembly and announced, if the enemy spares
my estate, I hereby donate it to the city of
Athens to be... used as public land. He neutralized
the rumor before it could even start. So smart.
But the tension inside the city was rising. It
was crowded. It was hot. And then in the winter
of 431 -430 BC, Pericles delivers one of the
most famous speeches in human history, the Funeral
Oration. This is the speech that defines the
Golden Age. He delivered it to honor the first
war dead. But if you read it, he didn't really
focus on the dead soldiers. He eulogized the
city of Athens itself. He talks about democracy,
about how Athenians live freely and enjoy life,
how they're open to the world. Exactly. He painted
a picture of Athens as an ideal society, the
school of Hellas, he called it. He said, we do
not copy our neighbors, but are an example to
them. It was designed to boost morale, to remind
them why they were suffering inside these walls.
He was selling the war. It's a beautiful speech,
but reading it now, knowing what happens next.
It feels so tragic because just a few months
later, the strategy falls apart in the most horrific
way possible. The plague? You crowd the entire
population of Attica into a single city in the
middle of a hot summer, hygiene breaks down,
and then a disease arrives. 430 BC, the plague
of Athens. We still aren't 100 percent sure what
it was. Typhus or typhoid fever are the leading
suspects, maybe even something like Ebola. But
it was devastating. Thucydides caught it himself
and survived. So his account is clinical and
just terrifying. He describes the burning fever.
The red eyes, bleeding throats, violent coughing.
And the social breakdown. People were dying so
fast they couldn't be buried. There were piling
bodies in the temples. Law and order completely
collapsed. Thucydides notes that people stopped
fearing the gods because they saw that the pious
died just as fast as the wicked. So it became
eat, drink, and be merry. For tomorrow we die.
A literal motto. And naturally, the people blamed
the guy who told them to move into the city in
the first place. They turned on Pericles. Viciously.
They blamed him for the war and the crowding.
They fined him a massive amount, somewhere between
15 and 50 talents, and stripped him of his generalship.
They fired him. In the middle of the crisis,
he engineered. They fired him. But the tragedy
for Pericles wasn't just political. It was deeply
personal. The plague entered his own house. He
lost his sister. And then he lost both of his
legitimate sons, Perilous and Xanthippus. And
this is where the irony of his life comes full
circle. Remember that citizenship law from 451
BC? The one that said you needed two Athenian
parents to be a citizen? Yes. His legitimate
sons were now dead. His line was ending. He had
one surviving son, Pericles the Younger, but
that was his son with Estasia. The foreigner.
The foreigner. By Pericles' own law, that boy
was not a citizen. The law he wrote to protect
the purity of Athens was now preventing him from
having an heir. That is a Greek tragedy writing
itself. You couldn't make that up. It is. But
Plutarch reports that at the funeral of his last
legitimate son, Pericles tried to place a wreath
on the body and just. He collapsed, sobbing.
The man known for his iron self -control. broken.
And the people saw this. The Athenian people,
seeing their broken leader, finally showed mercy.
They passed a special exemption to retroactively
make his illegitimate son a citizen. They reinstated
Pericles as general too, didn't they? They did
in 429 BC. They forgave him. I think they realized
the other leaders, people like Cleon, were just
angry populists with no real vision. They needed
Pericles back. That was too late. It was. Pericles
himself caught the plague. And the death scene
is, it's just so perfectly Pericles. It sums
him up completely. It does. Plutarch sets the
scene. He is dying. His friends are gathered
around the bed. And they're listing his great
achievements, his nine war trophies, his military
victories. They think he's unconscious. But he's
listening. He is. He interrupts them. And he
says, you are praising me for things that were
partly due to fortune, but you forgot the most
important thing. What was it? He said, no living
Athenian ever put on mourning because of me.
No living Athenian ever put on mourning because
of me. That is a heavy statement. What exactly
did he mean by that? He meant that in all his
years of absolute power, he never purged his
internal enemies. He never caused a civil war.
He never executed his political rivals. He ostracized
Saman, sure, but he didn't kill him. He managed
a democracy without becoming a tyrant who shed
the blood of his own people. Which is true, internally.
But externally... Thousands and thousands of
people died in his wars. And that is the contradiction
at the heart of the man. He was proud that he
didn't kill Athenians, even while his policies
sent them to die in battle against Spartans and
their allies. So he dies in 429 BC. Athens fights
on for another 25 years, but they eventually
lose. The Golden Age ends. So how do we assess
him? Thucydides gave a pretty clear verdict.
Thucydides said Athens was in name a democracy,
but in fact governed by its first citizen. He
believed Pericles led the people rather than
being led by them. And he contrasted Pericles
with the guys who came after. Yes, successors
like Cleon, who in Thucydides' view just pandered
to the mob's worst instincts and ruined the city.
For Thucydides, Pericles was the last great statesman.
But is that fair? Was Pericles' strategy actually
good? Was it sustainable? That is the big debate.
Critics, both modern and ancient, argue his strategy
was doomed from the start. It was too defensive.
It was too expensive. The historian Donald Kagan
estimates it cost 2 ,000 talents a year just
to keep the strategy going. And it relied on
him. It relied too much on his personal authority.
When he died, the plan fell apart because no
one else could execute it. No one else had the
credibility to tell the farmers to watch their
homes burn. It's the classic great man problem.
He built a system that only he could run. Precisely.
And by building an empire on tribute, he made
Athens hated. The war was, in a way, a reaction
to the very empire he built. He built the Parthenon,
but he built it on a foundation of resentment.
So here's the final thought then. The Golden
Age is inextricably linked to this one man. He
built the Parthenon with questionable funds,
started a war he didn't live to finish, and died
amid a plague he may have inadvertently made
worse. Yet, he set the standard for the statesman
incorruptible, mostly eloquent and visionary.
He defined the era. Without him, we probably
wouldn't be talking about Athens in the same
way today. So here's a provocative question for
you listening. If Pericles had survived the plague,
if he had lived another 10 years, would Athens
have won the war? Or was the empire he built
already a bubble waiting to burst, destined to
collapse under its own weight no matter who is
in charge? It is the ultimate what -if of ancient
history. We will never know. But we do know that
for a few decades, under the squill head, Athens
shone brighter than almost anywhere else in history.
Thanks for diving in with us. Until the next
one.