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What were Pericles' political reforms, and did they make him the leader or the servant of Athens's radical democracy?

Pericles' political reforms and radical democracy: state pay for jurors and other public office (misthophoria) opening participation to poorer citizens; the citizenship law of 451/450 BC; the completion of the Ephialtic reduction of the Areopagus; his repeated election as strategos; and the ancient debate over whether he led or followed the demos

A focused answer to the HSC Ancient History Personalities dot point on Pericles' political reforms - state pay for jurors and officeholders (misthophoria), the 451/450 BC citizenship law, completing Ephialtes' reduction of the Areopagus, his run of strategoi elections, and whether he led or followed the demos.

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Quick answer

Pericles' political reforms turned Cleisthenic democracy into radical democracy. He completed Ephialtes' reduction of the Areopagus (from 462/461 BC), stripping the last aristocratic check on the demos; he introduced state pay for office (misthophoria), above all jury pay at 2 obols a day (Aristotle, Ath. Pol. 27.3), so poorer citizens could actually serve; and he carried the citizenship law of 451/450 BC requiring both parents to be Athenian, which narrowed the citizen body, an irony that later forced him to seek a special exemption for his own son by Aspasia. His power rested on one elected office, the strategia, held some fifteen years from 443 BC. Whether he LED the demos, as Thucydides (2.65) claims, or FOLLOWED and courted it, as Plato's Gorgias and the comic poets allege, is the central debate: the best answers show that in a direct democracy, leadership meant winning consent, so he both guided the demos and depended on its sovereign vote.

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Historians on Pericles' reforms

What this dot point is asking

NESA's Personalities strand for Pericles wants you to explain his POLITICAL reforms and his relationship to Athens's radical democracy: the introduction of state pay (misthophoria) for jurors and other officeholders, which opened real participation to poorer citizens; the citizenship law of 451/450 BC, which tightened who counted as a citizen; the completion of Ephialtes' reduction of the Areopagus, which removed the last aristocratic check on the demos; and his repeated election as strategos, the single office on which his power rested. Above all it asks you to weigh a debate the ancient sources themselves argue over: did Pericles LEAD the demos, as Thucydides claims, or FOLLOW and court it, as the comic poets and Plato allege? This dot point is not a survey of Athenian institutions in general (that is the Ancient Societies topic, "Athens's radical democracy and political institutions"); it is about what PERICLES specifically did to them, and how his role should be judged.

In plain English

Imagine a club where nearly every committee job is filled by drawing names from a hat, but only people rich enough to skip a day's work can really afford to serve, so in practice the "open to all" jobs keep going to the same comfortable few. Now a leader does three things. First, he pays a small daily allowance for committee work, so the members who live pay-cheque to pay-cheque can finally take part for real. Second, he tightens the membership rule, from then on you only count as a full member if BOTH your parents were members, which quietly shrinks the club even as it opens up inside. Third, he strips the old senior council of its veto, so the general meeting really is the final word. He himself holds just one elected post, re-elected year after year, and runs the place by winning the vote again and again.

The whole club then argues about what he really was. His admirers say he genuinely LED, steering the members toward decisions they would not have reached alone and sometimes telling them things they hated. His critics say he FOLLOWED and flattered, that the daily allowance was really a bribe to keep the crowd cheering for him. That argument, leader or crowd-pleaser, is exactly the question this dot point puts about Pericles.

The answer

The base of his power: the strategia

Pericles held no special constitutional office. Like the Athens dot point in Ancient Societies sets out in detail, almost every Athenian post, the boule of 500, the jury pool of the dikasteria, and roughly 700 magistracies, was filled by lot for a single year with no repeat. The one major exception was the board of ten strategoi (generals), filled by election (cheirotonia) precisely because military command needed proven skill, and elected officials alone could be re-appointed without limit.

That single carve-out is the whole basis of Pericles' career. He was elected strategos again and again; Plutarch (Life of Pericles 16) records fifteen continuous years from 443 BC, after the ostracism of his last serious rival, Thucydides son of Melesias, until his death in 429 BC. He had no power to command the assembly and could be removed at any election, as he was in 430 BC, when the ekklesia fined and deposed him before re-electing him in 429 BC. His ascendancy was therefore a matter of winning the sovereign vote repeatedly, not of holding office above it.

