The Golden Age of Athens

The Golden Age of Athens, often called the Age of Pericles after the statesman who dominated Athenian politics for much of the period, refers to the roughly fifth-century-BCE height of Athenian power, wealth and cultural achievement following the Greek victory over Persia in the Greco-Persian Wars. Financed substantially by tribute from the Delian League, an alliance of Greek city-states Athens increasingly dominated and converted into an informal empire, the period saw the construction of the Parthenon and the other major buildings of the Acropolis under Pericles's building program, along with the flourishing of Athenian democracy, philosophy and drama. Tragedians including Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides and the comic playwright Aristophanes staged their works in this period, while Socrates began the philosophical inquiries that would shape Plato. The period is generally considered to have ended with the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE against Sparta.