Where did Pericles grow up and live?

📍Agora of Athens, Monastiraki, Athens, Attica 105 55, Greece

“I led Athens during its golden age in the fifth century BC, and the city I served was also the city that formed me. I was born around 495 BC into the Alcmaeonid family — one of Athens' most distinguished aristocratic clans — and grew up in a city that was transforming itself from a conventional Greek polis into the world's first democracy. The Parthenon and the Propylaea and the other buildings of the Acropolis were built under my direction, not as vanity projects but as physical expressions of what Athens was and aspired to be. The city's public spaces — the Agora, the Pnyx where the citizens assembled — were where democracy happened in practice, where every free male citizen could speak. I gave the funeral oration for those killed in the first year of the Peloponnesian War, and in it I described what we were defending.”

👍 LovedThe Athenian democracy in its fullest expression — the assembly, the jury courts, the sense that collective self-governance was possible. The building programme on the Acropolis that gave the democracy its physical face. The intellectual life of a city that contained Socrates and Sophocles and Herodotus.

👎 DislikedThe plague that struck Athens in 430 BC and killed a quarter of the population — and eventually killed me. The Peloponnesian War that I had advised entering and that would ultimately destroy Athenian power. The democracy's capacity to turn on its own leaders.

Map showing where Pericles lived — Agora of Athens, Monastiraki, Athens, Attica 105 55, Greece

🗺️ Approximate location today

📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons

Sources: Kagan, D. Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy (1991), Free Press; Plutarch, Life of Pericles (75 AD)