Pericles' death, the plague and his legacy: HSC Ancient History
“The final years of Pericles: the opening of the Peloponnesian War and the defensive strategy under strain; the plague of Athens 430 to 429 BC and its social, moral and personal effects, including the deaths of his legitimate sons; his deposition, fine and re-election as strategos; the citizenship grant to his son by Aspasia; his death in 429 BC; the failure of his strategy under his successors; and ancient and modern evaluations of the Periclean Age”
The Peloponnesian War began in 431 BC, and Pericles' defensive strategy, abandon Attica, shelter the population behind the Long Walls, and outlast Sparta by sea, packed Athens with refugees just as the plague struck in 430 to 429 BC. Thucydides, an eyewitness who survived it, records the epidemic killing a large share of the population (no ancient total survives) and dissolving religious and legal restraint. Pericles' two legitimate sons died, forcing a special grant of citizenship to his son by Aspasia, Pericles the Younger, in breach of his own 451 BC law. Blamed for the war and the plague, Pericles was deposed and fined in 430 BC, re-elected strategos in 429 BC, and then died, probably of the plague, in autumn 429 BC. Thucydides (2.65) judges Athens under him to have been "in name a democracy but in fact the rule of the first citizen," and blames the lesser successors, Cleon and later the Nicias to Alcibiades rivalry, for the blunders (Sicily, 415 to 413 BC) that led to defeat in 404 BC. Modern historians (Kagan, Samons, Azoulay) both use and question the resulting "Periclean Age," debating how far one man deserves credit for the greatness and blame for the fragility of Athens.
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What this dot point is asking
NESA's closing strand for Pericles wants you to explain how his career ended in the shadow of the Peloponnesian War: the defensive strategy of the first two years and the strain it placed on Athens, the plague of 430 to 429 BC and its demographic, social and moral effects (as reported by the eyewitness Thucydides), the personal disasters that struck Pericles himself, his brief fall and recovery, his death in 429 BC, and the failure of his strategy under lesser successors. It then asks you to weigh how ancient and modern historians have judged the "Periclean Age" and Pericles' responsibility for both the greatness and the fragility of Athens.
Imagine a long-serving, hugely admired club president who has led his club to the top of the league and built a gleaming new stadium. He talks the club into a war with its biggest rival, and his plan is defensive: pull everyone inside the fortress, let the enemy trash the surrounding fields, and win slowly by outlasting them at sea. Then a deadly epidemic sweeps through the crowded fortress, kills a huge share of the members (including his own two grown-up sons), and everyone panics and blames him. They sack him and fine him, then a few months later, with nobody better around, they beg him back. Not long after, the same disease kills him. Once he is gone, a run of weaker, squabbling leaders throws away his cautious plan, and the club eventually loses the whole war. Ever after, people argue about whether he was the genius who made the club great or the gambler whose choices left it fatally exposed. That argument is Pericles' legacy.
The answer
The first years of the war: the strategy under strain
The Peloponnesian War between Athens and the Spartan-led alliance broke out in 431 BC. Pericles, the dominant Athenian statesman and repeatedly elected strategos (general), had shaped the policy that led to it and now shaped the way Athens fought. His strategy was deliberately defensive on land and aggressive at sea. Rather than meet the superior Spartan hoplite army in a pitched battle, he brought the rural population of Attica inside the walls of Athens and the Long Walls linking the city to its port at Piraeus, abandoning the farmland and villages to Spartan devastation. Athens would ride out the invasions behind its fortifications, keep itself supplied by sea, draw on the tribute of its empire, and use its navy to raid the Peloponnesian coast, aiming to wear Sparta down rather than to win a decisive victory.
King Archidamus II of Sparta invaded Attica in 431 BC and again in 430 BC, ravaging fields and olive groves while the Athenians watched from the walls. This was psychologically punishing: farmers packed into the crowded city saw their property destroyed and could not respond. At the end of the first campaigning season, in the winter of 431 to 430 BC, Pericles delivered the Funeral Oration for the war dead, recorded (and heavily shaped) by Thucydides in Book 2, praising Athens as "the school of Hellas" and its democracy as the model for others. The speech is the high statement of the Periclean ideal, delivered on the eve of the catastrophe that would test it.
The Peloponnesian War began in 431 BC. Pericles' strategy was to abandon the Attic countryside, shelter the population behind the Long Walls, and rely on the navy and imperial tribute to outlast Sparta. The Funeral Oration (Thucydides 2.35 to 46) was delivered in the winter of 431 to 430 BC, the year before the plague. The overcrowding this strategy required is exactly what turned the plague into a disaster.
