On the other side of the Atlantic, criticism was equally ferocious. The American republicans, influenced as they were by their readings of Plutarch and Plato, had no sympathy at all for fifth-century Athenian democracy, which they judged to be unstable and anarchical. They far preferred that of Solon.110 But it was the Romans who fascinated them the most. Significantly enough, when the founding fathers of the American nation met in Philadelphia in 1787, they set up, not a Council of the Areopagus, but a Senate that was to meet in the “Capitol.”
Even when not totally ignored, Pericles became a target of virulent attacks. Alexander Hamilton (1757–1802), who founded the Federalist party and was an influential delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, launched a direct attack on the stratēgos in an article in the Federalist Papers on 14 November 1787. At this point, we should note the importance of this collection of papers. It was designed to interpret the new American Constitution and promote it. Using the pen-name “Publius,” a pseudonym chosen in honor of the Roman consul Publius Valerius Publicola, Hamilton confirmed all the anti-Periclean clichés: “The celebrated Pericles, in compliance with the resentments of a prostitute, at the expense of much of the blood and treasure of his countrymen, attacked, vanquished and destroyed the city of the Samians. The same man … was the primitive author of that famous and fatal war which, after various vicissitudes, intermissions and renewals, terminated in the ruin of the Athenian commonwealth.”111 On both sides of the Atlantic, Pericles was thus presented as an unscrupulous warmonger.112
A Liberty-Killing Tyrant: The Pericles of the Terror
In France, the nature of the attacks against Pericles underwent a change in the Convention period (1792–1795). After the king was deposed, Pericles came to embody not a corrupt orator, but a liberty-killing tyrant. Abbé Grégoire was the first to make this accusation, in his report to the Convention dated 8 August 1793. What was at stake at this point was the justification of the suppression of all scholarly academies and societies, on the pretext that they had placed themselves at the service of despotism: “Tyrants have always adopted the policy of assuring themselves of vociferous fame; and so it was in the case of Pericles who, after ravaging Acarnania in order to please his mistress, through his example corrupted an Athens that was cowed by his skill and persuaded historians to tell lies in his favor.”113 According to Grégoire, Pericles in this way concealed his tyrannical power, thanks to the scholars who served him and were prepared to misrepresent reality in their works, just as did so many Academicians of the Ancien Régime.
Under the Terror, the stratēgos was yet again represented as a manipulating tyrant. However, he was invoked not as a figure who encouraged a break with the monarchical past, but rather as one who anticipated eventual tyrannical consequences. That was, indeed, the purpose of Billaud-Varenne, a Montagnard and member of the Committee of Public Safety, in his report dated 1 Floreal, Year II (20 April 1794): “The wily Pericles clothed himself in popular colours in order to conceal the chains that he was forging for the Athenians. For a long time, he made the people believe that he never ascended to the tribune without telling himself, ‘Remember that you will be speaking to men who are free.’ And then that same Pericles, having managed to seize absolute power, became the most bloodthirsty of despots.”114 This was a transparent allusion to Robespierre, who was accused of pretending to love the people, the better to obtain undivided power for himself. A few months later, Billaud-Varenne broke off relations with “the Incorruptible Robespierre,” thereby hastening the latter’s downfall.
After Thermidor and the execution of Robespierre, Abbé Grégoire turned that implicit analogy into an explicit comparison: on 17 Vendémiaire, year III (8 October 1794), in his Rapport sur les encouragements, récompenses et pensions à accorder aux gens de lettres et aux artistes (Report on the encouragement, rewards and pensions to be granted to scholars, literary men and artists), he associated the Athenian stratēgos and the French Revolutionary in a common condemnation: “And in what century have talents been more atrociously persecuted than under Robespierre’s tyranny? Pericles drew the line at just ejecting the philosophers.”115 Abbé Grégoire thus added intolerance to the long list of Pericles’ vices, thereby following in the footsteps of that other abbé, Jean-Jacques Barthélemy.
