Pericles of Athens
Page 24
In the writings of Guicciardini (1485–1540), a friend of Machiavelli’s and a Florentine politician, blame gave way to praise. Pericles makes no more than a discreet appearance in his writings, but he does so to his advantage. The author draws attention to the incorruptibility of the stratēgos, thereby justifying his view that there was “no citizen more worthy and glorious” than Pericles, who governed Athens for thirty years “thanks solely to his authority and his reputation for virtue.”18 Did this amount to an exception to the doubtful reputation of the stratēgos? Not altogether. His praise was somewhat qualified: even if he gladly acknowledged Pericles’ virtue, Guicciardini criticized his demagogic views and maintained that to come to power thanks to the Senate was preferable to depending on the people in order to do so.19
One generation later, Carlo Sigonio (1523–1584), a native of Modena, returned to a negative view of the stratēgos, in the very first monograph to be devoted to the city of Athens, the De Republica Atheniensium (1564).20 Having been a teacher in Venice, where its powerful fleet reminded him of Athens, Sigonio was very well informed about the ancient sources and stuffed his text with Greek, citing not only philosophers but also the Athenian historians and orators. However, this scholar remained extremely reserved on the subject of Pericles, whom he accused of having ruined Solon’s admirable constitution: “As for Aristides, who acquired great authority through these [Persian] wars and, after him, Pericles, a man adept at speaking and action, both amplified the constitution of this popular republic and granted to the plebs and the incompetence of the multitude all that Solon’s laws had denied them.”21 A few pages later, Sigonio made his criticisms more explicit: “Pericles made the people more insolent and arrogant by assigning to the plebs the financial means to set up courts and to construct theatres for their entertainment, thereby toppling the power of the Areopagus through the intermediary of Ephialtes.”22 Despite Sigonio’s admiration for the democratic city, which was very rare in his day, he remained captivated by Plato’s vision, which spared neither Pericles nor even Aristides.23
“The Ruination of the Republic”: The Disenchanted View of Jean Bodin
In France, at the end of the sixteenth century, Jean Bodin (1530–1596) seized upon Pericles, making him the execrated emblem of all republican regimes. This remarkable jurist endowed with an encyclopedic mind was writing in a France rent apart by the religious quarrels between the Catholics and the Huguenots. Faced with the Religious Wars, Bodin chose to exalt the royal State that alone was capable of bringing those internecine struggles to an end. It was he who set out the bases of the first real doctrine of sovereignty, having engaged in an in-depth historical inquiry in the course of which he investigated the political regimes of the past.
Bodin began his investigations with a book that was published in 1566, titled Methodus ad Facilem Historiarum Cognitionem (Method for the Easy Comprehension of History). In chapter 6, devoted to the constitution of republics, Bodin set out to “compare the empires of the Ancients with our own” in order, by establishing historical parallels, to discover the best possible form of government. The Athenian system was scrutinized in a demonstration in which Pericles played a key role by reason of his actions against the aristocratic Areopagus and his introduction of payment for public services: “At length Pericles changed a popular state into a turbulent ochlocracy by eliminating, or at least greatly diminishing, the power of the Areopagites, by which the safety and dignity of the state had been upheld. He transferred to the lowest plebs all judgments, counsel, and direction of the entire state by offering payments and gratuities as a bait for dominion.”24 No good could come from this action of the stratēgos, whom Bodin found guilty of having put an end to the “constitutional and just” regime that preceded the evil government by the plebs.
