7. Pericles' Last Speech - The End of an Era (How the Plague of Athens Changed Everything)

The plague had come.Athens was already crowded beyond anything it had been built to sustain thousands of refugees from the Attic countryside packed behind the walls. Into that compression came a pestilence unlike anything in living memory.And alongside the dying bodies, something else began to break down, namely the social fabric itself.Estimates suggest as many as a hundred thousand people died. Possibly a quarter of the entire population of Attica.The city that had trusted Pericles and had abandoned farms, endured the burning of the countryside, and believed his promise that patience would prevail. They now turned on him. And all the grief and fury of Athens landed on the man who had led them here.So Pericles called an assembly. For the last time.In this episode we hear his final speech, a remarkable and unsettling piece of oratory that does not offer comfort but instead closes off every alternative to continuing the war. We analyse what Pericles is really doing beneath the surface, examine his extraordinary admission that the Athenian empire was, by his own description, a tyranny, and ask what it means that the man who gave the Funeral Oration gave this speech one year later.And we ask what Athens would become without him.