Pericles of Athens

by Vincent Azoulay, Janet Lloyd

  Ostracism, which was voted upon every year, took place in two stages. In the sixth month of the year, a preliminary vote that took the form of a show of hands decided whether or not to initiate the procedure. If this was in principle accepted, a second (secret) vote took place to decide who was to be condemned. This vote was conducted using potsherds (ostraka) upon which the citizens wrote the name of the man they wished to ostracize—a process that provides a good indication of the relative literacy of Athenian society. The individual with the most votes was then exiled, provided that a quorum of at least 6,000 voters had taken part. Those graffiti did not always stop at naming a victim but in some cases also mentioned the reasons that motivated the vote. It sometimes happened that the sexual reputation or even sexual behavior of men involved in politics was invoked to justify their exile. While some were blamed for their excessive wealth—such as one “horse breeder”—others were accused of adultery (moikhos). As for Cimon, Pericles’ first opponent, on one of the ostracism shards bearing his name (figure 9), he was even accused of maintaining an incestuous relationship with his sister, Elpinike: “Cimon [son of] Miltiades, get out of here and take Elpinike with you!”45 Because a vote of ostracism did not need to be justified by any particular offence that was penally reprehensible, it rested partly on the accusations laid against politicians for their personal behavior.46

  FIGURE 9. Ostraka of Cimon (ca. 462 B.C.). From S. Brenne, 1994, “Ostraka and the Process of Ostrakophoria,” in W.D.E. Coulson et al., eds., The Archaeology of Athens and Attica under Democracy. Oxford, UK: Oxbow Books, 13–24, here fig. 3-4, p. 14.

  The fact was that the Athenians not only set controls upon the Athenian elite by imposing numerous laws that affected them. They also did so by circulating rumors about their behavior that were first given expression in the theater and from there spread throughout the city. In this way, they exerted strong moral and ideological pressure upon those responsible for important duties.

  Omnipresent Social Controls

  The Invectives of the Comic Poets: Pericles on Stage

  Comic poetry, which was full of allusions to contemporary political life, fulfilled a function of social control over the members of the Athenian elite. In the orchestra of the theater of Dionysus, at the time of the Great Dionysia or the Lenaea, the poets often directed personal attacks—onomasti kōmōidein—against the individuals most deeply involved in civic life. Politicians were directly named by the actors performing before the entire assembled people. Gibed at or even ridiculed, they were attacked as much for their public actions as for their lifestyles and their behavior in private.

  Pericles was a particular target of such personal attacks. His relationship with Aspasia and his supposed sympathies for tyranny were frequently mocked on stage.47 Such accusations peaked at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. Plutarch certainly testifies to the growing hostility then surrounding the stratēgos: “Many of his enemies [beset him] with threats and denunciations and choruses sang songs of scurrilous mockery, designed to humiliate [ephubrizontes] him, railing at his generalship for its cowardice and its abandonment of everything to the enemy” (Pericles, 33.6). In view of all this, it might seem but a small step to assuming that comedy—and, more generally, simply rumors—played a part in the stratēgos’s removal from power in 430/429. But that is a step that should not be taken.

  In the first place, there were limits imposed upon the freedom of speech (parrhēsia) of the comic poets. The ancient sources even record certain episodes of censure in which Aristophanes and other comic writers were targeted, at particularly delicate moments in the history of Athens.48 Although the cases brought against comic poets are by no means all confirmed,49 a decree aiming to ban personal attacks in the theater does appear to have been passed in 440/439 at the instigation of Pericles; no doubt, the stratēgos hoped in this way to put a stop to the most virulent attacks launched against him while the city was engaged in the lengthy siege of Samos. However, this measure that had been approved within the context of a crisis was waived less than three years later;50 in the fifth century, no law restrained the freedom of speech of the comic poets for very long.51

