Quick questions on The evaluation and interpretations of Pericles: HSC Ancient History

The counterweight to Thucydides is Athenian Old Comedy, the only substantial CONTEMPORARY evidence that is hostile to Pericles. Comic poets attacked him relentlessly through the 440s to 420s BC. Cratinus mocked his oddly elongated head (hence the recurring nickname "squill-head" or onion-head) and his aloof, Zeus-like dominance, casting him as a would-be tyrant. Aristophanes, writing after Pericles' death, blamed him in the Acharnians (425 BC) for the Megarian Decree and for kindling the Peloponnesian War, and in the Peace (421 BC) suggested he started the war to distract from the scandal around the sculptor Phidias.

Beyond these three, other ancient voices survive. Aristotle's Constitution of the Athenians (Ath. Pol.) gives a relatively sober account of Pericles' reforms, though it suggests the introduction of pay lowered the quality of those taking part in public life.

Modern historiography splits along a line that mirrors the ancient one. The heroic reading was crystallised by the English historian George Grote, whose History of Greece (1846 to 1856) presented Pericles as the enlightened champion of liberal democracy, effectively reading Victorian parliamentary ideals back into fifth-century Athens. This is the tradition that gave us the confident phrase "the Age of Pericles."