Pericles - Magnet

Small format, serious subject matter. This portrait magnet brings one of history's most consequential statesmen into your everyday spaces - a daily reminder that the people who shaped civilization are worth remembering.

This Pericles magnet features an elegant engraved-style portrait, part of the Great Minds of Classical Greece collection. A distinctive gift for history lovers, political science students, and educators. Available in three sizes.

ABOUT PERICLES (c. 495–429 BC)

Pericles didn't invent Athenian democracy. He perfected it - and in doing so presided over the most extraordinary flowering of human culture in the ancient world.

During his thirty-year dominance of Athenian politics, he commissioned the Parthenon, funded the arts, strengthened the navy, and expanded democratic participation to a degree unprecedented in the ancient world. The Golden Age of Athens - the age of Sophocles, Socrates, Phidias, and Thucydides - unfolded under his leadership and patronage. He understood that a city's greatness was measured not just by its military power but by what it built, thought, and created.

He was also a realist. His funeral oration, recorded by Thucydides, remains one of the most powerful defenses of democratic values ever delivered - a speech that Abraham Lincoln studied before writing the Gettysburg Address. When the Peloponnesian War came, he counseled patience and strategy over glory, knowing that Athens' long-term strength lay in its institutions rather than its battlefield victories.

He died of plague in 429 BC, one of the earliest victims of the epidemic that would ravage Athens for years. The city he left behind had been transformed. The civilization he helped build has never entirely ended.