Cleon is the governor of Tarsus when Pericles arrives bearing grain to save the city from famine. A man of good intentions and genuine gratitude, Cleon welcomes the prince, offers him lodging, and later agrees to raise Marina as his own daughter when Pericles leaves her in his care. He understands duty and honor, and he takes his responsibilities to both Pericles and the child seriously. Yet Cleon’s fatal weakness is his inability to stand against his wife’s will. When Dionyza’s envy of Marina’s beauty and accomplishments metastasizes into murderous intent, Cleon finds himself trapped between his love for his wife and his sense of moral obligation.
The play shows Cleon’s gradual corruption not as a sudden descent into villainy but as a kind of spiritual suffocation. He permits Leonine to be hired as Marina’s would-be assassin; when the deed appears to have succeeded, he participates in the lie, helping Dionyza erect a false monument to the girl’s memory and composing flattering epitaphs. Yet even as he does these things, Cleon is aware of his own degradation. After the supposed murder, he expresses anguish to Dionyza, acknowledging that what they have done is among the foulest crimes under heaven. He knows he is damned, but he lacks the will or courage to undo the evil or confess it. His conscience becomes a prison; knowledge of guilt without the power to remedy it is its own form of torment.
By the play’s end, Cleon’s weakness is visited upon him with swift justice. When word spreads in Tarsus that Marina is alive and that Pericles knows the truth, the people of the city—whom Cleon once saved from starvation—rise up and burn both him and Dionyza in their palace. The play suggests that his sin was not the act itself but the failure to resist, the surrender of his will to another’s darkness. Cleon represents the tragedy of the good man who permits evil, and in his fate we see the play’s stern judgment: that passivity in the face of wickedness is itself a form of guilt.
