A population of perhaps thirty or forty thousand free citizen males could produce, within three generations, the pioneering tragedian Sophocles (born in 496 BC), the statesman Pericles (495), the tragedian Euripides and the sculptor Pheidias (both c. 480), the philosopher Socrates (c. 469), the historian Thucydides (c. 460), the comic dramatist Aristophanes (c. 448), the historian and moralist Xenophon (c. 430), and the philosopher Plato (c. 427).
