Pericles of Athens

by Vincent Azoulay, Janet Lloyd

  In this process of accelerated decadence, Pericles was given a crucial role: “Elevated to the sublime views of Themistocles, [Athens] falls a dupe to Pericles, who leads her to the brink of her ruin.”71 Because he was extraordinarily talented, Xanthippus’s son was all the more effective as a corrupter: “A great captain, a great statesman and a still greater orator, Athens had never yet had a citizen who re-united in himself so many talents; but all these accomplishments employed to serve his ambition proved fatal to his country.”72 Mably then pinpointed his attack, accusing the stratēgos of having persuaded his fellow-citizens to replace their concern for republican virtue by a love of servile politeness: “[Pericles] foresaw with pleasure that Athens, in the midst of festivals, entertaining spectacles and pleasures, would abandon the customs suitable for a free State and that arts that were useless soon would become those most respected; the Athenians, distracted from their duties, would eventually aspire only to the puerile and dangerous glory of being the most polished and amiable people in Greece.”73 Mably thus added a Rousseauist touch to the generally accepted traditional picture derived from Plutarch, for, as Rousseau saw it, nothing could be worse than “this uniform and treacherous veil of politeness” that smothered republican liberty.

  Mably even regarded Pericles as a veritable despot who sought the people’s support only the better to crush his own opponents: “This talented tyrant of Athens was too skilful to rely on the stability of their affections if he did not continually labour to fix them upon an immovable basis … He held the Great in subjection through the abasement wherein he had thrown the Areopagus and all the Magistracies so that no question was decided but conformably to his own will.”74 Having dispelled all competition, according to Mably, Pericles surrounded himself with insignificant and fawning courtiers: “Pericles had always banished merit from high places and employed only such persons in the Administration as were incapable of exciting his jealousy.”75

  Pericles, “the scourge of his country and of Greece,” “the adroit tyrant of Athens,” a corrupt and corrupting stratēgos: there could be no appeal against such a verdict. In contrast to this terrible ogre, Abbé Mably sang the praises of an austere fourth-century Athenian, Phocion. It was a by no means fortuitous choice. Phocion, an ally of the Macedonians, possessed what Mably considered to be two inestimable qualities. In the first place, before being sentenced by the people to die by drinking hemlock, he had put a stop to democratic disorders by establishing a voting system based on tax qualifications. But above all, he had manifested Spartan virtues: “even in corrupt Athens, he retained the simple and frugal ways of ancient Sparta.”76 In this respect, Phocion constituted an exception in an Athens that had been corrupted by its orators. Mably represented him as heralding his own indictment of the stratēgos: “Pericles, whose superior genius might have made not only Athens but all Greece happy, did not stick at corrupting our morals, to cajole and gain the commonality; he made us the tyrants of our allies to make himself be thought necessary; and lastly kindled the fatal Peloponnesian War to shore up his tottering interest, and save himself from being called to an account for his maladministration.”77 Mably thus bestowed a whole new dimension upon the critique sketched in by Rousseau.

  However, it was another Abbé (and another Jean-Jacques too) who, on the eve of the revolution, put the finishing touches to this dark portrait of the Pericles of the Enlightenment.

  Abbé Barthélemy: Pericles, the Father of All Vices

  In 1788, Abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy published his Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce. This work caused a great stir and attracted widespread attention throughout Europe.78 Instead of producing a conventional historical treatise, the author chose to approach Antiquity in a quite original manner. Readers discovered the world of Greek cities—its places, inhabitants, customs, and way of life—through the innocent eyes of a young Scythian traveling through Greece in the mid-fourth century. The work was also noticeably unusual in another respect. It was the result of thirty years of research and was based on first-hand knowledge that the author had acquired from work in the medallions section of the King’s Library in Paris.

