# Pericles **c. 495–429 BCE.** The Athenian who presided over the democracy at its height, built the Parthenon, and led the city into the war that ended it. ## The Elected Man in a City of Lotteries The detail that makes Pericles useful here: in a system that filled almost every office **by lot** (see [[Sortition]]), he held one of the few **elected** offices — *strategos*, general — and was re-elected to it something like fifteen years running. **Athens's most powerful citizen occupied the one position its own theory classified as oligarchic.** Thucydides put it precisely: Athens was "in name a democracy, but in fact the rule of the first man." The Athenians did not experience this as hypocrisy; they had built a system in which the lottery distributed ordinary power widely and election concentrated a narrow, revocable kind of it, and the concentration was visible and annual. ## The Funeral Oration The speech Thucydides gives him over the first war dead of 431 BCE is the founding text of democratic self-description in the West. Its claims — that Athens is an example rather than an imitator; that advancement follows merit not class; that a man who takes no interest in public affairs is not harmless but useless; that ordinary citizens are competent judges of policy even when they cannot originate it — are quoted in Western democracies continuously. Two things about it are worth carrying. **It is a war speech.** The Funeral Oration is a recruiting document delivered at a state funeral in the first year of a war Pericles had argued for. Its idealism is doing wartime work. **Thucydides wrote it.** The historian states openly that he composed speeches to fit what the occasion demanded. **The most-quoted description of Athenian democracy is a literary reconstruction by a man who was not a democrat.** ## The Plague and the Judgment Pericles's strategy was to abandon the Attic countryside, bring the population inside the walls, and let the navy win the war. Crowding the city produced the plague of 430 BCE, which killed perhaps a quarter to a third of the Athenians — Pericles among them, in 429. The Athenians fined and deposed him during the crisis and then re-elected him. **The democracy punished its leader for an outcome and restored him for his judgment, inside a year** — which is more institutional flexibility than the standard morality tale about mob rule allows for. > [!note] Why the vault keeps him > Pericles is the standing rebuttal to two opposite misuses of Athens. Against the right's version — Athens as an aristocratic golden age — he is the elected servant of a lottery-based system that fined him. Against the sentimental version — Athens as pure participatory virtue — he is proof that a direct democracy still concentrated real power in one re-elected man for a generation, and that its finest statement of principle was written by a critic, about a war. See [[Antiquity in Right-Wing Thought Hub]]. ## See Also - [[Athens]] · [[Ancient Greece]] · [[Peloponnesian War]] · [[Sortition]] · [[Ostracism]] - [[Democracy]] · [[Demagogue]] · [[Deliberative Democracy]] - [[Greek History Hub]] · [[Antiquity in Right-Wing Thought Hub]]