Quick questions on Pericles and the Acropolis building program: HSC Ancient History

By the late 430s BC Pericles was too dominant to attack directly, so, in the tradition preserved chiefly by Plutarch (Pericles 31-32), his enemies struck at the people closest to him.

Plutarch (Pericles 31) reports that Phidias, as overseer and Pericles's friend, was first accused of embezzling some of the gold of the Athena Parthenos; because the gold had been made removable and could be weighed, that charge failed. He was then charged with impiety for carving portraits of himself, as a bald old man lifting a stone, and of Pericles, fighting an Amazon, into the Amazonomachy on Athena's shield. Plutarch says Phidias was imprisoned and died there; the fourth-century Atthidographer Philochorus instead records that he went to Olympia (where he made the great statue of Zeus).

Pericles's teacher, the natural philosopher Anaxagoras, was exposed to prosecution under the decree of Diopeithes, which allowed impeachment of those who did not believe in the gods or who taught doctrines about "the things on high". Anaxagoras had taught that the sun was a fiery stone or mass of metal, not a god. Plutarch (Pericles 32) says Pericles, fearing for him, helped him leave Athens.

Pericles's Milesian companion Aspasia was prosecuted for impiety and for procuring free women, the charge brought by the comic poet Hermippus (Plutarch, Pericles 32). Pericles reportedly secured her acquittal only by pleading for her in tears, an unusual public display for so controlled a statesman.