The Athenian History according to Pericles: Ancestors, Fathers, and Present-Day Men in Thuc. II 36, 1-3

In Thuc. II 36, 1-3 Pericles structures the entire Athenian history into three phases, clearly distinguished through their respective merits: the age of the progonoi, that of the pateres, that of the present-day men. This is a great difference with the other logoi epitaphioi, where the Athenian past is an undifferentiated continuum; on the contrary, the tripartite climax in Thuc. II 36, 1-3 aims to give greater prominence to the last two phases, when Athens acquired and then developed the arkhe. Despite the overall clarity of the text, scholars have been puzzled by the exact identity of οἱ πατέρες ἡμῶν mentioned in 36, 2 (and therefore by the definition of the chronological boundaries between the three groups). In this paper, strong arguments are given in favor of the thesis that the age of the pateres includes the Persian Wars: above all, the comparison with Thuc. I 144, 4 and the need for internal coherence between Thuc. 2, 36, 1 and Thuc. II 36, 4 (with its reference to the struggle against the “barbarian enemy”). Therefore, if the sixty years between 490 and the end of 431 are divided in half, the boundary between pateres and ‘present-day men’ can be placed around 461 BC: an actual turning point in the fifth-century Athenian history. Anyhow, this question is not only merely exegetical: the attribution of the Persian Wars to the pateres is consistent with the viewpoint (widespread in fifth-century sources) according to which the Persian Wars were the first step in the acquisition of the arkhe; the absence of a minimal reference to the Persian Wars (a central theme in contemporary Athenian propaganda) seems to match the Periclean Athenian foreign policy, which put an end to the wars against the Persians, focusing on the hegemony over the allies and on the confrontation with Sparta and her allies.