As represented by the Socratics, Pericles thus appeared, at best, as an exceptional man who was nevertheless incapable of educating anyone at all, at worst as a despicable demagogue who flattered the base instincts of the people. So should we regard these acerbic criticisms simply as a form of an obsessional attack on the foremost leader of a despised regime? Maybe, but there is more to it. Over and above the case of the stratēgos, Plato aimed, in this work of his, to point the finger at the failure of the entire Athenian political personnel.
A Long-Term Evolution: The Establishment of “Tyranny” by the People
In the Gorgias, Plato targeted not just Pericles, but included in his critique all the leaders of Athens from Themistocles onward. According to him, not one of them had succeeded in the slightest degree in checking the desires of the people: “In persuading or compelling her people to what would help them to be better—they were scarcely, if at all, superior to their successors” (Gorgias, 517b). All things considered, Pericles was neither better nor worse than the rest of them: he behaved toward the Athenians “as to children, trying merely to gratify them, not caring a jot whether they would be better or worse in consequence.”23 In this respect, Plato agrees with the severe judgment passed on the Athenian politicians in this period by Theopompus of Chios. This pupil of Isocrates laid charges of demagogy against not only Pericles but also Cimon, despite the fact that the latter supported the aristocratic status quo.24 According to Theopompus, the generosity of the former differed in no way at all from that of the latter. Both were nothing but sordid flatterers.
Unlike Theopompus, Plato did not stop at this bitter conclusion. Far from abusing the Athenian leaders, he exonerated them, with a certain degree of slyness, of all serious responsibility for the decline of the city. For even had they wished to do so, the leaders of the people were powerless when it came to opposing the whims of the masses. In Plato’s view, it was always the people who held the whip-hand over the politicians, not the reverse. Contrary to the tradition favored by Aristotle and Xenophon, that proclaimed that the dēmos simply reflected its leaders, Plato held that the people were in truth responsible for the corruption of the Athenian elite groups: “What private teaching do you think will hold out and not rather be swept away by the torrent of censure and applause, and borne off on its current, so that he will affirm the same things that they [that is, the people] do to be honourable and base, and will adopt the same habits [epitēdeusein], and be even such as they?”25
According to Plato, the members of the elite were totally incapable of resisting the democratic “torrent” that swept away everything in its path. Unlike most of his fellows, this philosopher took the democracy that he so detested extremely seriously: far from the people being a mere puppet, it held terrifying power over its leaders, forcing them to align their behavior with the lowest common denominator. Faced with this tyrant-people, the leaders had to adjust their wishes to the expectations of the crowd or otherwise risk discredit, ostracism or even death. As Plato asserted in another context, in order to live in safety under the reign of a despot, it was best to agree with all that he said and resemble him as closely as possible.26
Within such an interpretative framework, Pericles’ behavior takes on a new meaning. Despite his attempts at resistance, the life of the stratēgos testifies to the establishment of democratic conventions that became ever more intrusive. In the face of increasing public pressure, Pericles was obliged to show that his behavior was above suspicion and to reject all overostentatious forms of distinction. His rejection of sumptuary expenses, his avoidance of his friends (philoi), his manner of behavior in the Assembly, and his way of favoring the fleet’s oarsmen, rather than the hoplite phalanx, all reflected the establishment of a new balance between the people and the Athenian elite. From this point onward, in both their public behavior and their private attitudes, the demagogues needed constantly to strive to diminish the social distance that separated them from ordinary citizens.
Once their polemical thrust is neutralized, the Platonic analyses make it possible to view relations between the “great man” and the democracy in a new light. Far from embodying a break, the Periclean moment fits into a long-term evolution that involved the people’s taming of the Athenian elite. It was precisely the process of leveling that the Athenian oligarchs regarded as insupportable, being quick to interpret it as a sign of irremediable political and moral decline.
