Socrates here delivers to Menexenus a speech that he claims to have learned from Aspasia, a consort of Pericles and prominent female Athenian intellectual.

Plutarch informs us that Ion severely criticised Pericles, who is said to have been his rival in love.

T. S. Eliot found more to admire, saying of the moment of Pericles ' reunion with his daughter: " To my mind the finest of all the ' recognition scenes ' is Act V, i of that very great play Pericles.

Diogenes Laertius reports the story that he was prosecuted by Cleon for impiety, but Plutarch says that Pericles sent his former tutor, Anaxagoras, to Lampsacus for his own safety after the Athenians began to blame him for the Peloponnesian war.

In Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre Diana appears to Pericles in a vision, telling him to go to her temple and tell his story to her followers.

Thucydides admired Pericles, approving of his power over the people and showing a marked distaste for the demagogues who followed him.

Pericles had such a profound influence on Athenian society that Thucydides, his contemporary historian, acclaimed him as " the first citizen of Athens ".

When he first left the ecclesia ( the Athenian Assembly ) disheartened, an old man named Eunomus encouraged him, saying his diction was very much like that of Pericles.

The famous statesman Pericles also commissioned several sculptures for Athens from him in 447 BC, to celebrate Greek victory against the Persians at the Battle of Marathon during the Greco-Persian Wars ( 490 BC ).

The great statesman Pericles was closely associated with this new learning and a friend of Anaxagoras, however, and his political opponents struck at him by taking advantage of a conservative reaction against the philosophers ; it became a crime to investigate the things above the heavens or below the earth, subjects considered impious.

Pericles was a great speaker ; this quality brought him great success in the Assembly, presenting his vision of politics.

After Pericles ' death in 429 BC, Nicias became an important Athenian politician with the aristocratic ( conservative ) party looking to him as their leader.

Pericles returns to Tyre, where his trusted friend and counsellor Helicanus advises him to leave the city, for Antiochus surely will hunt him down.

A storm wrecks Pericles ' ship and washes him up on the shores of Pentapolis.

Although his equipment is rusty, Pericles wins the tournament and the hand of Thaisa ( who is deeply attracted to him ) in marriage.

Pericles ' wanderings bring him to Mytilene where the governor Lysimachus, seeking to cheer him up, brings in Marina.

Next, the goddess Diana appears in a dream to Pericles, and tells him to come to the temple where he finds Thaisa.

In 1608, Wilkins published a prose narrative of Pericles which contains several lines that seem to recall specific lines in the play, leading to the conclusion that his editing of the play led him to the composition of the prose.

The little which is known about him is mostly gleaned from a small passage in Plutarch ’ s Life of Pericles.

* Jimmy ’ s Kidnapped: Citracett and a gorilla ( named " Gorilla Friend " in an organ grinder monkey outfit, later " Anaxamander-the Noble Primate " in a " Pericles helmet ") kidnap Jimmy the Hapless Idiot Boy after Rip harasses him into running away.

Some of these plays ( such as Pericles ) are believed by most scholars of Shakespeare to have been written by him ( at least in part ).

Pericles is mentioned by name in two other plays and there are also indirect references to him.

His writings attracted the notice of Pericles, who offered to provide for his maintenance, if he would come and reside with him ; but Simon refused, on the grounds that he did not wish to surrender his independence.

Some of the most important figures of Western cultural and intellectual history lived in Athens during this period: the dramatists Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides and Sophocles, the physician Hippocrates, the philosophers Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, the historians Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon, the poet Simonides and the sculptor Phidias, The leading statesman of this period was Pericles, who used the tribute paid by the members of the Delian League to build the Parthenon and other great monuments of classical Athens.

Berlin traced positive liberty from Aristotle's definition of citizenship, which is historically derived from the social role of the freemen of classical Athens: it was, Berlin argued, the liberty in choosing their government granted to citizens, and extolled, most famously, by Pericles.

Athenian citizens had to be descended from citizens — after the reforms of Pericles and Cimon in 450 BC on both sides of the family, excluding the children of Athenian men and foreign women.

Yet in the case of Pericles, it is wrong to see his power as coming from his long series of annual generalships ( each year along with nine others ).

Under Pericles, in 450 BC, restrictions were tightened so that a citizen had to be born from citizen parentage on both sides.

The League's modern name derives from its official meeting place, the island of Delos, where congresses were held in the temple and where the treasury stood until, in a symbolic gesture, Pericles moved it to Athens in 454 BC.

In 454 BC, the Athenian general Pericles moved the Delian League's treasury from Delos to Athens, allegedly to keep it safe from Persia.

It was from tribute paid to the league that Pericles set to building the Parthenon on the Acropolis, replacing an older temple, as well as many other non-defense related expenditures.

The balance of power shifted from Athens to Sparta, ending the Golden Age of Pericles that had marked Athenian dominance in the Greek ancient world.

* Pericles leads Athenian forces in the expulsion of barbarians from the Thracian peninsula of Gallipoli, in order to establish Athenian colonists in the region.

Pericles used some of the money from the maritime League of Delos, to rebuild and decorate Athens to celebrate this victory.

* Pericles declares that the Delian League's considerable treasury at Delos is not safe from the Persian navy and has the treasury transferred to Athens, thus strengthening Athens ' power over the League.

The threat from the Spartan army leads Pericles to arrange, by bribery and by negotiation, that Athens will give up its mainland possessions and confine itself to a largely maritime empire.

* After hearing that the Spartan army had accepted bribes from Pericles, Pleistoanax, the King of Sparta, is impeached by the citizens of Sparta, but flees to exile in Arcadia.

* Pericles becomes ill from the plague but he recovers, temporarily.

* Pericles renews alliances with the Rhegium on the south west corner of Italy and Leontini in south-east Sicily, threatening Sparta's food supply route from Sicily.

A body of Athenian colonists was accordingly sent out by Pericles, under the command of Lampon and Xenocritus ; but the number of Athenian citizens was small, the greater part of those who took part in the colony being collected from various parts of Greece.

Pericles responds by proposing to reimburse the city for all the expenses from his private property, on the condition that he would make the inscriptions of dedication in his own name.

His stance is supported by the ecclesia, so Thucydides ' efforts to dislodge Pericles from power are defeated.

That he studied general history, as we see from the quotations in Plutarch's lives of Lycurgus, Solon, Aristides, Pericles, Nicias, Alcibiades, Lysander, Agesilaus, and Demosthenes, which were probably borrowed from the work on Lives.

Anaxagoras enjoyed the patronage of influential figures such as Pericles, but oligarchic elements also had political advocates and Anaxagoras was charged with impiety and expelled from Athens around 437 BC.

* Pericles: Among the most famous of Athenian leaders, he was blamed in The Acharnians for starting the Peloponnesian War but he receives some faint praise here as somebody who never stole food from the prytaneion-unlike Cleon ( line283 ).

Pericles initiated its reconstruction with white marble brought from the nearby quarry of Pentelicon.