FIGURE 13. Napoleon passing through the Brandenburg Gate after the battle of JenaAuersted (1806), by Charles Meynier. Oil on canvas. The Brandenburg Gate was inspired by the Propylae of Mnesicles. Versailles, chêteaux de Versailles et de Trianon. © RMN-Grand Palais (Chêteau de Versailles) / rights reserved.
THE PERICLEAN MYTH AT ITS PEAK
After the French Revolution, the status of Greek Antiquity changed in Europe. At this point, a different relationship to history developed, involving not so much imitation as distancing, an accurate assessment of which was provided by Benjamin Constant’s 1819 lecture on “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared to That of the Moderns.” From now on, Greece was approached as a period and a civilization within the history of the world rather than a reservoir of exempla from which one could take one’s pick. This distancing was accompanied by an increasing professionalization of historical writing, based on the development of philology and a critical study of sources. Within this new historiographical framework, Thucydides had his revenge on Plutarch to the point of becoming the archetype of a scientific historian, passionate about truth and rigor. Periclean Athens profited from these developments and was now recognized in Europe and the United States as the major model of an ancient city. Two liberal historians played a crucial role in this great transformation—George Grote in England and Victor Duruy, who introduced Grote’s theses into France.
The Birth of a Great Bourgeois Parliamentarian: The Pericles of the English Nineteenth-Century Historians
The British Anti-Periclean Tradition
In the early nineteenth century, Periclean democracy still had a detestable reputation among British elite groups raised on readings of Plutarch. The work of Sir George Lyttleton is typical in this respect.
When he retired from political life, this former First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer wrote a collection of Dialogues of the Dead (1760), imitating Fontenelle and Fénelon, in which Pericles did not appear to advantage. In dialogue XXIII, Pericles conversed with Cosimo dei Medici and passed severe judgement on his own government:
We are now in the regions where Truth presides, and I dare not offend her by playing the orator in defence of my conduct. I must therefore acknowledge that, by weakening the power of the court of the Areopagus, I tore up that anchor which Solon had wisely fixed to keep his republic firm against the storms and fluctuations of popular factions. This alteration which fundamentally injured the whole State, I made with a view to serve my own ambition, the only passion in my nature which I could not contain within the limits of virtue. For I knew that my eloquence would subject the people to me, and make them the willing instruments of all my desires.40
In the Underworld imagined by Lord Lyttleton, Pericles was condemned to wander like a soul in pain, mocked by wise Athenians who accused him of having cast Athens into irremediable corruption.41
It is true that, in the same period, a few British scholars had tried to present a more flattering vision of Athenian democracy.42 But that rehabilitation did not extend to Pericles himself, as can be seen from the work of the Irish historian John Gast. The Rudiments of the Grecian History, published in Dublin in 1753, is presented as a series of thirteen dialogues between three people: a master, a scholar who has made some progress as an ancient historian, and, last, a novice. This unusual arrangement allows the author to present a critical evaluation of Greek history from which Pericles does not emerge at all enhanced. In dialogue XI, the government of the stratēgos is riddled with criticisms. The first remarks are laudatory: the Athenian is described as “an accomplished statesman and a powerful speaker, beyond all that ever were in Athens before him.”43 But the praises soon dry up: the stratēgos, spurred on by his all-consuming ambition, is said to have used his formidable powers for the worse rather than for the better—in particular, manipulating the people in order to obtain the condemnation of the noble Cimon, even at the risk of endangering his own country. “He was a man, tho’ in arms as great as Cimon, and as to brightness of parts and fine improvements of mind far greater, yet in most other respects the reverse of him; sacrificing his country to his ambition, lavishing away the riches of the State to obtain the suffrages of the multitude, seeking to establish his power even on the ruins of the Public Wealth, and scheming destructive Wars.”44 And his speech for the prosecution continues in the same vein. Although himself a man of frugal habits, Pericles is accused of giving the people corrupt habits, the better to dominate it: “He sought to govern Athens; for this purpose he opened the Exchequer to the craving multitude, he gratified their passions, he fed their voluptuousness, he multiplied their wants. … The very virtues which he had, undid his country.”45
As for William Young (1749–1815), although he favored the Athenian democratic regime, his description of the stratēgos was no kinder. In his History of Athens, published in 1777,46 Young accused Pericles of having unleashed the Peloponnesian War “to screen some past malversation or to make his abilities necessary for the future, or even for meaner motives.”47 The stratēgos is said to have been a master of intrigue who introduced “licentiousness in the State.”48 The only shaft of light in this somber picture is that Young does recognize Pericles’ genius in managing, through cunning and corruption, to hold together “the heterogeneous and uncemented mass” that the Athenian people then was.