The plague of Athens, 430 to 429 BC
In 430 BC, during the second Spartan invasion, a devastating epidemic broke out in Athens, probably entering through the crowded port of Piraeus. The overcrowding of refugees behind the walls, precisely the situation Pericles' strategy created, allowed it to spread with terrible speed. Thucydides gives a famous, clinically detailed account (2.47 to 54); he is an unusually valuable witness because he caught the disease himself and survived, and he deliberately recorded the symptoms so that the disease might be recognised if it ever returned.
Thucydides declines to name a cause and gives no total death toll; modern estimates that a quarter to a third of the population died are illustrative reconstructions, not ancient figures. The identity of the disease is still debated (typhus, typhoid, smallpox and other candidates have been proposed; a contested DNA study of a mass grave in the Kerameikos cemetery, published in 2006, suggested typhoid fever). What Thucydides stresses is not the medicine but the social and moral collapse. With the pious and the reckless dying alike, men lost their fear of the gods and of the law; the dead lay unburied or were thrown onto others' funeral pyres; and many, expecting to die soon, abandoned restraint for immediate pleasure and quick spending. The disease returned in a further wave in 427 to 426 BC. Coming a single year after the Funeral Oration's portrait of a disciplined, high-minded citizenry, the plague reads in Thucydides as the brutal unravelling of the Periclean ideal.
Personal catastrophe and the citizenship grant
The plague struck Pericles' own household. His two legitimate sons by his Athenian wife, Xanthippus and Paralus, both died, leaving him without a recognised heir. Plutarch (Pericles 36) records his public composure breaking at the funeral of Paralus, the one time he was seen to weep.
This created a legal problem of Pericles' own making. His citizenship law of 451 BC had restricted Athenian citizenship to those with two Athenian parents. His surviving son, Pericles the Younger, was the child of Aspasia, a woman from Miletus, and so was not a citizen under his father's own statute. With his legitimate line extinguished, the Athenians granted a special exemption allowing Pericles the Younger to be enrolled as a citizen (Plutarch, Pericles 37). The irony is sharp: the law Pericles had used to define and narrow Athenian citizenship had to be set aside for his own son. Pericles the Younger later became a general and was among the commanders executed by the Athenians after the Battle of Arginusae in 406 BC.
Deposition, fine, and re-election
The combination of a second ravaged harvest and the plague turned popular feeling sharply against Pericles in 430 BC. The Athenians, penned behind the walls and dying in numbers, blamed the man who had brought on the war and forbidden them to defend their land. Against his advice they sent an embassy to Sparta to sue for peace; when it achieved nothing, their anger fell on him. They deposed him from the generalship and imposed a heavy fine, which Plutarch (Pericles 35) reports variously as between 15 and 50 talents.
The reversal was short-lived. Thucydides (2.65) presents Pericles delivering a defiant final speech (2.60 to 64) defending his strategy and urging the Athenians to endure, and records that, with no leader of comparable authority available and the first shock of the plague passing, the Athenians soon re-elected him strategos for 429 BC and restored his standing. For Thucydides this episode proves both the volatility of the democratic crowd and the indispensability of Pericles' leadership.
The death of Pericles, 429 BC
Pericles did not long enjoy his restored authority. He died in the autumn of 429 BC, in the third year of the war, having (in Thucydides' precise phrase, 2.65.6) survived its outbreak by two years and six months. Thucydides implies he died of the plague or its lingering after-effects; Plutarch (Pericles 38) describes a slow, wasting illness rather than the disease's usual swift course, and adds the story of Pericles, near death, being told his greatest boast should be that no Athenian had ever put on mourning because of him.
The immediate aftermath: the lesser successors
Thucydides uses Pericles' death to deliver his central verdict on Athenian leadership (2.65). Pericles, he argues, had led the people rather than flattered them; because he sought no power by improper means and needed no bribes, he could contradict the assembly and even provoke its anger, so that what was in name a democracy was in fact the rule of the first citizen. His successors, Thucydides continues, were more on a level with one another, each grasping to be first, and so surrendered the direction of policy to the shifting moods of the people.
