Author Description

*Includes the full text of Pericles famous Funeral Oration during the Peloponnesian War as recorded by Thucydides. *Includes pictures of famous art depicting Pericles and important people, places, and events in his life. "Future ages will wonder at us, as the present age wonders at us now. We do not need the praises of a Homer, or of anyone else whose words may delight us for the moment, but the estimation of facts will fall short of what is really true." - PericlesA lot of ink has been spilled covering the lives of history's most influential figures, but how much of the forest is lost for the trees? In Charles River Editors' Legends of the Ancient World series, readers can get caught up to speed on the lives of antiquity's most important men and women in the time it takes to finish a commute, while learning interesting facts long forgotten or never known. In conjunction with the founding of democracy, Athens ushered in the "Golden Age" of the Ancient Greeks, which saw the invention or mastery of everything from mathematics and engineering to philosophy and art. And among the Athenians, none were as influential as Pericles, the West's first great statesman. Leading Athens for upwards of 40 years between the Second Persian War and the Peloponnesian War, Pericles has become an idealized figure over the last 2,000 years, but he was a polarising figure among his contemporaries. According to some, he was an honest and upstanding politician, while for others he was the lowest kind of demagogue, a political opportunist whose ability to wriggle free of criticism was best summed up by the typically pithy comment of his rival Thucydides (not to be confused by the famous historian of the same name, one of the main sources for Pericles's life). When asked who the better fighter was, Thucydides replied, "Pericles - even when he loses, he still convinces the Athenians he's won". As Strategos, Pericles was Athens' commander-in-chief, and the chief architect of