Pericles of Athens
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So, as the scales abruptly tip the other way, should we now topple the statue of Pericles that tradition has sculpted so carefully? In a switch from miracle to mirage, does the Athenian general (stratēgos) deserve to be relegated to a forgotten page of history, as no more than an emblem of a macho, slave-based, and colonialist world—in short, as a prefiguration of the Western imperialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? To do so would be to lurch from Charybdis to Scylla, from unbridled idealization to radical relativism. For in truth, that negative vision is just as reductive as what it replaces, for it judges the ancient city by the yardstick of contemporary realities.
The other reef that a historian must endeavor to avoid in an inquiry such as the present one is anachronism. To condemn Pericles in the name of today’s values would be to make a remarkable error in perspective. To reduce the past to the present would be to view one’s prey with only one eye, like the Odyssey’s Cyclops. The whole perspective is distorted … We should bear in mind that slavery was not abolished in Europe until the nineteenth century, and, in France, women did not acquire the right to vote until the end of World War II. But should we, on that account, deny the role played by the Second and the Third Republics in the democratization of the French nation? To gauge the break that occurred in the time of Pericles, we should, in truth, compare it, not to the situation today, but to that which then prevailed in the ancient world. A “one-eyed” view definitely tells us far more about today’s obsessions than about fifth-century Athens. Such anachronisms can, in a more insidious fashion, often be traced to the analogies to which historians resort in order to evoke the Greek world and its “great men.” It is probably totally pointless to regard Pericles as the leader of a political party—as if any such structures existed in Athens—or to interpret the building site on the Acropolis as the fruit of Keynesian policies avant la lettre, with Pericles assuming the mantle of Roosevelt.2
Should we, then, simply draw attention to the radical difference of the Greek world, at the risk of boring readers confronted with an Antiquity shrouded in its singularity? If Pericles resembles our contemporary politicians not at all, why continue to take an interest in that figure? Yet is it possible totally to shed the preoccupations of the present day, as we confront the past? Again, it is all a matter of balance. The present book favors an un-Cyclopean, two-eyed view founded upon a constant “toing and froing” between the present and the past. Provided it is kept under control, anachronism may have pedagogic or even heuristic virtues.3 The narrow path that I intend to follow involves drawing comparisons with the present, without, however, succumbing to the dizzying prospects of analogy.
In this odyssey strewn with pitfalls, there is one last trap that is particularly hard to avoid—namely, personalization, which is an inherent part of all biographical projects. Like the traveler who, enraptured by the siren’s songs to the point of losing all recollection of his family and homeland, a biographer often tends to neglect the social and political environment in which his hero moves. By focusing on a single individual, a historian risks leaving in the shadows the role played by the collectivity. That would, to put it mildly, be paradoxical when one is tackling the first democracy in history. It has to be said that the ancient sources do nothing to dispel such an enchantment. By the end of the fifth century, already Thucydides was declaring that “Athens, though in name a democracy, gradually became in fact a government ruled by its foremost citizen” (2.65).
That famous declaration has for many years been taken quite literally, as if the history of the Athenian democracy and the career of its leader could be superposed one upon the other and completely fused.4 But such personalization is eminently challengeable: Thucydides, himself a stratēgos, was far from being as “objective” as a certain line of historiography has long maintained. In so far as historians today are more objective than their famous predecessor, it is fair enough to declare “No, Thucydides is not a colleague,”5 for the author of The Peloponnesian War was heir to a deep-seated tradition that tended to envisage history solely in relation to the great men who, it was supposed, molded it.
So should we tip the scales in the opposite direction and dilute Pericles’ own actions with those of the Athenian people? In order to render to Caesar that which is Caesar’s and to the people that which is theirs, it would be tempting to write a history of Athens animated by an anonymous collective: in short, to write a history not of Pericles, but of 50,000 citizens. A number of studies on the stratēgos do have that tendency and, on the pretext of producing a life of Pericles, in fact sketch in a portrait of fifth-century Athens.6
All the same, that would be a simplifying, if not simplistic approach to the problem. Rather than choose between the people and a single individual, it would better to consider that very question as the subject to be studied. Even if Pericles did undeniably weigh heavily upon the city’s collective decisions, on the other hand, reading between the lines, the life of the great man illuminates the influence that the Athemian dēmos exerted upon its leaders. In order to wield the slightest degree of power, the great man was obliged to take popular expectations into account and to align, adjust, and adapt his own behavior in response to them. It is precisely that complex interaction between the crowd and its leaders that deserves to be placed at the heart of the inquiry.
A project centered on Pericles has to walk a tightrope. We should take care not to idealize Athens but, at the same time, not to deny the rupture introduced by the invention of democracy; if possible, we should also avoid misleading parallels without, however, renouncing certain carefully controlled anachronisms, given that history, even when positivist, always feeds on present-day debates; and finally, we should succumb neither to the illusion of the power of one great man nor to that of the all-powerful masses. Rather, we should inquire into the productive tension that developed between the stratēgos and the Athenian community. If we accept those three conditions, we have some hope of plumbing the true historical depths of both Pericles and the city, at the same time emphasizing the profound differences as well as the few resemblances that it has with our own contemporary democratic life.