Completing the Ephialtic reduction of the Areopagus

The decisive institutional shift toward radical democracy came just before Pericles' rise. In 462/461 BC, Ephialtes stripped the ancient council of the Areopagus, made up of former archons, of its political oversight, its "guardianship of the laws" and general supervision of magistrates and the state, transferring these powers to the boule, the ekklesia and the dikasteria (Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians 25).

Pericles was Ephialtes' younger associate and, according to both Aristotle (Ath. Pol. 27.1) and Plutarch (Life of Pericles 9), took part in the attack. When Ephialtes was assassinated soon afterwards, Pericles inherited the leadership of the popular side and consolidated the change, so that the Areopagus was left with little beyond its old jurisdiction over homicide. The significance is constitutional: removing the Areopagus's aristocratic brake left the sovereign organs of the demos, the assembly, the council chosen by lot, and the popular jury courts, with no senior body able to override them.

State pay for office: misthophoria

Pericles' most celebrated domestic reform was misthophoria, state pay for public service. Its best-attested form is pay for the dikasteria (jury service), introduced probably in the 450s BC at 2 obols a day (Aristotle, Ath. Pol. 27.3). Aristotle attributes the measure explicitly to Pericles and gives it a political motive: outspent by his richer rival Cimon, who had funded poorer citizens from his own estate, Pericles instead "gave the people what was their own" through pay from public funds. The same logic extended pay to members of the boule and to other magistracies, so that a full day given to the state carried a small wage. (The rate for jurors was later raised to 3 obols by Cleon, after 425 BC, well after Pericles' death.)

Jury pay mattered because it converted a formal right into one the poor could actually use. A citizen who lived by his daily labour could not previously afford to give a day to the courts, however entitled he was to sit; pay let the annual jury pool of 6,000 and the offices filled by lot be drawn from the whole citizen body rather than only its leisured members. This is the element that makes Periclean democracy "radical" in substance and not merely in name.

The citizenship law of 451/450 BC and its irony

In 451/450 BC, in the archonship of Antidotus, Pericles carried a law that for the first time required BOTH parents to be Athenian, not only the father, for a child to hold citizenship (Aristotle, Ath. Pol. 26.4). Aristotle links the measure to the large number of citizens; modern historians debate whether its purpose was mainly to guard the material privileges of membership, pay, land allotments (cleruchies) and distributions, for a defined body, or to manage citizen numbers. Either way, its effect was exclusionary: even as misthophoria widened participation INSIDE the citizen body, this law drew a sharper line around WHO belonged to it.

The law rebounded on Pericles personally, an irony the ancient tradition relished. His partner Aspasia came from Miletus and was therefore not Athenian, so their son, Pericles the Younger, was not a citizen under his own father's law. When Pericles' two legitimate sons by his Athenian wife, Xanthippus and Paralus, died in the plague of 430/429 BC, he was left to petition the very assembly that had passed his law to enrol Pericles the Younger as a citizen by special exemption, which it granted (Plutarch, Life of Pericles 37). Pericles the Younger went on to serve as a strategos and was among the generals executed after the battle of Arginusae in 406 BC. The episode is a favourite exam illustration of how a general reform can trap its own author.

Ekklesia, boule and dikasteria under Pericles

Pericles worked entirely within, not above, the machinery detailed in the Ancient Societies dot point. The ekklesia remained the sovereign assembly, deciding war, peace, finance and every major decree; the boule of 500, chosen by lot, prepared its agenda; the dikasteria, the mass jury courts, decided verdict and penalty with no appeal. Pericles' reforms did not replace this system but energised it: completing the Areopagus reduction made these organs supreme, and misthophoria made them genuinely open to the poor. His leadership therefore always ran through persuasion of the assembly and re-election to the strategia, which is exactly why the ancient sources argue over whether the demos was following him or he was following it.

Did Pericles lead or follow the demos?

This is the interpretive heart of the dot point, and the sources divide sharply.

