Pericles

Open and friendly in our private relation, in our public acts we keep strictly within the law. We recognize the restraint of reverence; we are obedient to officials and laws, especially the laws that protect the oppressed and to the unwritten laws whose violation brings admitted shame. Yet ours is no work-a-day city only. No other provides so many recreations for the spirit – contests and sacrifices all year round, and beauty in our public buildings to cheer the heart and delight the eye day by day. Moreover, this city is so large and powerful that the wealth of the whole world flows into her, so that our own products seem no more homelike to us than those of other nations.




We love beauty without extravagance, and wisdom without unmanliness. We employ wealth, not as a means to vanity and ostentation, but as an opportunity for service. To acknowledge poverty is no disgrace; the true disgrace is making no effort to overcome it. An Athenian citizen does not neglect public affairs because he is too concerned with his private business. We regard a person who takes no interest in public affairs, not as quiet but useless. If few of us are originators, we are all sound judges of policy. The great impediment to action is, in our opinion, not discussion, but the lack of full information which is gained by discussion prior to action.

-In a funeral address designed to honor Athenian warriors who had died fighting Sparta, Pericles gave this choice oratorical declamation on the Athenian way of life as it then exsisted.

This was in the golden age of Herodotus and Thucydides, the famous Greek historians. It was the age of Socrates the philosopher, Hippocrates the physician, Phidias the sculptor, Aristophanes the satirical dramatist, and Sophocles and Euripides and classical Greek dramatists. Sculpture, architecture, painting, drama, science, philosophy, history, commerce and political stability all flourished during this amazing period. It has truly been called “the Golden Age of Pericles”.

It is also interesting that the famous golden age of Grecian culture occured right about the time the Jews were returning to Jeruselam from Babylon in 438 B.C.