Pericles of Athens
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To tackle Pericles’ actions, historians are thus reduced to consulting literary sources. These are marked by two major features: first, the essential role that is played by a late text, Plutarch’s Life of Pericles, which gathers together many pieces of evidence dating from the fifth and fourth centuries, whose relative reliability has been demonstrated by historians;12 second, the two-edged nature of the documentation on the stratēgos, some of which is laudatory, some critical.
Topping the list is Herodotus, an author whose loyalties remain hard to pin down. That is not really surprising. In the course of his work devoted to the Persian Wars and their cause, this historian, a younger contemporary of the stratēgos, mentions Pericles only once. Despite the absence of any tangible evidence, many interpreters nevertheless portray Herodotus as an enthusiastic partisan of the stratēgos.13 He was living in Athens in the 450–440s and was even thought to have slipped in a discreet laudatory reference to Pericles when he recounted a dream that his mother had had just before the baby’s birth.14 However, there is nothing to support this hypothesis, which rests upon a questionable assumption—namely, that “the father of history must surely have been a friend of the father of democracy.” The fact is, though, that in his Histories Herodotus gives a critical account, if not of Pericles himself, at least of his ancestors, and does not hesitate to record traditions hostile to the Alcmaeonids and to Pericles’ father, Xanthippus.15 The historian is certainly no totally committed eulogist of Athens. Even if he admired the city that emerged victorious from the Persian Wars, he expressed barely veiled criticisms of the imperialist power that, guided by Pericles, oppressed the Ionian Greeks within the framework of the Delian League. As a native of Halicarnassus, he was well placed to see that his own community had simply exchanged one form of domination for another, when it passed from Persian control into that of the Athenians.
While Herodotus’s view of Pericles may lead to some confusion, that is not the case of other contemporary testimonies. The criticism of the comic poets is undeniably bitter, as are the comments of Ion of Chios and Stesimbrotus of Thasos. However, Thucydides, the historian of the Peloponnesian War, was clearly full of admiration.
In Pericles’ lifetime, in the theater, comic poets such as Cratinus and Hermippus were quick to depict the stratēgos as a ridiculous figure.16 The comic authors were writing about the contemporary scene, and their often violent and sometimes abusive plays were performed before the entire city, on the occasion of the great religious festivals in honor of Dionysus. Most of those comedies have come down to us only as fragments, but they nevertheless do allow us to sense the virulence of the accusations launched against Pericles. The poets reproached him for his tyrannical behavior and, above all, for connections of his that were harmful to the city. On the stage, Pericles was represented sometimes as an all-powerful leader, sometimes as a puppet manipulated by his friends (such as Damon) or his lovers (such as Aspasia).17
All the same, those theatrical works are tricky for a historian to handle: in the first place, for the very reason that they are fragmentary and this often makes it difficult to reconstruct their authors’ intentions; second, because they aim to shock and deliberately magnify certain characteristics in order to provoke laughter, in what seems to be a ritualized verbal ranting; and finally, because they inevitably make their criticism personal and always attack clearly identified figures—rather than political and social mechanisms. Attacks ad personam are one of the mainsprings of comedy, which defines itself by naming names (onomasti komoidein).18 So it is that Comedy invariably tends to concentrate exclusively on individuals whom it certainly denigrates but nevertheless positions very much centerstage.
