Pericles of Athens

by Vincent Azoulay, Janet Lloyd

  Reconstruction of the Myth of Autochthony

  All the indications suggest that this great story of origins took shape in its definitive form between 450 and 430, at the very time when Pericles was in power and the religious building sites were springing up all over Attica.22 It was at this point—not earlier, as is sometimes argued—that the Athenians began to proclaim themselves to be born from the earth, so that they were all, collectively, the descendants of the king Erechtheus, who was born from the very soil of Attica.23

  To understand how this belief, central to Athenian imaginary representations, came to be elaborated, we must start with a comment on vocabulary. In the fifth century, the term autokhthōn did not mean people “born from the earth,” but simply people who had lived on their territory from time immemorial, without ever migrating.24 According to Herodotus, such were the cases of the Arcadians in the Peloponnese, the Carians in Ionia, and the Ethiopians and Libyans in Africa.25 The Athenians also belonged to this category since, already by the time of the Second Persian War, they were claiming to have lived always in Attica.

  Furthermore, the Athenians had long believed that one of their earliest kings was born from the earth (gēgenēs), as is attested by the following lines from the Iliad: “And they that held Athens, the well-built citadel, the land of great-hearted Erechtheus, whom of old Athene, daughter of Zeus, fostered, when the earth, the giver of grain, had borne him.”26 The story of Erechtheus is well-known to us thanks to the eponymous tragedy by Euripides, written in the late fifth century. Seized by a violent desire for Athena, the lame Hephaestus attempted, unsuccessfully, to rape her. His semen did spatter the goddess’s thigh, however, and she grabbed a twist of wool (eru) to wipe her leg, and then dropped it on the Attic ground (khthon). From that fertilized earth, Erechtheus emerged and was received and raised by Athena.27

  There is, however, nothing to prove that, as early as the Archaic period, the Athenians were considering themselves to be the descendants of Erechtheus. To believe in a king born from the soil is one thing; to believe yourselves, collectively, to be his descendants is quite another. It was not until the time of Pericles that the Athenians took to presenting themselves as the offspring of Erechtheus, thereby giving a new sense to the notion of autochthony. After a first fleeting appearance in the Eumenides of Aeschylus, the theme was developed by Sophocles in his Ajax, in the 440s. Here, the Athenians were presented as men born from the earth, the offspring of Erechtheus. It was at that point, and only then, that the various elements in the story of autochthony fused together, enabling the citizens to pride themselves on not only having always lived on the land of their fathers—their fatherland—but also being directly descended from their mother earth, their motherland.28

  Autochthony, now part and parcel of the Athenian identity, functioned as a tale of collective ennoblement. This prestigious birth conferred upon the Athenians a very particular solidarity: since they all shared the same mother, they were all brothers; and on a social and ritual level, this was expressed by the phratries that united them all under the patronage of a common ancestor. Outside Athens, this belief justified them thinking that they were superior to other cities which, as Euripides put it, “were made up of elements imported from many origins, like counters set out on a chequer-board.”29

  It was this imaginary context that made sense of the construction, in the early 440s, in the Agora, of a building consecrated to Hephaestus and Athena. Even though the temple was completed only after the peace of Nicias in 421 and the cult statues were not installed until 416/415, the project and the early stages of the construction work were, if not Periclean, at least of the Periclean period.30 This edifice, built entirely of marble, was by far the most luxurious in the Agora, and its sculpted ornaments spread over a larger area than any other Doric temple in the Greek world, except for the Parthenon. The splendor of the temple was matched by the munificence of the festival introduced in 421, when the great building was completed. It included a solemn procession, a torch-race between the tribes, imposing sacrifices and, possibly, a musical competition. The Hephaesteia celebrated the lame god with a lavishness unequaled anywhere in the Greek world.