  Second, those gibes did not necessarily directly influence the Athenians’ voting in the Assembly. Even as he was being subjected to constant fire from his critics, Pericles was reelected without interruption from 443 to 429, and, similarly, Cleon retained the people’s confidence despite the success, in 424 B.C., of Aristophanes’ Knights, in which the demagogue was dragged through the mud in the person of an uncouth Paphlagonian.52 So such invectives seem not to have had much direct effect politically. There was a strong ritual dimension to those insults and outrageous claims, and their function was mainly cathartic. The violence of comic language stemmed more from a ritualized process of verbal abuse than from any clearly articulated political program.53

  All the same, that is not to say that such attacks had no impact at all. They affected Pericles significantly, leading him to modify his behavior. The reason he decided, upon entering political life, to adopt a totally transparent way of life was precisely so as to try to avoid such verbal attacks.54 In order to avoid being attacked on the comic stage, politicians thus had good reason to keep a check on their own behavior and to adjust it to satisfy popular expectations. Comedy certainly did affect Athenian political life, not directly—by influencing the citizens’ votes—but rather indirectly, by reflecting in a magnifying mirror the “ethico-political” norms with which members of the elite were invited to conform.

  The Strength of Rumors: The Goddess with a Thousand Mouths

  The criticisms that were amplified in the theater, which acted as a sounding-board, started off in the Agora, where they circulated in a diffuse manner. As they passed from mouth to mouth and from ear to ear, rumors swiftly grew into an anomalous and sometimes disquieting collective phenomenon.55 Pericles was himself a victim of this gossip and these whispers that grew mysteriously without being associated with anyone in particular. Legetai or legousin, as the Greek texts put it: “it is said” or “they say.” This is the formula to which Plutarch resorts in order to convey the rumors surrounding the stratēgos, who was said to be transfixed with love for Aspasia, corrupting the wives of other citizens, and mixing with enemies of the city.56

  Through what channels were these rumors spread? The poets would sometimes lend them their voices, but initially the rumors circulated in informal spaces, as murmurings in the shops or even in the meetings of phratries and other associations.57 The workplaces of certain craftsmen—barbers, cobblers, and fullers—constituted important meeting places,58 where information would gather to the point where it would even turn into veritable waves of opinion.59 Even before rumors became rife in public places, they would sometimes emerge in private ones. According to Plutarch, Pericles was the target of slander started by members of his own family, who were indignant at his intransigent attitude where financial matters were concerned: “Xanthippus, incensed at this, fell to abusing his father and, to make men laugh, publishing abroad his conduct of affairs at home, and the discourses that he held with the sophists” (Pericles, 36.2). It seems that, later, Pericles’ elder son even increased his attacks to the point of starting a rumor that his father was sleeping with his own (Xanthippus’s) wife (Pericles, 36.3)!

  Even if these rumors were groundless, they were certainly not harmless. They forged collective beliefs that could not simply be swept aside by their victims. The fourth-century orators were even ready to recognize a degree of truth in them. According to Aeschines, “In the case of the life and conduct of men, a common rumor which is unerring does of itself spread abroad throughout the city,”60 which was why, probably at the time of Cimon and Pericles, the Athenians had devoted a cult to it, “as the most powerful of goddesses” (hōs theou megistēs).61 The philosopher Plato was likewise astonished at the amazing power of rumor62 that, praising some and denigrating others, defined norms of behavior that were all the more influential because they
were not formalized. Phēmē thus acted upon the very heart of reality, as “a great subterranean power, an essential part of what is held to be true.”63 It oriented the actions of the Athenian leaders, who were often enough obliged to dance to the tune of slander, in order to save their very lives: rumor, “the eternal accuser” (katēgoron athanaton),64 dogged the steps of the politicians who, as a result, were forced to adjust their behavior.65

  Chatter and malicious gossip formalized the fears and expectations of the dēmos, structured public opinion, and surreptitiously defined the behavior that the people expected from the Athenian elite. Rumors, although informal, undeniably affected the behavior of the political actors just as much as or even more than legal procedures did. We should not regard social pressure and institutional controls as radically opposite. The fact was that the people exercised a kind of informal control at the very heart of the city institutions: speaking in the Assembly, orators had to cope with reactions from the dēmos that were sometimes brutal and unpredictable, as Pericles well knew, often in glorious circumstances, but sometimes in bitter ones.