Similar but even greater prejudice prevails in the two great syntheses that appeared at the end of the eighteenth century: John Gillies’s The History of Ancient Greece, which appeared in 1786, and William Mitford’s The History of Greece, a vast fresco in multiple volumes, published in various editions between 1784 and 1829. These two works shared the common hostility toward the city of Athens. Gillies, the official historiographer of the Royal House of Scotland, was appalled by the “democratical licentiousness and tyranny introduced by Pericles”49 and even accused the stratēgos of having initiated the decadence of the entire Hellenic world: “In one word, the vices and extravagances, which are supposed to characterise the declining ages of Greece and Rome, took root in Athens during the administration of Pericles, the most splendid and most prosperous in the Grecian annals.”50 As for William Mitford, he professed a greater scorn for the democratic regime, criticizing “the inherent weakness and the indelible barbarism,” although he did also confess to a sneaking admiration for the Athenian leader.51
A Change of View: George Grote’s Moment
In his monumental publication, A History of Greece, which appeared between 1846 and 1856, George Grote (1794–1871) attacked those widespread attitudes. This work by an erudite ex-banker opens with a predictable attack on Mitford and goes on to defend a liberal and democratic view of the Greek city, following the example set by Connop Thirlwall.52 Grote, a former member of the English parliament, was close to utilitarian philosophers such as John Stuart Mill, and he admired Pericles without reserve. His eulogy was founded on close scrutiny of the ancient texts, and, as far as possible, he favored the judgments of Thucydides, “our best witness in every conceivable respect,”53 above all other ancient sources. This led him not only to reject the generally accepted distinction, drawn originally by Plutarch, between the first and the second parts of the stratēgos’s political career, but also to exonerate Pericles of all responsibility for the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, sweeping aside all the accusations of the comic poets.54 And while Grote did criticize the Athenians’ treatment of their allies, he considered that “it was beyond the power of Pericles seriously to amend,” even maintaining that “practically, the allies were not badly treated during his administration.”55 In conclusion, the historian, in one lengthy sentence, gathered together the essence of the praises showered upon Pericles in the course of his book:
Taking him altogether, with his powers of thought, speech and action—his competence civil and military, in the council as well as in the field—his vigorous and cultivated intellect, and his comprehensive ideas of a community in pacific and many-sided development—his incorr
uptible public morality, caution, and firmness, in a country where all those qualities were rare, and the union of them in the same individual of course much rarer—we shall find him without parallel throughout the whole course of Grecian history.56
This enchanted view of Periclean Athens was supported by John Stuart Mill, who produced an enthusiastic review of the work, carrying in his wake the flower of the British intelligentsia.57 The fact is that George Grote was by no means a scholar without influence. This British historian had been the leader of the “Philosophic Radicals” Party in the House of Commons, and, even though he wrote his work after his retirement from politics in 1841, he retained many supporters willing to spread his theories.