At this point, Pericles vanished from the revolutionary scene. The fact was that, under the Directoire, a few scholars occasionally challenged the use that had so copiously been made of ancient references ever since 1789. In his Lectures on History, delivered in the Ecole normale supérieure in 1795, Volney launched into a violent attack against “the new sect [who] swear by Sparta, Athens and Titus Livy.”116 This orientalist sought to correct the ideas of his listeners and readers by presenting a more realistic picture of Antiquity: “Eternal wars, the murder of prisoners, massacres of women and children, breaches of faith, internal factions, domestic tyranny and foreign oppression are the most striking features of the pictures of Greece and Italy during five hundred years, as it has been portrayed to us by Thucydides, Polybius and Titus Livy.”117 Pericles’ Athens was by no means exonerated in this depressing judgment. According to Volney, the masterpieces of Athenian art were “the primary cause” of Athens’s downfall “because, being the fruit of a system of extortion and plunder, they provoked both the resentment and defection of its allies and the jealousy and cupidity of its enemies, and because those masses of stones, although well cut, everywhere represented a sterile use of labour and a ruinous drain on wealth.”118 Periclean Athens, denigrated both before and after Thermidor, certainly was a major victim of the Revolution.
An Alternative Tradition? Camille Desmoulins’s Liberal Pericles
Even though it was hard for them to emerge from such an ocean of criticisms, a few rare signs do suggest the existence of an alternative tradition that was more favorable to the Athenian stratēgos. At the pictorial level, the painter Augustin-Louis Belle (1757–1841) exhibited an Anaxagoras and Pericles (today in the Louvre) in the 1796 Salon (figure 12). The painting illustrated the scene in which the old philosopher, believing that his friend has forgotten him, allows himself to starve to death (Plutarch, Pericles, 16.7). Although the choice of this episode testified to a certain interest in the stratēgos, it was nevertheless ambiguous, for it tended to underline the shortcomings of Pericles. Anaxagoras’s extended arm was highly symbolic; it was as if the philosopher was bidding the stratēgos to exit from the scene.
FIGURE 12. Anaxagore et Périclès (1796), by Augustin-Louis Belle (1757–1841). Oil on canvas. The Matthiesen Gallery, London. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / image RMN / © Direction des Musées de France. Photo courtesy of The Matthiesen Gallery, London.
It is definitely in the writings of Camille Desmoulins that the only positive view of Pericles is to be found. When elected to the National Convention, Desmoulins took his seat amid the Montagnards, but he felt nothing but disdain for Sparta. In truth, he was one of the rare revolutionaries who possessed a solid knowledge of Greek culture.119 Having progressively distanced himself from his great friend Robespierre, he founded a new newspaper Le Vieux Cordelier (The Old Friar) in which he attacked the Enragés (“the Angry Ones”) and, in particular, their unbridled enthusiasm for Sparta: “What do you mean with your black broth and your Spartan freedom? What a fine lawgiver Lycurgus was, possessing knowledgeable skill that consisted solely in imposing privations upon his fellow-citizens and who made them all equal just as a storm renders all who are shipwrecked equal?”120 In opposition to the mirage of Sparta, Desmoulins set up an idealized Athenian city. According to him, only the Athenians had been “true republicans, lasting democrats by both principle and instinct.”121
However, it was not until the seventh and last number of Le Vieux Cordelier, dated Pluviose, Year II (early February1794) that Desmoulins celebrated Pericles openly, praising his steadfast opposition to all forms of censorship. In particular, he admired his ability to accept criticism instead of wiping it out: “So rare, in
both Rome and Athens, were men like Pericles. When attacked by insults as he left the assembly, he was accompanied home by a Father Duschesne-figure endlessly screeching that Pericles was an imbecile, a man who had sold himself to the Spartans. Even in these circumstances, Pericles summoned up sufficient self-control and calm to say coldly to his servants, ‘Take a torch and accompany this citizen back to his home.’”122
We should, however, assess this praise correctly. In the first place, Desmoulins praised Pericles only insofar as he protected freedom of expression, not as a promoter of direct democracy. What he liked about Athens was, above all, “the freedom for each man to live as he wished to and for poets and singers to laugh at contemporary politicians.”123 Second, the impact of his writings was minimal, for this last issue of Le Vieux Cordelier circulated only in proof-form and was published only posthumously. One month later, on 5 April 1794, Camille Desmoulins was guillotined, and his praise of Pericles resounded hardly at all and remained without parallel.
