What it is
The Life of Pericles is Plutarch's biography of the Athenian statesman Pericles (c. 495–429 BCE), paired in the Parallel Lives with the Roman Fabius Maximus — two leaders of steadiness and self-command who restrained their cities' rasher impulses. The platform reads it as Plutarch's fullest study of leadership exercised through character, and as a central text for the Athens of the great age.
Its purpose and method
Plutarch reads Pericles as the model of the leader who masters himself. He dwells on Pericles' celebrated self-control — his unflappable dignity, his refusal to be provoked or to court the crowd, his power to lead the volatile Athenian assembly by authority rather than flattery. The platform reads the Life under leadership and character: Plutarch's Pericles leads not by technique but by the visible steadiness of his character, and the Life is in large part a study of how that inner discipline translated into public authority over a free and turbulent people.
What it argues about Pericles and Athens
The Life ties Pericles' character to Athens' greatness and to the seeds of its trouble. Plutarch credits him with the building program that crowned the Acropolis, with the leadership that made Athens the school of Greece, and with a personal integrity proof against the bribery and faction of his rivals. The platform reads it alongside the platform's broader treatment of Athens and against the Life of Alcibiades, Pericles' ward: the contrast between the guardian's self-command and the ward's ungoverned brilliance is one Plutarch's reader is meant to feel. The Life reads Athenian greatness through the character of the man who shaped its golden age.
Influence and citation
The Life of Pericles is, with Thucydides, one of the two principal ancient portraits of the statesman, and Plutarch preserves much (the building program, the personal anecdotes, the famous sayings) that the historians do not. The platform reads it with the standard discipline — Plutarch wrote five centuries after Pericles, weighing character over chronicle — and draws on it for the essay on the education of statesmen, where Pericles stands as the type of leadership formed by self-mastery.