Pericles and the Conquest of History

Review essay covering V. Azoulay, Pericles of Athens; T. R. Martin, Pericles: A Biography in Context; and L. J. Samons, II, Pericles and the Conquest of History: A Political Biography. NOTE: I state wrongly at the beginning of the paper that the "Pericles Cup" was discovered in 2008. It was discovered in 2014.

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.

The Review of Politics, 1993

Journal of Leadership Accountability and Ethics, 2012

2015

Pericles and the Challenge of Democratic Leadership Book: "Pericles of Athens", by Vincent Azoulay Translated by Janet Lloyd, Foreword by Paul Cartledge Published by Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014 ISBN-10: 0691154597 ISBN-13: 978-0691154596 Language: English; Hardcover: 312 pages Hardcover: $30.99; Kindle: $23.87Vincent Azoulay's new book, originally published in France by Armand Colin in 2011, brings much that is fresh and innovative in a rather crowded field. Of great interest to political scientists, political theorists, and international relations specialists, this masterly translation of Azoulay's eloquent text is inviting as it is intellectually stimulating. The foreword to the English edition by Paul Cartledge does an admirable job in placing Azoulay's Pericles in context. To start with, the main contribution of the book is to propose a fresher look at Pericles as a statesman in the "model" regime of classical, Athenian direct demo...

Nearly a decade after editing The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Pericles (2007), S. was drawn once more into the Periclean ‘vortex’, to emerge with a full-length biography that considers those ‘circumstances and ideas’ that shaped the actions of Pericles and Athens in the fifth century BC (p. xi). In focusing on the development and subsequent impact of a remarkable career, S. offers an engaging review to set against recent works by, notably, G.A. Lehmann (Perikles: Staatsmann und Stratege [2008]) and V. Azoulay (Périclès: La démocratie athénienne à l’épreuve du grand homme [2010]), but presents instead a far from ‘likeable’ portrait of the Athenian statesman.

The Classical Review, 2012