when did the golden age of athens start and end
Fifth-century Athens Fifth-century Athens is the Greek city-state of Athens in the time from 480 BC-404 BC. This was a period of Athenian political hegemony, economic growth and cultural flourishing formerly known as the Golden Age of Athens with the later part The Age of Pericles. The period began in 478 BC after defeat of the Persian invasion, when an Athenian-led coalition of city-states, known as the Delian League, confronted the Persians to keep the liberated Asian Greek cities free. After peace was made with Persia in the mid 5th century BCE, what started as an alliance of independent city-states became an Athenian empire when Athens abandoned the pretense of parity among its allies and relocated the Delian League treasury from Delos to Athens, where it funded the building of the Athenian Acropolis and put half its population on the public payroll and maintained dominating naval power in the Greek world. With the empire's funds, military dominance and its political fortunes guided by statesman and orator Pericles, Athens 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 BCE Athens, as did the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, the physician Hippocrates, and the philosopher Socrates. Athens' patron goddess was Athena, from whom they derived the name.
Athena Parthenos It was the most renowned cult image of Athens,[note 1] considered one of the greatest achievements of the most acclaimed sculptor of ancient Greece. Phidias began his work around 447 BC.[note 2] Lachares removed the gold sheets in 296 BC to pay his troops, and the bronze replacements for them were probably gilded thereafter; it was damaged by a fire about 165 BC but repaired.[2] It continued to stand in the Parthenon in the 5th century AD, when it was removed by the Romans[citation needed]. An account mentions it in Constantinople in the 10th century.[3]