The result, in Thucydides' account, was a series of blunders. The most prominent successor was Cleon, whom Thucydides portrays as a violent demagogue; later came the rivalry of Nicias and Alcibiades. Their competition helped drive the disastrous decision to invade Sicily (415 BC), an expedition annihilated in 413 BC, and Athens finally surrendered to Sparta in 404 BC. Thucydides frames all of this as the vindication of Pericles' cautious strategy of endurance, and as proof that Athens lost the war less to Sparta than to the failure of leadership after Pericles was gone.
Legacy: the "Periclean Age"
Pericles gave his name to the cultural and political high point of fifth-century Athens: the "Periclean Age" or "Golden Age of Athens," associated with radical democracy, the maritime empire, and the building programme crowned by the Parthenon. Because our fullest source, Thucydides, so admired him and blamed his successors for the fall, the label carries a built-in judgement, that Athens was greatest under Pericles and declined without him. That framing is powerful but partisan, and modern historians have both used and questioned it.
How to read a source on this topic
Section III sources for Pericles' final years are dominated by two writers, and the first job is always to tell them apart. Thucydides is a near-contemporary who lived through the war, knew the politicians, and survived the plague himself; his account (Book 2) is analytical, deeply informed, and openly admiring of Pericles. Plutarch, writing around AD 100, some five centuries later, composed a moralising biography (Life of Pericles) that preserves anecdotes and variant figures Thucydides omits, but at a great distance and with a biographer's interest in character over analysis.
Three reading habits matter. First, separate the eyewitness core (Thucydides on the plague and the strategy) from the later, anecdotal layer (Plutarch on Pericles weeping, on the fine, on the dying man's boast): both are useful, but for different questions and with different reliability. Second, treat Thucydides' verdict in 2.65 as an interpretation, not a neutral fact: it is designed to exalt Pericles and to blame his successors for the eventual defeat, so it should be tested against evidence such as the very deposition of 430 BC, which shows Pericles was not always in control of the assembly. Third, when a source reports a figure or a cause (the size of the fine, the death toll, the identity of the disease), check whether it is an ancient statement or a modern reconstruction, and flag it accordingly.
- Command words
- "Outline" wants a compact, sequenced answer (the strategy, the succession of events). "Explain" wants a causal LINK (why the overcrowding made the plague deadly, why the Athenians turned on Pericles). "Assess," "evaluate" and "to what extent" demand a sustained JUDGEMENT held across every paragraph, not a neutral description of both sides.
- Using a source in four moves
- (1) Content: what does it actually say (the plague's moral effects, the "first citizen" verdict). (2) Reliability: who wrote it, how long after, with what sympathy (Thucydides the admiring eyewitness; Plutarch the distant moralist). (3) Usefulness: what specific question it answers despite its bias. (4) Perspective: whose view it serves (Thucydides' elite distrust of demagogues; Plutarch's biographical moralising).
- Weaving in historiography
- Never just list historians. Use the pattern "[ancient evidence] shows X; Thucydides reads it as Y because Z; but Kagan or Azoulay qualifies this by W." That structure, tying each historian to specific evidence and a position, is what earns historiography marks in a Section III response.
1. Source-analysis response (using Thucydides on the plague). "Thucydides' account of the plague is highly useful because it is the testimony of an eyewitness who caught the disease and survived, and who deliberately recorded its symptoms and social effects for posterity. Its usefulness lies less in medical diagnosis, since he names no cause and modern scholars still dispute the disease, than in its picture of moral collapse: the failure of religious and legal restraint, the unburied dead, the turn to reckless self-indulgence. Its reliability is strengthened by his firsthand experience, but it is shaped by his purpose, to show the Periclean ideal of the Funeral Oration being unravelled within a year, so the bleakness may be heightened for that contrast."
Marker's note: separates content from reliability and usefulness, uses the eyewitness status as a strength while noting the literary purpose as a limit, rather than treating the account as a neutral report.
2. Essay paragraph (Thucydides' verdict weighed against modern historians). "Thucydides' claim in 2.65 that Athens was 'in name a democracy but in fact the rule of the first citizen' is the foundation of the heroic Pericles, and it is deliberately built to blame the later demagogues for the defeat of 404 BC. Yet the same historian records the Athenians deposing and fining Pericles in 430 BC, which shows his control of the assembly was never as complete as the verdict implies. Modern historians press this further: Donald Kagan credits Pericles' achievement but judges his passive strategy incapable of winning, while Vincent Azoulay argues the commanding 'first citizen' is partly a construction of Thucydides himself. The more defensible reading is that Pericles was the dominant, but not the unchallenged, leader of a genuinely volatile democracy."