Pericles himself was at once an actor in and a witness to this progressive swing. Although a major player in it, he did not initiate the process nor did he bestow upon it its final form. At the time of his death, the people’s ideological domination was still far from unchallenged, as the story of Alcibiades, the stratēgos’s ward, clearly shows. The munificence of this young Athenian and his disorderly behavior did not prevent him from fascinating the dēmos nor, despite all his transgressions, did it stop him being elected stratēgos several times in the 420s and 410s.27 It was not until the fourth century and the lasting trauma created by the Peloponnesian War that the democratic system became stabilized and the compromise between the elite and the people found its definitive formulation.
CHAPTER 10
The Individual and Democracy: The Place of the “Great Man”
Now, at the end of this biographical odyssey, let us return, if not to the shores of Ithaca, at least to the question that served as its starting point. Was Pericles an all-powerful figure or an evanescent one? How, exactly, did the actions of the stratēgos and the will of the people interact? Can we settle for the forthright conclusion expressed by Thucydides in his final panegyric for stratēgos: “Athens, though in name a democracy, gradually became in fact a government ruled by its foremost citizen” (2.65.9)? According to the ancient authors, there seemed to be no doubt about it. Pericles’ monarchy, theorized by the historian of the Peloponnesian War, was also a favorite theme of the comic poets, who were always ready to represent the stratēgos as an unscrupulous tyrant. In truth, Pericles’ admirers and detractors were all perfectly happy to agree on one point—namely, the predominance of the stratēgos’s position in the city of Athens. Some—Thucydides for one—depict him as a beneficent sovereign; others, as a dangerous and corrupting tyrant. Either way, the dēmos appears as a mere puppet manipulated by Pericles. Thanks to his establishing the misthos and launching his policy of major building works, the stratēgos is depicted as a monarch showering benefits upon his passive or even apathetic subjects.
Although that view is purveyed on every side by the ancient authors, it needs to be criticized and replaced in context. It fails to take into account the various control-mechanisms that surrounded the power of Athenian magistrates, Pericles first and foremost. Not only did he always have to negotiate with the other stratēgoi, which, de facto, limited his influence, but, like any other member of the elite, he was subject to many forms of supervision on the part of the people. At an institutional level, his authority was frequently the object of scrutiny; accounts had to be submitted, and there was always a real threat of ostracism or of an accusation of high treason. At the social and ritual level, Pericles was forced to withstand numerous attacks from the comic dramatists, justify himself in the face of insistent rumors about his behavior, both private and public, and suffer noisy abuse from the crowds in the Assembly. Although his influence over the city’s destiny was undeniable, the stratēgos was obliged to take popular expectations into account and, accordingly, adopt an attitude in conformity with the democratic ethos. Far from ruling Athens as a monarch, Pericles lived constantly under tension in a context in which the power of the demos was relentlessly increasing.
“PERICLES THE OLYMPIAN”: THE POWER OF A SINGLE MAN?
Monarch and Tyrant
When addressing the Athenians right at the beginning of the fourth century, the orator Lysias, showing no concern for historical accuracy, declared “our ancestors chose as nomothetae [that is, lawgivers] Solon, Themistocles and Pericles.”1 There was no mention of Cleisthenes
or Ephialtes in this idealized evocation of the ancestral constitution, the patrios politeia. That omission was in no way surprising. “The fact is that, in Athenian minds, there had been no institutional innovations except in great periods that could be identified with a single man known and recognized by the whole community.”2 In accordance with a mechanism well charted in the Greek world, as elsewhere, important changes were always associated with one great man in particular. As recollection of events faded, the collective memory effected a simplification and stylization that tended to associate the introduction of a variety of measures with certain leading figures. The Spartans thus attributed a whole collection of economic, social, and institutional reforms to one single semimythical lawgiver, Lycurgus, despite the fact that the Spartan kosmos was set in place only gradually; and in just the same way, the Athenians associated the creation of their city as a political community—the famous synoecism—solely with the name Theseus—even though the process had clearly taken place only gradually in the course of a considerable period of time.
