1. GOLDEN AGE OF ATHENS1.1 Leader with integrityPericles (c.495-429 BC), the Athenian political leader and general was noted for his oratory, political acumen, and integrity. He dominated Athens throughout the third quarter of the 5th century BC. He supported Ephialtes in his attack on the Areopagus, and after his death became champion of the Athenian democracy, proposing pay for jurors, and other innovations. He was instrumental in strengthening and extending the Athenian empire, sending out colonies, and personally leading the attack against rebellions at Samos and an expedition into the Black Sea, important as a source of corn. He originated a major building programme, of which the jewel was the Parthenon, the temple that dominated the acropolis. When the spectre of war with the Peloponnesians threatened in the 430s, Pericles determined to resist their demands. After the Peloponnesian War broke out, he persuaded the Athenians to abandon the countryside when the Spartans invaded and to rely on their fleet. He was briefly deposed from the generalship when plague shattered Athenian confidence, but was re-elected the following year (429). He died of plague soon afterwards.In expanding Pericles' biography, modern historians consider this Athenian statesman as being largely responsible for the full development of Athens, of both the Athenian democracy and the Athenian empire, making Athens the political and cultural focus of Greece. His achievements included the construction of the Acropolis, begun in 447.1.2 Background and educationKnowledge of the life of Pericles derives largely from two sources. The historian Thucydides admired him profoundly and refused to criticize him. His account suffers from the fact that, 40 years younger, he had no firsthand knowledge of Pericles' early career; it suffers also from his approach, which concentrates exclusively on Pericles' intellectual capacity and his war leadership, omitting biographical details, which Thucydides thought irrelevant to his theme. The gaps are partly filled by the Greek writer Plutarch, who, 500 years later, began writing the life of Pericles to illustrate a man of unchallengeable virtue and greatness at grips with the fickleness of the mob and finished rather puzzled by the picture he found in his sources of Pericles' responsibility for a needless war. These sources are not all ascertainable, but they certainly preserve an invaluable amount of fact and contemporary gossip, which is sometimes nearly as useful.Pericles was born into the first generation able to use the new weapon of the popular vote against the old power of family politics. His father, Xanthippus, a typical member of this generation, almost certainly of an old family, began his political career by a dynastic marriage into the controversial family of the Alcmaeonids. He soon left their political camp, probably on the question of relations with Persia, and took the then new path of legal prosecution as a political weapon.