Pericles of Athens (36 page)

For Perrault, Pericles was no more than a pompous name among others, a symbol worn
threadbare by provincial dignitaries lacking all distinction.
⁴⁰

Charles Perrault’s niece, Marie-Jeanne l’Héritier de Villandon made the very same
point in her
Enchantements de l’éloquence
(
The Enchantments of Eloquence
), a collection of stories dating from 1695. One of these, titled “The Fairies,” ends
with a parallel that disparages the
stratēgos
:

I do not know, Madame, what you think of this story, but it seems to me no more incredible
than many of the tales that ancient Greece brings us; and when describing the effects
of Blanche’s eloquence, I am as happy to say that pearls and rubies fall from her
lips as I am to say that flashes of lightning came from the mouth of Pericles. Story
for story, it seems to me that those of ancient Gaul are worth roughly the same as
those from Greek antiquity; and the fairies have just as much right to produce wonders
as do the gods of fable.

As a worthy heir to Perrault, Madame de Villandon wished to tell French stories, unburdened
by weighty ancient references, especially those involving heroes of Greece from a
bygone age, such as Pericles.

Nor were the Ancients’ defenders any keener on the figure of Pericles than the supporters
of the Moderns were. And on the rare occasions when they used it, they drowned him
in a list in which the
stratēgos
was hard put to make his mark. That was the case, for example, in the speech that
Jean Racine delivered to the Académie Française in honor of Pierre Corneille, who
died in 1648: “This was a figure truly born for the glory of his country, comparable
(I will not say to all Rome’s excellent tragedians, since Rome admits that she was
not very successful in that genre) but at least to the likes of Aeschylus, Sophocles
and Euripides of whom Athens was as proud as she was of figures such as Themistocles,
Pericles and Alcibiades, who lived in that same period.”
Although the citation is undeniably appreciative, Pericles is reduced to the role
of a mere foil for the Athenian tragic poets and, on the rebound, for the deceased
Corneille.

When the
stratēgos
does appear in the seventeenth century, it is in a very particular genre, that of
Dialogues of the Dead, which flourished in the reign of Louis XIV. In these, we find
a pensive or even saddened Pericles, meditating on his descent to the Underworld.

A Pericles in Torment: The
Stratēgos
in Dialogues of the Dead

Dialogues of the Dead were all the rage at the end of the seventeenth century. This
narrative technique, inspired by Lucian of Samosata (A.D. 120–180) accommodated all
kinds of encounters. Here, Ancients and Moderns could meet freely and talk together
after their deaths. For those who adopted this format, imagining improbable postmortem
encounters from which the heroes did not always emerge enhanced, it seemed an amusing
way to undermine great figures of the past.

In 1685, Fontenelle (1657–1757), a well-established partisan of the Moderns, produced
a series of Dialogues of the Dead in which, in the Elysian Fields of the Greek Underworld,
figures from Antiquity met with more contemporary characters. For him, this was an
ideal opportunity to confront ancient thought with modern ideas, rejecting the primacy
so often accorded to the Ancients. In his third dialogue, Socrates and Montaigne are
chatting in the Underworld and, ironically enough, it is the Greek philosopher who
takes it upon himself to deflate the prestige of the great figures from Antiquity:

S
OCRATES
.—Take care you are not deceived; Antiquity is an Object of a peculiar kind; its distance
magnifies it. Had you but known Aristides, Phocion, Pericles and myself (since you
are pleased to place me among their number), you would certainly have found some to
match us in your own Age. That which commonly possesses people so in favour of Antiquity
is their being out of humour with their own times, and Antiquity takes advantage of
their spleen. They cry up the Ancients in spite to their contemporaries. Thus, when
we lived, we esteemed our ancestors more than they deserved; and, in requital, our
posterity esteem us at present more than we deserve.
⁴¹

However, the appearance of Pericles here is still very discreet. Although mentioned
in passing, the
stratēgos
is not characterized at all, as if Fontenelle did
not consider him worthy of being a major character in a dialogue of the dead. Five
years later, in his
Digression sur les Anciens et les Modernes
, he did not even mention the
stratēgos
, but cited only Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes in support of his thesis.

It was not until the Dialogues of the Dead composed by Fénelon (1651–1715) that Pericles
at last landed a leading role, even if this did not necessarily redound to his advantage.
Fénelon, a latecomer to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, presented himself
as a conciliator, refusing to take sides. He was appointed tutor to Louis XIV’s grandson
(between 1689 and 1695), and during this period wrote his
Dialogues des morts
, which were, however, not published until after his disgrace.
⁴²
The purpose of this work, designed for the edification of the
dauphin
, was educational. The
dauphin
was presented with models either to emulate or, on the contrary, to shun. Freely
inspired by an anecdote told by Plutarch,
⁴³
the eighteenth dialogue was entirely unambiguous in this respect. In it, Pericles
held the role of a counterexample.

The
stratēgos
, here greeting his pupil Alcibiades upon the latter’s arrival in the Underworld,
was depicted as a tormented man, bewailing his fate and his lost authority:

P
ERICLES
.—You know very well, that could eloquence prevail (and this I may say without vanity)
I should come off as well as any other: but talking to them is in vain. Those flatteries
by which the Athenians were won, those subtle turns in discourse, those insinuating
ways by which men are taken, by falling in with their humours and passions, are of
no service here. Their ears are stopped, and their hearts of brass cannot be moved.
Though I died in the unhappy Peloponnesian war, yet am I punished for it here below.
They ought to have forgiven me such fault, in the commission of which I lost my life;
and which I was led into by your persuasions.

