Athens·430 BC
The Golden Age of Pericles
2 hr 52 min·25 August 2026·17 chapters·14 sources
In the summer of 430 BC, the Parthenon was two years old. There were farmers asleep in the colonnades at the foot of the hill it stood on, and they had been there for more than a year.
A slow, unhurried walk through the whole of everyday life in classical Athens — not a single day, but the entire era: the houses and what was in them, the market at noon, the courts with no judges and no appeal, the potters’ quarter, the silver mines, the Assembly on the hill, the festivals, the birth rites, and the people the city owned. Everything here is drawn from what actually survives — inscriptions cut in marble, auction lists, building accounts, courtroom speeches, comedies, excavation reports — and where the record runs out, that is said out loud rather than quietly filled in. Just under three hours, told slowly, for listening or for sleep.
Chapters
17 · each opens the film at that pointSources
as published with the film- Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 2
- Pseudo-Xenophon (“the Old Oligarch”), Constitution of the Athenians
- Aristophanes, Acharnians and Wasps
- Xenophon, Poroi — on the Laurion mining leases
- The Erechtheion building accounts, IG I³ 474–476 — Epigraphical Museum, Athens
- The Attic Stelae, 414 BC — W. K. Pritchett, Hesperia XXII (1953)
- Casualty list of the tribe Erechtheis, IG I³ 1147 — Musée du Louvre
- Nikophon’s law on silver coinage, 375/4 BC
- The Kerameikos mass burial, excavated 1994–95, Greek Archaeological Service
- Papagrigorakis et al., International Journal of Infectious Diseases (2006); and the reply of Shapiro, Rambaut & Gilbert, same journal, same year
- James Davidson, Courtesans and Fishcakes
- Lisa Nevett, House and Society in the Ancient Greek World
- Ben Akrigg, Population and Economy in Classical Athens
- Excavations of the Athenian Agora, American School of Classical Studies at Athens
Something wrong here? Tell us — corrections are made in public.