On one side, Thucydides (2.65.8 to 9), a contemporary and himself later a strategos, judges that Pericles "led them rather than being led by them," precisely because he did not have to flatter the assembly for power, could contradict and even anger it, and reined it in or spurred it on as the situation required. Hence his famous verdict that Athens was "in name a democracy, but in fact rule by the first man." On this reading, the pay reforms and the building programme were the acts of a statesman shaping the state, and Pericles' willingness to impose an unpopular defensive strategy in the Peloponnesian War, refusing to march out against the Spartans, is the clearest proof that he led against the demos's own instinct.

On the other side stands the hostile tradition. Old Comedy poets such as Cratinus and Telecleides mocked "the Olympian" as a near-tyrant who fed his following; Plato's Gorgias (515 to 516) charges that Pericles corrupted the Athenians by making them idle and greedy with pay and largesse; and Aristotle (Ath. Pol. 27.4) preserves the criticism that jury pay debased the courts. Plutarch (Life of Pericles 9), drawing on this tradition, records the view that, outspent by Cimon, Pericles "turned to the people" with pay to buy support. On this reading, misthophoria was less a democratic reform than a bid for popularity, and Pericles followed and flattered the demos as much as he led it.

The strongest answers refuse to treat these as simple opposites. In a direct democracy, leading meant supplying enough of what the demos wanted to be trusted when you told it what it did not want to hear. Pericles' pay reforms genuinely served the demos's material interest (so, in that sense, he followed it), yet on the war he plainly led it against its wishes, and it could remove him, as it did in 430 BC, whenever its patience ran out.

How to read a source on this topic

Section III sources on Pericles are typically drawn from Thucydides' History (the funeral oration at 2.35 to 2.46 and the assessment at 2.65), Aristotle's Constitution of the Athenians (25 to 28 on the reforms), Plutarch's Life of Pericles, the fragments of Old Comedy that Plutarch and others preserve, and Plato's Gorgias. Three reading habits.

First, fix the DATE relative to Pericles. Thucydides is a contemporary eyewitness; the comic poets are contemporary but comic and hostile; Plato writes a generation later, shaped by Socrates' execution in 399 BC; Aristotle writes later still, with documentary detail but a century's distance. The gap between "during his life" and "long after" usually decides a source's reliability.

Second, separate GENRE. Aristotle's Ath. Pol. mostly DESCRIBES how the reforms worked; comedy and Plato mostly ARGUE about whether Pericles was good for Athens. Both are evidence, but of different things, description in the first case, contemporary or later opinion in the second.

Third, move from content to reliability to usefulness to perspective, and reach a judgement, rather than simply describing what a source says. A comic jibe about "the Olympian" is superb evidence of how critics FRAMED Pericles, and weak evidence of what he actually intended.

Historians on Pericles' reforms

Thucydides (contemporary; History 2.65) supplies the "led rather than followed" reading and the "first man" verdict, admiring but analytical.

Plato (Gorgias 515 to 516) supplies the hostile philosophical charge that Pericles corrupted the Athenians with pay, written a generation later.

Aristotle (Constitution of the Athenians 25 to 28) is the fullest ancient account of the reforms themselves, attributing jury pay and the citizenship law to Pericles while also recording the criticism that pay lowered the courts (27.4).

Plutarch (Life of Pericles, c. AD 100) preserves much lost material, including comic fragments and earlier historians, but writes some five centuries later and moralises, so his colourful detail must be handled with care.

Donald Kagan (Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy, 1991) reads Pericles as a principled statesman guiding a consenting demos, close to Thucydides' own view.

Loren J. Samons II (Pericles and the Conquest of History, 2016) is more sceptical, warning that the idealised "great leader" owes much to Thucydides' admiration and should not be taken at face value.

P. J. Rhodes, the standard commentator on the Constitution of the Athenians, treats the reforms as institutionally decisive and reads the ancient "bribery" framing of pay with caution.

