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(credits Ellen Mayer-Splain and Stacie Weiss)
Pericles was born into a rich, aristocratic family.
Pericles sponsored a major dramatic production for the festival of Dionysus; he was assigned to Aeschylus whose play won that year. This brought Pericles widespread recognition.
Pericles first became involved in politics, organizing a vote in the popular assembly with another politician to deprive the old, noble council of its remaining power. This had far reaching consequences and "many historians believe it to mark the defining moment of Athenian democracy."
Thucydides was born to Olorus, a relative of Cimon, which made his family wealthy and influential as they owned several mines in Thrace. He lived in a suburb southwest of Athens.
Pericles introduced a new citizenship law that a son must have both an Athenian mother and father to be considered a citizen of the city. This served to limit the ability of the aristocracy to forge alliances with aristocrats from other cities.
Pericles began his most famous project, the building of the Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis
The Peloponnesian War began between Athens and Sparta, and Thucydides began writing his History of the Peloponnesian War.
"Pericles stood before the popular assembly and urged them to make a momentous decision: 'If we go to war, as I think we must, be determined that we are not going to climb down. For it is from the greatest dangers that the greatest glories are to be won.' The assembly responded by declaring war on Sparta."
(www.pbs.org/empires/thegreeks/htmlver/characters/f_pericles.html)
Pericles delivered his Funeral Oration.
"Ostensibly the speech that Pericles delivered over the war dead in the winter of 431/30, it represents Thucydides' evaluation of the age of Pericles." (homepage.usask.ca/~jrp638/CourseNotes/ThucNotes.html)
Thucydides was in Athens when plague broke out. Thucydides survived; Pericles did not. Pericles died in the fall of 429 BCE.
"As the historian Thucydides observed of Athens during Pericles' long rule over it: 'In name democracy, but in fact the rule of one man'." (www.pbs.org/empires/thegreeks/htmlver/characters/f_pericles.html)
Plague of Athens ended.
Thucydides was elected a military general and was given
command of an Athenian fleet at Thasos in the Northern Aegean Sea. At the Battle of Amphipolis in winter, Thucydides was asked to help his fellow Athenians who were being attacked, but he was unable to come to their aid before they surrendered. Thucydides was recalled, tried, and sentenced to exile. Thus he was away from Athens for most of the rest of the war, but the exile gave him the chance for travel and wider contacts among the various combatants, especially in Sparta. His exile ended with the defeat of Athens by Sparta in 404 BCE.
The war ended with Sparta victorious over Athens. Thucydides returned to Athens after the war ended, and others petitioned that he be allowed to return from exile
There is no firm evidence about Thucydides's death. It has been claimed that he was assassinated and then later buried
at Athens in the vault of Cimon's family. It is also though that he died of natural causes circa 397BCE. His History of the Peloponnesian War ended abruptly in 411 BCE and did not cover the end phases of he war. Xenophon’s Hellenica is considered a continuation of Thucydides history.
First English translation of History of the Peloponnesian War is published by Thomas Hobbes.
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