  But that intimate knowledge of Antiquity did Pericles no favors.79 While Abbé Barthélemy showered praise upon Solon, he poured bitter criticism upon the stratēgos, blaming him for being largely responsible for the decadence of Athens. In the long introduction designed to establish the background to his account, the abbé spelled out his reproaches in a separate section devoted to “the age of Pericles.”80

  Admittedly, the portrait begins on a positive note, for Barthélemy ascribes a number of altogether exceptional virtues to the son of Xanthippus: he manifested “in his domestic life the simplicity and frugality of ancient times; in the administration of public affairs an unalterable disinterestedness and probity; in the command of armies a careful attention to leave nothing to chance and to risk his reputation rather than the safety of the state.”81 But all this was nothing but an “illusion,” as Barthélemy put it, for his personal qualities were not accompanied by any care for the public good.

  On the contrary, Barthélemy alleges that Pericles acted as an unscrupulous demagogue. Predictably enough, the Abbé contrasted his pernicious behavior to the noble attitude of Cimon. While this rival of Pericles used his own fortune “in embellishing the city and relieving the wretched,” Pericles used the public treasury of the Athenians and that of the allies, with the sole aim of flattering the multitude: “The people, seeing only the hand that gave, shut their eyes to the source from whence it drew. They became more and more united to Pericles who, to attach them still more strongly to himself, rendered them the accomplices of the repeated acts of injustice of which he was guilty.”82 This was doubly unjust, for, as a result of Pericles’ demagogic maneuvers, Cimon was ostracized and the Areopagus was marginalized. “Under frivolous pretexts, [Pericles] destroyed the authority of the Areopagus, which vigorously opposed its influence to his innovations and the growing licentiousness of the times.”83

  After driving away the aristocrat Thucydides, his last major opponent, the stratēgos is represented as having exercised his power without restraint and all the more effectively given that he never made a show of it. Like a skillful illusionist, Pericles governed hidden in the shadows, so that the people did not notice that he was manipulating it: “Everything was governed by his will, though everything was apparently transacted according to the established laws and customs; and liberty, lulled into security by the observance of the republican forms, imperceptibly expired under the weight of genius.”84

  Beyond the city, Pericles’ behavior is represented as equally deplorable. Admittedly, Barthélemy recognizes his wise decision not to increase the conquests of Athens. “When he saw the Athenian power attain to a certain point of elevation, he deemed it disgraceful to suffer it to decline and a misfortune any farther to augment it. All his operations were governed by this consideration and it was the triumph of his politics so long to have retained the Athenians in inaction while he held their allies in dependence and kept Lacedaemon in awe.”85 Yet that strategic prudence was counterbalanced by his extreme rigor where the allies were concerned; all their revolts were crushed in bloodbaths of violence. Where the other nations of Greece were concerned, “Pericles was odious to some and formidable to all.”86 As an all-powerful demagogue within the city and a pitiless oppressor beyond it, Barthélemy’s Pericles had no saving graces at all.

  The account of the Peloponnesian War does nothing to dispel this negative impression. On the contrary, according to Abbé Barthélemy, the conflict even dissipated the illusion that the stratēgos, with his genius, had created, for it brought to light the true extent of the corruption in the city: “At the commencement of the Peloponnesian war, the Athenians must have been greatly surprised to find themselves so different from their ancestors. A few years had sufficed to destroy the authority of all the laws, institutions, maxims and examples accumulated by preceding ages for the conservatio
n of manners.”87 It seemed that in the space of three decades, Pericles had stripped the city of all the virtues painstakingly acquired by previous generations.

  Barthélemy considered the increasing numbers of courtesans in Attica to be the very symbol of the general dissoluteness. In his view, Pericles was, if not the promoter of this fashion imported from Ionia, at least a passive accomplice in its development: “Pericles, a witness to the abuse, did not attempt to correct it. The more severe he was in his own manners, the more studious was he to corrupt those of the Athenians, which he relaxed by a rapid succession of festivals and games.”88 Inevitably, the Abbé made the most of the chance to remind his readers of the evil influence of Aspasia, whom he accused of having brought about the war “to avenge her personal quarrels.”89 And his conclusion fell with all the force of a guillotine blade: “Pericles authorized the licentiousness; Aspasia extended it.”90

