Pericles of Athens
Page 23
CHAPTER 11
Pericles in Disgrace: A Long Spell in Purgatory (15th to 18th Centuries)
The Oeuvres Complètes (Complete Works) of Voltaire, published in 1771, contain an intriguing conversation between Pericles, a Russian, and an eighteenth-century Greek.1 After such a long time in the Underworld, the stratēgos is keen to find out what modern men think of him. Addressing his compatriot, he naively asks, “But tell me, is not my memory still venerated in Athens, the town where I introduced magnificence and good taste?” To his great disappointment, his Greek companion has never heard either of him or even of Athens: “So you are as little acquainted with the famous and superb town of Athens as with the names of Themistocles and Pericles? You must have lived in some underground place, in an unknown part of Greece.” The Russian, who is less ignorant than his companion, intervenes to explain to the stratēgos how much the world has changed since his death: the Greeks, now subjects of the Ottomans, no longer know even the name of Athens. The opulent city has been replaced by “a wretched, squalid little town called Setines.” Contemplating the ravages of time with horror, the disillusioned stratēgos concludes, “I hoped to have rendered my name immortal, yet I see that it is already forgotten in my own land.”
This conversation from beyond the tomb strikingly condenses Pericles’ uneven trajectory in the Western world. Having suffered a long eclipse up until the eighteenth century (this chapter), the stratēgos progressively made a comeback. Even as he confirmed the fact that Pericles had been forgotten, Voltaire contributed toward his rehabilitation, and helped to forge the expression “the age of Pericles” (chapter 12).
A disgraced, even forgotten Pericles: the very idea will come as a surprise to readers accustomed to identify Athens with the prestigious figure of the stratēgos. One of the primary virtues of a historiographical inquiry is certainly its ability to dispel automatic assumptions and show that traditions do themselves have a history. No, Pericles was not always an admired icon. In the accounts of Athens from Antiquity right down to the eighteenth century, the stratēgos, ignored and sometimes discredited, became no more than a marginal figure.
How can one understand that journey across a desert without memories? By way of explanation, a number of factors may be considered. In the first place, there is the crushing influence on Western culture of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives: the success of this work played a major role in the relative marginalization of the stratēgos. Second, a particular kind of relationship to the past: Pericles was the victim of a kind of history that was designed as “a lesson for life” and that above all looked to Antiquity to provide moral and aesthetic models. The moderns found Pericles too slippery a character and preferred more straightforward types. Moreover, last but not least, Pericles was a victim of the anti-democratic prejudice that pervaded the monarchical Europe of the modern period. In such a context, this Athenian leader certainly did not constitute an attractive model for those in power or for their cultural representatives.
So, after receiving an early, rather timid burst of acclaim in the Renaissance, Pericles was totally ignored by the Moderns. If his figure ever was evoked, it was as a foil—now as an embodiment of democratic instability (Machiavelli and Jean Bodin), now as a model of misleading eloquence (Montaigne). And in the great quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns that gathered momentum at the end of the seventeenth century, the stratēgos remained for the most part sidelined, being considered unworthy of comparison to Louis XIV. Tellingly enough, his rare appearances were limited to “dialogues of the dead”—as if Pericles could be imagined only in the Underworld, relegated to the kingdom of ghosts and oblivion.
The Enlightenment tempered this representation no more than marginally. Up until the end of the French Revolution, the stratēgos remained in the shadow of an Antiquity that was, to be sure, glorified, but that resolutely remained either Spartan or Roman. Amid the chorus of authors fascinated by Lycurgus or the Gracchi, a few dissenting voices nevertheless began to be heard, preparing the way for Pericles’ return to favor, in the nineteenth century, in totally different historiographical circumstances.
An inquiry such as the present one must clearly be based on no more than a drastic selection from the vast body of documentation that is available. So it will above all be a matter of sketching in the main guiding lines in a quite exceptional historiographical itinerary, sometimes proceeding in a series of “skips and jumps” (à sauts et à gambades), as Montaigne famously put it.
PERICLES IN THE RENAISSANCE
A False Start: An Isolated Eulogy from Leonardo Bruni
Yet it had all started well. In the fifteenth-century Italian republics—in particular, Florence—the humanists drew directly upon Greek works in which, among the Ancients, they found models that they could follow. They lived on an equal footing with Antiquity, using it as a means to break away from their own past (which was to become known as the Middle Ages). In this way, there emerged “a vision of a new world reconstructed from the words of Antiquity.”2 It was in this civic context that, in the West, the figure of Pericles was first mobilized.
