Established in 508 BC under ancient Athenian lawgiver Cleisthenes (570BC - 508BC), Athenian democracy remained remarkably stable for 180 years, until 322BC (aftermath of Lamian War). The period when Pericles (495BC - 429BC) led Athens as Archon ("ruler") from 461BC to 429BC, also known as the “Age of Pericles”, was the peak of Athenian hegemony.

Pericles promoted the arts and literature, so Athens acquired the reputation of being the educational and cultural center of the ancient Greek world. He started an ambitious project that generated most of the surviving structures on the Acropolis, including the Parthenon.

With the empire's funds, military dominance and its political fortunes guided by statesman and orator Pericles, Athens, a center for the arts, learning and philosophy, produced some of the most influential and enduring cultural artifacts of the Western tradition. The playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides all lived and worked in 5th-century BC Athens, as did the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, the physician Hippocrates and the philosophers Plato and Socrates.

As for other three, all of them were former archons before Pericles. Solon (630BC- 560BC) was one of the Seven Sages of Greece and credited with laying the foundations for Athenian democracy. Peisistratus (600BC – 527BC) laid the groundwork for the later pre-eminence of Athens in ancient Greece. Cleisthenes (570BC – 508BC) is referred as "the father of Athenian democracy".

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