  As if the cup were not by now full, in his summing up Barthélemy blamed Pericles’ Athens for yet another reason. As a man of the Enlightenment, he ranted against the sectarian behavior of Athenians under the reign of the stratēgos: “Under Pericles, philosophical researches were rigorously proscribed by the Athenians and, whilst soothsayers frequently received an honourable public maintenance in the prytaneum, the philosophers scarcely ventured to confide their opinions to their most faithful disciples.”91 By the end of this exercise in character-assassination, the Periclean edifice was shattered from top to bottom: as an illusionist, a demagogue, a tyrant, and an intolerant and corrupting oppressor, the stratēgos was reduced to the anti-hero of a city adrift.

  In this historiographical journey of ours, The Travels of the Young Anachar sis deserved, if not such a long detour, at least a pause. For, in the first place, this work presents the most extreme expression of the anti-Periclean tradition, amassing a vast collection of reproaches and gearing them up to a climactic paroxysm. Second, this work’s influence on the cultivated elite groups of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries should not be underestimated,92 for it ran into many editions and was widely diffused. It was this degenerate image of Pericles, produced by a combined reading of Plutarch and Barthélemy, that was particularly prevalent in revolutionary France.

  The Opponent of Liberty: Pericles in the Revolutionary Era

  The men of the revolution were not sparing in their references to Antiquity. Although the French Revolution regarded itself as a new era, it constantly reverted to the past in order to legitimate itself. This new world presented itself as a return to the Ancients. In the course of the Convention (21 September 1792–26 October 1795), certain ancient heroes became “the saints of the new revolutionary cult.”93

  “Everything Had to Be Spartan or Roman”: The Revolution and Antiquity

  But which Antiquity? As Volney, the orientalist, observed as early as 1795 in his Lectures on History, “Names, surnames, dress, manners, laws seem all about to become Spartan or Roman.”94 Mainly Roman, it should be said: Jacques Bouineau’s study of the Archives parlementaires and the Moniteur—roughly thirty thousand pages between 1789 and 1799—shows that, in the speeches of the revolutionaries, there are almost twice as many references to Latin culture as there are to that of Greece.95

  What is the explanation for this prevalence of Rome? The revolutionaries, steeped in the Latin rhetoric that was taught by the Jesuits and teachers of oratory had, for the most part, received a solid grounding in law (for example, Danton, Desmoulins, Robespierre, Barnave, Pétion, Vergniaud, Barère, Barbaroux, and Saint-Just), and the law taught in the French faculties of the eighteenth century was, essentially, Roman. All that the men of the Revolution knew about Greece was what they had read in the works of Plutarch or Abbé Barthélemy; and, compared to their lengthy exposure to Latin culture, that was very little.96

  When the revolutionaries did refer to the Greek world, they usually favored Sparta. Among the Montagnards, this was perfectly clear; according to Robespierre, the city of Sparta “blazed like a streak of lightning through the immense darkness,”97 illuminating humanity and revealing the path to follow. This fascination with the Spartans was often expressed to the detriment of Athens, which was disparaged for its lax manners and the corruption of its morals.98 Not even the sage Solon always escaped their criticisms. Billaud-Varenne crudely contrasted the two rival cities and their respective lawgivers as follows: “Citizens, the inflexible austerity of Lycurgus, in Sparta, became the unshakeable basis of the republic; the weak and trusting character of Solon plunged Athens back into slavery. This is a parallel that reflects the entire science of government.”99 As for Saint-Just, he was equally harsh with ancient democracy, expressing nothing but scorn for a system in which “everything proceeded as the orators directed.”100

  Was the image of Athens presented by the Girondins any different?

  On this point, we should not be misled by the nineteenth-century historiography, which sets the “Spartan” Montagnards in opposition to the “Athenian” Girondins.101 The Girondins rejected the Spartan mirage, regarding it as nothing but “a dreadful equality of poverty,” but that did not mean that they favored the city of Pericles. For example, on 11 May 1793, the Girondin Verniaud dismissed both regimes, declaring, “I conclude that you do not wish to turn the French into a purely military [that is, Spartan] people, with praetorian guards that hold all the power … nor into a people so beguiled by the soft ways of peace that, like the Athenians, it fears kings that attack it for being enemies of its pleasures rather than enemies of its liberty.”102 So Athens gained nothing from the political divisions that were tearing France apart in the period prior to Thermidor.

