The leadership of Pericles, the working of Athenian democracy, and the nature of the Athenian empire on the eve of and during the war

What this dot point is asking

SCSA wants you to understand how Athens was led and governed on the eve of and during the Peloponnesian War, and Pericles is the central figure. You need to explain how Athenian democracy worked, how the Delian League became an Athenian empire, the leadership and strategy of Pericles, and the significance of his death early in the war. The Greece option is examined through source analysis and essays, so you must name and evaluate evidence such as Thucydides, Plutarch and the epigraphic tribute lists.

Athenian democracy under Pericles was direct and radical by ancient standards. Adult male citizens met in the assembly (ekklesia) to debate and decide policy, war and law by majority vote; a council (boule) of five hundred, chosen by lot, prepared business; and large citizen juries staffed the law courts. Pericles is associated with measures that deepened this democracy, including pay for jury service, which allowed poorer citizens to participate, and a law restricting citizenship to those with two Athenian parents. He held no monarchic office but was repeatedly elected as one of the ten generals (strategoi), exercising leadership through persuasion in the assembly rather than formal command.

Thucydides gives a famous and double-edged assessment of Periclean leadership, observing that Athens was in theory a democracy but in practice was becoming rule by its first citizen. This is a crucial source judgement: Pericles led not by holding special power but by the authority of his arguments and his record, dominating the assembly through eloquence and trust. His funeral oration, as reconstructed by Thucydides, presents an idealised vision of Athens as the school of Greece, a self-governing community worth dying for, and is a central, though literary and idealising, source for Athenian self-image.

The Athenian empire grew out of the Delian League, the alliance formed in 478 BC after the Persian Wars to continue resistance to Persia. Athens, with its great fleet, led the League, and members contributed either ships or, increasingly, money. Over the following decades Athens turned the alliance into an empire: it suppressed attempts to secede, moved the common treasury from Delos to Athens in 454 BC, and used allied tribute to fund its navy and its building programme, including the Parthenon. The inscribed Athenian Tribute Lists, recording the contributions of subject states, are a vital epigraphic source for the scale and workings of this empire, providing official documentary evidence alongside the narrative of Thucydides.

The empire was central to Athenian power and to the causes of the war. The tribute of the subject states funded the fleet that made Athens dominant at sea and paid for the public works and pay for office that sustained the democracy. But Athenian expansion and interference, such as the Megarian Decree restricting a Spartan ally's trade, alarmed Sparta and its allies. Thucydides identifies the growth of Athenian power and the fear it caused in Sparta as the truest underlying cause of the war, placing the empire that Pericles defended at the heart of the conflict.

When the war broke out in 431 BC, Pericles devised Athens' strategy. Recognising that Athens could not defeat Sparta's superior army in a land battle, he persuaded the Athenians to abandon the countryside of Attica, bring the rural population inside the Long Walls connecting the city to its port at Piraeus, and rely on the fleet, imperial revenue and seaborne raids to outlast Sparta. The strategy was rational, but crowding the population behind the walls contributed to a catastrophe: a devastating plague struck Athens from 430 BC, killing a large part of the population and, in 429 BC, Pericles himself. Thucydides, an eyewitness, gives a famous clinical account of the plague.

Pericles' death removed the leader whose authority had restrained Athenian politics, and Thucydides contrasts his measured leadership with the reckless demagogues who followed, such as Cleon, and with later disasters such as the Sicilian Expedition. This judgement, that Athens declined once it lost his guiding hand, is itself an interpretation that students should weigh rather than accept uncritically. Understanding Pericles, the democracy he led, the empire he defended and the strategy he set is essential to explaining both the outbreak and the early course of the war.