Athens in the Age of Pericles

This is a marvelous look at Athens during its Golden Age in the 5th century BC. For a small community Athens was filled with several generations of over-achievers. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Socrates, Pheidias, Themistocles, Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato, Herodotus, Thucydides and Pericles himself all moved through this city in Attica and in some cases influenced each other. Athens at the beginning of its greatness was the creation of Cleisthenes who established it as a democracy following a period of particularly bizarre family politics that would be surprising even today. This ironically was the source of not only its greatness, but its destruction. The second factor that was responsible for Athens to achieve greatness was its role in defeating the Persians. The Persians retreated from the Aegean and the Athenians formed the Delian League which city states contributed either ships or money for the common defense. Since the Persians had better things to do than to invade pockets of Greek city states, Athens had money for a cultural explosion that formed the basis of western civilization. Architecture, drama, comedy, philosophy, and politics all came out of this development. Athens was not only the cultural center of the western world, it was the western world. What is sad is just how little survived from this period. The source of the greatness of Athens was also its downfall. Maintaining the Delian League, turned Athens into an imperial power, whose citizens became victims of a series of incompetent and unscrupulous leaders who proposed policies that lead to its diplomatic isolation. The greatest disaster was the campaign against Syracuse, which was not only incompetently waged, but lead to Alcibiades, the lead general of his day (and lacking in scruple) to defect to Sparta and propose a policy that would lead to the end of the long walls that had ensured access to the sea and trade. This book, the first in the Centers of Civilization Series is an excellent summing up the contributions of classical Athens and features extracts from Thucydides, some of the plays, and Plato. Few works can summarize the contribution of this golden age in a more concise manner