Marker's note: names ancient and modern historians with their actual positions, ties each to specific evidence (2.65, the deposition), and reaches a judgement rather than juxtaposing quotations.
3. Short-answer response (the citizenship grant). "After his two legitimate sons died in the plague, Pericles had no heir who was a citizen, because his own citizenship law of 451 BC required both parents to be Athenian and his surviving son's mother, Aspasia, was Milesian. The Athenians granted a special exemption enrolling Pericles the Younger as a citizen (Plutarch, Pericles 37). The episode is significant because Pericles' own restrictive law had to be waived for his own family, and because it shows the personal cost the plague inflicted on him alongside the political crisis."
Marker's note: rewards the specific link between the 451 BC law, Aspasia's status and the exemption, and a note on why the episode matters, rather than a bare narration.
- Treating Thucydides' verdict in 2.65 as neutral fact
- The "first citizen" judgement is a shaped interpretation designed to praise Pericles and blame his successors; test it against the deposition of 430 BC.
- Giving a precise death toll or naming the disease as certain
- Thucydides gives no total and no cause; "a quarter to a third died" is a modern illustrative estimate, and the disease's identity is still debated. Say so.
- Blurring Thucydides and Plutarch
- One is a near-contemporary eyewitness, the other a moralising biographer writing around AD 100; their reliability is not the same, and markers reward candidates who distinguish them.
- Narrating the war instead of arguing about Pericles
- The dot point asks you to evaluate his responsibility and legacy, not to retell the campaigns of 431 to 429 BC; every paragraph should serve a judgement.
- Listing historians instead of using them
- Naming Thucydides, Plutarch, Kagan, Samons and Azoulay earns little unless each is tied to specific evidence and a clear position in your argument.
Practice questions
Original practice questions graded from foundation to exam level, each with a full worked solution. Try them before revealing the solution.
foundation4 marksOutline the defensive strategy Pericles adopted for Athens in the first years of the Peloponnesian War.Show worked solution →
A 4-mark "outline" needs the core idea and three supporting elements.
1 mark: Pericles refused to meet the Spartan-led army in a pitched land battle, in which Athens was outmatched.
1 mark: he brought the rural population of Attica inside the fortifications of Athens and the Long Walls to Piraeus, abandoning the countryside to Spartan devastation.
1 mark: he relied on Athenian sea power and the tribute of the empire to keep the city supplied and to raid the Peloponnesian coast, wearing the enemy down rather than seeking a decisive victory.
1 mark: he counselled the Athenians to add no new territory to the empire while at war and to husband their resources, a policy of patient endurance recorded and endorsed by Thucydides.
Marker's note: rewards the linked idea of "avoid land battle, hold the walls, use the navy," not just one element; naming Thucydides as the source strengthens the answer.
foundation4 marksSource A: an ExamExplained reconstruction of the type of eyewitness observation a contemporary Athenian historian recorded about the moral effects of the plague: "As the dying lay unburied and men saw the pious and the reckless perish alike, few held back for fear of the gods or the law. Men spent their money freely and sought quick pleasures, thinking life and wealth alike short-lived."
Using Source A and your own knowledge, outline what this evidence suggests about the plague's effect on Athenian society.
Show worked solution →
A 4-mark "outline" needs points drawn directly from the source and linked to knowledge.
1 mark: identifies a breakdown of religious observance - the dead lay unburied and men no longer feared the gods, because the plague struck the pious and the impious alike.
1 mark: identifies a breakdown of law and social restraint - men no longer held back for fear of legal punishment.
1 mark: identifies a turn to reckless, short-term self-indulgence - people spent freely and sought immediate pleasure, expecting to die soon.
1 mark: links this to own knowledge - Thucydides, an eyewitness who caught the disease himself, presents the plague as dissolving the civic discipline and shared values that Pericles had praised in the Funeral Oration only a year earlier.
Marker's note: full marks require using the source's three effects (religion, law, self-indulgence) AND the link to Thucydides as an eyewitness; a response that only paraphrases the source without that link caps at 3 marks.
core6 marksExplain how Pericles' war strategy came under strain during the first two years of the Peloponnesian War.Show worked solution →
A 6-mark "explain" needs the strategy, the pressures on it, and their political effect.
1-2 marks: the strategy itself - crowding the population of Attica behind the walls while Spartan armies under Archidamus ravaged the farmland (invasions in 431 and 430 BC) demanded that Athenians watch their homes and crops burn without responding, which strained morale and popular patience.