Model exam responses

1. Source-analysis response (a comic fragment on jury pay). "A comic fragment mocking Pericles as 'the Olympian' who scatters obols so the poor swarm to the jury-benches is useful evidence for how his critics understood misthophoria: they read jury pay not as widening participation but as a leader buying a cheering following. Its usefulness is real but bounded. As Old Comedy it is contemporary, so it captures genuine hostility in Pericles' own lifetime, and it corroborates, from an unfriendly angle, that pay had a powerful political effect. But it is openly hostile and distorts for laughs, so it cannot be taken as a neutral account of the reform's purpose. Read alongside Aristotle's more measured explanation at Ath. Pol. 27.3 to 4, it shows that pay was politically charged from the start, without settling whether Pericles intended it as democratic reform or as a bid for support."

Marker's note: markers reward decoding the comic hostility into a historical claim, an explicit usefulness-and-limitation split, and corroboration with a second source rather than description alone.

2. Essay paragraph (led or followed). "The clearest test of whether Pericles led or followed the demos is what he did when its wishes and his judgement diverged. On the pay reforms he plainly gave the demos what served its material interest, which the comic poets and Plato's Gorgias (515 to 516) read as flattery. Yet on the Peloponnesian War he imposed a defensive strategy the citizens hated, refusing to march out against the Spartans, exactly the behaviour Thucydides (2.65.8 to 9) means when he says Pericles 'led them rather than being led by them.' The demos could and did remove him, fining and deposing him in 430 BC before re-electing him in 429 BC. A leader who supplies popular reforms yet still bends the demos against its instinct, and who remains answerable to its vote throughout, fits Thucydides' paradox precisely: leadership by consent, not rule over a crowd, which is why 'led' and 'followed' are two sides of the same relationship rather than a clean choice."

Marker's note: this paragraph scores because it uses the war strategy and the 430/429 BC removal-and-recall as evidence, integrates Thucydides against the hostile tradition, and answers the lead-or-follow question rather than narrating Pericles' career.

Command words and how to use a source

Match the verb. "Outline" or "describe" wants sequenced, named features (the terms of the citizenship law, the rate of jury pay) with no evaluation; "explain" wants the mechanism and why it mattered (how misthophoria changed WHO could serve, how the Areopagus reduction removed a check); "assess", "evaluate" or "to what extent" demand a sustained JUDGEMENT, stated early and defended throughout.

For any source, real or an ExamExplained-owned reconstruction, work through four steps every time: CONTENT (what it actually shows), ORIGIN (who produced it, and when, relative to Pericles), USEFULNESS AND RELIABILITY (what it can and cannot prove; label a reconstructed "type" of source as illustrative, never as a transcription), and PERSPECTIVE (an admiring eyewitness, a hostile comic poet, and a later philosopher each see Pericles differently). Weave historiography as argument, "Samons cautions that the 'great leader' image owes much to Thucydides' admiration," rather than dropping a name at the end of a paragraph.

Common exam traps

Describing Athenian institutions in general instead of PERICLES' reforms: The ekklesia, boule and dikasteria belong to the Ancient Societies topic. Here, keep the focus on what Pericles specifically changed: misthophoria, the citizenship law, and completing the Areopagus reduction.
Misdating or merging the pay rates: Pericles introduced jury pay at 2 obols in the 450s BC; Cleon raised it to 3 obols only after 425 BC, after Pericles' death in 429 BC.
Thinking the citizenship law WIDENED citizenship: It narrowed it, requiring both parents to be Athenian; that is the point of the Aspasia irony.
Crediting Pericles with assembly pay: Pay for attending the ekklesia (the ekklesiastikon) was introduced in the early 4th century BC, not by Pericles. Do not attribute it to him.
Taking comedy or Plato as neutral: They are hostile evidence for how critics FRAMED Pericles, not objective accounts of his aims.
Answering "led or followed" with a narrative: The question is interpretive: set Thucydides against the hostile tradition and reach a judgement.

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 how Pericles' pay reforms opened public office to poorer Athenian citizens.

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A 4-mark "outline" rewards several correct, briefly developed points.

State pay (misthophoria): Pericles is credited with introducing pay for public service, so that holding office no longer depended on private means (1 mark).
Jury pay first: His best-attested measure was pay for the dikasteria (jury service), probably in the 450s BC, at 2 obols a day (Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians 27.3) (1 mark).
Wider offices: In the same logic, pay was extended to members of the boule and other magistracies, so that a full day given to the state carried a small wage (1 mark).
The effect: A citizen who lived by his daily labour could now afford to sit on a jury or serve in office, turning a formal right into one the poor could actually exercise (1 mark).