  While the celebration of Athena is perfectly explicable, should we not be astonished at such a sumptuous outlay being devoted to “a rather secondary god”?31 We should indeed be somewhat surprised if, as a deeply rooted historiographical tradition has it, Hephaestus was celebrated in the Agora simply as the patron of craftsmen. The craftsmen, who were concentrated within the Ceramicus quarter, did certainly play a major role in the Athenian city, and it was probably by no means by chance that the decree relating to the organization of the Hephaesteia was proposed by an owner of craftsmen slaves who had made a fortune, Hyperbolus.32 Nevertheless, it would be mistaken to reduce the significance of the festival and the edifice solely to a celebration of the craftsmanship of Athens. The celebrations did not give blacksmiths and potters pride of place, but mobilized the tribes of the entire city, without privileging any particular category. And even if the metics, of whom there were many among the craftsmen, did take part in the ceremony, they did so in a minor role: they received no more than a portion of raw meat and did not have access to the sacrificial feasts, which were reserved solely for citizens. The point is that, in the Agora, Hephaestus and Athena were honored not simply as the patrons of the craftsmen, but as the protagonists in the story of autochthony that had now been rearticulated. Significantly enough, the base upon which the statues of the cult of Hephaestus and Athena rested represented the birth of Erechtheus (figures 7 and 8).33

  Admittedly, Pericles’ personal involvement in the enterprise is not documented; even if the building site was set up in his lifetime, the festival in honor of Hephaestus was not established until eight years after his death. More troubling still, the stratēgos said not a word about the divine ancestry of the Athenians in the funeral oration that he delivered in 431, in which he went only so far as to mention the remarkable stability of the Athenian populace ever since its origins: “This land of ours, in which the same people have never ceased to dwell [aei oikountes] in an unbroken line of successive generations, [our ancestors] by their valor transmitted to our times as a free state.”34 Rather than put this down to a hypothetical memory lapse on the part of Thucydides, we should recognize that that lacuna could have been deliberately planned. For this speech, Pericles had decided to opt for an erotic vocabulary rather than an ancestral one, in order to describe the Athenians: he wanted his fellow-citizens to fight for the city as erastai would for their erōmenoi, not as sons defending their earth-mother.35

  FIGURE 7. Hephaisteion statue-group (ca. 421 B.C.), as reconstructed by Evelyn Harrison. Evelyn B. Harrison, “Alkamenes’ Sculptures for the Hephaisteion: Part I, The Cult Statues.” American Journal of Archaeology, 81, 2 (1977): 137–178. Courtesy of Archaeological Institute of America and American Journal of Archaeology.

  FIGURE 8. Copy of the bas-relief sculpture of the Hephaisteion statue-group. Musée du Louvre; Galerie de la Melpomène (Aile Sully). Rez-de-chaussée—Section 15. No. d’inv. MR 710 (no. usuel Ma 579). Paris, Musée du Louvre. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Hervé Lewandowski.

  Nevertheless, one detail does show the stratēgos’s personal interest in the autochthony tale: the iconography of the statue of Athena Parthenos. Ensconced at the heart of the Parthenon, this immense effigy, over eleven meters high from top to toe, constituted “as it were a brief recapitulation of Periclean themes.”36 According to Pausanias (1.24.7), “Athena … holds a statue of Victory about four cubits high, and in the other hand a spear; at her feet lies a shield and near the spear is a serpent. This serpent would be Erichthonius.” In this way, at the feet of the goddess there stood the first Athenian, born from the earth, for whom the city set up a cult on the Acropolis, in the Erechtheum, which was rebuilt shortly after the stratēgos’s death.

  It turns out that Pericles was more the herald of civic religion than its hero. Even if he w
as actively involved in the ritual functioning of the community, his personal influence remained limited. He created no new festivals and was responsible for the construction of no sanctuary (for the Parthenon and the Odeon were not temples, in the ritualistic sense of the term). As for his direct involvement in the rehandling of the autochthony story, that cannot be confirmed. The stratēgos was thus a spokesman for the civic religion rather than its high priest.

  But quite apart from this role as an intermediary, Pericles maintained with the gods personal relations that the sources take into account, allowing us to catch a glimpse of his religious convictions or, at least, of the beliefs ascribed to him, sometimes in order to glorify him, but often so as to denigrate him.

