Pericles
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Pericles (495-429BC), the statesman who dominated the politics of Athens for thirty years, the so-called Age of Pericles, when the city’s cultural life flowered, its democracy strengthened as its empire grew, and the Acropolis was adorned with the Parthenon. In 431 BC he gave a funeral oration for those Athenians who had already died in the new war with Sparta which has been celebrated as one of the greatest speeches of all time, yet within two years he was dead from a plague made worse by Athenians crowding into their city to avoid attacks. Thucydides, the historian, knew him and was in awe of him, yet few shared that view until the nineteenth century, when they found much in Pericles to praise, an example for the Victorian age.
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Guests
- Edith Hall
19 episodes
Professor of Classics at King's College London - Paul Cartledge
22 episodes
AG Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge -
Peter Liddel No other episodes
Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Manchester
Reading list
-
Pericles of Athens
Vincent Azoulay (trans. Janet Lloyd) (Princeton University Press, 2014) Google Books → -
Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical Tradition
Madeleine M. Henry (Oxford University Press, 1997) Google Books → -
The Acropolis in the Age of Pericles
Jeffrey M. Hurwit (Cambridge University Press, 2004) Google Books → -
Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy
Donald Kagan (Free Press, 1990) Google Books → -
Short Oxford History of Europe: Classical Greece
Robin Osborne (Oxford University Press, 2000) -
The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Lives
Plutarch (trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert) (Penguin, 1973) Google Books → -
Greek Lives
Plutarch (trans. Robin Waterfield) (Oxford University Press, 2008) Google Books → -
Perikles and his Circle
Anthony J. Podlecki (Routledge, 1997) Google Books → -
Plutarch: Life of Pericles - A Companion to the Penguin Translation
Anthony J. Podlecki (Bristol Classical Press, 1998) -
A History of the Classical Greek World, 478-323 BC
P.J. Rhodes (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) Google Books → -
The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Pericles
Loren J. Samons II (Cambridge University Press, 2007) Google Books → -
A Commentary on Plutarch's Pericles
Philip A. Stadter (University of North Carolina Press, 1989) Google Books → -
The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War
Robert B. Strassler (ed.) (Simon & Schuster, 1998) Google Books → -
The History of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides (trans. Richard Crawley) (Barnes & Noble, 2006) Google Books → -
The Peloponnesian War
Thucydides (trans. Martin Hammond) (Oxford University Press, 2009) Google Books → -
The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians
Thucydides (trans. Jeremy Mynott) (Cambridge University Press ) Google Books → -
Pericles: A Sourcebook and Reader
Stephen V. Tracy (University of California Press, 2009) Google Books →
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Programme ID: m000mk25
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000mk25
Auto-category: 938.05 (Classical Greece)
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