Political Backlash: Pericles Fined and Temporarily Deposed

Leadership in a plague is a contact sport. Pericles, architect of the Long Walls strategy, faced that truth as pyres crackled at the Kerameikos and coughs echoed beneath the Pnyx. Plutarch tells us Athenians turned on him, “fined him” and “deposed him” for a time, before recalling him when fury cooled and need returned [4].

The charges were not legal niceties but visceral blame. Pericles had “poured the rabble from the country into the walled city” and “penned [them] up like cattle,” Plutarch reports, putting scarred farmers from Acharnai under rooftops they did not trust [4]. In the Agora, where bronze decrees glinted, men asked whether strategy that avoided spears had invited fever.

In the Assembly on the Pnyx, the sound of oratory carried over a city gone hoarse. Pericles argued that abandoning the plan would invite Spartan victory—grain still entered at Piraeus; the fleet still ruled the azure Saronic Gulf. He wore no scarlet cloak, only the authority of consistency. But consistency could not bury the dead [16].

The censure did not last. The same public that punished him soon reelected him, soberly acknowledging that, absent a cure, no new general could conjure one. Thucydides’ narrative does not linger on the vote but records the fact of Pericles’ leadership into 429, when the plague reached his own house [1], [4].

Politics did not stop the coughs. It did record the city’s need to do something in the face of helplessness. The fine struck a man; the plague struck Athens.