Plutarch's life of the Athenian statesman who built the Parthenon, led Athens into the Peloponnesian War, and died of the plague he had barricaded the city to withstand.
Plutarch's Pericles traces the career of the man who dominated Athenian politics for roughly three decades in the fifth century BCE. Born to an aristocratic family (his mother dreamed she bore a lion before his birth), Pericles studied under the philosopher Anaxagoras, who Plutarch says gave him his famous gravity, his imperturbable manner of speech, and his indifference to superstition. Wary early on of being compared to the tyrant Peisistratus, Pericles built a long, cautious ascent to power by championing the common people against the aristocratic faction, eventually outlasting rivals like Cimon and Thucydides son of Melesias to become, in practice if not in name, the sole director of Athenian policy.
The biography unfolds through two intertwined arcs: the building program and the war. Plutarch lingers over the construction of the Parthenon, the Propylaea, and the other monuments Pericles funded with treasury money nominally meant for the common defense of the Delian League, defending the project against charges of misappropriation and marveling that works meant to look ancient the moment they were finished were also raised with astonishing speed. The narrative then turns to the buildup toward the Peloponnesian War, the disputed Megarian decree, the Samian War, and Pericles's fateful decision to abandon the Attic countryside and fight from behind Athens's walls, a strategy that succeeded militarily but let the plague take hold in the crowded city. Plutarch closes with Pericles's stripping of command, his brief restoration, the deaths of his sons and sister to the plague, and his own final illness and death.
The Life matters historically because it is a primary lens through which later readers have understood the character of Athenian democracy at its high point, and because it wrestles openly with contradictory sources (Thucydides, Stesimbrotus, Ion, Idomeneus, Duris, Aristotle, Theophrastus) rather than pretending to a single settled account. Plutarch treats Pericles as an experiment in whether great power can be exercised without personal corruption, and his verdict, delivered explicitly at the Life's end, is that Pericles's restraint made his dominance a shield for the constitution rather than a threat to it.
“Pericles, marveling exceedingly at this man, and filling himself with the so-called study of celestial phenomena and lofty speculation, acquired not only, it seems, a proud disposition and elevated speech purged of vulgar and knavish buffoonery, but as well a facial gravity that resisted laughter altogether, an unhurried gait, and an arrangement of dress that was never disturbed by any passion while he spoke, an unruffled modulation of voice, and all such things that struck everyone with wonder.”
— Pericles
“As the works rose up, magnificent in scale, inimitable in form and grace, the craftsmen vying with one another to surpass their own artistry in beauty of workmanship, what was most astonishing of all was the speed. For things each one of which men thought would scarcely reach completion after passing through many successive generations, all of these were brought to completion within the flourishing prime of a single administration.”
— Pericles
“he calmed those who wished to fight and were chafing at what was happening, saying that trees, when cut and lopped, grow back quickly, but when men are destroyed, it is not easy to come by the like again.”
— Pericles
“The man is, then, admirable not only for the fairness and gentleness which he maintained amid many affairs and great enmities, but also for the loftiness of spirit which made him consider it the best of his achievements that, from such great power, he never gratified either envy or anger, nor treated any enemy as beyond redemption.”
— Pericles
“That power of his, once so envied, once called monarchy and tyranny, now looked, in hindsight, like a protective rampart shielding the constitution, so vast was the corruption and the sheer glut of wickedness weighing upon public affairs, which he, by keeping it weak and low, had hidden away and prevented from becoming incurable while in power.”
— Pericles
Pericles is paired with Fabius Maximus, the Roman general known for his delaying strategy against Hannibal. Plutarch explicitly introduces the Life as 'the tenth' book of the series, setting out Pericles's career alongside Fabius's.
Plutarch opens the Life with a broader argument about biography itself: that studying the deeds of virtuous men creates in the reader a zeal to imitate them, unlike admiring a craftsman's finished work without wanting to become a craftsman. Pericles is offered as exactly this kind of model, someone whose greatness is meant to instruct rather than merely entertain.
Plutarch reports the accusation directly: opponents charged that Pericles disgraced Athens by moving the common treasury of the Delian League from Delos to Athens and spending it on temples and statues. Plutarch also preserves Pericles's own defense before the assembly, in which he offered to pay for the buildings himself and inscribe them in his own name if the people preferred, at which point the assembly told him to spend freely from the public funds.
Facing a Spartan-led invasion force Plutarch numbers at sixty thousand hoplites, Pericles refused to meet them in open battle, instead evacuating the countryside and holding the city and its walls while using the navy to raid the Peloponnese. The policy avoided a catastrophic land battle but packed the population into a crowded city, which Plutarch identifies as the condition that let the plague take hold.
Pericles caught the plague that swept Athens during the war, though Plutarch notes his case was unusually slow and grinding rather than sharp and violent as it was for most others. He had already lost his sister and most of his political friends and family to the same epidemic, and he died shortly after being restored to command following a period when the Athenians had stripped him of his generalship.
Plutarch describes Aspasia as a woman renowned for her political wisdom, whom Pericles loved in what Plutarch calls 'an erotic kind' of attachment despite having a legitimate wife from whom he was separated. Comic poets mocked her relentlessly, comparing her to Omphale, Deianira, and Hera, and she was later prosecuted for impiety, a charge Pericles answered in person with tears before the jury.
Anaxagoras was the philosopher of natural science whom Plutarch credits with shaping Pericles's character, giving him his gravity of manner, his elevated style of speech, and his freedom from superstitious fear of celestial phenomena such as eclipses. Plutarch also records the pathetic detail that Anaxagoras, neglected in old age while Pericles was consumed by public affairs, began starving himself to death until Pericles rushed to his side upon hearing the news.
Plutarch reports competing explanations: some said it came from the buildings with which he adorned Athens, others from his political and military power, but Plutarch judges that comic poets of the time make clear the nickname arose chiefly from his manner of speaking, since his oratory was said to thunder and lighten like Zeus himself.
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