Quick questions on The historical context for Pericles: HSC Ancient History

Over the next quarter-century the alliance hardened into an empire (arche). When members tried to withdraw or resist, Athens used force: the revolt of Naxos (c. 470 BC) and the three-year siege of Thasos (465-463 BC) ended with those allies reduced to tribute-paying subjects. Most allies increasingly paid cash rather than supplying ships, which built Athenian naval supremacy while eroding their own independence.

The Athens Pericles led was governed by a democracy more thoroughgoing than anything before it. Its foundations lay in Cleisthenes' late-sixth-century reforms, but the decisive move to "radical" democracy came in 462/461 BC, when Ephialtes, an associate of the young Pericles, stripped the ancient aristocratic council of the Areopagus of most of its political powers and transferred them to the sovereign Assembly (ekklesia), the Council of 500 (boule) and the popular courts. Ephialtes was assassinated shortly afterwards (461 BC), and the democratic leadership passed to Pericles, whose conservative rival Cimon had been ostracised the same year.

The central source problem for Pericles is that the writer who shaped his image most decisively also admired him most. Thucydides is our fullest contemporary, and his portrait of the far-sighted "first citizen" who led rather than flattered the people became the template that later writers, and many modern historians, followed. This is why the hostile evidence of comedy and the neutral evidence of the inscriptions matter so much: they are the independent checks on a favourable tradition. Reading Pericles well means never taking the Thucydidean image as neutral fact, but weighing it against Cratinus and Aristophanes on one side and the documentary record of tribute and building on the other.

His History of the Peloponnesian War is our most important narrative source. Thucydides lived through the period, served as a general, and wrote with a deliberately analytical method. He plainly admired Pericles: he gives him the celebrated Funeral Oration (Book 2.35-46, delivered winter 431/430 BC) and judges (2.65) that Athens was "in name a democracy but in fact" the rule of its foremost citizen, who led the people rather than flattering them.

Part of Plutarch's Parallel Lives, this biography was written more than five centuries after Pericles' death. It is rich in anecdote and moral reflection and preserves material from now-lost earlier writers (including the comic poets and fifth-century authors such as Ion of Chios and Stesimbrotus), but it is late, secondhand and shaped by Plutarch's interest in character and morality rather than strict chronology.

This work, attributed to Aristotle's school, describes the development of the Athenian constitution, including the reforms of Ephialtes and Pericles' introduction of jury pay. It is valuable for sober constitutional detail, but it too was written more than a century after the events it reports.

The comic stage provides rare hostile contemporary evidence. Cratinus mocked Pericles' unusual head-shape and cast him as a domineering, quasi-tyrannical "Zeus"; Aristophanes portrayed an "Olympian" Pericles who thundered over Athens and blamed him for provoking the war through the Megarian Decree. Comedy is contemporary and preserves criticism the admiring tradition omits, but it exists to raise a laugh and win a prize, so it exaggerates and abuses, and Aristophanes' surviving plays date from after Pericles' death.

Documentary evidence cut on stone offers a partial check on the literary sources. The Athenian Tribute Lists record, from 454/453 BC, the one-sixtieth quota (aparche) of each ally's tribute dedicated to Athena, tracking the scale and members of the empire; and the building accounts (for the Parthenon, the Propylaea and other works) record income and expenditure on the Acropolis programme. These are contemporary and non-partisan, but survive fragmentarily and record finance and administration, not motive.