Pericles of Athens (5 page)

In roughly the same period, Pausanias adopted a radically opposed view in his
Periegesis
, in a passage in which he digressed on the subject of the famous men of the Athenian
past. While happy to praise the military exploits of Themistocles, Xanthippus, and
Cimon against the Persians (8.52.1–2), he expresses the greatest scorn for the warmongers
of the Peloponnesian conflict, “especially the most distinguished of them.” His judgment
is categorical: “they might be said to be murderers, almost wreckers of Greece.”
²⁸
Scandalized by the Greek internal wars, Pausanias does not deign even to mention
the name of Pericles and assigns him to a kind of
damnatio memoriae
.

Without any clear suggestion of a cause-and-effect link, the memory of the
stratēgos
thereafter progressively continued to fade right down to the early
fifteenth century, at which point the humanist Leonardo Bruni, inspired by the writings
of Thucydides and Aelius Aristides, revived it.
²⁹

From this rapid survey of the sources of Antiquity, it is possible to draw two clear
conclusions. The first is somewhat disappointing: to produce a straightforward biography
of Pericles involves guesswork or even an illusion, unless one imitates Plutarch and
creates an imaginary itinerary that reveals more about the preconceptions of its creator
than it does about the trajectory of the
stratēgos
. For what can be said about Pericles’ youth prior to 472, the date when he financed
Aeschylus’s
Persians
? What do we really know of his life between 461 and 450? No linear account of the
stratēgos
’s life is conceivable—unless, that is, one cheats with the information provided and
arranges it into a chronological order that, although coherent, is arbitrary. Only
the last three years of his existence, from 432 to 429, rise to the surface in this
ocean of ignorance, and they do so thanks to the unique shaft of light shed by Thucydides’
Peloponnesian War
.

Does this amount to an insurmountable defect that rules out writing any book about
Pericles? Not at all. A perusal of the ancient sources in fact indicates another,
surely more fruitful avenue of research. The ancient sources, ranging from Thucydides
to Plutarch and from the comic poets to Aelius Aristides, all, in their own ways,
ponder the relations established between Pericles the individual and the community
in which he lived. Is Pericles an all-powerful figure or simply a ventriloquist who
expresses the aspirations of the people? A wide range of answers can be envisaged,
and they deserve to be closely scrutinized. And this is the line of investigation
that will serve as a guiding thread for the present inquiry, which will be organized
into two major parts, the one historical, the other historiographical.

The first section will start with a study of the genealogical, economic, and cultural
trump cards that were held by the young Pericles at the point when he stealthily embarked
upon his political career (
chapter 1
). The following two chapters will be devoted to the bases of Pericles’ power. These
were clearly twofold: his success rested on military glory—as head of the Athenian
armies and navies (
chapter 2
)—and on his expert handling of public discourse—to the point of embodying the orator
par excellence who fascinated the Athenians from the Assembly tribune (
chapter 3
).

As
stratēgos
, Pericles was deeply implicated in the development of Athenian imperialism. With
no misgivings at all, he ruthlessly crushed the revolts of the allied cities, adopting
in this respect a policy that was widely favored in Athens: possibly his sole originality
lay in his theorizing its necessity and establishing imperial power on an unprecedented
scale (
chapter 4
). Within the city, Pericles actively promoted the genesis of a truly democratic economic
policy—a policy that was founded on widespread redistributions of the city’s wealth
to a newly redefined civic community (
chapter 5
).

Both within the city and beyond it, Pericles responded to the demands of the people
or even anticipated them. The pressure that the
dēmos
exerted could be felt at every level. It was because the least of his actions and
gestures were all scrutinized and, frequently, criticized that Pericles seems to have
kept his relatives, friends, and lovers at a distance. He no doubt hoped in this way
to ward off the many attackers who described him as a man who was manipulated, ready
to put the interests of those close to him before the well-being of the Athenian people
(
chapters 6
and
7
). Such reproaches were likewise leveled against his attitude toward the city gods,
for he was also accused of fostering friendships with impious men (
chapter 8
).

At Pericles’ death, these weighty suspicions faded away: the
stratēgos
now, a least for a part of tradition, came to symbolize a golden age that was gone
forever. A number of ancient authors even treated the passing of Pericles as a pivotal
moment in the history of Athens, as if his death marked the starting point of the
city’s decadence—a view that calls for serious qualification (
chapter 9
).

Having completed this historical journey, it will be necessary to reconsider this
whole investigation and return to the question formulated right at the outset—namely,
how did the Athenian democracy react to its experience of this great man? In short,
we must try to understand Athens as a reflection of Pericles and Pericles as a reflection
of Athens (
chapter 10
).

