Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Pericles, a young Greek nobleman, had been nurtured in a day nursery and his father's household had two cooks. His over-ambitious father hypnotized him into believing that Pericles was Zeus, a vacant position since there was no God, absolute or not, on Olympus or not.

Pericles rose to be an admiral, a judge, a statesman and a banker. His family's wealth dwarfed that of the senate and thus his political influence due to the avarice of thousands of cadres was enormous.

He studied and taught philosophy in his twenties at the lyceum, at the foot of the Parthenon. Here he cunningly exposed the structural functions of stoicism, hedonism, humanism, nihilism, scepticism and sophism as well as rival Spartan militarism, heroism, cynicism and totemism.

Totemism and stoicism were designed for the slaves explicitly to keep them docile, servile and impotent. Nevertheless some slaves – but not those chattels of Pericles – absorbed scepticism, and even nihilism - and wrote the world's first graffiti on private walls.

So what are the fundaments of philosophy? Pericles asked himself whilst drunk on the heavy Greek wine of Attica.

Aphorisms, proverbs, maxims and axioms all amalgamated, he reckoned. What would he not do to get the power of philosophy over the entire Spartan and Athenian populations!

It was 440BC, and Socrates was still embryonic in his suicidal scepticism – a minor soldier whose friends were homeless nomads wearing rags and feathers.

Pericles was never fated to meet the street people (Xenophon, Socrates, Diogenes of Sinope, Thales et al.) But he could not understand love as humanism either. He worshipped stress and repression, division and the Phrygian oracle. His high priest had a temple funded by Pericles and its locale was known only to murderous soldiers. Its orientation was not satanic but included elements of Mesopotamian mammon-worship. All concerned drooled over money and bloodshed. Sacrifice but rarely self-sacrifice was their religion.