IN 431 BC, Pericles gave all the peasantry of Attica wartime sanctuary within Athens, but the farmers could think only of the Spartans burning and looting their abandoned homesteads. Cramped, resentful Athens was then ravaged by a plague, and the fickle public turned on Pericles.

They decried his reckless spending, as if they had had no part in it. They disowned his artistic and architectural legacy, as if they had not been enriched by it. Rising orator Cleon brought him down much as Pericles had brought down Cimon, and he was stripped of his generalship.

Within months, the mercurial Athenians were begging him to return. But the loss of his two sons to the plague had broken his heart.

In the autumn of 429, wearied by forty years’ dancing attendance on the whims of Athens, Pericles - so charismatic, so profligate, so visionary - succumbed to the fever himself, and died.

Athens would have many more leaders with his faults; they would have none with his virtues.