Pericles: A Sourcebook and Reader

Preface

PREFACE This book about Pericles will fill, I hope, a need of teachers and students at high schools and colleges who are studying the golden age of Athens. That period is usually called the Periclean Age after Athens’ greatest leader, Pericles. However, despite the undeniable importance of the man, there exists no book in English that collects in one place the scattered primary evidence about his life. Scholarly books on Pericles and his era, of course, appear with regularity in a variety of languages. Two recent works are W. Will, Thukydides und Perikles (Bonn, 2003), and A. Banfi, Il governo della città: Pericle nel pensiero antico (Bologna, 2003). This modest sourcebook and reader has several purposes: to bring together in readable translations all of the passages pertaining to Pericles that were written by persons who either knew him personally or were in a position to know others who knew him well, to provide helpful interpretive comments on these passages, and to assess what Pericles’ contemporaries may have thought of him. xxi This book is intended for students who have no knowledge of Greek and who also are likely to have very little knowledge of ancient Greece. Thus I have deliberately kept the notes and scholarly apparatus to a minimum, referring mainly to the primary sources. Basic information students will need to know I have tried to include in the text or in the glossary. The translations throughout are my own. My goal in translating is to be both accurate and clear. Strict accuracy occasionally has been sacrificed in favor of a turn of phrase that is understandable to contemporary students. In the case of the historian Thucydides, that most difficult of Greek stylists, I have out of necessity greatly simplified his complex sentence structure, but I have not tried to give him a false clarity. His meaning is at times opaque, and I have not disguised that fact in translating him. The directors of the University of California Press some years ago paid me the compliment of inviting me to contribute this book. I trust this slim volume does not belie their confidence . I am indebted to the College of Humanities of the Ohio State University for the grant of a research leave for most of the 2000–2001 academic year, which enabled me to write an initial draft. Despite heavy administrative duties as Director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (2002–2007), duties that left little time for writing, I have now (five years later) finished the book. As I look back, my greatest debt is to my students, who over the last thirty years have shared their thoughts and questions with me. They are truly the coauthors of this volume. I also am indebted to the anonymous readers of the Press for detailed and helpful suggestions. Lastly, my wife, Professor June Allison, a fine Thucydidean scholar, and my son, Ben, now a senior in college—it is students his age and a bit xxii / Preface younger for whom this book is primarily intended—have offered invaluable criticism of the manuscript in its various stages. For good or ill, however, I alone am responsible for what is on these pages. The American School of Classical Studies / St. Augustine Beach Athens, Greece / St. Augustine, Florida December 2006 / August–September 2007 Preface / xxiii This page intentionally left blank ...