The extant fragments of Ion of Chios and Stesimbrotus of Thasos are equally difficult to interpret. Ion of Chios, who was contemporary with Pericles, excelled in a range of public genres, including tragedy and dithyrambs. When he visited Athens, he was a guest of Cimon, whom he describes in flattering terms, whereas he denigrates the behavior of Pericles, particularly at the time of the war against Samos.19 As for Stesimbrotus of Thasos, he was equally ill-disposed toward the stratēgos. In his treatise on Themistocles, Thucydides, and Pericles, he launches into a classic attack on these three Athenian political leaders, criticizing both their upbringing and their characters.20 It is not surprising that he criticized the seemingly high-handed behavior of Pericles; in the Greek world, lifestyles were an integral part of the definition of politics.21
These many attacks were the source of a tradition hostile to Pericles. Thucydides (the historian) was indisputably at the origin of an idealized representation of the stratēgos.22 This historian, who was himself a stratēgos before he was exiled from Athens in 424, presents, in his History of the Peloponnesian War, an idealized account of the actions of Pericles, reconstructing several of his speeches, including the famous funeral oration delivered in 431 in honor of the Athenians killed in the first year of the war. Yet Thucydides gives a detailed account of only the last two years of Pericles’ life. In part 1 of his History, which contains an account of the pentēkontaetia, the fifty-year period between the end of the Persian Wars and the start of the Peloponnesian War, the stratēgos is mentioned, fleetingly, only three times: when he beat the Sicyonians and attacked Oiniadae in 454 (1.111.2), when he defeated Euboea in 446 (1.114), and when he crushed the revolt in Samos in 440/39 (1.116–117). In effect, Pericles takes on the foremost roles only at the end of book I and already disappears halfway through book II (2.65) in this work that runs to a total of eight books. Thucydides dwells upon the stratēgos only as an actor in the Peloponnesian War and is not concerned to present a detailed account of his life before the outbreak of those hostilities. The historian is, in any case, interested in power and its mechanisms more than individuals themselves—although he does take care to underline the mark that Pericles left on Athenian political life (2.65).23
Throughout the fourth century, the ancient sources continue to oscillate between praise and blame, depending on the objectives of the authors and those of their public. With very few exceptions, the attitude of the philosophers is negative. Among Socrates’ disciples, Pericles becomes a subject of reflection both political and philosophical, and soon turns into an anti-model. Antisthenes (445–365), an admirer of Sparta and full of contempt for democracy, criticizes Pericles openly and showers insults upon his companion, Aspasia. As for Plato, he presents the stratēgos as a dangerous demagogue who corrupts the masses and is incapable even of raising his own children in a suitable manner. The Socratics thus used Pericles as a foil, within the framework of critical thinking about democracy and its innately vicious functioning.
At the other end of the spectrum, the Attic orators are more inclined to celebrate Pericles, although the stratēgos is frequently eclipsed by the brilliant aura surrounding Solon. Their discreet but positive comments may be explained by the fact that they were addressing a popular public rather than a select audience such as that of philosophic circles, in which anti-democratic views could be expressed more freely.24
In the last third of the fourth century, Aristotle and his school presented two contrasting pictures of Pericles. In his Politics, Aristotle turns the stratēgos into the very embodiment of phronēsis, prudence—that is to say, the ability to deliberate skilfully in an ever-changing world.25 Meanwhile, the author of the Constitution of the Athenians—whether Aristotle himself or a member of his school—unequivocally criticizes the introduction of the misthos and accuses Pericles of having sought by this means to corrupt the masses. In this way, he picks up the Platonic line.
In this succession of ancient texts, there is one that, although late, is a decisive link in the chain: The Life of Pericles by Plutarch (A.D. 46 to 125) This Greek gentleman, a native of Chaeronea in Boeotia, composed his Parallel Lives in the early second century A.D., at a time when Greece had already long since fallen under Roman domination. When setting up this particular parallel between a Greek and a Roman, Plutarch chose, in the name o
f the prudence that characterized them both, to compare Pericles and Fabius Maximus. This work, which was influenced by Plato, gathered together, in the form of more or less explicit citations, most of the comic fragments on Pericles, the criticisms of the stratēgos made by Ion of Chios and Stesimbrotus of Thasos, and also the hostile remarks of Antisthenes and the Socratics. So Plutarch’s handling of the subject inevitably presents today’s historians with a delicate problem.
In the first place, his work is marked by a desire to construct a unifying framework—a Life—drawing on material that, although abundant, is heterogeneous. This profusion of texts often leads Plutarch to attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable and, in his account, to juxtapose totally opposed traditions. For example, he devotes equal space to, on the one hand, Thucydides’ cool analysis of the underlying causes of the Peloponnesian War and, on the other, to the vituperations of the comic poets who delighted in emphasizing the role that Pericles’ partner, Aspasia, played in the outbreak of hostilities.