Instead of launching into a new biography of Pericles, we must instead seek to set this great figure in context, reinserting it into the democratic political culture of the fifth century B.C. Pericles, the man, is surrounded by numerous and sometimes contradictory accounts where, reading between the lines, we find embedded7 a picture of the social and historical world of classical Athens. Pericles thus seems to operate as a good reagent—to borrow a chemical metaphor—that reveals the multiple aspects of the workings of Athenian democracy.
In order to evaluate the extent and scope of these interactions, we must begin by reconstructing the background against which Pericles’ life unfolded. These salient chronological points are necessary in order to seize upon both the disagreements that crystallized around his actions and also the degree to which he left his mark on the destiny of Athens.
CHRONOLOGY: A BRIEF HISTORY OF PERICLES
The city (polis), which appeared around the eighth century, constituted a new form of political and territorial organization that rapidly spread throughout the Mediterranean region, from the Black Sea right across to the shores of Andalusia. In the early fifth century, the Greek world was composed of a mosaic of communities that were independent of one another but were linked by their language and their cults. Among them was the city of Athens, which at that time appears to have been a community undergoing serious changes. At the time of Pericles’ birth in 494/3 B.C.,8 the city had recently freed itself from the domination of tyrants who, for the past half-century, had held the reins of power. This was an important change. Once the tyranny had collapsed, in 510 B.C., all forms of personal domination remained for many years discredited—a factor that Pericles had to take into account throughout his career. In 508/7 B.C., this upheaval acquired an institutional form: a series of reforms, inspired by Cleisthenes, introduced profound changes into the polit
ical organization of the city, laying down the bases of the democracy that then developed in the course of the fifth century.
Pericles was related to Cleisthenes the reformer and so belonged to an extremely prestigious family. However, very little is known of his youth except that he probably spent a few years in exile, as his father Xanthippus was banished by the Athenian people when he was ostracized. This was a procedure that made it possible temporarily to get rid of any member of the elite considered to be too powerful and so prevent any return to tyranny. That sanction of ostracism lapsed in 485, halfway between the two Persian Wars, in which a fraction of the Greek cities stood against the Persian Empire.
Pericles grew up against the background of this struggle, which was, right from the start, an unequal one. The imbalance between the two worlds was flagrant: on the one side, disunited Greek communities of, at the most, a few thousand citizens, on the other side, the immense Achaemenid Empire, the center of gravity of which was positioned in the high Iranian plateaux but whose domination extended from the shores of the Black Sea, in the West, all the way to Afghanistan in the East, encompassing Egypt in the South. The First Persian War, in 490, was no more than a skirmish from which, to general surprise, the Athenian heavy infantry (the hoplites) emerged as victors. But the Second Persian War was a far greater confrontation. By land and by sea, the Persian forces invaded the territory of continental Greece and, in the face of this threat, no more than thirty-one cities—out of the hundreds that then made up Hellas—united to resist the offensive. Although Sparta was nominally in command of the Greek forces, Athens controlled most of the fleet, the construction of which had been financed by the silver extracted from the Laurium mines, in southern Attica.
It was in this dramatic context that Pericles’ father, Xanthippus, was recalled by the Athenians who, in the face of danger, momentarily desisted from their quarrelsome divisions. Led by the stratēgos Themistocles, the Greek troops destroyed the Persian fleet in September 480 B.C., in the straits of Salamis, not far from Athens. The Athenian oarsmen, recruited from among the poorest citizens (known as “thetes” in the classification established by Solon the lawgiver at the start of the sixth century), were responsible for this decisive victory, and this encouraged them to lay claim to a political role in keeping with their military importance. As for Pericles’ father, Xanthippus, he lost no time in excelling himself personally in the conflict by leading the Athenian fleet to victory off Cape Mycale, in 479 B.C., in one of the war’s last engagements.
At this stage, nothing precise is known about the young Pericles, and it would be another twenty years before he came to the fore of the political scene. Ever since the ostracism of Themistocles, who was accused in 471 B.C. of having treated with the Persian enemy, it had been the stratēgos Cimon who exerted the most influence in the city of Athens, thanks to the military prestige that he had acquired within the framework of the Delian League, founded in 478 B.C. After the Second Persian War, Athens had in effect taken the lead in an alliance designed to prevent a return of the Persians to the Aegean. This was centered on the little island of Delos, in the middle of the Cyclades archipelago. Although it began as an alliance freely joined, the league soon developed into an instrument in the service of the Athenians, who exploited the allied cities on the pretext of defending them against the Persian threat. Although the Athenian poorer citizens derived considerable material profit thanks to this advantageous position, their political influence within the city remained limited. To maintain the status quo, Cimon could depend upon the support of the venerable Council of the Areopagus, the seat of the city’s most prestigious magistrates: retired archons and members of the traditional Athenian elite.
