Pericles of Athens (22 page)

All the same, this show of self-control had another purpose: by demonstrating his
self-control, the
stratēgos
sought above all not to appear as a tyrant
whose sexuality was uncheckable. For when one was in a position of power, any sexual
act immediately took on a connotation of abuse. And Pericles was, indeed, reproached
for being less virtuous than he appeared to be in public. His opponents ascribed to
him sexual affairs as numerous as they were scandalous: Pericles was accused of perverting
the wives of citizens, of cuckolding his own son, and of selling his own country in
order to find himself in the beds of beautiful foreign women.

Pericles in Love

Contemporary sources were constantly criticizing Pericles’ behavior in matters of
aphrodisia
, matters of sexual love. Far from being solely in love with the city, as he recommended
his fellow-citizens to be, the
stratēgos
was said to have made many female conquests and to have been extremely lecherous.
²⁴
Pericles was reputed to have lived a particularly dissolute life and even to have
endangered the orderliness of families and city life.

In his
Life of Pericles
, Plutarch refers several times to his equivocal reputation. In the first place, the
enemies of the
stratēgos
criticized him for using Phidias as a go-between or even as a pimp, providing him
with sexual prey: “[It was said that] Phidias made assignations for Pericles with
free-born women who would come ostensibly to see the works of art.”
²⁵
However, such accusations could have seemed quite harmless, as Pauline Schmitt Pantel
has pointed out. There was nothing unusual about the type of relations mentioned;
meetings with
hetairai
(these courtesans were free women) were considered perfectly acceptable in the city.
²⁶
What was shocking, however, was the secrecy that surrounded such meetings: in a way,
the dissimulation was more reprehensible than the act itself, because it was contrary
to the transparency that the people demanded from their leaders.

But those were not the only reproaches that Pericles attracted regarding his sexual
behavior. “The comic poets took up the story and bespattered Pericles with charges
of abounding wantonness, connecting their slanders with the wife of Menippus, a man
who was his friend and a colleague in generalship [
hupostratēgountos
], and with the aviculture [
ornithotrophia
] of Pyrilampes who, since he was a comrade of Pericles, was accused of using his
peacocks and peahen to bribe the women [
gunaikes
] with whom Pericles consorted” (Plutarch,
Pericles
, 13.10). According to the rumors rife in the theater world, the
stratēgos
in this way betrayed the confidence of one of his closest friends, Menippus, and
compromised the reputation of the latter’s wife. Given the circumstances, we should
try to gauge the scale of the outrage of which he was accused. Adultery was very severely
punished by the Athenian laws
because it cast doubt on the legitimacy of children born within the framework of marriage.
Such an affair was considered so grave that a husband had the right to kill an adulterer
caught
in flagrante delicto
;
²⁷
and as for the wife, she had to be repudiated even if her husband did not wish for
this. So, as an adulterer, Pericles technically deserved death without a trial.

The story of Pyrilampes completes the list of Pericles’ depravities and adds a further
touch. At first glance, Pyrilampes appears to fill exactly the same role as Phidias,
for, like the sculptor, he acted as an intermediary of doubtful character for the
stratēgos
, secretly facilitating the satisfaction of the latter’s pleasures. However, the services
that he rendered had a very particular connotation. In fifth-century Athens, the breeding
of birds, especially peacocks, was closely associated with Eastern luxury and, more
particularly, with the Persian royalty.
²⁸
A peacock, like a parasol, was a “Persian fad”—rather like eighteenth-century “Turkish
fads”—that were imported into the Greek world to mark the particular distinction of
members of the elite.
²⁹
Besides, we know from Plato that Pyrilampes went on many embassies to the Great King,
³⁰
so it was probably on one of those occasions that he brought back the precious birds
as part of his luggage and took to breeding them—an extremely lucrative business given
that, at the end of the fifth century, a pair of peafowl was worth about 1,000 drachmas,
the price of a really good horse.
³¹
In these circumstances, the anecdote takes on a particularly political character:
by having these gorgeous birds delivered to his favorites, Pericles became associated
with the Great King and his pleasures and, more generally, with Eastern and despotic
luxury (
truphē
). Sex, luxury, and dissimulation: this anecdote drew on a whole collection of connotations,
all of which tended to portray Pericles as a tyrant.

