Pericles the Eccentric

It has been a decade since the last major biographical treatment of Pericles's life, career, and times appeared in English. (Others have appeared in German, Italian, and French, as befits a major ancient Greek political figure.) Each of the three predecessor works considered below has its special emphases and strengths. None, noticeably, is as hagiographic as some of its forerunners. Pericles has long since ceased to be a hero of his nation, as he was represented in late Victorian times.

The particular strength of Pericles of Athens, which was released in 2014 by Paris-based scholar Vincent Azoulay, lies in its scrupulous attention to the reception of Pericles, how he has been variously conceived and portrayed, for praise and blame alike, over the ages since Thucydides’ fifth-century B.C. portrayal of Pericles in the History of the Peloponnesian War. More traditional, because of its focus on politics, diplomacy, and war, is American Loren J. Samons II's 2015 Pericles and the Conquest of History. Also American-authored is Pericles: A Biography in Context by Thomas Martin, which appeared in 2016. Martin's biography is the most similar in approach and scope to my own new book Pericles: Statesman, Demagogue, Eccentric, especially as it correctly takes context in a plural sense to refer to family background, educational experience, and unorthodox domestic life, as well as the public institutions of democracy and empire and Pericles’ impact on those institutions and their impact on him.

As to what I hope readers might take away from reading about "my" Pericles, I would stress two negative points first: There was no such thing as "Periclean" Greece, Athens, or democracy. As important as he was to each of these, he was not the major (let alone the sole) decisive influence in shaping them. Second, his partner in life for his last twenty years, Aspasia of Miletus, was just that: his partner. She was emphatically not his mistress.

Positively, I hope readers will come to appreciate that Pericles was a strikingly remarkable individual, one of the most remarkable in all of ancient Greek and indeed world history. He was always at the dead center of Athens' and humanity's most considerable achievements, not least an unparalleled degree of direct democratic self-governance and an unequalled stream of top-notch dramatic (Aeschylus, Sophocles), literary (Thucydides) and artistic (Parthenon) productions that still influence us to this day. Of course, there were also downsides, with which Pericles was at least complicit: the inferior status and treatment of even free Athenian Greek women, as well as the enslavement of many thousands of mainly non-Greek persons. But balance is all.