2 marks: the plague - the overcrowding of refugees inside the walls turned the arrival of the plague in 430 BC into a catastrophe, killing perhaps a quarter to a third of the population (an illustrative modern estimate; Thucydides gives no total) and undermining confidence in Pericles' judgement.
2 marks: the political consequence - Athenians blamed Pericles for the war and the suffering, sent envoys to Sparta seeking peace against his advice, and deposed and fined him in 430 BC; Thucydides (2.59 to 65) presents this as popular anger overwhelming a sound long-term strategy.
Marker's note: rewards linking the passive strategy to the plague and then to the political backlash, not merely narrating the two invasions.
core5 marksExplain why the Athenians deposed and fined Pericles in 430 BC, and why he was soon re-elected.Show worked solution →
A 5-mark "explain" needs the causes of his fall and of his recovery.
1 mark: the second Spartan invasion of 430 BC coincided with the plague, so the population trapped behind the walls suffered both devastation of their land and mass death.
2 marks: the Athenians turned their anger on the man who had led them into the war and forbidden them to fight for their fields; they sent a peace embassy to Sparta against his advice, and when it failed they deposed him from the generalship and imposed a heavy fine (Plutarch, Pericles 35, reports figures between 15 and 50 talents).
2 marks: the recovery - with no leader of comparable authority, and once the first shock of the plague passed, the Athenians re-elected Pericles as strategos for 429 BC; Thucydides (2.65) presents this as proof that his leadership was indispensable and that the crowd's anger had been a passing mood.
Marker's note: rewards the causal pairing of plague-plus-invasion for the fall and the absence of an alternative leader for the re-election.
core6 marksSource B: an ExamExplained paraphrase of the type of retrospective judgement Thucydides makes on Pericles' leadership: "He led the people rather than being led by them, and because he did not seek power by improper means he could contradict them and even provoke their anger. What was in name a democracy was becoming, in fact, rule by the first citizen."
Using Source B and your own knowledge, assess the usefulness and reliability of Thucydides' judgement for evaluating Pericles' leadership.
Show worked solution →
A 6-mark "assess" needs content, usefulness, reliability/limitation and a brief judgement.
1-2 marks: content - the passage praises Pericles for leading rather than flattering the people, for financial integrity, and for an independence that let him restrain the crowd; it also claims Athens was really governed by one dominant man.
2 marks: usefulness - as the judgement of a contemporary who lived through Pericles' career, it is highly useful for the elite view of his authority and for the influential idea of a "first citizen" standing above ordinary politicians.
2 marks: reliability and limitation - Thucydides openly admired Pericles and shaped this verdict to contrast him with the "lesser" successors he blamed for Athens' defeat, so it is a persuasive interpretation rather than a neutral report; it downplays the opposition Pericles faced (the very deposition of 430 BC) and reflects Thucydides' own distrust of demagogic democracy. Judgement: useful and well-informed, but a partisan and retrospective assessment to be weighed against the evidence of genuine popular resistance.
Marker's note: rewards separating "useful because contemporary" from "limited because admiring and retrospective," and citing the deposition as evidence Thucydides' picture is idealised.
exam10 marksSource C: an ExamExplained reconstruction of the type of comparison Thucydides draws between Pericles and his successors: "Those who came after were more equal to one another, and each grasping to be first, they surrendered even the conduct of affairs to the whims of the people. From this came many blunders, above all the expedition to Sicily, which failed less through misjudging the enemy than through the quarrels of those at home."
Using Source C and your own knowledge, evaluate the usefulness of Thucydides for understanding the failure of Athenian strategy after Pericles' death.
Show worked solution →
A 10-mark response uses the source, adds own knowledge, and judges usefulness and its limits.
- Use the source
- Source C sets out Thucydides' thesis (2.65): Pericles' successors, lacking his singular authority, competed for popularity and let policy follow the mood of the assembly, producing disasters, above all the Sicilian Expedition, driven by faction at home rather than by the enemy.
- Corroborating own knowledge
- After Pericles' death in 429 BC, leadership passed to men Thucydides casts as demagogues, chiefly Cleon, then to the rivalry of Nicias and Alcibiades, whose feud shaped the decision to invade Sicily (415 BC) and the recall of Alcibiades that helped wreck it; the expedition was annihilated in 413 BC, and Athens finally surrendered in 404 BC. Thucydides presents this as the vindication of Pericles' cautious "endure and do not expand" strategy.
