Τhe strategic thinking of Pericles was not chronically limited to the so-called golden age, because its range, goes beyond these narrow and local limits. The period of his life may lie between the Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian War, and this is not accidental but necessary, because it is not about a missing link.
In actual fact, it’s his action which managed to separate these chronical events, by the imposition of a rule that impressed even Thucydides.
Pericles utilized the victory of Greeks over the Persians, not because he was a rhetorician based on strategy, but because he was a general and a strategist who understood Themistocles’s ingenuity on the importance of the Greek Navy.
Because he converted the Delian League, which had the sea as its fountation in to the Athenian Hegemony, which had the sea strategy as its fountation.
Therefore, Pericles managed to transform the naval defense in to a naval counterattack, which stabilized the geostrategic position of Athens through a marine topostrategy, which took advantage of nonexistent chronostrategic elements, while the enemies remained fixed in a classical approach of the space, because they didn’t comprehend that the land of the Greeks is the sea.
Pericles proved it.