  Among the revolutionaries, Sparta was often exalted while Athens was frequently reviled. So did the revolutionaries simply take over the clichés that had been elaborated in earlier centuries? That would be too hasty a conclusion to draw, for in truth a number of differences are detectable. In the first place, the revolutionaries invoked the patronage of the great ancient lawgivers with singular acuity. This was a way for them, by analogy, to think through the rupture that they were themselves introducing. The figure of Lycurgus could certainly not be ignored, and his memory was indeed constantly invoked. A bust of the Spartan lawgiver was set up, alongside that of Solon, in the meeting hall of the Convention, when it took over the Tuileries on 10 May 1793.103

  Besides, the revolutionaries drew upon a number of other episodes from the Greek past, exalting in particular the occasions when the Greeks had put up a heroic resistance to invaders. Of course, this was hardly surprising at a time when France itself was facing attack from the European powers that were in league against the young Republic. For instance, the Marseillaise (1792) was freely adapted from the paean sung by the Athenians at Salamis, and, in the summer of 1794, three plays relating to the Persian Wars were staged in Paris in less than one month: Miltiades at Marathon, The Battle of Thermopylae, and The Marathon Chorus.104

  Following Thermidor and the end of the Terror, other moments from Greek history also came to the fore. Under the Directoire (1795–1799), the Athenians came to be celebrated for their ability to achieve reconciliation after such deep political divisions. In this respect, the action of Solon and the amnesty decreed by Thrasybulus attracted considerable attention: “Thrasybulus was surrounded by a certain aura in post-Thermidor France, owing to the fact that he had helped to impose the unity of the city upon the victorious Democrats of 403. In a France rent asunder, he was regarded as the model of a conciliator and French orators did not fail to mention his name.”105

  The Warmonger: The Pericles of the French and American Revolutionaries

  In these troubled circumstances, Pericles was mostly conspicuous by his absence. Just as well, probably, for when his memory was invoked, he was portrayed, among the Montagnards and the Girondins alike, as a corrupt aristocrat or even as a liberty-killing tyrant.106

  His example was cited in May 1790 already when, in the Constituent Assembly, a question of burning importance
prompted intense debate: should the king be stripped of the right to declare war? While the orator Barnave pleaded the cause of the patriotic party, recalling all the unjust and calamitous wars that kings had undertaken, Mirabeau defended the interests of the sovereign, whose secret adviser he then was.

  According to Barnave, the right of war should be entrusted to the legislative body, not to the executive power, for a very simple and excellent reason: the National Assembly was less prone to corruption than the king’s ministers. In support of his argument, Barnave cited the case of Pericles, “a skilful minister” who was prepared to spark off the Peloponnesian War “so as to bury his own crimes”: “Pericles embarked upon the Peloponnesian War when he realized that he was unable to justify his accounts.”107

  Mirabeau’s reply to him in the Assembly came the very next day, pointing out the inadequacy of that ancient analogy: “He [Barnave] has cited Pericles waging war so as not to have to present his accounts. According to what he says, does it not seem that Pericles was a king or some despotic minister? Pericles was a man who, knowing how to flatter the passions of the populace and win its applause as he left the tribune, by reason of his largesse and that of his friends, dragged Athens into the Peloponnesian War. … Who did? The national Assembly of Athens.”108 In this way, Mirabeau put his opponent straight: in the first place, Pericles was not the king of the Athenians; and second, it was the Athenian Assembly that voted for this disastrous war—not some kind of sovereign. So Barnave’s reference to Pericles did nothing to advance his own cause!109 All the same, over and above their differences, the two orators were in agreement on one point: Pericles was indeed a corrupt and corrupting warmonger.