  THE POSSESSOR OF AN EQUIVOCAL) PIETY: A PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP WITH THE DEITY

  The Divine Pericles

  According to the ancient sources, Pericles had established privileged links with several deities in the pantheon. At the time of the construction of the Propylaea, the monumental entrance to the Acropolis (437–433 B.C.), the stratēgos benefited from the personal care of Athena, the poliadic, or City deity. During the construction work, the most zealous of the workmen slipped and fell from the top of the edifice. “He lay in a sorry plight, despaired of by the physicians. Pericles was much cast down by this, but the goddess appeared to him in a dream and prescribed a course of treatment for him to use, so that he speedily and easily healed the man. It was in commemoration of this that he set up the bronze statue of Athena Hygieia on the acropolis near the altar of that goddess, which was there before.”37

  At first sight, there is nothing exceptional about this dream. There was a well-known practice known as incubation that consisted in the sick receiving in their dreams a visit or revelations from the deity Asclepius. But such dreams came about only after the accomplishment of a well-established ritual: first, only the sick person could ask for a dream; then the god appeared in the sanctuary only after the appropriate rituals had been performed; and finally, the sick man never himself interpreted the signs that were sent to him, for that task fell to the deity’s priests.38 Nothing of the kind happened in the case of Pericles’ dream: Athena visited the stratēgos outside any ritual framework, short-circuiting the traditional mediations and leaving the dreamer and the goddess face to face. The anecdote thus places Pericles in a privileged position vis-à-vis the goddess, “as a mediator and quasi-diviner between the goddess and the wounded man.”39

  That transaction operated, as was often the case, according to the logic of a gift and a counter-gift. The first gift—the monumental transformation of the Acropolis—elicited from Athena a response in the shape of a dream sent privately to the stratēgos. In return, Pericles offered her a new consecration, which not only completed the exchange cycle, closing it upon itself, but also commemorated forever his special close relations with the goddess. It is quite clear that Plutarch was making the most of an embellished story: the dedication of the statue of Athena Hygieia discovered by the archaeologists makes no mention at all of the stratēgos and refers only to the Athenians; the individual is effaced when confronted by the collectivity which, in the fifth century, banned all excessive forms of personal distinction. The fact nevertheless remains that the anecdote testifies to a tradition that is favorable to Pericles, since it draws attention to the divine protection that he enjoyed—as did Odysseus in the Odyssey.

  To draw attention to such a proximity to the gods was nevertheless a risky business, for the Athenians might interpret it as a sign of concealed tyrannical ambitions. The Pisistratids had boasted of their privileged relations with the goddess and Pisistratus had seized power escorted by a false Athena, at the culmination of a ruse that was never to be forgotten.40 Was Pericles too close to the gods? That was precisely the notion that his detractors sought to instill in the minds of the Athenians.

  His opponents sometimes identified him with Dionysus, “king of the satyrs,”41 but it was to Zeus that the stratēgos was most frequently assimilated. This was a way of suggesting that Pericles had overstepped the boundaries of the human condition and had tipped over into overweening hubris. Plutarch was well aware of the accusation implied by such an association, and he endeavored explicitly to neutralize such attacks: “it seems to me that his otherwise puerile and pompous nickname [of “Olympian”] is rendered unobjectionable and becoming by this one circumstance, that it was so gracious a nature and a life so pure and undefiled in the exercise of sovereign power.”42 What could be more unsuitable, in a democracy, than a man who took himself for a god—worse still, the king of the gods?

  That identification was all the more problematic given that, in Athenian theater, Zeus was often portrayed as a despot who heeded nothing but his own desires: in Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus (or Pseudo-Aeschylus) even depicted Zeus as a tyrant usurping power in order to set up his own whims as laws (409), without any need for justification (324). So the poet Cratinus aimed to create alarm when he chose to identify Pericles with the most powerful of all the gods: “Faction [stasis] and Old Cronos were united in wedlock; their offspring was of all the tyrants the greatest and lo! he is called by the gods the head-compeller.”43 Such a comparison turned the stratēgos into an unscrupulous usurper, prepared to do anything in order to hang on to power.