Marker's note: markers reward the jury-pay figure (2 obols, Ath. Pol. 27.3) and the point that pay converted formal rights into exercisable ones, not just a general statement that Pericles was "generous."

foundation3 marksOutline the terms and date of Pericles' citizenship law.

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A 3-mark "outline" wants brief, sequenced points, not evaluation.

Date: The law is dated to 451/450 BC, in the archonship of Antidotus (Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians 26.4) (1 mark).
The requirement: For the first time it required BOTH parents to be Athenian, not only the father, for a child to hold citizenship (1 mark).
The stated reason and effect: Aristotle links it to the large number of citizens; its effect was to narrow and define the citizen body more tightly, guarding the privileges of membership (1 mark).

Marker's note: markers reward the "both parents" rule, the 451/450 BC date, and the point that the law RESTRICTED citizenship rather than widening it.

core5 marksSource A (an ExamExplained reconstruction, in the manner of an Athenian Old Comedy fragment mocking Pericles): 'Our Olympian scatters obols like Zeus his thunderbolts, and the poor swarm to the jury-benches for their two-obol supper, cheering the man who feeds them.' Using Source A and your own knowledge, explain what this type of source reveals about contemporary attitudes to Pericles' pay reforms.

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A 5-mark "explain" with a source needs the source USED, the inference it supports, and own knowledge beyond it.

Use the source: Source A represents the hostile comic tradition: it links Pericles' pay reforms directly to buying popular support, casting jury pay ("two obols") as a bribe and the poor jurors as a fed, cheering following, and mocks his aloof grandeur ("our Olympian") (2 marks).
The inference: This shows that the pay reforms were politically controversial in Pericles' own lifetime, and that critics read misthophoria not as widening participation but as a leader purchasing the loyalty of the demos (1 mark).
Own knowledge: Old Comedy poets such as Cratinus and Telecleides did nickname Pericles "the Olympian" and hint he ruled like a tyrant; the same charge that pay corrupted the citizens reappears in Plato's Gorgias (515-516) and in the criticism Aristotle records at Ath. Pol. 27.4, that jury pay lowered the quality of the courts (1 mark).
A caution: As comedy, the source distorts for laughs and is openly hostile, so it is strong evidence for how Pericles' critics FRAMED the reforms, not a neutral account of their purpose or effect (1 mark).

Marker's note: markers reward decoding the comic hostility into a historical claim (pay seen as bribery), a named corroborating source (Plato or Ath. Pol. 27.4), and an explicit statement that comedy is hostile evidence.

core6 marksExplain how Pericles completed the reduction of the Areopagus begun by Ephialtes, and why this mattered for Athenian democracy.

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A 6-mark "explain" needs the sequence, Pericles' role, and the constitutional significance, not narration.

The starting point: Ephialtes, 462/461 BC: Ephialtes stripped the ancient council of the Areopagus (composed of ex-archons) of its political oversight, its "guardianship of the laws" and general supervision of the state, transferring these powers to the boule, the ekklesia and the dikasteria (2 marks).
Pericles' role: Pericles was Ephialtes' younger associate and, according to Aristotle (Ath. Pol. 25 to 27) and Plutarch (Life of Pericles 9), backed the attack; after Ephialtes was assassinated, Pericles took over the leadership of the popular side and consolidated the change, so that the Areopagus was left with little beyond its old jurisdiction over homicide (2 marks).
Why it mattered: Removing the Areopagus's political brake left the sovereign organs of the demos, the assembly, the council chosen by lot, and the popular jury courts, without an aristocratic body able to override them. This is the decisive institutional step from the Cleisthenic system to "radical" democracy (2 marks).

Marker's note: markers reward the correct sequence (Ephialtes first, Pericles consolidates), the specific powers removed, and the argument that this cleared the last aristocratic check on the demos.

core6 marksSource B (an ExamExplained reconstruction, in the style of Aristotle's Constitution of the Athenians): 'Being worsted in wealth by Cimon, who gave freely from his own estate, Pericles instead gave the people what was their own, and provided pay for the jury-courts, by which means he built his following.' Assess the usefulness and reliability of this type of source for a historian investigating why Pericles introduced jury pay.