The ancient authors tended to attribute to certain men far more than they had, in truth, accomplished, thereby eclipsing other historical actors who were just as important. Cleisthenes the lawgiver remained in the shadow of Solon, who was considered to be more consensual, just as Ephialtes was reduced to a mere puppet manipulated by Pericles:3 that process of compression initiated in the fourth century found its fullest expression in Plutarch’s Life, which turned Pericles into the man of providence for the entire pentēkontaetia.
Does this mean that we should submit to a radical revision the image of an all-powerful Pericles, on the grounds that it resulted from a biased functioning of the collective memory that had been further amplified by the preconceptions of the ancient authors? To do so would, to say the least, be overhasty. In truth, that personal cult was not a purely a posteriori reconstruction, but instead was a theme that had already been elaborated in the fifth century, as several sources of evidence show. Even then, Thucydides was presenting the stratēgos as “the first of the Athenians” (1.139), who, unchallenged, dominated the city’s whole political life. According to this historian’s account, Pericles seems hardly even to belong to the civic community, so outrageously does he dominate it: he alone confronts the anger of all the Athenians, who form a homogeneous block facing him, before obliging the entire city (xumpasa tēn polin), purely by the force of his oratory, to recognize his superiority, his arkhē (2.65.1–2). According to Thucydides, the stratēgos even managed to subjugate the people with its own consent: “he restrained the multitude while respecting their liberties [kateikhe to plēthos eleutherōs], and led them rather than was led by them” (2.65.8).4
Nor was the historian Thucydides alone in expressing that opinion. In Pericles’ lifetime, already, the comic poets had delighted in setting the omnipotence of the stratēgos on stage, but in their case, did so in order to stigmatize it. They even went so far as to compare Pericles to the king of the gods, Zeus, although there was nothing complimentary about the assimilation, for, by calling him an Olympian, they were drawing attention to his hubris.5 Moreover, as well as describing him with that insolent label, the comic authors depicted him as a man who held quasi-absolute power. According to Telekleides, a contemporary of Pericles, the Athenians had handed over to him “with the cities’ assessments, the cities themselves, / to bind or release as he pleases, / their ramparts of stone to build up if he likes, and / then to pull down again straightway, / their treaties, their forces, their might, peace and / riches, and all the fair gifts of good fortune.”6 So it would seem that it was not just in foreign policies that Pericles did as he pleased, but also within the city; according to this poet, the citizens had abdicated their own sovereignty in his favor.
More alarming still, one deeply rooted tradition linked Pericles with the tyrants of Athens, the Pisistratids. This dark legend can already be detected, reading between the lines, in the ambiguous account of the birth of the stratēgos recorded by Herodotus. Just before giving birth to Pericles, his mother was said to have dreamed that she produced a lion.7 Although the analogy has certain heroic resonances,8 in a democratic context it is, to say the least, equivocal. For it links Pericles with Cypselus, the tyrant of Corinth, whose mother had a similar dream. Above all, however, it linked him with Hipparchus, the son of the tyrant Pisistratus who, also in a dream, had been compared to a lion and was destined to suffer a dire fate.9
As his opponents saw it, that was not the only link that bound Pericles to the tyrants of Athens. The very features of his face rendered him suspect. According to Plutarch, “it was thought that in feature he was like the tyrant Pisistratus; and when men well on in years remarked also that his voice was sweet and his tongue glib and speedy in discourse, they were struck with amazement at the resemblance” (Pericles, 7.1). Moreover, quite apart from his physical appearance, his network of friends evoked the memory of tyrants and those close to him were described as “the new Pisistratids” (Pericles, 16.1).
