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Pericles, the most accomplished statesman of Ancient Greece was born of distinguished parentage in the early part of the 5th century B.C. His father was that Xanthippus who won the victory over the Persians at Mycale, 479 B.C., and his mother Agariste, the niece of the great Athenian reformer, Clisthenes. Pericles received an elaborate education, but of all his teachers, the one he most reverenced, and from whose instructions he derived most benefit, was …

…perfection. To Pericles, Athens owed the Parthenon, the Propylae, the Odeum and numberless other public and sacred buildings; he also encouraged music and the drama, and, during his rule, industry and commerce were in so flourishing a condition, that prosperity was universal in Attica. At length in 431 B.C., the long foreseen and inevitable Peloponnesian war broke out between Athens and Sparta. Pericles himself died in the autumn of 429 B.C., after a lingering sickness.