Pericles And Lycurgus As A Leader Essay

The Leaderships of Pericles and Lycurgus Although there were many other notable leaders from ancient Greece, Pericles and Lycurgus should both be noted as two of the more prominent leaders in Greek history. Each leader influenced their own city-states both politically and socially. Pericles was a military general, a public speaker, and a widely known statesman in Athens (Joshua J. Mark, PERICLES, aceint.eu). Lycurgus was a lawmaker in Sparta, and he established many of ancient Sparta’s organizations and societies (Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, Lycurgus, britannica.com). The two leaders can be compared and contrasted. First, to compare each of them. Pericles and Lycurgus were both historical Greek leaders. They influenced their …show more content…
While both may have been influential leaders in society, they each had different jobs. Pericles was a military and a government leader, while Lycurgus was a government lawmaker. During Pericles’ time, his influence was so great that his lifetime was nicknamed, “the Age of Pericles” and the “Golden Age of Athens”. (History.com Staff, Pericles). Under Pericles, Athens saw the building of the Acropolis and the Parthenon. He also improved the democratic system of Athens by paying people for civic participation, and lowering the costs to attend theatrical performances for the poor (History.com Staff, Pericles). Lycurgus was portrayed as a bad guy when he was in line for the throne after his brother died, because his brother’s wife was pregnant with a baby boy (Plutarch, Lycurgus-The Father of Sparta, ahistoryofgreece.com). People committed slander against him, proposing that he was to kill the baby if it was a boy, so that he would have the throne (Plutarch, Lycurgus-The Father of Sparta, ahistoryofgreece.com). This however, was false, and he ran away due to his downgrading reputation. However many years later, Lycurgus came back with reforms for Sparta, and that is how he became Sparta’s “lawmaker”. Unlike Pericles, Lycurgus was never the full “ruler” of Sparta as Pericles was the “ruler” of Athens. But Lycurgus did help his society by creating a senate that he was a part of. Not only were they’re personalities different, but the belonged to rival civilizations. Athens and Sparta engaged in a war, called the “Peloponnesian War”. In the end of all the fighting, Sparta won, but both sides suffered heavy casualties. In Bill Thayer’s “Ancient Customs of the Spartans”, Plutarch writes that Lycurgus “banned foreigners from the country” so that “the foreigners don’t teach citizens bad things” (penelope.uchicago.edu). In Athens, Pericles states that Athens “is open to the world” (Historywiz Staff/Charles Forester, Pericles’