The Golden Age of Pericles

After the repeated attempts for invasion by the barbarians (from the ancient Greek word barbaros meaning a non-Greek, someone whose language was not Greek) of Asia and their defeat, there followed what is known as the Golden Age of Pericles in Greece and chiefly in Athens. Arts and Philosophy reached the highest point of perfection.

The Sacred Precinct of Delos became the political and commercial center of the Greek Commonwealth as one might say. The Greeks now dominated all the coasts of the Aegean, on the European and Asia Minor sides, and the Eastern basin of the Mediterranean in general.

The Athenian hegemony resulting from the victories at Marathon and Salamis, aroused the envy of the Spartans. This was the cause of the fratricidal Peloponnesian war, which over two periods, lasted 27 years in all (431-421 B.C.and 416-404 B.C.)

The dislocation of the Greek world which resulted from this civil war, forced the Macedonian Kings, as we shall see in the following chapter, to intervene in the internal affairs of the Greeks south of the Olympus.

[This map shows the regions inhabited by Greeks during the period covered by this chapter. From the work of the American historian Will Durant (1)].

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(1) Vide The Story of Civilization. Vol II. The Life of Greece, by Will Durant. Simon and Schuster, New York.

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