Pericles of Athens (44 page)

From 1870 onward, criticism increased, as knowledge about Athens became more detailed
thanks to the acquisition of a large epigraphic corpus and, above all, the discovery
of the
Constitution of the
Athenians
in 1891. As early as 1884, Karl Julius Beloch was distancing himself from “the unilateral
views of Grote’s school” and “the cult of radical democracy” that had become fashionable.
⁸⁸
Moreover, in Beloch’s
Greek History
, which appeared in 1893, Pericles was even subjected to an all-out attack. The German
historian, who was skeptical about the real power possessed by “great men,” considered
that the son of Xanthippus was even inferior to his predecessors, Themistocles and
Cimon. He was no more than “a great parliamentarian” (
ein großer Parlamentarier
),
⁸⁹
lacking any military talent. In the new Germany of Wilhelm II, disdain for representative
democracy was now expressed openly. But Beloch did not limit
his attack to this, for he went on to accuse Pericles of plunging Greece into a fatal
internal war; even if sentencing the
stratēgos
to pay a hefty fine in 430 was legally unjust, it was nevertheless basically justified
in that it was aimed at the politician “who had unleashed the fratricidal Hellenic
conflict for personal reasons and
had thereby been guilty of the greatest crime ever known in the whole of Greek history
.”
⁹⁰
Pericles was the destroyer of the unity of the Hellenic world; in the recently unified
Germany, this was the gravest of accusations.

In 1898, the Swiss German Jacob Burckhardt, for his part, returned to a more traditional
vein, accusing the Athenians of having used their power in an unjust manner both inside
the city and beyond it. He claimed that slavery and various handouts of pay gave rise
to laziness, depravity, and excessive luxury: “The most demoralizing tax was the
theorikon
, doled out to the poorer citizens for theatre tickets, for celebrating festivals
and games, and for sacrifices and public meals. The waste caused by this tax was relatively
as great as that at the most sumptuous courts, and later wars were lost for lack of
money because this sacrosanct tradition could not be abolished.”
⁹¹
Pericles, “responsible for most of the taxes just mentioned,” was powerless to oppose
such deadly tendencies. Far from being an educator of the people, “he was also forced
to humour their greed with pleasures of all sorts—not to satisfy it would have been
impossible.”
⁹²
The outbreak of the Peloponnesian War may even have seemed to him desirable, for
it offered him an opportunity to avoid the anger that the people felt against him.

At the turn of the century, the elective similarities formerly detected between Pericles
and the Germans had had their day. Now transformed purely into a parliamentarian and
reviled for having stirred up ill-feeling in the Greek world, his image was repudiated
and other models more in tune with the ideology of the Second Reich took its place.
By the time of the outbreak of World War I, the divorce was complete: clearly rejected
by the Germans, the
stratēgos
was now enrolled in the service of British propaganda. This prompted a renewed use
of the figure of Pericles that sometimes took unexpected turns, not only in England,
but once again in Germany when that conflict came to an end.

T
HE
D
ETERIORATION OF THE
P
ERICLEAN
M
YTH

The Exploitation of the Periclean Myth: Pericles amid the Turmoil of the Two World
Wars

During World War I, the Germans showed scant interest in Pericles. If ever they did
evoke the democratic city, it was, rather, in order to denigrate fourth-century Athens
and its loquacious orators. In 1916, Engelbert Drerup
published a book that attacked Demosthenes and the ancient “Republic of lawyers” (
Advokaten-republik
) in which the most inflammatory of modern issues rose to the surface. By means of
an analogy, Drerup explicitly targeted the Entente leaders, first and foremost “the
lawyer, Lloyd George,” who was then Minister for War in Great Britain.
⁹³
It was also a way of countering Clemenceau, who was devoting a veritable cult to
Demosthenes, whom he presented as championing the resistance to Philip II of Macedon.
⁹⁴

Pericles remained mostly uninvolved in this battle between great men. Significantly
enough, it was not until the day after the armistice, on 12 November 1918, that the
stratēgos
made a timid appearance on the Parisian stage, in an operetta by Henri Christiné
titled
Phi-Phi
. Although it was an instant success, Pericles did not emerge favorably from this
lighthearted comedy that enjoyed a three-year run in the “Bouffes parisiens” theater.
His role was no more than that of a foil, which was eclipsed by that of Phidias (alias
Phi-Phi), the play’s real hero. The latter mocked the
stratēgos
, who was prepared to dye his hair in order to marry the “charming young” Aspasia.
And this new “arch-countess” of Athens then proceeded to cheat on her husband with
the sculptor, who teased her, saying, “You need so many men that our statesman does
not satisfy you!”
⁹⁵
Pericles was thus mobilized, not as a figure of resistance and heroism, but as one
that represented loose moral behavior. This play founded the genre of musical comedies
and started off the “Flapper Years.”