Leonardo Bruni was one of the main vectors of this early acclimatization. He was born in Arezzo and was one of the brilliant generation of humanists grouped around Coluccio Salutati, whom he later succeeded as head of the chancellery of Florence. Immersed in Greek literature, as he was, he translated Aristotle, Plutarch, Demosthenes, and Plato and even produced a theoretical account of his experience of translation in a treatise titled De interpretatione recta. He used his intimate knowledge of the ancient sources in his Laudatio Florentinae urbis (In praise of the city of Florence), composed in 1404.3 At the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Florentines had just expelled the Visconti and adopted a republican form of government. Leonardo Bruni, the humanist, composed his Laudatio in order to legitimate this development and, naturally enough, it was the Athenian model to which he turned. He drew his inspiration from Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War and the Panathenaic Oration of Aelius Aristides—two texts that unambiguously exalted the institutions of Athens. In a clear imitation of the funeral speech, Bruni celebrated the geographical position of Florence, the crucial role that it had played against the foreign autocrats (the struggle against Milan was then raging), the superiority of the political institutions of Florence and its cultural supremacy.4 The humanist Leonardo Bruni was treading in the footsteps of the stratēgos.
Two decades later, in 1428, it was again to the Periclean model that Bruni turned when he composed the funeral oration for Nanni degli Strozzi.5 Taking advantage of this funeral in order to celebrate the city of Florence as a whole, in this speech Bruni extolled the liberty and equality of citizens ruled by an exemplary government that offered opportunities to every good man who deserved them. Even if Pericles was not explicitly mentioned, it was certainly his thinking and heritage that Leonardo Bruni used to promote his own political project.
Not long after this, the thinking of Pericles received more publicity. Around 1450, at the request of Pope Nicholas V, the great humanist Lorenzo Valla completed the first translation of Thucydides into Latin, thereby making the text more accessible. This Latin version was diffused in printed form. It was published in Treviso in 1483, and several more editions appeared in the course of the sixteenth century, incorporating the corrections made by Henri Estienne in 1564. The stage thus seemed set for the promotion of a positive view of Athens and its leader.
It all came to nothing, however. As a result of a number of structural factors, the memory of Pericles remained in limbo in the Western imagination. The first of those factors was the incredible success of Plutarch: traditions favorable to the stratēgos for a long time remained overshadowed by The Parallel Lives. The second was the prevalence of a particular attitude toward the past that was fueled by a perpetual quest for exemplary heroes; in the perspective of historia magistra vitae, the figure of Pericles was widely judged to be too lackluster or even repulsive.
The Reaso
ns for a Long Eclipse
Lost in Translation: The Distorting Filter of Ancient Translations
In order to understand Pericles’ failure to engage with modern Europe, we need to recognize a somewhat shocking fact: even when the ancient texts were translated, they were not necessarily read. Out of all the formidable efforts that were devoted to publishing and translating in the Renaissance, only a limited number of works eventually rose to the surface and were selected as required reading in the education of a gentleman. The works of Plutarch in particular must be picked out, along with those of Livy on the Roman side. For whole centuries, The Parallel Lives, more or less on their own, provided all that members of the cultivated elite knew about Greece and its successive leaders.
The rediscovery of Plutarch dated from the early sixteenth century, when the humanist Guillaume Budé, “the prince of Hellenists,” who was close to Francis I of France, published a series of Apophtegmes (precepts), borrowed from Plutarch’s works. But his popularity really took off in 1559, when Jacques Amyot translated the Parallel Lives. Amyot was the Grand Chaplain of France and the Bishop of Auxerre and he gave the work a new title, Vies des hommes illustres Grecs et Romains comparées l’une avec l’autre (The lives of illustrious Greeks and Romans compared to one another), dedicating it to Henri II, who had appointed him tutor to the royal children. This was the launching point of Plutarch’s incredible popularity both in France and beyond—in fact, throughout the West. As early as 1572, Henri Estienne, in Geneva, produced the first complete edition of the work. It was divided into two great tomes—on the one hand the Vies Parallèles and on the other the Oeuvres morales (the Moralia), taking over a division that dated back to the work of the Byzantine monk, Maximus Planudes.
The impact of Amyot’s translation was long-lasting. At the end of the sixteenth century, Montaigne was writing, “We ignorant fellows had been lost had not this book raised us out of the dirt; … ’tis our breviary.”6 Montaigne even went so far as to turn Plutarch into a close friend, almost a brother: “Plutarch is the man for me,”7 he exclaimed, to some extent setting him up as a rival to La Boétie! Far from being an isolated view, Montaigne’s admiration was shared across the board, from Machiavelli to Jean Bodin. It was thus through the prism of the Parallel Lives that the members of the elite groups of the modern age saw the figure of Pericles.8 But however much Plutarch admired Pericles’ great works, he denigrated the democrat and was only too happy to record the traditions that were the most hostile to the stratēgos.9
Should not a reading of Thucydides have somewhat redressed the balance? The Athenian historian had been translated into Latin very early on by Lorenzo Valla and subsequently into French by Claude de Seyssel (in a volume published posthumously, in 1527, under the aegis of King Francis I). However, up until the late eighteenth century The Peloponnesian War reached no more than a limited readership. In the first place, the translations of it left quite a lot to be desired. According to the scholar and publisher Henri Estienne, Valla and Seyssel had “distorted” the historian (Seyssel did not even read Greek).10 But above all, the work was out of step with the taste of the period. Occasionally, it was judged to be sublime and full of majesty, but the general opinion was that Thucydides’ style was austere and inelegant, and his dry, spare prose offended the aesthetics of classicism which, in contrast, praised to the skies the elegant expansiveness of Plutarch, which was even magnified by Amyot’s translation. Completed by a reading of Plato and of Aristotle (the Politics), the education of a man of the modern age paid no attention to any texts that might have corrected the detestable reputation of the stratēgos.
