Pericles of Athens (15 page)

This strange mimicry had two symmetrical functions. It was intended, within the urban
setting of the city itself, to commemorate the Athenian victory in the Persian Wars.
Better still, by creating this hall for spectacles, the Athenians were manipulating
the despotic symbolism associated with Xerxes’ tent and adapting it to democratic
purposes. Whereas the original pavilion had, in principle, been reserved for the exclusive
enjoyment of the Great King, the Odeon was conceived as an edifice open to all, constructed
for the pleasure of the entire population. However, this architectural choice probably
conveyed a quite different message to the foreigners who passed through Athens. The
edifice must have struck them as a veritable imperialist manifesto.
³⁸
The Odeon, which imitated the splendors of Achaemenid architecture, returned the
allies to the status of subjects and reminded them that they had, in truth, simply
swapped masters. We should furthermore bear in mind that it was on the staircase leading
to the Apadana, the throne-room in Persepolis, on which the Odeon drew freely for
inspiration, that the long cohorts of tributary peoples had been represented, bringing
their contributions to the Great King, in a lengthy procession (
figure 5
). Nor was that association
solely metaphorical: in Athens, the allies of the Delian League were obliged to pass
in front of Pericles’ Odeon when they came to deposit their tribute in the theater
of Dionysus.
³⁹
This edifice brilliantly symbolized their new status as tribute-bearers, strictly
in line with the imperial Achaemenid heritage.
⁴⁰

The same reasoning may be applied to the city’s most famous monument, the Parthenon,
for in many respects this too testified to the hardening of Athenian imperialism.

The Parthenon: A Marble Symbol of Athenian Imperialism

There can be little doubt that the great building program launched in Athens after
450 was associated with imperial dynamics. Pericles’ opponents would even reproach
him for having misapplied imperial revenues in order to realize his monumental policy
and, especially, to build the Parthenon with its statue of Athena Parthenos: “Hellas
is insulted with a dire insult and manifestly subjected to tyranny when she sees that,
with her own enforced contributions for the war, we are gilding and bedizening our
city, which, for all the world like a wanton woman, adds to her wardrobe precious
stones and costly statues and temples worth their millions” (Plutarch,
Pericles
, 12.2). To be sure, this declaration calls for a measure of qualification. For it
is by no means certain that the Parthenon was built with the money obtained from the
allies.
⁴¹
All the same, the fact remains that, in the imaginary representations of the Athenians
and of their allies, this building remained closely associated with the onward march
of the empire, for was it not used to shelter the league’s treasury, which was transferred
to Athens in 454 B.C., at the latest?

It is, moreover, this practical necessity—namely, to find a place for the treasury—that
explains the strange layout of the monument. The fact is that, ordinarily, a Greek
temple was built in accordance with a stereotyped schema: a vestibule (
pronaos
), then a central hall containing the cult statue (
naos
), and, finally, a back room (
opisthodomos
), for the use of the temple staff. In comparison to this canonical arrangement, the
structure of the Parthenon is, to say the least, unusual—and for two reasons: in the
first place, the huge dimensions of the
naos
contrast strongly with the limited area taken up by the
pronaos
and the
opisthodomos
(
figure 6
). The fact was that the central hall had to be spacious enough to house the immense
statue of Athena Parthenos. Then, an extra room, with four columns, was set between
the
naos
and the
opisthodomos
: a hall that gave its name to the edifice as a whole, the Parthenon, “the room for
the virgin.”
⁴²
It was in this space that the city treasures were stored, in particular the treasury
of the Delian League. This extra room that housed the allies’ tribute was thus the
very symbol of Athenian imperialism. It is surely not merely by chance that the four
columns that supported the roofing of this room were in the Ionic style. Incorporating
this Ionic style at the very heart of a Doric edifice was a way for the Athenians
to give material expression to their domination over a league made up chiefly of Ionian
cities.

Far from being a temple,
⁴³
the Parthenon was a treasury and a monument that glorified imperialism and symbolized
the hardening or even petrification of Athenian domination. In this respect, the chronology
is significant: the construction of the Parthenon began in 447, one year before the
great Euboean revolt, and it was completed in 438, one year after the Samos affair.

In truth, there is nothing specifically Periclean about the management of the empire,
except a particular way of theorizing about its necessity, and its presentation. Although
we should perhaps not impute to Pericles in particular the responsibility for the
city’s slide into imperialism, Pericles certainly did take over this new order without
compunction, both in practice and in the representations that he promoted. Now we
must evaluate to what degree the imperial dynamic and democratization of the city
went hand in hand. Let us do so by analyzing the bases of the Periclean economy.

CHAPTER 5

A Periclean Economy?

