c. 495-429 BC · Athenian statesman and general who led Athens at the start of the Peloponnesian War
About Pericles
Pericles (c. 495-429 BC), son of Xanthippus, was the leading statesman of Athens for some three decades, repeatedly elected one of the city's ten generals. He promoted the building program on the Acropolis that produced the Parthenon, strengthened the Athenian naval empire, and directed the city's strategy at the start of the Peloponnesian War. He died in 429 BC during the plague that struck Athens. The speech survives only in the version given by the historian Thucydides (c. 460-c. 400 BC), an Athenian general and contemporary.
delivered 431 BC; recorded by Thucydides c. 431-400 BC · Ancient · Oratory
Pericles' Funeral Oration is the speech that the Athenian statesman Pericles delivered in the winter of 431/430 BC at the public burial of the citizens who had died in the first year of the Peloponnesian War against Sparta. It survives only in the History of Thucydides, who heard Pericles speak and who says of the speeches in his work that he kept as close as he could to the general sense of what was actually said.