Pericles of Athens
Page 7
All the same, it would be mistaken to make Pericles out to be a gentle lamb, let alone a bleating pacifist who rejected any form of conflict. What the stratēgos rejected was not warfare in itself, but rather a particular way of waging it—that is to say, ill-prepared and without taking into consideration the balance of power between the forces involved. After all, Pericles shamelessly put down the revolts of his allies,34 and himself played a crucial role in unleashing the Peloponnesian War, as Thucydides confirms: “Being the most powerful man of his time and the leader of the State [agōn tēn polit eian], he was opposed to the Lacedaemonians in all things, and would not let the Athenians make concessions, but kept urging them on to the war.”35 Besides, we know of the accusations that the comic poets brought against him, judging him to be responsible for starting the war in order to distract attention away from misdemeanors of his own.36 Although he recommended a firm attitude when facing the Spartans, he was not willing to set off to war regardless of the conditions that obtained. If it is victory that one seeks, one has to prepare for war!37 That was the line of behavior adopted by the stratēgos who, at the start of the Peloponnesian War developed a strategy that was certainly effective but was, at the same time, much contested in the Athenian ranks.
The Peloponnesian War: The Originality of Pericles’ Military Strategy
When hostilities against Sparta broke out in 431, Pericles managed to convince his fellow-citizens generally to take refuge behind their walls, rather than clash head-on with the Peloponnesian troops, who outnumbered them and were better trained. It is true that the city benefited from its exceptional defensive position. Even before Pericles entered upon the political scene, the Athenians had begun to fortify their city and to link the urban core (astu) to their port, Piraeus, in such a way as to render the whole impregnable. The construction of the Long Walls had been launched by Cimon,38 although the work on the northern wall was not completed until after his ostracism (462/457). As for the southern wall, which doubled the earlier rampart, this was built at Pericles’ suggestion, between 452 and 431 B.C. (it is not possible to be more specific).39 Themistocles, Cimon, and Pericles all played their parts in these developments, and by the time they were completed, the town of Athens had become a kind of fortified island supplied with food from territory that included the cities of the Delian League as well as the Attic countryside.
Periclean strategy constituted a coherent whole. It was founded upon the abandonment of the rural territory, the avoidance of fighting on land and the prowess of the navy, and it involved a number of closely related elements: direct confrontation on land with the enemy’s army, which was undeniably more powerful than the Athenian one, was to be avoided; the Athenian navy was to be used, rather than the hoplites; outside the city territory, military operations were to be conducted using the fleet; the allegiance of the allies was to be maintained but without seeking to extend the Athenian Empire; the city was to rely on the products that were accessible thanks to Athenian sea power; and, finally, properties situated in the khōra were to be abandoned so as to concentrate on defending the maritime supply routes and the town of Athens (astu).40
It was this last decision that aroused the most resistance among the Athenians. For a largely rural population, the idea of abandoning the territory to the ravages of the enemy was hard to accept; moreover, this tactic was the more painful since the Athenians maintained a special relationship with their own land. They regarded themselves as autochthonous, the descendants of Erichthonius, who was the son of the Attic land and Hephaestus.41 For them, to abandon the khōra was to leave their life-giving mother defenseless.
This opposition, magnified by the outbreak of the plague in Athens in 430,42 threatened the authority of the stratēgos, as is attested both by Thucydides’ account and by fragments from the contemporary comic poets. In his play, the Moirai (The Fates), performed at the Lenaean Festival, in 430 B.C., the comic poet Hermippus deplored Pericles’ policy as follows:
Thou king of the Satyrs, why, pray, wilt thou not
Take the spear for thy weapon, and stop the dire talk
With the which, until now, thou conductest the war,
While the soul of a Teles is in thee?
If the tiniest knife is but laid on the stone
To give it an edge, thou gnashest thy teeth,
As if bitten by fiery Cleon.43
This passage delights in dwelling upon the implied cowardice of Pericles, who, in this context, is transformed into a latter-day Dionysus who prefers to lead a theatrical chorus rather than his men into battle. The comparison may well testify to Pericles’ interest in drama, but is designed above all to discredit the stratēgos, depicting him as a man concerned above all to promote his own pleasure rather than defend his city.
Despite this underlying anger, Pericles’ prudent strategy was followed by the Athenians even after the death of its promoter, for the fact was that it chimed with the interests of the majority of the citizens. Had that not been the case, Pericles, despite all his oratorical skills, would not have been able to carry the Assembly with him for more than a few months. In truth, his policy did suit the realities facing the Athenian democracy and also its imaginary representations. In the first place, in a city where one-fifth of the citizens possessed no land at all and almost two-thirds of them owned only fields of less than one hectare (around 2.5 acres), the abandonment of the khōra was the lesser evil.44 Only the large and medium-sized landowners, whom Aristophanes defended, were seriously affected by the Spartans’ devastation of the fields and their crops.45 As Pericles himself proclaimed in his speech to the Athenians in 430, “You should make light of them [the houses and the land], regarding them … as a mere flower-garden or ornament of a wealthy estate.”46 Furthermore, far from avoiding all conflict, Pericles simply chose one particular form of warfare—naval confrontation—rather than another—namely, hoplite combat. By favoring the oarsmen rather than the hoplites, the stratēgos followed in the footsteps of Themistocles, who valued the poorest of the citizens (the thetes), to the disadvantage of the hoplite class and the cavalrymen.47
It was because his policies responded to a profoundly democratic requirement that Pericles, despite forceful criticism, was in the end able to resist the resentments of the Athenian people and convince it of the correctness of his views—and to do so not solely thanks to his talents as an orator capable of bewitching his fellow citizens.48 The fact nevertheless remains that his expertise in public speaking certainly was a valuable asset to him in his pursuit of political authority.