There was one more rumor, of an even more serious nature, that circulated about the
stratēgos
. According to Stesimbrotus of Thasos, who was definitely hostile to Pericles, the
stratēgos
had even gone so far as to sleep with the wife of his son Xanthippus, committing
what Françoise Héritier has called “indirect incest of the second type,”
³²
so that the semen of both the father and the son mingled in the same womb. Plutarch
refuses to believe this “odious and impious attack on the wife of his own son,”
³³
and, following suit, most modern commentators have dismissed such anecdotes out of
hand. However, over and above the question of their veracity, they do tell us a lot
about popular expectations and the moral behavior expected of members of the elite.

It is hardly surprising, in this context, that Pericles was to be represented on the
comic stage as the “king of the satyrs.”
³⁴
This was not just a way of referring to the Dionysiac universe and the
stratēgos
’s interest in the theater—for the satyrs were closely associated with Dionysus.
³⁵
It was also a
transparent allusion to his supposedly rampant sexuality. Given that satyrs were well
known for their grotesque hypervirility,
³⁶
the poets found it amusing to depict Pericles as the opposite of his well-advertised
imperturbable and sober self. Worse still, they blamed him for indulging lasciviously
in carnal pleasures just when he should have been leading his fellow-citizens into
battle. These attacks on him reached a climax at the start of the Peloponnesian War,
when they were targeting in particular his relationship with the lovely Aspasia.

P
ERICLES AND
A
SPASIA
: T
HE
R
ESURFACING OF
W
HAT
W
AS
R
EPRESSED

Love-Stricken Pericles

“[Pericles] took Aspasia, and loved her exceedingly” (Plutarch,
Pericles
, 24.5). So here was our imperturbable
stratēgos
overcome by love for a foreign woman to the point of being accused of sacrificing
the city’s interests for her sake. In the fourth century B.C., the Socratic Heraclides
Ponticus defined the meeting with Aspasia as one of the major turning points in Pericles’
career. In his book
On Pleasure
, he declares that the great man “dismissed his wife from his house and preferred
a life of pleasure [
hēdonē
]; and so he lived with Aspasia, the courtesan from Megara, and squandered the greater
part of his property on her.”
³⁷
So, according to this fourth-century author, Pericles made two separate but symmetrical
changes in his lifestyle: first, upon entering public life, he renounced the social
life of the
sumposion
and all its extravagances; then, upon meeting Aspasia, he returned to an aristocratic
mode of life that was ruled by expensive extravagance and luxury.

According to the Socratic philosophers, Pericles now abandoned his modest lifestyle
and his proverbial imperturbability. In his
Aspasia
, the Socratic Antisthenes “claims that Pericles was in love with Aspasia and went
into and out of her house twice a day just to say hello to her.”
³⁸
That anecdote was repeated by Plutarch: “Twice a day, … on going out and on coming
in from the market-place, he would salute her with a loving kiss.”
³⁹
The reversion was total. Whereas, previously, he had been punctilious about avoiding
banqueting and about treading only the path leading to the Agora and the Council Chamber,
Pericles would now pay daily visits to a private house in order to embrace the lovely
Aspasia. “To love a woman to the point where, even though she was a foreigner and
a
hetaira
, one without compunction made a public show of it—that was a liberty and a nonconformist
way of behaving that was found truly shocking.”
⁴⁰

The Socratic Aeschines, whose testimony is repeated by Plutarch, tells us that Pericles’
imperturbable stance was shattered when Aspasia was brought to trial by the Athenian
lawcourts: “Aspasia he begged off, by shedding copious tears at the trial, as Aeschines
says, and by entreating the jurors.”
⁴¹
The trial of Aspasia kindled within the
stratēgos
feelings too long repressed, just as the death of his last remaining son, Paralus,
caused him to succumb to an irrepressible torrent of tears.