In his great work, The Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576), which was published in French a few years later, Bodin continued in the same political vein, adding a number of new touches to his picture. As in the Method, Pericles was judged to be responsible for the decline of Athens: “As Pericles, to gain the favor of the common sort, had taken away the authority from the Areopagites and translated the fame to the people … shortly after, the state of that Commonwealth, sore shaken both with foreign and domestic wars, began forthwith to decline and decay.”25 Worse still, the stratēgos was said to have dragged his city into warfare so as to avoid having to present his accounts: “Pericles …, rather than he would hazard the account that [the people] demanded of him for the treasure of Athens, which he had managed, and so generally of his actions, raised the Peloponnesian war, which never after took end until it had ruined divers Commonwealths, and wholly changed the state of all the cities of Greece.”26
This was certainly a dark picture, but Bodin did introduce one shaft of light into it. He suggested that Pericles did nevertheless manifest a degree of genius in his management of the people:
So the wise Pericles, to draw the people of Athens into reason, fed them with feasts, with plays, with comedies, with songs and dances; and in time of dearth caused some distribution of corn or money to be made amongst them; and having by these means tamed this beast with many heads, one while by the eyes, another while by the ears, and sometimes by the belly, he then caused wholesome edicts and laws to be published, declaring into them the grave and wise reasons thereof: which the people in mutiny, or in hunger, would never have hearkened unto.27
Bodin, adapting a passage from Plutarch’s Life of Pericles (11.4), the tone of which was extremely critical, nevertheless turned it into praise for the stratēgos. What can be the explanation for this paradoxical praise? The fact is that, between The Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (1566) and The Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576), the massacre of Saint Bartholomew had taken place (1572). Horrified by the spectacle of those popular “emotions,” Bodin was forced to admire the way that Pericles had managed to tame the people, “this beast with many heads” that was always ready to launch into unbridled violence.
But despite that late correction of a detail, the picture as a whole was still a sinister one: as described by Bodin, the stratēgos remained the symbol of an eminently detestable regime in which the monarchist jurist could find nothing good.
Pericles the Flatterer: Montaigne’s Critique
Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) was equally critical of Pericles but adopted a different angle of attack in order to denigrate the stratēgos—not that he was systematically hostile to Athens, for, influenced by Plutarch, he was quite prepared to admire Aristides and Phocion. However, he regarded Pericles as the archetype of rhetoricians and grammarians who were adept at “the science of the gift of the gab.” In the Essays, the first two books of which were published in Bordeaux in 1580, Pericles thus found himself accused of having used language to corrupt “the very essence of things”:
A rhetorician of times past said that to make little things appear great was his profession. … They would in Sparta have sent such a fellow to be whipped for making profession of a tricky and deceitful act; and I fancy that Archidamus, who was king of that country, was a little surprised at the answer of Thucydides, the son of Melesias, when inquiring of him which was the better wrestler, Pericles or he, he replied that it was hard to affirm; for when I have thrown him, said he, he always persuades the spectators that he had no fall and carries away the prize.28
Now Pericles was reduced to one single outstanding characteristic: he was expert in “the art of flattery and deception” and was represented as a sophist who misled his listeners by the sole power of his speech.
Montaigne’s critique conveyed a political point: according to him, rhetoric was “an engine invented to manage and govern a disorderly and tumultuous rabble,” and it was primarily a feature of “discomposed States,” “such as that of Athens.”29 Montaigne contrasted this anti-model to Sparta, the virtue of which lay precisely in a sparing use of speech: “the republics that have maintained themselves in a regular and well-modelled governm
ent, such as those of Lacedaemon and Crete, had orators in no very great esteem.”30 The laconic Spartans, who refused to indulge themselves with words, emerged all the greater from being compared to the stratēgos.
Pericles the flatterer: By assimilating the stratēgos to a fast talker, Montaigne set up a stereotype that was lastingly to haunt the imagination of members of the European elite, when, that is, they deigned even to consider the case of the stratēgos. For he now interested hardly anyone; at the threshold of the seventeenth century, the name of Pericles evoked above all the hero of a tragicomedy by Shakespeare. In this play, written around 1608, William Shakespeare set on stage the ups and downs of Pericles, prince of Tyre, who, like a latter-day Odysseus, traveled around the Mediterranean, meeting with extraordinary adventures, before returning home to reign over his country. The fact that the name “Pericles” could be given to an Eastern prince in this way testifies to the oblivion into which Pericles had sunk in the imaginary representations of the western world.