CHAPTER 3
The Bases of Periclean Power: The Orator
In the funeral oration that Pericles delivered in 431, to honor the citizens who had fallen during the first year of the Peloponnesian War, he praised the city, emphasizing the role that speech played in deliberations and decision-taking: “We Athenians decide public questions for ourselves or at least endeavor to arrive at a sound understanding of them in the belief that it is not debate that is a hindrance to action, but rather not to be instructed by debate before the time comes for action.”1 Unlike the laconic Spartans, the Athenians indeed never hesitated to enter upon long discussions prior to voting, in the meetings of the Assembly that took place on the Pnyx hill forty times a year.
Speak before doing anything and reflect before taking action: this characterization of Athens is to some extent valid for Pericles himself who, under cover of his celebration of the whole city, was implicitly praising himself. Thucydides often describes the stratēgos as an orator who enlightens the crowd and influences the decisions that it takes. The art of speaking—or not speaking—was clearly a second basis upon which Periclean power rested.
In this Athenian city rapidly moving toward democratization, persuasive oratory was now playing a key role. In this respect, Pericles remained the incarnation, par excellence, of an orator endowed with a power of rhetoric that combined both authority and pedagogy. The ancient sources never cease to dwell upon his quasi-di
vine oratorical power, employing a selection of metaphors the effects of which need to be assessed. When Pericles addressed the people from the tribune of the Assembly, he abided by extremely elaborate codes of oratory. The rhetoric and gestures that he adopted made him a measured orator whose imperturbability was nevertheless interpreted by his opponents as arrogance or even aristocratic disdain.
Pericles was a past master not only of public speaking but also of the art of remaining silent or, to be more precise, of getting his political allies to speak in his place: in order not to saturate the crowds with his own presence, often I he would remain in the background so as to make his own rare public appearances more solemn and striking. The combination of all these facets of his behavior rendered his hold over the people well nigh irresistible.
PERICLES AND RHETORIC: KNOWING HOW TO SPEAK
Rhetoric and Democracy
The Athenian democracy respected the principle of isēgoria: equal access to public speech for all citizens. At the start of every Assembly meeting, after the Pnyx had been purified by a sacrifice, the herald (kērux) stepped out before the Athenians, said a prayer and pronounced a curse on any orator who attempted to mislead the people, and then asked, “Who wishes to speak?”. Whoever came forward placed upon his head a myrtle crown that made him unassailable, and spoke directly to the people, proposing a decree to be voted upon. Any citizen could, in his turn, speak in answer to the preceding orator. The Assembly thus proceeded like a competition (agōn) in public speaking, with the city gods looking on.
In truth, these egalitarian principles masked powerful internal hierarchies. In the first place, according to the orator Aeschines, Athenian law ruled that turns for speaking be determined by the speakers’ respective ages: the oldest citizens had the right to speak first and this lent a particular force to their words.2 Second, not many Athenians dared to speak in public. Unless a man had mastered the art of oratory, he would soon expose himself to ridicule or even to thorubos, the kind of general tumult often mentioned in the speeches of the Attic orators.3 Furthermore, speaking in public involved a legal risk: the orator was responsible before the magistrates for the motions for which he requested the people’s assent. Even if his point of view triumphed in the Assembly, he might then be pursued by his opponents within the framework of a legal trial in which he was accused of illegality, a graphē paranomōn that may have been instituted by Ephialtes’ reforms of 462/1. If found guilty by the judges, the orator had to pay a heavy fine or was even condemned to atimia, total or partial privation of his civic rights. So nobody came forward to speak without carefully weighing up the pros and cons.
Stepping up to the tribune involved personal initiative, and the risk was all the greater given that the orator could not count on the support of any structured political formation. Although historians are often inclined to reduce Athenian political life to confrontation between two camps—the aristocrats and the democrats—we know of no official political party possessed of a clearly defined policy and stable organization in Athens.4 Although influential men were surrounded by factions that supported them, these were always precarious and informal. Coalitions would form and disintegrate depending on the circumstances and the questions debated.
Within such a fluctuating framework, mastery of the art of oratory represented an essential trump card for anyone bold enough to ascend to the tribune. That is why the lessons of the sophists were so successful among the Athenian elite of the second half of the fifth century. The mission of these itinerant sages was, in return for considerable fees, to teach a person how to handle speech, whatever the circumstances. In the course of his long stay in Athens, the Sicilian sophist, Gorgias, from Leontini, is even said to have defined rhetoric as follows: “the ability to persuade with speeches either judges in the law courts or citizens in the Assembly or an audience at any other meeting that may be held on public affairs.”5 As can be imagined, in Athens the demand for such skills was particularly great. “To control the people with one’s tongue”6 was precisely the aim of Athenian orators schooled by the sophists.