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A 6-mark source-analysis task needs balanced usefulness AND reliability, anchored in origin and motive, plus own knowledge and a historian.

Origin: This type of source reflects Aristotle's Constitution of the Athenians (Athenaion Politeia), a Peripatetic account of the mid-to-late 4th century BC that used earlier records and traditions, roughly a century after Pericles (2 marks).
Usefulness: It is genuinely useful because it supplies both the measure (pay for the dikasteria) and a stated motive (a bid to counter the private generosity of his richer rival Cimon), fixing jury pay as a deliberate political tool rather than an abstract reform; Ath. Pol. 27.3 to 4 is our fullest ancient explanation of the reform (2 marks).
Reliability: Reliability is limited by distance and viewpoint: Aristotle wrote long after the event and reflects a 4th-century assumption that popular leaders bid for support with pay, and his own text (27.4) then criticises the reform for debasing the courts, so the "buying a following" framing is interpretation, not a contemporary record. It should be checked against contemporary evidence such as Thucydides and the comic poets (1 mark).
Judgement: The source is most reliable as evidence of the reform's content and of how 4th-century Athenians explained it, and only indirectly reliable as evidence of Pericles' actual private motive; Rhodes, the standard commentator on the Ath. Pol., treats its documentary detail as valuable while reading its causal claims with caution (1 mark).

Marker's note: markers reward separating what the source records (the reform) from how far its stated motive can be trusted, the point that it is a century later, and a named historian (Rhodes) used to calibrate its reliability.

exam25 marksESSAY. To what extent did Pericles lead the demos rather than follow it? In your response, refer to relevant sources and historians' interpretations.

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A Band-6 response sustains a judgement on "to what extent," marshals dated evidence, and weaves historiography. This is a PLAN plus a model paragraph.

Thesis: Pericles held only one elected office and could be removed at any election, so his ascendancy rested on continuously persuading a sovereign demos, not commanding it; yet he repeatedly bent that demos to unpopular policy, which is leadership. On balance Thucydides' verdict, that he led rather than followed, best fits the evidence, but only because Athenian leadership meant winning consent, and his pay reforms mean he also served the demos's material interests.
Argument line 1: the institutions gave him no power to command: Pericles' only office was the strategia, elected annually; Plutarch (Life of Pericles 16) records fifteen continuous years from 443 BC. He was deposed and fined in 430 BC and re-elected in 429 BC. The demos, not Pericles, was sovereign, so any "rule" was rule by repeated re-election.
Argument line 2: the case that he LED: Thucydides (2.65.8 to 9), an eyewitness, states that Pericles "led them rather than being led by them," could contradict and even anger the assembly, and so Athens was "in name a democracy, but in fact rule by the first man." Kagan reads a principled statesman guiding a consenting demos, above all in imposing an unpopular defensive war strategy against the citizens' instinct to march out and fight.
Argument line 3: the case that he FOLLOWED or courted the demos: The hostile tradition reverses this. Plato's Gorgias (515 to 516) charges that Pericles corrupted the Athenians with pay and largesse; Aristotle (Ath. Pol. 27.4) records the criticism that jury pay debased the courts; Old Comedy (Cratinus, Telecleides) mocked "the Olympian" as a near-tyrant feeding his following. Plutarch (Per. 9) preserves the view that, outspent by Cimon, Pericles "turned to the people" with pay to build support.
Argument line 4: the reforms cut both ways: Misthophoria and the building programme did serve the demos's material interest, so in that sense he followed it; but on the war he plainly led it against its wishes. The two are not opposites: in a direct democracy, leading meant supplying what the demos wanted often enough to be trusted when you told it what it did not want to hear.
Historiography: Thucydides (contemporary, admiring) supplies the "led" reading; Plato and comedy (hostile) supply the "followed" reading; Kagan defends the statesman; Samons cautions that the idealised leader owes much to Thucydides' own admiration and should not be taken at face value; Rhodes reads the pay reforms as institutionally decisive rather than mere bribery.
Model paragraph (argument line 1): The sharpest test of who led whom is 430 to 429 BC. With the plague raging and the war going badly, the ekklesia stripped Pericles of the strategia and fined him, the ordinary sovereign sanction against any magistrate; yet within the year it re-elected him, persuaded once more by the reasoning Thucydides (2.60 to 2.64) attributes to him. A man who can be dismissed by a show of hands and then recalled by the same body is not a ruler over the demos, but a leader answerable to it, which is exactly why Thucydides frames the paradox as leadership by consent rather than as tyranny.
Judgement: To a large extent Pericles led: his power was consent-based and he repeatedly carried the demos against its own inclination. But his pay reforms mean he also followed its material interests, so the honest verdict is Thucydides' own, leadership that never stopped depending on the sovereign vote it guided.

