Pericles of Athens (38 page)

But that intimate knowledge of Antiquity did Pericles no favors.
⁷⁹
While Abbé Barthélemy showered praise upon Solon, he poured bitter criticism upon
the
stratēgos
, blaming him for being largely responsible for the decadence of Athens. In the long
introduction designed to establish the background to his account, the abbé spelled
out his reproaches in a separate section devoted to “the age of Pericles.”
⁸⁰

Admittedly, the portrait begins on a positive note, for Barthélemy ascribes a number
of altogether exceptional virtues to the son of Xanthippus: he manifested “in his
domestic life the simplicity and frugality of ancient times; in the administration
of public affairs an unalterable disinterestedness
and probity; in the command of armies a careful attention to leave nothing to chance
and to risk his reputation rather than the safety of the state.”
⁸¹
But all this was nothing but an “illusion,” as Barthélemy put it, for his personal
qualities were not accompanied by any care for the public good.

On the contrary, Barthélemy alleges that Pericles acted as an unscrupulous demagogue.
Predictably enough, the Abbé contrasted his pernicious behavior to the noble attitude
of Cimon. While this rival of Pericles used his own fortune “in embellishing the city
and relieving the wretched,” Pericles used the public treasury of the Athenians and
that of the allies, with the sole aim of flattering the multitude: “The people, seeing
only the hand that gave, shut their eyes to the source from whence it drew. They became
more and more united to Pericles who, to attach them still more strongly to himself,
rendered them the accomplices of the repeated acts of injustice of which he was guilty.”
⁸²
This was doubly unjust, for, as a result of Pericles’ demagogic maneuvers, Cimon
was ostracized and the Areopagus was marginalized. “Under frivolous pretexts, [Pericles]
destroyed the authority of the Areopagus, which vigorously opposed its influence to
his innovations and the growing licentiousness of the times.”
⁸³

After driving away the aristocrat Thucydides, his last major opponent, the
stratēgos
is represented as having exercised his power without restraint and all the more effectively
given that he never made a show of it. Like a skillful illusionist, Pericles governed
hidden in the shadows, so that the people did not notice that he was manipulating
it: “Everything was governed by his will, though everything was apparently transacted
according to the established laws and customs; and liberty, lulled into security by
the observance of the republican forms, imperceptibly expired under the weight of
genius.”
⁸⁴

Beyond the city, Pericles’ behavior is represented as equally deplorable. Admittedly,
Barthélemy recognizes his wise decision not to increase the conquests of Athens. “When
he saw the Athenian power attain to a certain point of elevation, he deemed it disgraceful
to suffer it to decline and a misfortune any farther to augment it. All his operations
were governed by this consideration and it was the triumph of his politics so long
to have retained the Athenians in inaction while he held their allies in dependence
and kept Lacedaemon in awe.”
⁸⁵
Yet that strategic prudence was counterbalanced by his extreme rigor where the allies
were concerned; all their revolts were crushed in bloodbaths of violence. Where the
other nations of Greece were concerned, “Pericles was odious to some and formidable
to all.”
⁸⁶
As an all-powerful demagogue within the city and a pitiless oppressor beyond it,
Barthélemy’s Pericles had no saving graces at all.

The account of the Peloponnesian War does nothing to dispel this negative impression.
On the contrary, according to Abbé Barthélemy, the conflict even dissipated the illusion
that the
stratēgos
, with his genius, had created, for it brought to light the true extent of the corruption
in the city: “At the commencement of the Peloponnesian war, the Athenians must have
been greatly surprised to find themselves so different from their ancestors. A few
years had sufficed to destroy the authority of all the laws, institutions, maxims
and examples accumulated by preceding ages for the conservation of manners.”
⁸⁷
It seemed that in the space of three decades, Pericles had stripped the city of all
the virtues painstakingly acquired by previous generations.

