The action that unfolds in Ivan Avramov’s novel “The Mistake of Pericles” takes the reader to hoary antiquity - the 5th century BC, Ancient Athens, the last three years of the life and work of Pericles the Olympian. Under him, ancient Greek democracy reached an unprecedented peak, but, nevertheless, gradually began to decline. And paradoxically, it was its chief guardian and leader Pericles who drove the first nail into the coffin of Athenian democracy. Why? What mistake, and not just one, but several, did he make as the first strategist of Athens - “Hellas Hellas”, as they were then called, a clot of “Attic salt”, a city where the smartest of the smart and the most talented of the talented aspired? They strived because they knew that this policy is a stronghold of freedom, democracy and universal equality of all citizens before the law. Here artists, sculptors, poets, philosophers, scientists are surrounded by care and attention; beauty, harmony and creativity are valued here, in contrast to the ideological enemy of Athens, Sparta, with its martinet morals, with its citizens, who are often brave but rude warriors. The Lacedaemonians were accustomed to holding in their hands not an agricultural sickle or a sculptor's chisel, but only a sword and a spear. Among the characters in the novel are the philosophers Anaxagoras and Socrates, the creators of the Parthenon, the sculptor Phidias and the architects Ictinus, Callicrates, the brilliant playwrights Sophocles and Euripides, the young ambitious Alcibiades, the Spartan king Archidamus... A large place in the narrative is given to the relationship between Pericles and his girlfriend, the famous hetaera Aspasia... Thoughtful the reader will note that the problems on which the author focused his attention have not lost their significance in our days; much of what arose in that distant era, distant from us for thousands of years, is present in our everyday life, requiring further development and improvement...