T
oday, an “economy” means the production, distribution, and consumption of goods, both
material and immaterial. But this term, which was forged in Athens in the classical
period, had a sense that was very different from its contemporary one. In the fourth
century,
oikonomia
defined, first, the way of managing an
oikos
, an agricultural property. It was only by extension that the term came to designate
the management of the resources of a city, or even an empire. This mismatch between
oikonomia
and “economy,” the ancient formulation and the modern definition, for a long time
led historians to doubt the existence, in the Greek world, of any economic sphere
separate from all other social activities.

One group of ancient historians thus maintains that the cities knew of nothing more
than a primitive form of economy, characterized by the preponderant part played by
agriculture, the role of self-subsistence, the limited place of crafts and money,
and an absence of major exchange systems. That view has long since been challenged
by experts who, on the contrary, emphasize the dynamism of the ancient economy. In
this battle between “primitivists” and “modernists” that started at the end of the
nineteenth century, the Athens of Pericles constitutes a particularly animated scene
of disagreement.

The fact is that, in the course of the fifth century, the democratic city experienced
a phase of extraordinary prosperity. Its silver coinage was developing so rapidly
that the little Athenian “owls” became the common currency of a large part of the
Greek world. Its port, Piraeus, became the major seat of exchange for the eastern
Mediterranean. However, historians are not in agreement as to the nature of the economic
prosperity of Athens: did it result from an internal dynamic, in particular a rational
management of resources both private and public, or was it no more than a by-product
of Athens’s exploitation of the Delian League? What were the bases of the Athenian
economy under Pericles? Was this an economy based on the revenues that Athens obtained
from the hegemonic position that it acquired, or did its vitality spring from the
rise of new economic ways of proceeding within the city? And, in any case, is it really
possible to assign to Pericles a specific role in any such evolution?

To find answers to these questions, we must begin by focusing upon the private sphere:
can we detect the existence of any Periclean
oikonomia
—that is to say, any specific way of managing an
oikos
and one’s own personal assets? According to the ancient authors, the
stratēgos
administered his own patrimony extremely carefully, radically rejecting extravagant
behavior and the kind of practices that led one into debt and that were then favored
by the Athenian elite.

When we pass from the private sector to the civic level, the questions change. They
now concentrate on the part that the empire played in the economic dynamism of Athens.
Even if it is clear that the Athenians drew substantial benefits, both direct and
indirect, from the empire, this does not mean that their prosperity stemmed solely
from the tribute that they levied on their subject cities. Today, most historians
think that the policy of “major constructions” associated with the name of Pericles
was financed only partly by the league treasury, which was transferred to Athens before
454.

Whatever the exact degree of the economic exploitation of the allies, the city also
profited from other large revenues—what the Greeks called
prosodoi
. The Athenians took to using these sums of money in a new way: they redistributed
part of them to the community in the form of wages and civic allowances. Perhaps this
was the true specificity of the Periclean economy: a new way of redistributing wealth
to beneficiaries who, in return, became more strictly controlled. In this major development,
Pericles certainly played a decisive role.

P
ERICLES AND A
R
ATIONAL
M
ANAGEMENT OF THE
O
IKOS
: T
HE
B
IRTH OF A
“M
ARKET
E
CONOMY
”

The
Oikonomia Attikē

Etymologically,
oikonomia
designates the controlled management (
nomos
comes from
nemein
, with the root meaning “distribute” and so “manage”) of a household. Far from identifying
with the modern notion of an economy, initially it concerned only the private sphere
and, above all, affected only agricultural activity, to the detriment of other forms
of production and distribution, such as artisan activity and commerce.

It is true that agriculture constituted the essential part of the wealth that was
produced in the Greek world—as much as 80 percent of its total value.
¹
This predominance of agricultural activity has sometimes led historians to represent
the Greek economy as a static world, characterized by technological stagnation and
an ideal of self-sufficiency. But was that really the case? It is certainly what one
might think, reading ancient history sources that set such
a high value upon the
autourgos
, the citizen who worked on his land with his own bare hands within the framework
of direct exploitation. Yet that representation corresponds only partly to the reality.

In plenty of cities, the majority of citizens did not possess a property large enough
to assure the viability of such an ideal of self-sufficiency. In Athens, the only
city for which it is feasible to guess at a few figures, fewer than one citizen out
of three was in a position to live off his own land. Close on two-thirds of the civic
population either owned no land at all or else not enough for them to live off; most
citizens owned plots of land less than one hectare in area (that is, less than 2.5
acres) and were consequently forced to engage in other activities, as craftsmen or
as wage-earning agricultural laborers, in order to make a living.
²
So only a fraction of the citizen population lived off its land, a number that corresponded
to the number of those who, in the fifth century, belonged to the census class of
zeugitae
. To these should be added a tiny elite composed of large-scale landowners, such as
Cimon and Pericles—probably no more than one thousand individuals in all—who owned
estates of over 20 hectares (that is, 50 acres), which were in many cases run by specialized
managers (see later).