All this resulted in the creation of a filter that lastingly warped the reception of Antiquity in general and of Pericles in particular. Plutarch held first place and was followed by Plato and Aristotle. Clearly democracy and its leaders did not emerge flatteringly from the selective process applied to the ancient texts.
Pericles, a Man without Merit: Not an Exemplary Figure
Plutarch’s great popularity was accompanied by another factor that was equally negative for Pericles. This was a particular attitude to history that can be traced back to Cicero. Up until the eighteenth century, history was regarded primarily as a “teacher of life” (magistra vitae), as that Roman orator famously put it. It could be summed up as a collation of examples which, when picked out (ex-empla) elicited either imitation or, on the contrary, execration.11 All that men remembered from history were characters and images, great tableaux, and symbolic scenes that painters delighted in reproducing.12
FIGURE 10. Pericles, detail from the fresco Strength and Temperance (ca. 1497), by Perugino. Perugia, Collegio del Cambio. Image courtesy of the Collegio del Cambio. Photo by Sandro Bellu.
As an exemplary figure, Pericles did not seem an attractive model. He was not among the colorful figures around whom analogies and comparisons crystallized. When the stratēgos was mentioned, it was seldom on his own account. Often enough he was cited in passing among the rest of the politicians who embodied Athenian democracy: Themistocles, Aristides, Cimon, and Alcibiades.13 Neither a glorious conqueror such as Alexander the Great, nor a brave warrior such as Themistocles or his own rival Cimon; neither a wise lawgiver such as the consensual Solon nor a heroic martyr such as Socrates; not even as scandalous a stratēgos as his pupil Alcibiades—nothing about Pericles really caught the eyes and attention of members of the modern elite. Even his death left them indifferent: how boring, to die in one’s bed, consumed by disease! That is why there were so few pictorial representations of the stratēgos. Apart from one timid appearance in Perugia, in the strange guise of a bearded old man painted by Perugino (ca. 1497; figure 10) in the reception hall of a guild of money-changers,14 Pericles was ignored by both the Renaissance painters and those of modern times. In Raphael’s famous painting, The School of Athens (ca. 1509–1510), he is conspicuous by his absence despite the fact that he might logically have found a place there since it was, after all, he who turned Athens into “a living lesson.”
Shunned by painters and poets, Pericles remained in the shadow of other ancients who were deemed more presentable. The glorification of those few figures affected the image of Pericles himself disastrously. What the readers of Plutarch remembered was that the great men of Athens were all dragged through the mud: Themistocles, Aristides, and Cimon had all been ostracized; Socrates and Phocion were executed. It was hard to cherish their memory without condemning the form of governance that had set them aside or put them to death. The role of the anti-hero was therefore assigned to democracy and to Pericles himself, who was more or less strongly associated with it.
Those who did deign to take an interest in him dwelt on his disturbing aspects; only the most equivocal events in his life were selected, all with a view to criticizing him. Presented as he was, now as a war-monger, now as a corrupter of the people, he seemed the very embodiment of both democratic instability and deceptive eloquence.
Pericles, or the Democratic Anti-model
Even in the small Italian city-states of the Renaissance, Pericles never became a positive model; in this respect, Leonardo Bruni was far more of an exception than a general rule. Moreover, even he did not explicitly praise the stratēgos, but drew his inspiration solely from his funeral speech. The fact was that the political thinkers of the Italian Renaissance displayed a marked preference for the Roman Republic and the government of Sparta. In view of the constant revolutions of Athenian democracy, they loudly and strongly proclaimed their admiration for the stability of the Spartan regime and its well-balanced constitution. In the writings of Machiavelli (1469–1527), the armed camp on the banks of the Eurotas River was presented as an ideal to imitate, while the city of Athena was an example to be avoided.15
Pericles in Italy: A Bad Counselor or a Virtuous Citizen?
In his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, published between 1512 and 1517, the great political thinker Machiavelli set up the following striking parallel:
According to Machiavelli, Solon was the sole inventor of democracy: so exit Pericles, along with all the other Athenian leaders. But, as it happened, that mattered little since, according to the Florentine writer, the Athenian regime was vitiated right from top to bottom.
When Machiavelli cites Pericles by name (the only time in his entire work), it is, moreover, to mock his views. He criticizes his military ideas, declaring them to be totally misconceived: “History proves in a thousand cases what I maintain, notwithstanding that Pericles counselled the Athenians to make war with the entire Peloponnesus, demonstrating to them that by perseverance and the power of money they would be successful. And although it is true that the Athenians obtained some successes in that war, yet they succumbed in the end; and good counsels and the good soldiers of Sparta prevailed over the perseverance and money of the Athenians.”17 He claims that the stratēgos proved himself incapable of correctly evaluating the balance of power on the eve of the Peloponnesian War. Overconfident in the financial resources of his country, he forced it into a conflict that it was bound to lose.