Pericles

Pericles came from the Alcmaeonid family through his mother, one of Athens's old power clans. Between roughly 461 and 429 BC he dominated Athenian politics as its leading orator and general, steering the city through the tail end of the Greco-Persian Wars and into the Peloponnesian War with Sparta. He converted the Delian League—originally a defensive alliance—into an Athenian empire. At home he pushed Athenian democracy so hard that critics accused him of populism. He spent the city's wealth on an ambitious building program that gave Athens the Parthenon and most of the other structures still…