In this combination of as much praise as blame, Plutarch himself conveys a mixed view of Pericles’ actions. On the one hand, he is clearly intent on celebrating the man behind the great architectural works—the monuments that, at the time when he was composing his Lives,26 testified to the ancient power of Greece; yet, at the same time, as a good disciple of Plato and an admirer of Cimon, he wanted to denigrate Pericles, the democrat. This tension sometimes makes it difficult to grasp his true intentions. To resolve this contradiction, Plutarch divides the life of his hero into two artificially opposed parts. He suggests that at first Pericles behaved as a demagogue, showering gifts upon the masses and thereby fostering pernicious habits among them (9.1). Then, when his own position was definitively assured, following the ostra cism of Thucydides of Alopeke, Pericles is portrayed as radically changing his attitude and, without hesitation, restraining the aspirations of the people, at the risk of incurring its anger (15.2–3).
One further difficulty makes interpreting Plutarch’s text a particularly delicate matter. Because he lived at the time of the Caesars, he does not always understand the facts that he claims to describe. He tends to interpret Pericles’ actions in the light of his own time, attributing to his hero the behavior or even the authority of a Roman emperor. The fact that the people might exercise truly effective sovereignty never even crosses his mind.
Exhaustive though it is, the Life of Pericles does not herald an end to the controversies that surrounded the figure of the stratēgos. A few decades after the death of Plutarch, Aelius Aristides (A.D. 117–185), in his speech Against Plato; in Defence of the Four, without the slightest reservation, pays emphatic homage to the democratic leader. On the strength of Thucydides’ authority, he maintains that Pericles never corrupted the people in the slightest way, contrary to the popular view among Platonists, echoed by Plutarch.27
In roughly the same period, Pausanias adopted a radically opposed view in his Periegesis, in a passage in which he digressed on the subject of the famous men of the Athenian past. While happy to praise the military exploits of Themistocles, Xanthippus, and Cimon against the Persians (8.52.1–2), he expresses the greatest scorn for the warmongers of the Peloponnesian conflict, “especially the most distinguished of them.” His judgment is categorical: “they might be said to be murderers, almost wreckers of Greece.”28 Scandalized by the Greek internal wars, Pausanias does not deign even to mention the name of Pericles and assigns him to a kind of damnatio memoriae.
Without any clear suggestion of a cause-and-effect link, the memory of the stratēgos thereafter progressively continued to fade right down to the early fifteenth century, at which point the humanist Leonardo Bruni, inspired by the writings of Thucydides and Aelius Aristides, revived it.29
From this rapid survey of the sources of Antiquity, it is possible to draw two clear conclusions. The first is somewhat disappointing: to produce a straightforward biography of Pericles involves guesswork or even an illusion, unless one imitates Plutarch and creates an imaginary itinerary that reveals more about the preconceptions of its creator than it does about the trajectory of the stratēgos. For what can be said about Pericles’ youth prior to 472, the date when he financed Aeschylus’s Persians? What do we really know of his life between 461 and 450? No linear account of the stratēgos’s life is conceivable—unless, that is, one cheats with the information provided and arranges it into a chronological order that, although coherent, is arbitrary. Only the last three years of his existence, from 432 to 429, rise to the surface in this ocean of ignorance, and they do so thanks to the unique shaft of light shed by Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War.
Does this amount to an insurmountable defect that rules out writing any book about Pericles? Not at all. A perusal of the ancient sources in fact indicates another, surely more fruitful avenue of research. The ancient sources, ranging from Thucydides to Plutarch and from the comic poets to Aelius Aristides, all, in their own ways, ponder the relations established between Pericles the individual and the community in which he lived. Is Pericles an all-powerful figure or simply a ventriloquist who expresses the aspirations of the people? A wide range of answers can be envisaged, and they deserve to be closely scrutinized. And this is the line of investigation that will serve as a guiding thread for the present inquiry, which will be organized into two major parts, the one historical, the other historiographical.
The first section will start with a study of the genealogical, economic, and cultural trump cards that were held by the young Pericles at the point when he stealthily embarked upon his political career (chapter 1). The following two chapters will be devoted to the bases of Pericles’ power. These were clearly twofold: his success rested on military glory—as head of the Athenian armies and navies (chapter 2)—and on his expert handling of public discourse—to the point of embodying the orator par excellence who fascinated the Athenians from the Assembly tribune (chapter 3).