- Usefulness
- As a contemporary who knew the politicians and probably heard the debates, Thucydides is an unusually well-placed and analytical source; his framework of "Pericles the restraining statesman versus reckless successors" has shaped every later account of Athens' defeat.
- Limitations
- The judgement is also an interpretation built to defend Pericles: it may exaggerate the successors' incompetence, understate flaws in Pericles' own passive strategy (which offered no clear path to victory, as Kagan argues), and reflect Thucydides' aristocratic distaste for popular leaders like Cleon, whom he portrays with open hostility.
- Judgement
- Thucydides is indispensable and richly useful for the events and for the "first citizen" thesis, but his usefulness is greatest when his admiration for Pericles and hostility to the demagogues are read as a shaping perspective rather than as neutral fact.
Marker's note: Band 6 answers name at least two later events (Sicily 415 to 413 BC, the defeat of 404 BC) and one modern qualification (for example Kagan on the strategy) and separate "useful because contemporary and analytical" from "limited because partisan."
exam25 marksESSAY. Evaluate the extent to which Pericles should be regarded as responsible for both the greatness and the vulnerability of Athens at the time of his death, with reference to ancient and modern interpretations.Show worked solution →
A Band 6 essay sustains a judgement on "to what extent," uses named dated evidence, and weaves ancient AND modern historiography. Plan plus model paragraph.
- Thesis
- Pericles built much of what made Athens great - its radical democracy, its imperial revenues, and the cultural and building programme of its golden age - but the same policies (the aggressive empire and the walls-and-navy war strategy) also created the vulnerability that the plague and his death exposed; he is therefore substantially responsible for both, though the plague was an accident no strategy could foresee.
- Argument line 1: architect of greatness
- Under Pericles' long ascendancy Athens completed the Parthenon and the Acropolis programme, funded from the Delian League treasury moved to Athens in 454 BC, and developed the fullest form of direct democracy (pay for jurors, the citizenship law of 451 BC). Thucydides' version of the Funeral Oration (winter 431 to 430 BC) presents Athens as "the school of Hellas," the fullest ancient statement of the Periclean ideal.
- Argument line 2: architect of vulnerability
- The empire that funded this greatness provoked Sparta, and Pericles' own diplomacy (the Megarian Decree, his refusal to compromise) helped bring on the war in 431 BC. His strategy of abandoning Attica and crowding the population behind the walls turned the plague of 430 to 429 BC into a demographic catastrophe, killing perhaps a quarter to a third of Athenians (illustrative estimate; Thucydides gives no total).
- Argument line 3: ancient interpretation
- Thucydides (2.65) exonerates Pericles, blaming Athens' eventual defeat on the "lesser" successors who abandoned his restraint; Plutarch (Pericles 38) treats his death in 429 BC as the loss of a moderating hand. Both are admiring, and both were written to make Pericles the standard against which decline is measured.
- Argument line 4: modern interpretation
- Donald Kagan credits Pericles' democratic and imperial achievement but judges his war strategy too passive to win. Loren Samons is more critical of the empire and the finances behind the golden age. Vincent Azoulay (Pericles of Athens, 2014) argues the "great man" was in part a construction of Thucydides and later tradition, warning against crediting or blaming one individual for a whole city's fortunes.
- Model paragraph (line 2, vulnerability)
- The greatness and the vulnerability sprang from the same decisions. The empire that paid for the Parthenon also gave Sparta and her allies a reason to fight, and the naval strategy that made Athens unbeatable at sea required surrendering the farmland of Attica and packing refugees inside the walls. When the plague arrived in 430 BC, that overcrowding turned an epidemic into a disaster, and the very citizens Pericles had confined turned on him, deposing and fining him before re-electing him in 429 BC. As Thucydides concedes even while defending him, the strategy was sound in theory but depended on a patience the suffering population could not sustain, so the vulnerability was not separate from the greatness but its shadow.
- Conclusion
- Pericles is largely responsible for both: his democracy, empire and cultural programme made Athens great, and his imperial and military choices built in the fragility the plague exposed. But the plague itself was chance, and, as Azoulay warns, no single leader wholly determines a city's fate.
Marker's note: Band 6 answers name at least three historians (Thucydides and Plutarch as ancient; two of Kagan, Samons, Azoulay as modern), use specific dated evidence (the Funeral Oration 431 to 430 BC, the plague 430 to 429 BC, the deposition and re-election), and reach an explicit "to what extent" judgement rather than narrating his career.