It was within that roughly sketched-in context that, in 463 B.C., Pericles entered upon the political stage as an opponent of Cimon, laying accusations against him. Once he had kicked this bothersome rival decisively into touch, there followed thirty or so years in the course of which Pericles clearly took over all the major roles in the city, while the democracy gradually became stronger. All the same, his authority at no point went unchallenged. At first he suffered attacks from all those who, led by a relative of Cimon’s, Thucydides of Alopeke (who should not be confused with the historian of the same name), opposed the rise to power of the people (the dēmos) in the city. Even after the ostracism of this dangerous rival, in 443 B.C., Pericles was assailed by virulent criticisms, as is testified by the attacks launched, in the course of the 430s, against several of those close to him—namely, Anaxagoras the philosopher; Aspasia, Pericles’ partner; and the sculptor Phidias.
The mark that Pericles made upon the city was nevertheless undeniable. In the first place, it was he who pressed for the most prestigious magistracies to be open even to the most poverty-stricken of the citizens; next, the census disqualifications that had been established at the beginning of the sixth century were progressively removed, although access to the post of archon continued to be denied to the thetes. It was also thanks to Pericles’ initiative that pay, in the form of misthoi, was for the first time introduced as remuneration for taking part in civic life. By the end of the 450s, the juries serving in Athenian courts were reimbursed so that the least wealthy citizens could be in a position to serve in lawsuits without fear of losing a day’s wages. From being purely a formality, democracy gradually became a reality. Meanwhile, Pericles initiated a policy of major public works, the building of the Parthenon between 447 and 438 B.C. being its most dazzling manifestation; and, finally, he completed the construction of the Long Walls that linked the town to its port, Piraeus, and also built a war-fleet, to the great advantage of the thetes, who manned the triremes and received a wage for this. In this respect, internal democratization and external imperialism kept in step as they developed.
So it was by no means by chance that Pericles also became a passionate defender of Athenian interests within the Delian League. In, at the latest, 454 B.C., at the height of its influence, the federal treasury was transferred to the Acropolis. Now the Athenians could draw on it as they wished, in order to finance the functioning of their democracy. But among their allies, these developments gave rise to discontent that was all the more fervent given that the Persian peril had been dispelled as early as the 460s. With the swearing of the Peace of Callias in 449 B.C., the situation became critical. This treaty drew a final line under the confrontation that began with the Persian Wars, thereby rendering the maintenance of the Delian League pointless. However, Athens refused to dissolve this alliance, from which it acquired substantial profits; and Pericles had no compunction about putting down the uprisings that followed, in Euboea in 446 B.C. and then a long war against Samos, which lasted from 441 to 439.
Meanwhile, over and above these sporadic revolts, the democratic city had to cope with the growing hostility of Sparta and its Peloponnesian allies. Alarmed by Athens’s rise to power, the Spartans headed an alliance designed to counter its influence. After a series of clashes between their respective allies, followed by a brief interlude of calm—the “Thirty Years’ Peace” of 446 B.C.—tensions rose again until, in 431 B.C., the conflict erupted openly. This was the start of the Peloponnesian War. It was to last for twenty-seven years and end in the defeat of Athens in 404 B.C. It was Pericles who elaborated the strategy that, during the early years, made it possible for the Athenians to resist the Peloponnesians despite the latter’s numerical superiority and their redoubtable infantry. Thanks to their own superiority at sea and their impregnable defense system, the Athenians even appeared to be in a good position to triumph. But from 430 onward, a serious “plague” ravaged the city, and one year later Pericles was dead, carried off by this scourge.
Those few milestones trace a complex biographical path, the subtle twists and turns of which it is hard to pinpoint. The fact is that the ancient sources are full of gaps and can seldom convey a clear idea of the role that Pericles played in the evolution of the city of Athens in the mid-fifth century.
S
OURCES: THE ANCIENT CONSTRUCTION OF THE FIGURE OF PERICLES
I should first point out that the epigraphical and archaeological sources throw very little light upon the stratēgos’s actions. No decree proposed by Pericles has come down to us, and he is mentioned by name in only two inscriptions. The first, engraved more than a century after his death, records that, as khorēgos, he financed three tragedies (including The Persians) and a satyr play, by Aeschylus. The second, on which Pericles’ name was restored by epigraphists, alludes to his involvement in the construction of a fountain in the sanctuary of Eleusis in Attica.9
The archaeological evidence leaves the historian equally at a loss. The bust of Pericles that adorns the covers of so many books is merely a marble copy dating from the Roman period. The bronze original, sculpted by Cresilas, a craftsman of Cretan origin, used to stand on the Acropolis, no doubt as a votive offering (a gift to the deity) dedicated after his death by those close to him.10 Pericles was represented wearing his famous helmet, raised to expose his brow. In this case too, we should remember that it was an idealized image, designed to represent a function—that of stratēgos—rather than the individual himself, as a snapshot might do.11