Pericles in an England at War: A Call to Arms

Only in England was Pericles truly honored during World War I. One year after the
start of the conflict, in the autumn of 1915, all the London buses carried an advertisement
bearing an extract from the funeral oration in which the
stratēgos
called upon his fellow-citizens to imitate the bravery of the soldiers who had fallen
in defense of their city (
figure 16
): “For you now it remains to rival what they have done and, knowing the secret of
happiness to be freedom, and the secret of freedom a brave heart, not idly to stand
aside from the enemy’s onset.”
⁹⁶

Cited in the fine translation by the British historian Alfred Zimmern,
⁹⁷
this passage rested on a set of implicit references that suggested that the English
were identified with the Athenians, the Germans with the Spartans. The analogy was
the more apposite given that a number of Germanic historians had rehabilitated the
Spartans in the course of the nineteenth century, even going so far as to represent
those harsh warriors as “the Prussians of Antiquity,” as Karl Otfried Müller put it.
⁹⁸

What can be the explanation for the remarkable interplay of roles between the French,
fascinated by Demosthenes, and the English, committed to Pericles? Or, to put that
another way, why did Clemenceau, after retiring from political life, write a life
of Demosthenes rather than a biography of Pericles? The explanation is easy enough
to find when one reflects upon the identities of Athens’s enemies. For the French,
the struggle against the Macedonian kings provided a more attractive parallel than
the struggle against the Spartan oligarchy. As a reflection of French resistance to
Kaiser Wilhelm II, the war against Macedonia could be likened to a republican crusade
against the despotism of Philip II. The English, however, had nothing against royalty
as such; the Peloponnesian War offered them a chance to play upon a different register—not
the opposition between a republic and a monarchy, but the confrontation between a
liberal sea-power and an aggressive continental power.
⁹⁹

Periclean Athens remained a model for English politicians right up to 1945. In his
Memoirs
, Winston Churchill showered praise upon Lord Beaverbrook (then minister for food
supplies), who, in one of his letters, had quoted the last sentence from Pericles’
last speech: “Open no more negotiations with Sparta. Show them plainly that you are
not crushed by your present afflictions. They who face calamity without wincing and
who offer the most energetic resistance, these, be they States or individuals, are
the truest heroes.”
¹⁰⁰
Impossible not catch an echo of the famous “We shall never surrender” pronounced
by the English prime minister in June 1940. In that same speech, Churchill too promised
to continue the battle, whatever the cost, with the help of “our Empire beyond the
seas,” in the same way as Pericles did in the Peloponnesian War.
¹⁰¹
English historians were quick to set the two situations in parallel. At the end of
World War II, the Greek scholar Gilbert Murray wrote of the outbreak of hostilities
between Sparta and Athens as follows:
“Just as in 1914 or 1939, a rich democratic sea-power with a naval empire, full of
interest in all forms of social, artistic and intellectual life, was pitted against
a reactionary militarist land power, which had sacrificed most of its earlier culture
to stark efficiency in war.”
¹⁰²

Yet we should not exaggerate the relevance of such comparisons. In the first place,
those “Anglo-Periclean” affinities were by no means exclusive, for Gilbert Murray
also quoted Demosthenes in support of his thesis.
¹⁰³
Furthermore, not all British leaders felt the same admiration for the
stratēgos
. In 1940, the future director of the Intelligence Service cited the funeral oration
in an official report, with a view to stigmatizing the dangers of open democracy in
times of war: “Athens lost the war,” he reminded his correspondent, so Pericles’ city
could surely not constitute a model to be followed.
¹⁰⁴
Finally, the English were not alone in referring to the Athenian leader. Ever since
the second half of the nineteenth century, the Americans too had claimed the figure
of the
stratēgos
, with a view to turning him into one of the guardianheroes of American democracy.
President Abraham Lincoln has been shown to have been inspired by the funeral oration
when composing the famous “Gettysburg Address” in honor of the dead who fell in battle
in July 1863.
¹⁰⁵

Paradoxically, however, it was in Germany that the exploitation of the Periclean myth
was carried furthest, in particular after Hitler’s accession to power. The upshot
of a strange alliance between
Altertumswissenschaft
and Nazi propaganda was that the
stratēgos
became the archetype of the charismatic Führer, stamping his imprint upon both time
and space with his monumental constructions.

Pericles in Defeated Germany: The Quest for a Führer

In the immediate postwar years, a humiliated Germany again turned to Athens in order
to think through its own present situation. As Anthony Andurand has shown, Germanic
historians identified the situation of their vanquished country with the fate of the
Athenian city in 404: in both cases, the military defeat was accompanied by a change
of political regime.
¹⁰⁶
In September 1919, in a lecture titled “Thucydides and Ourselves,” the historian
Max Pohlenz drew a contrast between the glorious Athens of 430 and the broken city
of 404, in a bid to find lessons for the Germany of his own day. He was a supporter
of the conservative Right, who regarded Periclean democracy as the archetype of a
Volkstadt
, a state in which the sovereignty of the
dēmos
was limited by all the citizens’ blind obedience to the law. According to Pohlenz,
this “democracy of duty” implied a Führer in whom the people could believe. Whereas
Pericles had ideally filled that role, his successors had turned out to be incapable
of carrying on his work: “There was no
longer any statesman who possessed the qualities necessary to be the people’s leader
[
Führer des Volkes
]. Now there were only Party leaders [
Parteiführer
],” “purely professional politicians [
reine Berufsparlamentarier
],”
¹⁰⁷
all fighting one another with no thought for the interests of the community as a
whole (
des ganzen
). As Pohlenz presented Pericles, the latter was the embodiment of a glorious but
bygone period. However, the evocation of his memory indicated a path to follow, even
a political solution: reading between the lines, the historian’s compatriots were
invited to elect a new Führer, one capable of breaking with the Weimar Republic and
all its useless partisan squabbles.