Paul Cartledge gave the British School at Athens's Friends' lecture on Pericles, the man behind the adjective, read as statesman, demagogue and eccentric.
Paul Cartledge, the Cambridge classicist, gave the British School at Athens’s autumn Friends’ lecture at Senate House in Bloomsbury on Tuesday 15 September 2026. His subject was Pericles.
Cartledge is A.G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge, and Emeritus A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture.
Pericles is one of the few ancient Greeks whose name became an adjective: Periclean Athens, even Periclean Greece. The lecture asked what that shorthand conceals about the man behind it.
Cartledge, often asked to explain classical Athens to people who are not classicists, read one career three ways, as statesman, demagogue and eccentric. He offered the three as readings rather than a verdict, and they did not reconcile.
The British School at Athens was founded at a meeting the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, called in 1883, and it opened its completed building in 1886. It is the British institute in Greece, excavating, publishing and housing scholars in Athens.
The lecture was held in Room 264. The School’s Friends, a membership open to the public, fund its London lectures, and its autumn programme moved to Athens afterwards.