Really without parallel? Perhaps not. Another member of the Convention, Marc-Antoine Baudot (1765–1837), also seems to have swum against the anti-Periclean tide. Trained as a doctor and a staunch Montagnard, he nevertheless had leanings toward the “Indulgent” group, and after Robespierre’s fall he was forced into exile, from which he returned only with the advent of Louis-Philippe, in 1830. In one of his plans for an epitaph for his tomb, Baudot described himself as republicanus Periclidis more, a republican in the manner of Pericles.124 So was this a second revolutionary who was declaring loud and strong his preference for a Periclean Athens? To believe so would be mistaken. That epitaph dated from the 1830s, not from the revolution itself. Baudot was probably kidding even himself when, in his Notes historiques, he declared “I wanted a Republic in the manner of Pericles, that is to say one with luxury, the sciences, the arts and trade. Poverty, in my opinion, is good for nothing at all and I would join with Dufrêne in declaring it to be not a vice but even worse.”125 In his youth, Baudot was in truth by no means a lover of Athenian luxury but on the contrary poured anathema upon the wealthy. His exaltation of a bourgeois Pericles does not date from the Revolutionary period. Rather, it reflects the tempered ideals of Baudot in his twilight years. The fact is that, between 1789 and the July Revolution (1830), there had been a radical change in paradigms: the nineteenth century saw the construction of a bourgeois Athens, and here, Pericles once more headed the field.
CHAPTER 12
Pericles Rediscovered: The Fabrication of the Periclean Myth (18th to 21st Centuries)
From the Renaissance right down until the beginning of the nineteenth century, Pericles was seldom raised to the rank of a model. For most of the time, he was arrogantly ignored and remained in the shadow of the great men of Sparta and Rome. When his memory was recalled, it was mainly to his disadvantage; depicted, as he was, now as a corrupting demagogue, now as a corrupt warmonger, for the elite groups of the modern era his role was that of a scarecrow. That critical approach, inspired by Plutarch, became even more entrenched in the eighteenth century and peaked at the time of the French Revolution.
Yet it was at the point when those attacks became most virulent that a more favorable view of the stratēgos was quietly taking shape. For not all the men of the Enlightenment were particularly keen on austere Sparta or the moderate democracy of Solon. Although Charles Perrault sought to compare “the age of Louis XIV” solely to that of Augustus, Voltaire insisted that “the age of Pericles” would not be at all shamed by such a comparison. The famous formula “the age of Pericles,” which was to enjoy a fine future, now made its appearance.
However, it was only in Germany that, as early as the eighteenth century, Pericles became an undisputed icon. In the relationship to Antiquity, the Germans were already following a Sonderweg, or path of their own, in that they preferred not only Greece to Rome, but also Athens to Sparta, and it was, moreover, Classical—not Archaic—Athens that won all their attention. As early as 1755, Winckelmann was presenting an enchanted view of the Athenian art of the mid-fifth century, a view with which Pericles was closely associated.
Elsewhere in Europe, it was not until the following century that there appeared a magnified image of Pericles in the guise of a great bourgeois parliamentarian. The monumental History of Greece written by the liberal historian George Grote and published in the mid-nineteenth century played a crucial role in this change of view. This work, which was rapidly translated into French, in its turn inspired the reflections of European historians such as Victor Duruy and Ernst Curtius. Within a few decades, Pericles became the very embodiment of the Greek miracle, to the point of being celebrated as the genius who had bequeathed to posterity two imperishable monuments: the marble creation of the Parthenon and the verbal creation of the funeral oration.
For the Periclean myth to become rooted, it was necessary for two parallel developments to come together. In the first place, a change in political practices and ideas: the progress made by parliamentary democracy in the nineteenth century did much to boost the new popularity of the stratēgos. Second, a new perception of historical time was needed: just as the model of a historia magistra vitae was receding, there emerged a mode of history that was, if not scientific, at the least attentive to the succession of different ages and civilizations—their births, their peaks, and their declines. In this new regime of historicity, Pericles found a place of importance, as an essential player in the constitution of this Classical age that presented Antiquity with its most beautiful monuments.
But the nineteenth century was also marked by the matter of nationalisms. This impassioned interest in identities affected relations with Antiquity in a lasting fashion. Through a strange kind of osmosis between interconnecting vessels, just as the French and the English were rediscovering Pericles, the Germans seemed to be turning away from him. Within the framework of Bismarck’s new State, the Athenian stratēgos was no longer surrounded by an aura of sanctity; the landowning and military elite groups of Prussia, the Junkers, were now identifying with the Spartans, while the Hohenzollern dynasty took its models from Alexander and the Hellenistic kings.
