Overview
Pericles, Greece's greatest statesman and the leader of its Golden Age, created the Parthenon and championed democracy in Athens and beyond. Centuries of praise have endowed him with the powers of a demigod, but what did his friends, associates, and fellow citizens think of him?
In Pericles: A Sourcebook and Reader, Stephen V. Tracy visits the fifth century B.C. to find out. Tracy compiles and translates the scattered, elusive primary sources relating to Pericles. He brings Athens's political atmosphere to life with archaeological evidence and the accounts of those close to Pericles, including Thucydides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Protagoras, Sophocles, Lysias, Xenophon, Plato, and Plutarch. Readers will discover Pericles as a formidable politician, a persuasive and inspiring orator, and a man full of human contradictions.
Synopsis
"Pericles was first citizen at Athens when tragedy, comedy, architecture, rhetoric, philosophy, historiography, graphic arts, democracy, and empire were taking on forms that one way or another shape analogous undertakings today. Steven Tracy, whose wit and eyesight have enabled students to differentiate the hands of the Athenian cutters who inscribed laws and decrees in stone, provides a tight focus on this iconic yet curiously incorporeal figure.
In so doing he gives us an illuminating view of one of mankind's most brilliant generations."—Alan L. Boegehold, author of When A Gesture Was Expected
"Tracy's Pericles: A Sourcebook and Reader neatly arranges the collected extant sources for Pericles' life and public career, and provides an insightful and stimulating commentary directed towards undergraduates; it will help teachers convey to their students the complexities of the man's life and of Periclean Athens. This important contribution will become a standard resource in undergraduate courses on the period."—Michael D. Dixon, University of Southern
Indiana