PERICLES, FORGOTTEN IN THE GREAT CLASSICAL AGE
Pericles Nowhere to Be Found: The Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns
At the turn of the seventeenth century, relations with the Ancients imperceptibly changed. With the advent of the Classical age—the age of princes, the national interest, and absolutism—the great figures of Antiquity were considered no longer as political models but rather as a collection of admirable modes of behavior and incarnations of moral virtues such as heroism, self-control, and a sense of honor and obedience.31
In this new situation, Pericles was seldom mentioned. Even the most erudite of authors tended to pass over his actions in silence, one of them being Jacob Spon, the great Protestant scholar who produced one of the very first collections of Latin inscriptions, the Miscellanea eruditae antiquitatis. In his Voyage d’Italie, de Dalmatie, de Grèce et du Levant fait aux années 1675 & 1676, which he wrote in collaboration with George Wheler, the stratēgos appeared nowhere except where the Parthenon was described as “a temple built by Pericles.”32
Among the Greeks, it was now Alexander the Great who was the center of attention. In France, the great Condé and Turenne were both likened to the Macedonian king as, after the siege of La Rochelle (1627–1628), was Richelieu, who was called “the French Alexander.” But of course it was chiefly the French monarch who was compared to Alexander. Louis XIV even assigned him a key role in royal propaganda: in the 1660s, the painter Charles Le Brun, at the king’s request, produced a great cycle of paintings depicting the achievements of Alexander; and in 1665, the tragedian Racine played explicitly on the analogy when he dedicated his play, Alexandre le Grand, to the king.33
In the early 1670s, the wind of history suddenly veered. Parallels with the ancients were abandoned. Now Louis XIV would advance alone in all his majesty, refusing to be compared to anyone else, even Alexander. The court rapidly fell into line. In 1674, Jean Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, in his Triomphe de Louis et de son siècle thus berated the Ancients, accusing them of not having displayed “the love and respect that they owed their country.” In 1687, the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns took off. In a session at the Académie Française, Charles Perrault had his poem Le Siècle de Louis le Grand read out, to celebrate the recovery of the convalescent king. Its opening lines became famous:
La belle antiquité fut toujours vénérable
Mais je ne crus jamais qu’elle fût adorable.
Je vois les anciens, sans plier les genoux;
Ils sont grands, il est vrai, mais hommes comme nous
Et l’on peut comparer, sans craindre d’être injuste,
Le siècle de Louis au beau siècle d’Auguste.
(Fine antiquity was always venerable
But I never considered it adorable
At the sight of the ancients I do not bend the knee;
True, they are great but just men as are we;
And we may, with no fear of seeming unjust, Compare our age of Louis to that fine age of Augustus.)
In 1688, one year later, Perrault’s first dialogue on the Parallel between the Ancients and the Moderns, which underpinned and justified that poem, was published. It was followed by three further dialogues that appeared, respectively, in 1690, 1692, and 1697. Perrault did not attack Antiquity as such, but denied it his allegiance. Convinced that there is “nothing that is not improved by time,” the courtier-poet proclaimed the Moderns’ superiority over the Ancients. The present became the supreme yardstick that had to be considered as both a reference and the pattern to be followed.34 Meanwhile Boileau and La Bruyère, as partisans of the Ancients, on the contrary continued to regard Antiquity as an essential resource and, above all, a model that encouraged Moderns not to be carried away by an excess of self-satisfaction.