These divergent historiographical trajectories appeared in the full light of day in the twentieth century. In World War I, for example, the British invoked the memory of Pericles when faced with the Germans, who were converted to Spartans. But the allocation of roles was not always so clearcut. Even as the memory of the stratēgos was cherished by European democrats, Pericles also elicited a certain fascination among Nazi intellectuals, who were won over by his oratorical charisma, his great architectural works, and his intransigent imperialism.
After the end of World War II, attitudes toward Pericles changed again. Once he had been converted to an innocuous icon for school classrooms, within popular culture the stratēgos came to arouse nothing but indifference. Meanwhile, among historians, his image was deteriorating as decolonization speeded up and the ideology of the rights of man—and woman—was increasingly forcefully affirmed. Now, Pericles was sometimes presented as the promoter of an imperialist, slave-based, and macho system in a mirror held up to a Western world that was now assailed by doubt as to its founding values. Having for centuries been criticized for being too democratic, now he was attacked for not being democratic enough.
THE ROOTS OF THE PERICLEAN MYTH
The Genealogy of a Formula: “The Age of Pericles”
Even today, “the age of Pericles” formula is a cliché.1 That expression, along with the milder “Athens in Pericles’ day,” until recently appeared in school syllabuses for sixth-grade students in France to indicate the study of Athenian democracy as a whole. But, far from being neutral, it is a formula that implies a particular way of thinking about time and historical developments; it is, in itself, already an interpretation that suggests that one individual can model the face of a whole period to the point of coming to embody it entirely.
To trace the genealogy of the expression, we need to go back to the early ce
nturies of the Christian era, when Eusebius, Jerome, and Augustine were proposing that historical development should be envisaged as an immutable sequence of four “ages” or “centuries”:2 the Assyrians (or Babylonians); the Persians (or Medes/Persians); the Macedonians; and, finally, the Romans. The concept was based on an interpretation of the vision of Daniel, in the Old Testament (Daniel 7.2–8)—a vision that introduced four beasts that symbolized four future kings or kingdoms.
In the sixteenth century, Jean Bodin recalled that ancient image, the better to dismiss it. In chapter 7 of his Méthode de l’histoire (Historical Method), he tried to refute “the theory of the four monarchies and the four golden ages [aurea secula],”3 which, according to him, was based on a mistaken interpretation of the sacred texts. However, the notion of an “age” was not abandoned, even if, at this point, it was profoundly rearranged. Instead of serving to suggest a succession of empires leading up to the second coming of Christ, the formula came to characterize particular periods, regardless of any concern to insert them into some historical continuum. For instance, at the time of the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns (ca. 1680–1720), the royal historiographers constructed “the age of Louis XIV” as a mirror of “the age of Augustus,”4 as if those two high points in human history reflected one another timelessly across the intervening centuries.
The formula was applied to Pericles only quite late in the day, for it did not appear until the mid-eighteenth century, when it was used for the first time—to my knowledge—by the future Frederick II of Prussia. In 1739, the young prince had the idea of writing a refutation of Machiavelli, underlining the need for a monarch to serve the State, govern according to reason and reject all wars of conquest. Voltaire, won over by this enlightened concept of power, showered endless praises upon the manuscript and even found himself entrusted with the task of editing it. After many ups and downs, that task was completed in 1741,5 just as Frederick came to the throne. In his Anti-Machiavelli, the new sovereign tried to define an ambitious artistic policy, taking Athens as his model: “Nothing makes a Reign more illustrious than the Arts that flourish under its protection. The age of Pericles is as famous for the great men of genius who lived in Athens as for the Battles that the Athenians were then fighting.”6 In its first appearance, “the age of Pericles” thus found its unity in the flourishing of its arts, not in the birth of politics—for democracy was certainly by no means compatible with the ideals, however enlightened, of Frederick II. Several years before Winckelmann and shortly after the publication of the Ancient History composed by Rollin (1731–1738), the Anti-Machiavelli thus heralded the pro-Periclean turning point reached by the members of the German elite in the eighteenth century.7
Pericles of Athens Page 27