In any case, his success was such that the English of the second half of the nineteenth century sometimes saw themselves as Athenians dressed in frock coats and top hats. This trend to draw comparisons peaked in George Cox’s History of Greece, published in 1874, in which Periclean Athens was presented as a blueprint for Victorian England and its maritime empire. On the basis of the Thucydidean funeral oration, Cox declared, somewhat sanctimoniously,
All the special characteristics of English policy—its freedom of speech, the right of people to govern themselves … may be seen in equal development in the policy of Athens.58
The Liberal and Republican Pericles of the French: From Duruy to Gambetta
In France, Grote’s work was a resounding success. As early as 1848, Prosper Mérimée was spreading the word and relating the book’s major message to the current political situation. “For us, who live under a government founded upon universal suffrage, the study of Greek history is of particular interest and the example of the little republic of Athens may well be profitable for the great republic of France.”59 Mérimée found in the theses developed by Grote a means of breaking away from a deeply rooted French orthodoxy: “M. Rollin and many others have accustomed us to regard the Athenians as the most flighty people in the world, frivolous, cruel, careless and bent solely on pleasure. Yet this flighty and frivolous people elected Pericles as their stratēgos or president year after year. This great man laughed good-naturedly at the comedies that mocked him but, upon leaving the theatre, he still found his power respected.”60 With Mérimée, the rehabilitation of democratic Athens—and its leader—took off.
This turn of events is the more remarkable given that, up until 1850, the French had shown scant interest in Pericles, as can be seen from their pictorial art. Although Aspasia was the object of a certain vogue in the early nineteenth century, painters never showed her in the company of the stratēgos, but always at the side of the handsome Alcibiades or the wise Socrates.61
It is true that Pericles did appear in the famous Apotheosis of Homer that Ingres painted in 1827, to decorate one of the ceilings of the Charles X Museum in the Louvre (figure 14). But his portrait was only roughly sketched in and was lost among the crowd of figures to the left of the poets, where he was almost entirely blocked out by Phidias. It was not until 1851 that François Nicolas Chifflart did him the honor of placing him in the foreground of his painting titled Pericles at the Deathbed of His Son,” exhibited at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts (figure 15).62 The fact that this oil painting won the Grand Prix de Rome for a historical painting seems symbolic, for in that same year, Hachette published the first edition of the Histoire grecque by Victor Duruy (1811–1894), which devoted particular attention to Pericles.
FIGURE 14. The Apotheosis of Homer (1827), by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Oil on canvas. Pericles is hardly visible, a sign that he is less important than Homer and Phidias, who almost entirely hide him. The tableau is imagined at the same moment as George Grote was preparing to put the stratēgos back center-stage in the West. Paris, Musée du Louvre. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Thierry Le Mage.
Declaring his disdain for Sparta, which was reduced to “a mere war-machine,” this French historian celebrated bourgeois Athens and its incomparable leader, with unprecedented enthusiasm: “Never before, in Athens, had any man held such power … and never was power acquired and preserved by such pure means. Pericles, with no particular title and no special post of command and through the sole authority of his genius and virtues, became the master of Athens, a post that he filled with more nobility than Augustus in Rome.”63 The idealization of Pericles now reached its peak, for Duruy even went so far as to justify the city’s imperialistic policy: “Of all the regimes that were destroyed, only one was to be regretted, that of Athens and Pericles. As long as it existed, there were fewer instances of cruelty and injustice and greater glory and prosperity than Greece had ever known.”64
FIGURE 15. Périclès au lit de mort de son fils (1851), by François Nicolas Chifflart (1825–1901), Saint-Omer, Musée de l’Hôtel Sandelin, inv. 975.001. © Musées de Saint-Omer, D. Adams.
However, this eulogy did not go so far as to celebrate the democratic system as such, as, for the author, those Athenians all belonged to an elite group, “an aristocracy raised by its taste, its elegance, its intellectual culture and its habit of command, far above the ordinary condition of other peoples.”65 So it was not the “ignoble populace” that governed the city, but an aristocracy of 15,000 citizens. From this point of view, Duruy’s argument was perfectly compatible with the authoritarian regime that, in the very same year as that of the first edition of his work, had been established by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte.
