J.B. Bury was a celebrated historian who wrote around the turn of the 19th century. His classics on the Roman Empire and Greece still stand among the best texts on the classical civilizations.
In conjunction with the founding of democracy, Athens ushered in the "Golden Age" of the Ancient Greeks, which saw the invention or mastery of everything from mathematics and engineering to philosophy and art. And among the Athenians, none were as influential as Pericles, the...