What is the significance of PERICLES to the HISTORY OF ANCIENT GREECE?
Under the leadership of Pericles, Athenian democracy reached its apex. Athens became a true democracy in which common citizens possessed an unprecedented degree of power. Athens assumed the leadership of a confederacy centered in the Aegena, an empite that prevented further incursions by Persia into Greece. Among the products of Periclean Athens were art and architecture that remain the wonders of the world, the three greatest tragedians of ancient Greece, the most famous philosopher of the ancient world, and the first historians. It was here in the period of Pericles that Athens constituted both the culmination of Greece’s archaic period and the birthplace of Western Civilization. NOTE: the ancient Greeks are very different from the modern Greeks of today.