The stratēgos may well also have been compared to those controversial figures on account of the policies that he pursued. Some aspects of his actions as leader of the city were certainly reminiscent of certain initiatives of the Athenian tyrants. When he reorganized the Great Panathenaea so as to secure a greater place for musical competitions, Pericles was following in the footsteps of Pisistratus, who had, if not created, at least lent new luster to this great Athenian festival.10 Likewise, the construction policies of the stratēgos recalled Athens’s tyrannical past. The gigantism of the Parthenon must have been regarded as an echo of the immense temple of Zeus Olympius, the construction of which, to the south east of the Acropolis, had been launched around 515 B.C. by the Pisistratids who, however, did not have time to complete it.11 In suggesting that the embellishment of the city was, as Plutarch claimed, “manifestly subjecting it to tyranny” (Pericles, 12.2), Pericles’ opponents no doubt hoped to associate the stratēgos’s monumental policies with the detested memory of the Pisistratids.
The monumental program launched by Pericles on the Acropolis played a crucial role in the process that led to Pericles being depicted as an all-powerful monarch. To some extent, the ancient sources did represent the stratēgos’s power as a reflection of the Parthenon, majestic, intimidating, even overwhelming, thereby transforming the magistrate into an emperor so intent on his building projects that he eluded all popular control.
The Builder-Emperor
If Plutarch so greatly admired Pericles, despite all his “demagogic” policies, it was primarily on account of the “great works” with which the biographer associated him so closely. In his final comparison between Pericles and Fabius Maximus, Plutarch expresses his boundless admiration for those buildings that, in a way, increased the prestige of the whole of Greece in comparison with the triumphant Rome of the early centuries of its empire: “By the side of the great public works, the temples and the stately edifices with which Pericles adorned Athens, all Rome’s attempts at splendour down to the times of the Caesars, taken together, are not worthy to be considered.”12 In this way, Plutarch explicitly compares the action of the stratēgos to that of the Caesars. His monumental policies make him a prefiguration of the Roman emperors—in particular, Hadrian, who was a contemporary of the biographer and who, out of a sense of philhellenism, restored the edifices of Athens that were built under Pericles.13
Was this simply a later idea that emerged at the time when Plutarch was composing his Lives, as a result of a kind of contamination from the Roman imperial model? Not at all. In his own lifetime, the stratēgos was already associated with the monuments constructed at the peak of his career. The comic poets represented him as “carrying the Odeon on his head”;14 and one century later the orator Lycurgus of Athens, himself also a great builder who completed the construction of the theater of Dionysus, redesigned the Pnyx, and restored the temples of the Acropolis, wrote as follows: “Pericles, who had conquered Samos, Euboea, Aegina, and had construc
ted the Propylaea, the Odeon, the Parthenon, and had collected ten thousand talents for the Acropolis, was crowned with a simple crown of olive leaves.”15
However, even if this vision of an architect-Pericles frequently recurs in the ancient sources, for a number of reasons it calls for qualification. In the first place, we should distinguish between the edifices that are “Periclean” because Pericles himself proposed them and the monuments that are called “Periclean” only because they were constructed at the time when the stratēgos wielded influence in the city.16 If we credit the testimony of the orator Lycurgus, only the Odeon, the Parthenon, and the Propylaea—the last conceived by Mnesicles and all constructed in the five years between 437 and 433—should be attributed to the direct initiative of Pericles. To be sure, he also played a role in the construction of the Long Walls, which constituted a crucial element in his defense strategy. Nevertheless, he was not alone in taking part in their construction: Thucydides does not even mention his name in this connection,17 and Plato’s Socrates links him with only the construction of the inner wall that reinforced the northern wall that connected the city with Piraeus.18
Next, even Pericles’ supposed control of the work sites in which he was directly involved needs qualification. So it is, to put it mildly, mistaken to speak of “the labors of Pericles” as if they were comparable to the “labors of Heracles.” Pericles was no Hellenistic king, let alone a Roman emperor who, on his own, as an autocrat, decided upon the constructions to be undertaken. Every one of his projects was submitted to a vote of the Assembly that also decided how to finance it. Architects produced plans, models, and estimates, all of which were submitted for the approval of the Council. Magistrates then proceeded to adjudicate on the proposed works,19 which, once started, were subject to the intrusive control of a college of ten epistatai elected by the Assembly.
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