  Cratinus repeated that same accusation, making it more pointed, in his play titled The Spirits of Wealth, which was performed in 430–429, at the time when Pericles was under attack from all quarters for his handling of the war: “Here is Zeus, chasing Cronos from the kingship and binding the rebellious Titans in unbreakable bonds.”44 Through this analogy, the comic poet covertly evoked the ostracism of Cimon, in 462/1: confronting Zeus/ Pericles, Cimon was identified with Cronos, a benevolent sovereign, ousted by his son. As it happened, the parallel was flattering to Pericles’ fallen rival, for ever since Hesiod, the reign of Cronos had evoked the golden age when “the grain-giving field bore crops of its own accord, much and unstinting, and they themselves, willing, mild-mannered, shared out the fruits of their labours, together with many good things.”45 With this analogy, the comic poet recalled the proverbial generosity of Cimon, which Plutarch carefully assesses: “[Cimon] made his home in the city a general public residence for his fellow citizens, and on his estates in the country allowed even the stranger to take and use the choicest of the ripened fruits, with all the fair things that the seasons bring. Thus, in a certain fashion, he restored to human life the fabled communalism of the age of Cronos—the golden age.”46 In this game of masks, the comparison proved extremely disadvantageous to Zeus-Pericles, who, by getting rid of Cronos-Cimon is implied not only to have established an unjust tyranny but also to have brought about the end of the golden age.

  There was another reason why this “pantheonization” was particularly unpleasant: by being assimilated to Zeus, Pericles was represented as a flighty lover who disrupted family life. In this respect, Zeus’s reputation was by now certainly well established. Seducing both mortals and immortals as he pleased, he had engendered many bastards all over the world. So it was certainly not by chance that Aspasia was herself seen as Zeus’s irascible wife Hera : “And Sodomy [katapugosunē] produced for Cronos this Hera-Aspasia, the bitch-eyed concubine.”47 Inevitably, the analogy rebounded against the stratēgos’s partner and also his bastard son, Pericles the Younger.

  These often alarming and sometimes grotesque jokes cracked by the comic poets were intended to provoke laughter and alarm among the spectators and, as such, were inclined to reflect the fantasies of Pericles’ opponents rather than Pericles’ own religious thinking. In order to get some idea of his own deeper convictions, we need to turn to other sources that are, unfortunately, equally biased.

  A Clear Head or a Weak Mind?

  In the few accounts that bear upon his personal beliefs, Pericles appears to be torn between two diametrically opposed positions. At one moment, the stratēgos is presented as a defender of rationalist thinking, cursorily dismissing all supernatu
ral interpretations; at other times, he is presented as a supporter of traditional religion or even a religion that never looked beyond superstition.48 Choosing between these two alternatives, many contemporary historians have often seemed to favor the former, even going so far as to represent Pericles as an aufklärer (an enlightenment figure), the herald of a world moving toward secularization.49

  It is true that several anecdotes portray the Athenian leader as an enlightened disciple of the sophists, stripping the world of its enchanted aspects, the better to mock all divine omens. In 430, when a fleet of vessels was about to set sail under his orders, “It chanced that the sun was eclipsed and darkness came on and all were thoroughly frightened, looking upon it as a great portent. Accordingly, seeing that his steersman was timorous and utterly perplexed, Pericles held up his cloak before the man’s eyes, and, thus covering them, asked him if he thought it anything dreadful or portentous of anything dreadful. ‘No,’ said the steersman. ‘How then,’ said Pericles, ‘is yonder event different from this, except that it is something rather larger than my cloak which has caused the obscurity?’”50 It is a very nice story, but it has no historical basis since no eclipse of the sun is attested in that year.51

  How should we interpret this cobbled-together anecdote? In order to understand it, we need to replace the story in the context in which it was circulated—that of the philosophical schools, according to Plutarch (Pericles, 35.2). The story was of a moral rather than a historical nature. The point was to set in contrast, term for term, the enlightened behavior of Pericles and the hidebound attitude of one of his unfortunate successors, Nicias. In late August 413, while in command of the Athenian troops massed against Syracuse, Nicias was confronted with a total eclipse of the moon. Faced with this omen, he dithered helplessly for several whole days, “spending his time making sacrifices and consulting diviners, right up until the moment when his enemies attacked.”52 That long delay had grave consequences, for it led to the rout of the Athenians at Syracuse and eventually decided the outcome of the war. So these two episodes reflected two leaders, two different attitudes, and two moments in Athenian history: the glorious start of the Peloponnesian War and the ignominious conclusion of the expedition to Sicily, and an implicit contrast was drawn between them.