  Heckling in the Assembly: Orators under Pressure

  Even in the Ekklēsia, which is where the ancient authors ascribe the most influence to him, Pericles’ speeches were always controlled by the crowd. The people did not hesitate to express their disapproval noisily or even to heckle the orators despite—or because of—all their rhetorical skills.66 Even though most citizens did not, themselves, dare to speak, that does not mean that they remained passive, silently gaping as they listened to the speeches delivered from the tribune. Time and again, the orators had to contend with great bursts of noisy applause, protests, whistles. and laughter and were even faced with heckling (thorubos), as many speeches of the Attic orators testify.67 “Vocal interruptions and heckling in court and Assembly undermined the speaker’s structural advantage as the focus of the group’s attention and reminded him that his right to speak depended on the audience’s power and patience.”68 The heckling stemmed from the normal Athenian exercise of freedom of speech, and its effect was to regulate the functioning of collective institutions while, in contrast, religious silence on the part of the masses was characteristic of peoples that were subjected to authoritarian regimes.69

  Pericles was on several occasions forced to confront a restless, even hostile, crowd that was perfectly prepared to interrupt him in the Assembly. According to Plutarch, the stratēgos was initially the target of violent criticism at the time when his ambitious building projects were discussed. Led by his political opponent Thucydides and his followers, the revolt broke out right in the middle of the discussions held on the Pnyx: “They slandered him [dieballon] in the assemblies, ‘The people has lost its fair fame and is in ill repute because it has removed the public moneys of the Hellenes from Delos into its own keeping.’” (Pericles, 12.1). Nor did the hostility aroused by the great construction works abate. In the course of another Ekklēsia meeting, Pericles had to render an account of the money provided for this vast building program. Faced with the people’s violent recriminations, right there in the Assembly, the stratēgos offered to complete the constructions using his own funds, on condition that all the merit would then go solely to him. But the Athenians rejected that solution and even “cried out with a loud voice [anekragon] and bade him take freely from the public funds for his outlays and to spare naught whatsoever.”70 While this episode certainly draws attention to Pericles’ persuasive powers, it also indicates the limits of his influence. Placed in danger on the tribune, the stratēgos could defuse the hostility of the people only by persuading it of how useful his project would be for the whole community; it was because these constructions increased the prestige of their city that the Athenians now noisily approved of the stratēgos and his building policy.

  When the conflict against the Peloponnesians began, that public pressure became more alarming. In 430, the stratēgos needed all his skills to calm down the anger of the people that now found itself enclosed within the city walls and infected by the plague: “After the second invasion of the Peloponnesians the Athenians underwent a change of feeling, now that their land had been ravaged a second time while the plague and the war combined lay heavily upon them. They blamed Pericles for having persuaded them to go to war and held him responsible for the misfortunes which had befallen them, and were eager to come to an agreement with the Lacedaemonians. They even sent envoys to them, but accomplished nothing. And now, being altogether at their wits’ end, they assailed Pericles” (Thucydides, 2.59.1–2). It was, according to Thucydides, only with great difficulty that he eventually managed to swing his audience round in his favor.71 As Arnold Gomme remarks: “Perhaps nothing makes more clear the reality of democracy in Athens, of the control of policy by the ekklesia, than this incident: the ekklesia rejects the advice of its most powerful statesman and most persuasive orator, but the latter remains in office, subordinate to the people’s will, till the people choose to get rid of him.”72

  A few months later, even the magic of his oratory was no longer enough. Thucydides does not dwell on this episode, which does not reflect well on his hero, but he does record that Pericles was relieved of his responsibilities as stratēgos at an Assembly session, probably following an epikheirotonia tōn arkhōn procedure. “They did not give over their resentment against him until they had imposed a fine upon him” (Thucydides, 2.65.3). Dismissed from the tribune and brutally stripped of his magistracy, Pericles retired to his oikos until a little later, when the remorseful Athenians summoned him back.