Pericles mastered this art of persuasion (peithō) to the highest degree. The stratēgos dominated his opponents by his speech—and solely by his speech. In a city marked by its semi-literacy, Pericles was still fully a man of oral communication. Unlike the orators of the fourth century such as Demosthenes or Aeschines, he left to posterity no written texts, apart from his decrees. So it is only through the filter of other authors—in particular, Thucydides—that we can attempt to evaluate the nature of Pericles’ rhetoric and its amazing persuasive force.
Pericles the Demagogue
A reading of The Peloponnesian War enables one to appreciate the full measure of Pericles’ oratory. In this work, the historian records three long speeches delivered by the stratēgos. The first relates to the declaration of war; the second, dated 431, is the funerary oration in which Pericles celebrates an Athens still confident and domineering; the third, one year later, in 430, is the harangue that he addressed to a rowdy assembly at the time when the city, ravaged by the plague, had to endure the devastation of its territory.
Clearly, these extremely sophisticated if not sophistic speeches7 certainly do not bear authentic witness to Pericles’ eloquence. Thucydides may well have been present when these three rhetorical tours de force were delivered, but he reconstructed them many years later, leaving his own stamp upon them at a time when he had long since been living in exile. So these samples of Periclean eloquence are in all likelihood partly Thucydidean. Indeed, the historian himself half-admits to this at the beginning of his work: “The speeches are given in the language in which, as it seemed to me, the several speakers would express, on the subjects under consideration, the sentiments most befitting the occasion, though at the same time I have adhered as closely as possible to the general sense of what was actually said.”8
Despite this partial rewriting, The Peloponnesian War makes it possible to appreciate the two complementary facets of Pericles’ oratorical skill: authority and pedagogy. According to Thucydides, the stratēgos did not hesitate to counter the crowd’s anger and even chided it severely. This authoritarian dimension had a pedagogic aim. In his speeches to the Assembly, the stratēgos frequently addressed the people as he would a capricious child who would change its mind depending on the circumstances.9 This uncompromising speech-making won the historian’s admiration: “he restrained the multitude while respecting their liberties, and led them rather than was led by them, because he did not resort to flattery, with a view to pleasing them [pros hēdonēn], seeking power by dishonest means, but was able, in the strength of his high reputation, to oppose them and even provoke their wrath” (2.65.8). The fact is that Pericles stood out as being radically different from his successors who, according to Thucydides, sought in their speeches only to flatter the people, without any attempt to instruct it.10
Of course, this is an idealized description. Although contemporary sources are in agreement when they emphasize Pericles’ oratorical skills, they certainly do not all praise him for them. Pericles is often criticized for his ability to turn black into white—and, in particular, to persuade his listeners that he had won a fight when, in fact, he had lost it11—and he is often depicted as an orator who, though extraordinary, is alarming. The comic poets compare his eloquence now to a kind of bestial seduction, now to a divine enchantment, resorting to a double play of revealing metaphors.
First, consider the animal metaphor: in Eupolis’s Demes, Pericles’ wit is compared to the sting of a wasp or a bee: “Pericles was the most eloquent man in the world. When he appeared he was like a good sprinter. His words set him ten feet ahead of the other orators. He spoke rapidly, but as well as this rapidity, a kind of Persuasion [Peithō] clung to his lips, for he was the only orator who left his prick [kentron] in the ears of those who heard him” (fr. 102 K.-A.). Here, the poet assimilates Periclean rhetoric to a sting striking the listener in order to blunt his perceptions (the metaphor al
so clearly plays on sexual connotations).12
Now for the divine metaphor: according to Plutarch, it was on account of his extraordinary eloquence that Pericles was nicknamed “the Olympian” by the comic poets: “they spoke of him as ‘thundering’ and ‘lightning’ when he harangued his audience, and as “wielding a dread thunderbolt [keraunon] in his tongue.’”13 This metaphor attributes a quasi-divine power to the speech of the stratēgos. A thunderbolt, the divine attribute par excellence, could strike a person down and could bind those whom it touched, constricting them in unbreakable bonds from which it was absolutely impossible to escape.14 The poet Cratinus possibly resorted to the same analogy in his play titled The Ploutoi (The Spirits of Wealth), composed in 430/429 B.C. for the Lenaean Festival, in which he assimilated Pericles to Zeus “binding the rebel Titans in unbreakable bonds [desmoi].”15
Periclean eloquence thus possesses a disquieting power that links it now to the beasts, now to the gods. In both cases, the stratēgos was set apart from common humanity, either for better or for worse. When the comic writers presented him in this way, they intended to arouse in the public admiration as well as suspicion.16
One reason why Periclean rhetoric was effective, even terrifying, is that it observed a number of oratorical and gestural codes that served to magnify its impact and renown even further.