Barthélemy considered the increasing numbers of courtesans in Attica to be the very
symbol of the general dissoluteness. In his view, Pericles was, if not the promoter
of this fashion imported from Ionia, at least a passive accomplice in its development:
“Pericles, a witness to the abuse, did not attempt to correct it. The more severe
he was in his own manners, the more studious was he to corrupt those of the Athenians,
which he relaxed by a rapid succession of festivals and games.”
⁸⁸
Inevitably, the Abbé made the most of the chance to remind his readers of the evil
influence of Aspasia, whom he accused of having brought about the war “to avenge her
personal quarrels.”
⁸⁹
And his conclusion fell with all the force of a guillotine blade: “Pericles authorized
the licentiousness; Aspasia extended it.”
⁹⁰

As if the cup were not by now full, in his summing up Barthélemy blamed Pericles’
Athens for yet another reason. As a man of the Enlightenment, he ranted against the
sectarian behavior of Athenians under the reign of the
stratēgos
: “Under Pericles, philosophical researches were rigorously proscribed by the Athenians
and, whilst soothsayers frequently received an honourable public maintenance in the
prytaneum, the philosophers scarcely ventured to confide their opinions to their most
faithful disciples.”
⁹¹
By the end of this exercise in character-assassination, the Periclean edifice was
shattered from top to bottom: as an illusionist, a demagogue, a tyrant, and an intolerant
and corrupting oppressor, the
stratēgos
was reduced to the anti-hero of a city adrift.

In this historiographical journey of ours,
The Travels of the Young Anachar sis
deserved, if not such a long detour, at least a pause. For, in the first place, this
work presents the most extreme expression of the anti-Periclean tradition, amassing
a vast collection of reproaches and gearing them up to a climactic paroxysm. Second,
this work’s influence on the cultivated elite groups of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries should not be underestimated,
⁹²
for it ran into many editions and was widely diffused. It was this
degenerate image of Pericles, produced by a combined reading of Plutarch and Barthélemy,
that was particularly prevalent in revolutionary France.

The Opponent of Liberty: Pericles in the Revolutionary Era

The men of the revolution were not sparing in their references to Antiquity. Although
the French Revolution regarded itself as a new era, it constantly reverted to the
past in order to legitimate itself. This new world presented itself as a return to
the Ancients. In the course of the Convention (21 September 1792–26 October 1795),
certain ancient heroes became “the saints of the new revolutionary cult.”
⁹³

“Everything Had to Be Spartan or Roman”: The Revolution and Antiquity

But which Antiquity? As Volney, the orientalist, observed as early as 1795 in his
Lectures on History
, “Names, surnames, dress, manners, laws seem all about to become Spartan or Roman.”
⁹⁴
Mainly Roman, it should be said: Jacques Bouineau’s study of the
Archives parlementaires
and the
Moniteur
—roughly thirty thousand pages between 1789 and 1799—shows that, in the speeches of
the revolutionaries, there are almost twice as many references to Latin culture as
there are to that of Greece.
⁹⁵

What is the explanation for this prevalence of Rome? The revolutionaries, steeped
in the Latin rhetoric that was taught by the Jesuits and teachers of oratory had,
for the most part, received a solid grounding in law (for example, Danton, Desmoulins,
Robespierre, Barnave, Pétion, Vergniaud, Barère, Barbaroux, and Saint-Just), and the
law taught in the French faculties of the eighteenth century was, essentially, Roman.
All that the men of the Revolution knew about Greece was what they had read in the
works of Plutarch or Abbé Barthélemy; and, compared to their lengthy exposure to Latin
culture, that was very little.
⁹⁶

When the revolutionaries did refer to the Greek world, they usually favored Sparta.
Among the Montagnards, this was perfectly clear; according to Robespierre, the city
of Sparta “blazed like a streak of lightning through the immense darkness,”
⁹⁷
illuminating humanity and revealing the path to follow. This fascination with the
Spartans was often expressed to the detriment of Athens, which was disparaged for
its lax manners and the corruption of its morals.
⁹⁸
Not even the sage Solon always escaped their criticisms. Billaud-Varenne crudely
contrasted the two rival cities and their respective lawgivers as follows: “Citizens,
the inflexible austerity of Lycurgus, in Sparta, became the unshakeable basis of the
republic; the weak and trusting character of Solon plunged Athens back into slavery.
This is a parallel that reflects
the entire science of government.”
⁹⁹
As for Saint-Just, he was equally harsh with ancient democracy, expressing nothing
but scorn for a system in which “everything proceeded as the orators directed.”
¹⁰⁰

Was the image of Athens presented by the Girondins any different?