It was, of course, not the first time that Greek Antiquity had come under attack.35 As early as the Renaissance, the Greek language had been accused by a Catholic and Latin Europe of being the vehicle of ancient paganism, the Byzantine schism, and, later, Lutheran heresy. Despite the eventual success of the humanists, in the Europe of the Counter-Reformation, Greek literature remained lastingly suspect. Criticism of Greek literature now again became fashionable, thanks to Charles Perrault, who lambasted Homer and the corrupt religion of the Greeks.36 However, what was new was that now the prestige of Rome too was being, if not questioned, at least challenged. Sometimes the discredit of the Ancients reached a ridiculous level: Father Hardouin, prompted by a radical skepticism, even suggested that most of the Greek and Roman texts were in truth the work of fourteenth-century Dominican forgers!37
In this long drawn-out quarrel, the figure of Pericles played an extremely marginal role. He was seldom targeted by the moderns but nor was he enrolled by the defenders of the Ancients. Attracting so little interest, the stratēgos remained in the shadows, or even in Hades, and he made no more than a few fleeting appearances in the Quarrel.
In his great poem on Le Siècle de Louis le Grand, Charles Perrault never even mentioned Pericles, whereas he did refer, each in turn, to Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, and Menander. More significantly still, in his works as a whole, which accumulate so many references to the Ancients, allusions to the stratēgos can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and, even then, he is never cited on his own. In the Parallèle entre les Anciens et les Modernes, Pericles is merely one of the many ancient orators that, according to Perrault, pedants use quite irrelevantly: “They make an appalling din and with the grandiose words of Demosthenes, Cicero, Isocrates and Pericles that are constantly on their lips and that they emit with an altogether unnatural pronunciation, they astonish even the cleverest people and sweep along the common folk to whom these kinds of ghosts always seem grander than the real scholars who possess both minds and life.”38 In this way, Perrault belittled Pericles even without targeting him in particular, along with other representatives of a hoary old rhetorical culture.
The same goes for a letter addressed to a friend, in which Perrault derides the pompous eloquence of the Ancients:
As for Prose, you complain that one no longer dares to mention the names of Cambyses or Epaminondas in a speech. Such a great shame! … Have not those two names, along with those of Themistocles, Alcibiades, and Pericles, sufficiently tired the ears of all our Princes, in the speeches that are addressed to them? Do you expect the King, when the good of the State obliges him to travel here and there in his kingdom, to suffer the same persecution in every town with a mayor or dignitary who fancies himself as an eloquent speaker? Just imagine how exhausting it must be to be assailed twice a day by Themistocles or Epaminondas or even both of them at once!39
For Perrault, Pericles was no more than a pompous name among others, a symbol worn threadbare by provincial dignitaries lacking all distinction.40
Charles Perrault’s niece, Marie-Jeanne l’Héritier de Villandon made the very same point in her Enchantements de l’éloquence (The Enchantments of Eloquence), a collection of stories dating from 1695. O
ne of these, titled “The Fairies,” ends with a parallel that disparages the stratēgos:
I do not know, Madame, what you think of this story, but it seems to me no more incredible than many of the tales that ancient Greece brings us; and when describing the effects of Blanche’s eloquence, I am as happy to say that pearls and rubies fall from her lips as I am to say that flashes of lightning came from the mouth of Pericles. Story for story, it seems to me that those of ancient Gaul are worth roughly the same as those from Greek antiquity; and the fairies have just as much right to produce wonders as do the gods of fable.
As a worthy heir to Perrault, Madame de Villandon wished to tell French stories, unburdened by weighty ancient references, especially those involving heroes of Greece from a bygone age, such as Pericles.
Nor were the Ancients’ defenders any keener on the figure of Pericles than the supporters of the Moderns were. And on the rare occasions when they used it, they drowned him in a list in which the stratēgos was hard put to make his mark. That was the case, for example, in the speech that Jean Racine delivered to the Académie Française in honor of Pierre Corneille, who died in 1648: “This was a figure truly born for the glory of his country, comparable (I will not say to all Rome’s excellent tragedians, since Rome admits that she was not very successful in that genre) but at least to the likes of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides of whom Athens was as proud as she was of figures such as Themistocles, Pericles and Alcibiades, who lived in that same period.” Although the citation is undeniably appreciative, Pericles is reduced to the role of a mere foil for the Athenian tragic poets and, on the rebound, for the deceased Corneille.