Pericles

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Pericles (495-429BC), the statesman who dominated the politics of Athens for thirty years, the so-called Age of Pericles, when the city’s cultural life flowered, its democracy strengthened as its empire grew, and the Acropolis was adorned with the Parthenon. In 431 BC he gave a funeral oration for those Athenians who had already died in the new war with Sparta which has been celebrated as one of the greatest speeches of all time, yet within two years he was dead from a plague made worse by Athenians crowding into their city to avoid attacks. Thucydides, the historian, knew him and was in awe of him, yet few shared that view until the nineteenth century, when they found much in Pericles to praise, an example for the Victorian age.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Edith Hall 19 episodes
  Professor of Classics at King's College London
• Paul Cartledge 21 episodes
  AG Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge
• Peter Liddel No other episodes
  Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Manchester

Reading list

• Pericles of Athens
  Vincent Azoulay (trans. Janet Lloyd) (Princeton University Press, 2014) Google Books →
• Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical Tradition
  Madeleine M. Henry (Oxford University Press, 1997) Google Books →
• The Acropolis in the Age of Pericles
  Jeffrey M. Hurwit (Cambridge University Press, 2004) Google Books →
• Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy
  Donald Kagan (Free Press, 1990) Google Books →
• Short Oxford History of Europe: Classical Greece
  Robin Osborne (Oxford University Press, 2000)
• The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Lives
  Plutarch (trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert) (Penguin, 1973) Google Books →
• Greek Lives
  Plutarch (trans. Robin Waterfield) (Oxford University Press, 2008) Google Books →
• Perikles and his Circle
  Anthony J. Podlecki (Routledge, 1997) Google Books →
• Plutarch: Life of Pericles - A Companion to the Penguin Translation
  Anthony J. Podlecki (Bristol Classical Press, 1998)
• A History of the Classical Greek World, 478-323 BC
  P.J. Rhodes (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) Google Books →
• The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Pericles
  Loren J. Samons II (Cambridge University Press, 2007) Google Books →
• A Commentary on Plutarch's Pericles
  Philip A. Stadter (University of North Carolina Press, 1989) Google Books →
• The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War
  Robert B. Strassler (ed.) (Simon & Schuster, 1998) Google Books →
• The History of the Peloponnesian War
  Thucydides (trans. Richard Crawley) (Barnes & Noble, 2006) Google Books →
• The Peloponnesian War
  Thucydides (trans. Martin Hammond) (Oxford University Press, 2009) Google Books →
• The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians
  Thucydides (trans. Jeremy Mynott) (Cambridge University Press ) Google Books →
• Pericles: A Sourcebook and Reader
  Stephen V. Tracy (University of California Press, 2009) Google Books →

Related episodes

• Solon the Lawgiver
  
  23 Mar, 2023 930 History of the Ancient World
• Demosthenes’ Philippics
  
  17 Nov, 2022 930 History of the Ancient World
• Xenophon
  
  26 May, 2011 930 History of the Ancient World
• Thucydides
  
  29 Jan, 2015 930 History of the Ancient World
• Socrates
  
  27 Sep, 2007 180 Ancient, medieval, and Eastern philosophy
• The Bacchae
  
  18 Mar, 2021 880 Classical and modern Greek literatures
• Thermopylae
  
  5 Feb, 2004 930 History of the Ancient World
• Aristotle’s Politics
  
  6 Nov, 2008 320 Political science
• The Battle of Salamis
  
  23 Mar, 2017 930 History of the Ancient World
• Sparta
  
  19 Nov, 2009 930 History of the Ancient World

---

Programme ID: m000mk25

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000mk25

Auto-category: 938.05 (Classical Greece)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello, we're back with a new series.