On this point, we should not be misled by the nineteenth-century historiography, which
sets the “Spartan” Montagnards in opposition to the “Athenian” Girondins.
¹⁰¹
The Girondins rejected the Spartan mirage, regarding it as nothing but “a dreadful
equality of poverty,” but that did not mean that they favored the city of Pericles.
For example, on 11 May 1793, the Girondin Verniaud dismissed both regimes, declaring,
“I conclude that you do not wish to turn the French into a purely military [that is,
Spartan] people, with praetorian guards that hold all the power … nor into a people
so beguiled by the soft ways of peace that, like the Athenians, it fears kings that
attack it for being enemies of its pleasures rather than enemies of its liberty.”
¹⁰²
So Athens gained nothing from the political divisions that were tearing France apart
in the period prior to Thermidor.

Among the revolutionaries, Sparta was often exalted while Athens was frequently reviled.
So did the revolutionaries simply take over the clichés that had been elaborated in
earlier centuries? That would be too hasty a conclusion to draw, for in truth a number
of differences are detectable. In the first place, the revolutionaries invoked the
patronage of the great ancient lawgivers with singular acuity. This was a way for
them, by analogy, to think through the rupture that they were themselves introducing.
The figure of Lycurgus could certainly not be ignored, and his memory was indeed constantly
invoked. A bust of the Spartan lawgiver was set up, alongside that of Solon, in the
meeting hall of the Convention, when it took over the Tuileries on 10 May 1793.
¹⁰³

Besides, the revolutionaries drew upon a number of other episodes from the Greek past,
exalting in particular the occasions when the Greeks had put up a heroic resistance
to invaders. Of course, this was hardly surprising at a time when France itself was
facing attack from the European powers that were in league against the young Republic.
For instance, the
Marseillaise
(1792) was freely adapted from the paean sung by the Athenians at Salamis, and, in
the summer of 1794, three plays relating to the Persian Wars were staged in Paris
in less than one month:
Miltiades at Marathon
,
The Battle of Thermopylae
, and
The Marathon Chorus
.
¹⁰⁴

Following Thermidor and the end of the Terror, other moments from Greek history also
came to the fore. Under the
Directoire
(1795–1799), the Athenians came to be celebrated for their ability to achieve reconciliation
after such deep political divisions. In this respect, the action of Solon
and the amnesty decreed by Thrasybulus attracted considerable attention: “Thrasybulus
was surrounded by a certain aura in post-Thermidor France, owing to the fact that
he had helped to impose the unity of the city upon the victorious Democrats of 403.
In a France rent asunder, he was regarded as the model of a conciliator and French
orators did not fail to mention his name.”
¹⁰⁵

The Warmonger: The Pericles of the French and American Revolutionaries

In these troubled circumstances, Pericles was mostly conspicuous by his absence. Just
as well, probably, for when his memory was invoked, he was portrayed, among the Montagnards
and the Girondins alike, as a corrupt aristocrat or even as a liberty-killing tyrant.
¹⁰⁶

His example was cited in May 1790 already when, in the Constituent Assembly, a question
of burning importance prompted intense debate: should the king be stripped of the
right to declare war? While the orator Barnave pleaded the cause of the patriotic
party, recalling all the unjust and calamitous wars that kings had undertaken, Mirabeau
defended the interests of the sovereign, whose secret adviser he then was.

According to Barnave, the right of war should be entrusted to the legislative body,
not to the executive power, for a very simple and excellent reason: the National Assembly
was less prone to corruption than the king’s ministers. In support of his argument,
Barnave cited the case of Pericles, “a skilful minister” who was prepared to spark
off the Peloponnesian War “so as to bury his own crimes”: “Pericles embarked upon
the Peloponnesian War when he realized that he was unable to justify his accounts.”
¹⁰⁷