3314–3329 AM · 447 BCE — 432 BCE · world history
Periclean Athens and the Parthenon
The fifteen years of building the Acropolis, in which Athenian democracy and drama came to their height.
Pericles diverts the naval league's treasury into rebuilding the Acropolis the Persians burned, and the Parthenon rises. In the same years citizens vote in assembly, juries of hundreds decide cases, and spring festivals stage Sophocles and Euripides, heirs of Aeschylus, who had died a few years earlier. The franchise reached only free men, but the idea began here.
Sources
Scholarship
- Greek authors: Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch — Thucydides (Pericles’ funeral oration) and Plutarch, Pericles
- archaeology of the Aegean world — the Parthenon itself and the building accounts of the Acropolis in Athenian inscriptions
Basis: documents and evidence.