Marker's note: Band 6 answers ANSWER the "to what extent," cite Thucydides 2.65 precisely, set it against the hostile Plato/comedy tradition, deploy dated evidence (the 443 BC run of strategoi, the 430/429 BC fine and re-election, jury pay), and integrate at least two named historians as argument. A chronological retelling of Pericles' career without engaging the lead-or-follow question caps the response mid-band.

exam20 marksESSAY. Assess the significance of Pericles' domestic reforms of the 450s BC for the development of Athenian radical democracy.

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A Band-6 essay reaches an explicit judgement on significance and ranks the reforms rather than listing them. This is a PLAN plus a model paragraph.

Thesis: Pericles' domestic reforms were the decisive step from the Cleisthenic system to genuinely radical democracy, because they converted formal rights into rights the poor could actually exercise; but their significance is double-edged, since the citizenship law simultaneously narrowed the very demos the pay reforms empowered.
Argument line 1: completing the Areopagus reduction: By consolidating Ephialtes' transfer of oversight (462/461 BC) to the boule, ekklesia and dikasteria, Pericles removed the last aristocratic brake on the sovereign organs of the demos (Aristotle, Ath. Pol. 25 to 27). Significance: it cleared the constitutional ground for popular sovereignty.
Argument line 2: misthophoria: Jury pay (Ath. Pol. 27.3, 2 obols a day), extended to the boule and magistracies, is the hinge of "radical" democracy: without a wage, only the leisured could serve; with it, the annual jury pool and the offices filled by lot could be drawn from the whole citizen body. This is the difference between holding a right and exercising it.
Argument line 3: the citizenship law of 451/450 BC: Requiring both parents to be Athenian (Ath. Pol. 26.4) narrowed and defined the citizen body. Its significance is exclusionary as well as democratic: it guarded the material privileges the other reforms created, pay, cleruchies and distributions, for a tightly bounded group.
Historiography: Aristotle attributes all three measures to Pericles and is our key witness; Rhodes stresses their institutional weight; Kagan reads them as principled democratic construction; debate continues on the citizenship law's motive (protecting the privileges of empire versus demographic management).
Model paragraph (argument line 2): Jury pay is the clearest proof that the reforms made democracy radical in substance, not only in name. Aristotle records that Pericles introduced 2 obols a day for the dikasteria, and the logic spread to the boule and other offices. A citizen who lived by his daily labour could now give a full day to the state without going hungry, so the 6,000-strong jury pool and the roughly annual rotation of allotted office could genuinely reach the poor rather than only the propertied. Formal entitlement and the means to use it are not the same thing, and misthophoria closed that gap, which is precisely why hostile critics from the comic poets to Plato attacked pay as the mechanism that put power in the hands of the many.
Judgement: Highly significant: the reforms turned Cleisthenic democracy into working radical democracy by removing the aristocratic check and funding mass participation. But their democratising and exclusionary effects are inseparable, so the significance is that of a single package that both widened participation and drew a sharper line around who could share it.

Marker's note: Band 6 answers reach an explicit judgement on significance, RANK the reforms (misthophoria as the hinge), cite specific detail (Ath. Pol. 27.3, the 451/450 BC date), and note the citizenship law's exclusionary edge rather than treating all three reforms as simply "democratic."