A
LCIBIADES
.—True, I advised you to undertake this war, rather than be obliged to make up your
accounts. … Can your judges here below be angry at such maxims?

P
ERICLES
.—Yes, so very angry, that though in that cursed war I lost the confidence of the
people, and died of the plague,
yet have I suffered terrible punishments here, for having unseasonably disturbed the
public quiet. By this you may judge, cousin, how well you are like to come off
.
⁴⁴

Confessing himself guilty of unleashing the Peloponnesian War, Pericles thus ended
up suffering in the Underworld, where his formidable rhetorical
skills were of no avail to him and could not mollify his judges who remained deaf
to all his fine words and judged only his actions.
⁴⁵
For once, he attracted attention at centerstage, but he was depicted as an unscrupulous
politician, now punished for his reprehensible actions.

However, despite these timid appearances in the Underworld, for most of the time Pericles
remained confined to the margins of Western imaginary representations.

A Flash of Lightning in the Darkness: Hobbes’s Pericles

The work of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) presents an exception in this gloomy panorama.
Before becoming the now famous great philosopher, the author of
Leviathan
made his name with a translation of
The History of the Peloponnesian War
, which was published in 1629 (
figure 11
). To translate this work by Thucydides was by no means an obvious thing to do, for
the Greek historian aroused scant interest in Tudor England except among a few scholars,
such as Francis Bacon. To be sure, the work had already been translated almost a century
earlier, in 1550, by Thomas Nicoll. However, that translation was not at all trustworthy
insofar as it was based on the faulty French translation by Seyssel, which was itself
derived from the “faithless beauty” in Latin by Lorenzo Valla. “No doubt Hobbes was
right in saying that Thucydides had been traduced rather than translated into English.”
⁴⁶

Hobbes, who came from a modest family, with neither fortune nor reputation, undertook
this vast enterprise while employed as a tutor in the noble Cavendish family. In the
humanist manner, he regarded history as a determining element in the education of
the young aristocrat in his charge. Pericles, depicted as an honest man, motivated
solely by virtue, emerged enhanced from a reading of this work. In contrast to Hobbes’s
pessimistic diagnosis of human nature, Pericles did not appear as a bloodthirsty wolf
but rather as an attentive shepherd, struggling against the impulses of his flock,
with no concern for his own egoistic interests.
⁴⁷

Hobbes explained the mainsprings for his admiration for the
stratēgos
in a short text devoted to the life of Thucydides that accompanied the translation.
⁴⁸
According to him, the Athenian historian harbored no sympathy for democracy: “From
his opinion touching the government of the state, it is manifest that he least of
all liked the democracy.”
⁴⁹
According to Hobbes, Thucydides instead favored not only oligarchy but, even more,
monarchy. In his view, Athens reached the peak of its glory when ruled by sovereigns,
first Pisistratus, then Pericles: “He praiseth the government of Athens when it was
mixed of the few and the many, but more he commendeth it both when Peisistratus reigned
(saving that it was a usurped power) and when, in the beginning of this war, it was
democratical in name, but in effect monarchical under Pericles. So that it seemeth
that as he was of regal descent, so he best approved of the regal government.”
⁵⁰
Hobbes’s approval of the
stratēgos
was thus based on a particular reading of Thucydides, whom he considered to be a
fervent supporter of monarchy. On those grounds, he interpreted the famous formula
of book II—“It was in name a state democratical; but in fact a government of the principal
man”—as a barely veiled monarchist slogan.
⁵¹

In his old age, in 1672, Thomas Hobbes’s opinion remained unchanged. Looking back
over his career, he claimed in his autobiography written in Latin verse that Thucydides
pleased him “more than all the other” historians, because “he has shown that democracy
was bad and [that] a single man was far wiser than the crowd.”
⁵²
The rehabilitation of Pericles thus took place to the detriment of democracy, which
was depicted as a pure simulacrum that concealed an acceptance of royalty or, at any
rate, of personal power: “This was to be not only the position of Thucydides, but
a great political discovery that was to make it possible, throughout history, for
conservatives in all countries and all ages, to admire the greatness of Athens without
approving of the popular regime.”
⁵³

By inventing this elegant solution (praising Pericles and at the same time stigmatizing
the popular regime), Hobbes established the bases for the rehabilitation of the
stratēgos
in a Europe dominated by monarchist culture and ideals. So, a priori, the period
seemed ready for Pericles’ return to grace, given that, in the years that followed,
the ancient models made a triumphant return. But, alas, the chance was yet again missed,
and anti-Periclean clichés even enjoyed a rejuvenation.

P
ERICLES AS
J
UDGED BY THE
E
NLIGHTENMENT

After the Moderns’ victory over the Ancients in the last years of the seventeenth
century, the century that followed was marked by a sudden “return to Antiquity.” Europe
was seized by a veritable mania for the ancient world, which was sharpened by the
discovery of the towns buried beneath the lava from Vesuvius: Herculaneum in 1738
and Pompeii ten years later: “for the first time, people penetrated, as if committing
a burglary,
right into
Antiquity.”
⁵⁴
And this was not simply a return to the
status quo ante
. The eighteenth century helped to “repoliticize” the relationship to the Ancients
and, in particular, to focus on Greece. However, this “repoliticization” process took
place through the intermediary of the Sparta of Lycurgus, not the Athens of Pericles.