Paul Cartledge gives the British School at Athens Friends' lecture on Pericles — the man behind the adjective, read as statesman, as demagogue and as eccentric.
Pericles is one of the few ancient Greeks whose name became an adjective. Periclean Athens, even Periclean Greece: the shorthand does a great deal of work, and Paul Cartledge’s lecture is about what it conceals. Statesman, demagogue and eccentric are offered as three readings of one career rather than as a verdict on it, and the three do not reconcile with one another.
Cartledge is A.G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge, and Emeritus A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture. He is the scholar most often asked to explain classical Athens to people who are not classicists, which is a harder job than it sounds and the reason this particular Friends’ lecture fills a room.
It is given for the British School at Athens, which the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, called a foundation meeting for in 1883 and which opened its completed building in 1886. The School has been the British institute in Greece ever since, excavating, publishing and housing scholars in Athens, and its London events are how its Friends see the work between seasons. The lecture is in Room 264 at Senate House in Bloomsbury, six until seven, and the School’s autumn programme moves to Athens after it. Its Friends fund the lectures and a good deal else the School does in London, and the membership is open to anybody rather than to academics alone.