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)
• Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical Tradition
  Madeleine M. Henry (Oxford University Press, 1997)
• The Acropolis in the Age of Pericles
  Jeffrey M. Hurwit (Cambridge University Press, 2004)
• Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy
  Donald Kagan (Free Press, 1990)
• 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)
• Greek Lives
  Plutarch (trans. Robin Waterfield) (Oxford University Press, 2008)
• Perikles and his Circle
  Anthony J. Podlecki (Routledge, 1997)
• 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)
• The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Pericles
  Loren J. Samons II (Cambridge University Press, 2007)
• A Commentary on Plutarch's Pericles
  Philip A. Stadter (University of North Carolina Press, 1989)
• The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War
  Robert B. Strassler (ed.) (Simon & Schuster, 1998)
• The History of the Peloponnesian War
  Thucydides (trans. Richard Crawley) (Barnes & Noble, 2006)
• The Peloponnesian War
  Thucydides (trans. Martin Hammond) (Oxford University Press, 2009)
• The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians
  Thucydides (trans. Jeremy Mynott) (Cambridge University Press )
• Pericles: A Sourcebook and Reader
  Stephen V. Tracy (University of California Press, 2009)

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Programme ID: m000mk25

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000mk25

Auto-category: 938.05 (Classical Greece)

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