Hubris: Pericles, the Parthenon, and the Invention of Athens

About the Book

A new perspective on ancient Athens at the height of its powers, reinterpreting the city's supposed "Golden Age" as a period of ruinous culture wars.

The age of Pericles, in the fifth century BC, is often described as the Golden Age of Athens. The city witnessed a flowering of philosophy, art, and architecture-including an ambitious building program, with the Parthenon its centerpiece. But as David Stuttard shows in this vivid account, the seemingly triumphant city was in fact riven by conflict and contradiction. Though nominally a democracy, Athens led a tyrannical empire. And for Pericles and his circle, the Parthenon was less a holy place than a propaganda vehicle. Its sculptures carried the message that Athenians, beloved by the gods, were nearly divine in their own right-which to many Greeks smacked of hubris.

As long as things went well, Athenian democracy appeared to prosper. But just a year after the Parthenon was finished, Athens was at war with Sparta; a plague killed a third of the population, including Pericles; and earthquakes razed much of the city. In the wake of what seemed like divine retribution, popular outrage against those accused of undermining state religion was so strong that it took the execution of Socrates to lance the boil.

Hubris offers dramatic portraits of key figures like Pheidias, who sculpted the monumental figure of Athena yet fell prey to charges of impiety; Themistocles, who built the Athenian navy but died an exile in enemy lands; and Alcibiades, the psychopathic playboy whose mercurial ego hastened his city's defeat. To understand the Parthenon and the Athens that built it, Stuttard makes clear, we must recognize the tensions among the city's rivalrous families, generations, and social classes, whose visions of their place in the world ultimately proved incompatible.

About the Author :
David Stuttard is an independent scholar, theater director, and Fellow of Goodenough College, London. He has written numerous books about Ancient Greece, including Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens and Phoenix: A Father, a Son, and the Rise of Athens.

Review :
Judiciously researched…Stuttard moves the story along with flair. Stuttard brings ancient Athens to vivid life as a world riven by intense moral and religious debate rather than a dry realm of ponderous metaphysics. It’s an elegant corrective to the soft-focus nostalgia with which Classical Greece is often viewed. A unique history of Athens in the Age of Pericles…a creative and convincing joining of art and architecture with social and political history in that far-distant time. Tells the story of classical Athens in lock-step tandem with a detailed tour of the Acropolis itself…[Stuttard] lovingly describe[s] every feature and dimension of the Parthenon while linking those features to the outlines of Athenian history in their victory over Persia, their lightning-fast growth as a regional superpower, their increasingly bitter rivalry with Sparta, and the many changes Pericles himself instituted in his society. A wonderful book. The rise and fall of Athens in the fifth century BC may seem familiar, but David Stuttard is a gifted storyteller and the tale is not told in the usual way. Hubris offers a cultural as well as a political and military history: Stuttard immerses us in Athenian life and shows how the Parthenon, along with other monuments and artistic productions, makes sense in the context of Athenian ambitions, hopes, and fears. Teeming with fascinating details and sparkling turns of phrase, Hubris is a sheer treat. There is no shortage of books on Classical Athens, but Hubris stands alone in its expansiveness, readability, and congeniality. Deftly interlacing politics, religion, architecture, art, and literature, David Stuttard uses his keen imagination and consummate learning to illuminate the ‘city of the gods.’ It is one of the book’s many strengths that it provokes readers to determine for themselves the extent to which hubris brought about Athens’s ruin. One could not wish for a more vivid or more captivating guide to the tragic demise of one of humanity’s greatest experiments. David Stuttard is among our finest popularizers of ancient Greek political and cultural history, and an expert on the fifth-century BC building complex centered on the Acropolis of Athens and the Parthenon. In Hubris, he brings all these skills together to produce the most gripping history of Athens’s self-invention during a century graced by Pericles, Thucydides, and Sophocles, among a glittering galaxy of other intellects and creators.