As stratēgos, Pericles was deeply implicated in the development of Athenian imperialism. With no misgivings at all, he ruthlessly crushed the revolts of the allied cities, adopting in this respect a policy that was widely favored in Athens: possibly his sole originality lay in his theorizing its necessity and establishing imperial power on an unprecedented scale (chapter 4). Within the city, Pericles actively promoted the genesis of a truly democratic economic policy—a policy that was founded on widespread redistributions of the city’s wealth to a newly redefined civic community (chapter 5).
Both within the city and beyond it, Pericles responded to the demands of the people or even anticipated them. The pressure that the dēmos exerted could be felt at every level. It was because the least of his actions and gestures were all scrutinized and, frequently, criticized that Pericles seems to have kept his relatives, friends, and lovers at a distance. He no doubt hoped in this way to ward off the many attackers who described him as a man who was manipulated, ready to put the interests of those close to him before the well-being of the Athenian people (chapters 6 and 7). Such reproaches were likewise leveled against his attitude toward the city gods, for he was also accused of fostering friendships with impious men (chapter 8).
At Pericles’ death, these weighty suspicions faded away: the stratēgos now, a least for a part of tradition, came to symbolize a golden age that was gone forever. A number of ancient authors even treated the passing of Pericles as a pivotal moment in the history of Athens, as if his death marked the starting point of the city’s decadence—a view that calls for serious qualification (chapter 9).
Having completed this historical journey, it will be necessary to reconsider this whole investigation and return to the question formulated right at the outset—namely, how did the Athenian democracy react to its experience of this great man? In short, we must try to understand Athens as a reflection of Pericles and Pericles as a reflection of Athens (chapter 10).
Pericles was neither a hero nor a nobody. He should be restored to his full complexity, and we should endeavor to free ourselves f
rom a historiography that, over a long period, either ignored him or exposed him to public contempt, before eventually transforming him into a veritable icon of democracy. The Periclean myth is a recent re-creation. Up until the end of the eighteenth century, Pericles was for the most part judged with disdain, if not arrogantly ignored. Blinded by Roman and Spartan models, the men of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment regarded the stratēgos as an unscrupulous demagogue who headed a degenerate regime (chapter 11). It was not until the nineteenth century—and, in particular, Thucydides’ return to favor—coupled with the advent of parliamentary regimes in Europe—that, progressively, a new Pericles emerged in the writings of historians, where he was now presented as an enlightened bourgeois. Prepared by Rollin and Voltaire and completed by George Grote and Victor Duruy, this slow metamorphosis engendered the figure of an idealized Pericles who, still today, is enthroned in school textbooks on a par with Louis XIV (chapter 12).
CHAPTER 1
An Ordinary Young Athenian Aristocrat?
In the Politics, Aristotle defines the elite by a collection of characteristics that distinguishes it from the common people: good birth (eugeneia), wealth (ploutos), excellence (aretē), and, finally, education (paideia).1 These were the various aspects, combined in different degrees, that defined social superiority in the Greek world. Pericles was clearly abundantly endowed with all those distinctive attributes. However, in a democratic context, such advantages could sometimes turn out to operate as obstacles or even handicaps. Not all forms of superiority were acceptable in themselves, but needed to adopt a form that was tolerated by the dēmos for fear of arousing its mistrust or even anger: in Athens, the forms taken by distinction constituted an object of implicit negotiation between members of the elite and the people.
Such compromises were evident at every level. Membership of a prestigious lineage was undeniably an advantage, provided that the people did not doubt the family’s attachment to the new regime that Cleisthenes had set in place. Likewise, wealth was a blessing for anyone who wished to launch himself into political life, but only if that fortune was judged to be legitimate by the Athenians and if a considerable proportion of those riches was used to benefit the community as a whole. Finally, the asset of a refined education was of capital importance in a context in which influence was clearly associated with an ability to hold forth in the Assembly; but if that skill was employed in a thoughtless manner it could be taken for a form of cultural arrogance that the average citizen would not tolerate.