  Without doubt, heckling from the people had the power to counterbalance the rhetoric of even the most distinguished orators: these inarticulate murmurs could neutralize any logos, however persuasive it might be. It was in this way that the people tamed its elite leaders: far from dominating their audience, the Athenian leaders found themselves controlled by the dēmos, at the mercy of its more or less spontaneous reactions. Faced with ever possible dissent, it was very difficult for the orators to propose points of view that were too much at odds with popular expectations.

  Persnickety institutional procedures, tumultuous popular interventions in the Assembly, outrageous comic insults, and obsessive rumors: in the course of the fifth century, all these progressively combined to promote the political and ideological dominance of the Athenian dēmos. Plato, in the next century, was the writer who best described the powers by which the elite groups were tamed by the people—a process that the philosopher considered to be seriously pathological.73 Democracy was, in other words, for him a leveling downward. Plato developed an eminently polemical point of view toward the Athenian city, but he was fundamentally right, for in the fourth century, orators could no longer openly distinguish themselves from the common crowd on the basis of their supposed superiority.

  Yet this evolution was by no means always interpreted as a crippling defect in Athenian democracy. All that Plato denounced was, on the contrary, celebrated by Demosthenes in his speech On the Crown (§ 280): “But it is not the diction of an orator, Aeschines, or the vigour of his voice that has any value: it is supporting the policy of the people [hoi polloi] and having the same friends and the same enemies as your country.” Demosthenes recognized the imperious need for the rhētores to fall into line with popular norms, which in effect, in the fourth century, meant with the demagogues (in the neutral sense of that term) and to strive constantly to diminish the social distance that separated them from the ordinary citizens.74

  Was this conclusion reached by the fourth-century orators and philosophers something that was already sensed by Pericles and the age in which he lived? Not entirely. The life of the stratēgos testifies to the fragile balance maintained between, on the one hand, the persistent prestige of members of the Athenian elite and, on the other, the growing power of the people. But even if Pericles still stood out from the majority of the Athenians by virtue of both his wealth and his charisma as an orator, his behavior also reflected a desire to conform with the
aspirations of the people. It was a provisional compromise that continued to evolve in the decades that followed. In this respect, Pericles’ career symbolizes a point of equilibrium just as much as a moment of rupture: to the Athenians, his death seemed to mark the end of an era. To be sure, it was far from being a total reversal, for the demagogues who succeeded him were by no means newcomers who had emerged from the gutter and now proceeded to turn the city upside down!75 Nevertheless, they were the first leaders who explicitly paraded their close social and cultural ties with the people, thereby incurring the wrath of members of the traditional elite, who still clung on to their own distinction. Indeed, the death of the stratēgos brought about not so much a revolution, but rather a revelation. Once Pericles had gone, it was no longer possible to deny the plain fact: pace Thucydides, Athens certainly was now, in fact as well as in name, a democracy.

  So, in order to speak dispassionately of Pericles, should we put aside Thucydides and his biased judgements? It would be impossible to do so, if only for historiographical reasons. However much of a caricature it may have been, the historian’s view has, ever since Antiquity and right down to the present day, lastingly influenced the way that the Periclean moment is interpreted. The fact is that, transmitted as it was by Plutarch, that view soon became a commonplace that was for the most part accepted totally uncritically by the Moderns. However, Pericles did need to recover his status as a “great man,” and this proved no easy matter. For a long time, the stratēgos occupied no more than a marginal place in references to Greek and Roman Antiquity: the “Age of Pericles” was a very long time coming.