This idealized representation of Periclean Athens did not triumph without encountering a degree of resistance in French intellectual circles. The philologist Charles Nisard, a devoted supporter of Sparta, produced an acerbic review of Duruy’s work, accusing its author of devoting a “juvenile admiration” to Athens.66 However, the situation evolved rapidly in the years that followed, when Duruy obtained uncontested power in the educational world.67 Having risen through every level of the educational system, he was in a position to spread his ideas in textbooks such as his Abrégé d’histoire grecque pour la classe de cinquième (Abridged history of Greece for fifth-year pupils), which appeared in 1858 and ran into many further editions. Having become the general inspector of secondary education (1862–1863) and subsequently the Minister for Public Instruction (1863–1869), under the Second Empire, he found himself in an unchallengeable position to impose his view of Greece throughout the colleges and secondary schools of France.
The advent of the Third Republic put the finishing touches to this slow conversion of attitudes. While Napoleon III remained fascinated by Julius Caesar—to whom he devoted a biography in 1865—Gambetta regarded Periclean Athens as a model for the new Republican regime. He explicitly referred to the analogy in the funeral speech he delivered on 24 May 1874, in the Montparnasse cemetery, at the tomb of Alton Shée: “If it has the intelligence to rally to the new France, the France of work and science, [the nobility], through proud patriotism and noble delicacy, will contribute to providing the French republic with the flower of elegance and distinction that will make it, in the modern world, into what the Athenian republic was in Antiquity.”68 Modeling his speech on Pericles’ funeral oration, Gambetta looked forward to the establishment of a moderate Republic that brought together the work of the populace, the knowledge of scholars, and the elegance of aristocrats.
Pericles in the Altertumswissenschaft: The History of a Disenchantment
Beyond the Rhine, Pericles benefited from the popularity of Thucydides that was then sweeping through Europe. The founders of Altertumswissenschaft, the “science of Antiquity,” shared a boundless admiration for the author of The Peloponnesian War. They included Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Leopold von Ranke, and Wilhelm Roscher—whom Marx even went so far as to call Wilhelm Thucydides Roscher.69 The author of The Peloponnesian War underwent a veritable historiographical apotheosis.70 His history was regarded as an “extraordinary work”;71 and Niebuhr even considered Thucydides to be “the most perfect historian among all those that have ever written,”72 while Ranke, for his part, confessed that Thucydid
es was the writer “before whom he fell to his knees.”73
This admiration was reflected in opinions of Pericles, as is clear from the Griechische Geschichte by Ernst Curtius (1814–1896), which appeared between 1857 and 1867.74 Following in the neohumanist steps of Winckelmann, Curtius extolled Athenian prosperity and launched into a “defence and illustration” of Pericles. Like Grote, he based his eulogy on the rehabilitation of Thucydides, “the only man who makes it possible for us to rediscover the original features of this image [that of Pericles] that has been so disfigured.”75 He claimed that the stratēgos, who was a statesman as well as a philosopher, exerted upon the people a “consistent and firm government,” thereby creating a perfect “combination of democracy and monocracy.”76 No major fault could be attributed to him, including where the members of the Delian League were concerned: “as to the treatment of allies, the sagacity as well as the sense of justice of Pericles led him to object to the imposition of any undue burdens upon them, and to any measure tending to irritate their feelings.”77 Even his private life was praiseworthy: Curtius found no fault with his love of Aspasia, a woman who possessed “a lofty and richly endowed nature, with a perfect sense of all that is beautiful.” According to Curtius, “the possession of this woman was in many respects invaluable for Pericles. Not only were her accomplishments the delight of the leisure hours which he allowed himself, and the recreation of his mind from its cares, but she also kept him in intercourse with the daily life around him.” Better still, he declared, she initiated him into Sicilian eloquence and “was of use to him through her various connexions at home and abroad, as well as by the keen glance of her sagacity and by her knowledge of men.”78
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