This image of Pericles in tears over the fate of his companion should, however, be
interpreted with a measure of reserve, for, contrary to Plutarch’s claims (
Pericles
, 32.1–2), there is no evidence to confirm that Aspasia was in reality ever accused
of impiety. Writing centuries after the event, the ancient authors may have mistaken
for reality what was, in truth, just a collection of accusations made in the theater
in order to raise a laugh from the Athenian audience. After all, Plutarch does suggest
that Aspasia’s accuser was none other than the comic poet Hermippus, “who alleged
further against her that she received free-born women into a place of assignation
for Pericles” (32.1). From there to believing that the biographer is confusing comedy
accusations with legal procedures is only a small step and one that we are perfectly
free to take.

Whether the trial was a reality or a fiction, Pericles seems to have lived for several
years with Aspasia, who did at least bear him a son, Pericles the Younger. That liaison
in itself was quite enough to scandalize some Athenians, who proceeded to accuse the
stratēgos
of succumbing to the manipulations of this beautiful foreigner.

The Warmonger: Aspasia, the New Helen

Socrates’ followers belittled Pericles by portraying him as Aspasia’s puppet. According
to the Socratic Aeschines, this “wise, statesmanlike” woman turned the
stratēgos
into her disciple, even teaching him her rhetorical skills. That is likewise the
ironical representation produced by Plato in his dialogue, the
Menexenus
(235e): according to Socrates, Aspasia coached plenty of orators, beginning with
Pericles and himself. What is more, it was she who composed the funeral speech that
the philosopher delivers in this dialogue, drawing on all the commonplaces of patriotic
rhetoric. Plato’s irony is at its most biting here: so it was a foreign woman who
composed this praise of democratic Athens that was so proud of its masculine autochthonous
roots! Implicitly, Plato even suggests that Aspasia could well have composed the funeral
speech delivered by Pericles at the start of the Peloponnesian War.
⁴²
Pericles schooled by Aspasia: that stereotype may well go back to the comic
authors of the day, since the comic poet Callias was already repeating it in the second
half of the fifth century.
⁴³

However, Aspasia is certainly not always represented in such a flattering manner.
According to most of the
stratēgos
’s opponents, this lovely foreign woman charmed Pericles not so much with her words
but with her body: in her company, the
stratēgos
was schooled in matters of the flesh rather than those of the mind, even if, as the
Greeks saw it, the one did certainly not rule out the other.
⁴⁴
Worse still, Pericles was said to have been obeying the whims of his beloved mistress
when he embarked upon two wars: first the Samos campaign, then the Peloponnesian War.

Probably drawing his inspiration from Douris of Samos (ca. 300 B.C.),
⁴⁵
Plutarch first evokes the role played by Aspasia in the unleashing of the war against
Samos. Aspasia, who was a native of Miletus, with which the city of Samos was in conflict,
is said to have persuaded Pericles to intervene in favor of her own country. In fact,
the entire campaign was said to have been placed under the sign of eroticism run wild;
another Samian author, the historian Alexis, claimed that Pericles’ army included
Athenian prostitutes who, in 439 B.C.,
⁴⁶
at the end of the conflict, set up a cult to Aphrodite in Samos, by way of celebrating
the victory! The anecdote is historically unreliable but it does reflect the hostile
rumors that were circulating about the
stratēgos
, who was accused of having connived at the whims of his companion of ill-repute.
⁴⁷

According to the comic poets, Aspasia, not content with having sparked off that ferocious
conflict, which was marked by cruel acts of revenge, was likewise accused of starting
the Peloponnesian War. In his
Dionysalexandros
(Dionysus in the role of Paris/Alexander), Cratinus blamed Pericles for having started
the war in order to please Aspasia, who was transformed for the occasion into a latter-day
Helen of Troy. The play—which is now lost, although its plot is known to us
⁴⁸
—was probably composed in 430–429 B.C., and, in the mode of an allegory, it likens
Pericles to a latter-day Paris who prefers the gifts of Aphrodite to those of Athena
and Hera:
⁴⁹
the
stratēgos
is said to have provoked the war out of love for his companion, just as the Trojan
hero, in his day, had done for the sake of Helen.
⁵⁰