Periclean Buildings, Eternal Fame, and Well-Being in the Present: the Pericles of Plutarch and the Pericles of Thucydides. In SemRom n.s.12, 2023, pp. 239-282 (original) (raw)
Related papers
review of P. A. Stadter, A Commentary on Plutarch’s Pericles
Classical Philology, 1991
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This review of this significant 300-page book is my homage to a dear friend, David Cotton, who taught me much about classical Greece but I needed to create a personal, permanent history to help my failing memory. Bowra, a scholar of the greatest distinction, spent a large part of his life (like Mr. Cotton) studying ancient Greece. The focus of this book is on the one hundred years when classical Athens reached its zenith, heavily influenced by its leader, Pericles. The real hero of this story is the Athenian people, who founded the first real democracy and showed how much it meant to them and how they were inspired by its opportunity. This is the story of the first Century of the Citizen. The tragedy is that it took another 2,500 years for democracy to emerge again to try to improve human affairs but the violence of Athenian society is still present and threatens global disaster for all advanced civilizations. There are many interesting parallels between this century and our own.
Pericles has had the rare distinction of giving his name to an entire period of history, embodying what has often been taken as the golden age of the ancient Greek world. “Periclean” Athens witnessed tumultuous political and military events, and achievements of the highest order in philosophy, drama, poetry, oratory, and architecture. Pericles of Athens is the first book in more than two decades to reassess the life and legacy of one of the greatest generals, orators, and statesmen of the classical world. In this compelling critical biography, Vincent Azoulay provides an unforgettable portrait of Pericles and his turbulent era, shedding light on his powerful family, his patronage of the arts, and his unrivaled influence on Athenian politics and culture. He takes a fresh look at both the classical and modern reception of Pericles, recognizing his achievements as well as his failings while deftly avoiding the adulatory or hypercritical positions staked out by some scholars today. From Thucydides and Plutarch to Voltaire and Hegel, ancient and modern authors have questioned the great statesman’s relationship with democracy and Athenian society. Did Pericles hold supreme power over willing masses or was he just a gifted representative of popular aspirations? Was Periclean Athens a democracy in name only, as Thucydides suggests? This is the enigma that Azoulay investigates in this groundbreaking book. Pericles of Athens offers a balanced look at the complex life and afterlife of the legendary “first citizen of Athens” who presided over the birth of democracy.
In the famous funeral oration that Thucydides provides us, his Pericles praises the city of Athens for having citizens who, among other things, need no Homer to sing their praises and who philosophize without growing soft. These and other claims, along with Thucydides’ own explicit assessment of Pericles’ leadership of Athens, have led many commentators to conclude that Thucydides held Pericles to be the wisest leader of Athens, a model of human wisdom and leader of a republican civic life worthy of emulation even and perhaps especially in modern, secular liberal democracies. In the light of Thucydides’ judgments in the rest of the work, however, and of his account of the war as a whole, there is reason to doubt this conclusion, and to proceed with caution in our emulation of Pericles’ teaching.