Periclean Buildings, Eternal Fame, and Well-Being in the Present: The Pericles of Plutarch and the Pericles of Thucydides

The ideas (and even some elements of the lexicon) attributed to Pericles by Plutarch (Per. 12. 3-5) in his account of the building program debate can be traced in the Thucydidean Pericles, too. Plut. Per. 12. 4 can be compared to Thuc. 2. 41. 4 (as for the doxa arising from the Periclean buildings) and mostly to 2. 64. 3. This Thucydidean (Periclean) passage shows many conceptual links with Pericles’ words in Plut. Per. 12. 4: e.g., the military Athenian self-sufficiency; the pride for the new outlook given to Athens by the Periclean building program; the idea that glory arises from this new urban outlook, too; the euphoria as the result of a conscious political action, which every citizen may benefit from; and so on. These points of contact show that the ideas expressed by ‘Pericles’ in Plut. Per. 12. 3-4 date back not only to a well-informed intermediate source from the 5th cent. BC, but, arguably, to the historical Pericles himself, precisely because the agreement with Thucydides is close but totally independent if the formal, stylistic, and narrative aspects are considered. These comparisons add to the many elements which allow us to accept the historical reliability of the sequence of political events narrated in Plut. Per. 12 (a well-known vexata quaestio).