Athens had been destroyed by Persia, and Themisto-cles had led efforts at rebuilding in the decade that followed the defeat of the Persians. But he was ostracized in 470 b. c., and leadership of Athens fell to others. Then in 460 b. c., Pericles became archon (chief government official), and in the next thirty-one years he would institute so many reforms and direct the construction of so many splendid buildings that the era of his leadership would come to be known as the Age of Pericles or the Periclean Age (pair-uh-KLEE-uhn).
Although Cleisthenes (Pericles's great-uncle, as a matter of fact) had introduced democracy in Athens more than 40 years before, it was far from well established. There was a strong aristocratic party, that would happily have returned to the old days of the oligarchy. Among its leaders was Cimon (SIE-muhn; c. 510-c. 451 b. c.), son of Miltiades and leader of the force that had destroyed the Persian fleet in 467 b. c. When the helots of Sparta attempted a revolt in 465 B. C., Cimon urged the leaders of Athens to support the Spartan aristocracy. In 462 B. C., Athens sent a force to help suppress the revolt.
But just when Cimon was ensuring the stability of the old order in Sparta, something quite different was afoot in Athens. Also in 462 b. c. the city enacted a series of reforms that dramatically increased the power of its citizens over their government. Formerly a representative democracy, Athens became a rare example of a direct democracy. Direct democracy is a system in which all citizens are permitted, and indeed expected, to vote on issues before the government. Direct democracy is possible only with a very small, highly informed population, as was the case in Athens.
The democratic reforms were the work of young Pericles, who also extended the rights of citizenship to more men,
Poor as well as rich. He instituted a number of magnificent building projects financed by the cities of the Delian League, whose gold had been removed to Athens for “safekeeping.” Among the projects was one that had originated with the Themistocles, the building of a protective corridor, called the “Long Walls,” to connect Athens with its port at Piraeus (pie-REE-uhs) five miles away. Within the city, Pericles oversaw the building of many splendid temples and other public buildings. Perhaps none was as magnificent as one that survives to the present day: the Parthenon (PAHR-thuh-nahn).
The Parthenon sits atop the Acropolis in Athens. Its damaged beauty (it suffered an explosion during a war in a. d. 1687, when it was used as a munitions warehouse) seems to whisper of another time. A temple to Athena, the maiden, or parthenos, for whom Athens was named, it was far more than a beautiful building. Even today, architects are mystified by the brilliant design of Ictinus (ik-TIE-nuhs) and Callicrates (kuh-LIK-ruh-teez), the chief architects. They seem to have possessed an incredibly advanced understanding of how humans see objects in space. In a number of places where lines appear straight, they are actually curved, because a truly straight line would have seemed curved. The columns bulge at the center in order to look as though they taper gently from bottom to top.
Historians have less of a clear idea about the interior of the Parthenon. Long before the explosion, the temple was altered in order to make it first a Christian church, which it remained for about a thousand years, and later a Muslim mosque (MAHSK). At the center of the temple was a huge statue of Athena, designed by the great sculptor Phidias (FI-dee-uhs; fl. c. 490-430 B. c.) The temple included a number of treasures, among them the throne on which Xerxes had sat as he watched his defeat by the Greeks at Salamis; yet without question the greatest treasure was the statue of Athena itself. Like the Olympian Zeus, another sculpture by Phidias, it was made of gold and ivory. It probably showed Athena with a shield and weapons of war.
Not only is the Parthenon a symbol of the great Peri-clean Age, its story is also tied with the end of that brilliant time. Pericles' enemies had never gone away, and as a means of getting at him, they accused Phidias of stealing part of the gold intended for the statue. After Phidias disproved these
Charges, they charged him with carving pictures of himself and Pericles on Athena's shield—something which, if true, would have been a serious offense to the goddess. They managed to make the charges stick. Though Pericles stuck by Phidias, the sculptor was imprisoned.
The attacks of his enemies helped render Pericles less effective in his later days, but he would ultimately become a victim of his own creation. Perhaps the biggest city of its time, Athens's population in the Periclean Age may have been as high as 200,000, of which a quarter were citizens. The rest— women, children, foreigners, and slaves—lived poorly in comparison to the citizens, though they were generally much better off than their counterparts in Sparta and elsewhere.
Despite the great complexity of its civilization, the physical life of Athens was simple. People lived on a diet that consisted of little more than bread, olives, fruit, cheese, fish, and wine. At night they slept on the flat roofs of their houses because the interiors, made of sun-dried brick, was usually hot. There were public baths and steam rooms, and also open-air public toilets. Athens had no plumbing, and people simply threw their waste into the streets, which of course encouraged the spread of disease. In 429 b. c., Athens suffered a plague in which Pericles himself died.
World History