Pericles was neither a hero nor a nobody. He should be restored to his full complexity,
and we should endeavor to free ourselves from a historiography that, over a long period,
either ignored him or exposed him to public contempt, before eventually transforming
him into a veritable icon of democracy. The Periclean myth is a recent re-creation.
Up until the end of the eighteenth century, Pericles was for the most part judged
with disdain, if not arrogantly ignored. Blinded by Roman and Spartan models, the
men of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment regarded the
stratēgos
as an unscrupulous demagogue who headed a degenerate regime (
chapter 11
). It was not until the nineteenth century—and, in particular, Thucydides’ return
to favor—coupled with the advent of parliamentary regimes in Europe—that, progressively,
a new Pericles emerged in the writings of historians, where he was now presented as
an enlightened bourgeois. Prepared by Rollin and Voltaire and completed by George
Grote and Victor Duruy, this slow metamorphosis engendered the figure of an idealized
Pericles who, still today, is enthroned in school textbooks on a par with Louis XIV
(
chapter 12
).

CHAPTER 1

An Ordinary Young Athenian Aristocrat?

I
n the
Politics
, Aristotle defines the elite by a collection of characteristics that distinguishes
it from the common people: good birth (
eugeneia
), wealth (
ploutos
), excellence (
aretē
), and, finally, education (
paideia
).
¹
These were the various aspects, combined in different degrees, that defined social
superiority in the Greek world. Pericles was clearly abundantly endowed with all those
distinctive attributes. However, in a democratic context, such advantages could sometimes
turn out to operate as obstacles or even handicaps. Not all forms of superiority were
acceptable in themselves, but needed to adopt a form that was tolerated by the
dēmos
for fear of arousing its mistrust or even anger: in Athens, the forms taken by distinction
constituted an object of implicit negotiation between members of the elite and the
people.

Such compromises were evident at every level. Membership of a prestigious lineage
was undeniably an advantage, provided that the people did not doubt the family’s attachment
to the new regime that Cleisthenes had set in place. Likewise, wealth was a blessing
for anyone who wished to launch himself into political life, but only if that fortune
was judged to be legitimate by the Athenians and if a considerable proportion of those
riches was used to benefit the community as a whole. Finally, the asset of a refined
education was of capital importance in a context in which influence was clearly associated
with an ability to hold forth in the Assembly; but if that skill was employed in a
thoughtless manner it could be taken for a form of cultural arrogance that the average
citizen would not tolerate.

Pericles’ entrance upon the Athenian political stage took place in the context of
this generalized negotiation. His first dextrous steps into public life enabled him
to win over the people by demonstrating that his superiority, at once genealogical,
economic, and also cultural, was compatible with the democratic ideology and the practices
that were taking shape.

T
HE
T
RUMP
C
ARDS
H
ELD BY THE
Y
OUNG
P
ERICLES

Eugeneia
: An Equivocal Ancestry

At the time of Pericles’ birth, strictly speaking, there was in Athens no “aristocracy”
in the sense of a system in which hereditary power was held by a few great families.
Yet for a long time historians believed that in the Archaic period, the city was managed
by a handful of lineages that monopolized all powers. In truth, however, that is a
mistaken interpretation of the ancient sources, read through the deforming prism of
ancient Rome. The city of Athens was, quite simply, not organized into
genē
. In the Archaic and the Classical periods,
genē
essentially designated families—or groups of families—from which the priest or priestess
of a civic cult was chosen; and no more than a marginal political influence seems
to have been exerted by those groups.
²

However, this does not mean that descent counted for nothing in early-fifth-century
Athens. There were undoubtedly certain powerful families (
oikiai
) that played a primary role in city life. All Athenians belonged to lineages that
it is possible to pick out thanks to the names borne by their members. Pericles was
called “the son of Xanthippus,” and his eldest son was called “Xanthippus, son of
Pericles.” The rules for passing a name down resulted in the eldest son acquiring
the name of his paternal grandfather, thereby creating an interplay of recognizable
echoes and conferring a cumulative aura upon patronyms. Pericles, the younger son
of Xanthippus and Agariste, in point of fact came from a doubly prestigious line (
figure 1
), but was not a member of any kind of “nobility,” in the sense that the word still
carries today.

His father Xanthippus, son of Ariphron, led the Athenian and other Greek troops to
victory in the battle of Cape Mycale, at the end of the Second Persian War. The author
of the
Constitution of the Athenians
even calls him the “people’s champion” (
prostatēs tou dēmou
),
³
and his influence was considered sufficiently alarming for him to be ostracized by
the Athenians in 485 B.C. However, contrary to one deeply rooted historiographical
myth, he
did not belong to the postulated
genos
of the Bouzygae:
⁴
neither Herodotus nor Thucydides nor even Plutarch have anything to say about this.
In reality, the belief rests upon a mistaken reading of a fragment from a comic poet,
Eupolis, who had one of his characters declare: “Is there any orator that can be cited
now? The best is the Bouzyges, the cursed one [
alitērios
]!”
⁵
But, according to one ancient commentator, the poet, far from alluding to Pericles,
was referring to a certain Demostratus, an orator who played a by no means negligible
role in Athens at the time of the Peloponnesian War.
⁶

In truth, little is known about Xanthippus’s clan except that its lineage was judged
sufficiently prestigious for the Alcmaeonids to consent to give it one of their daughters
in marriage (Herodotus, 6.131). So initially, it was actually through his maternal
descent that Pericles came to the city’s notice.
⁷
The Alcmaeonids were certainly one of the most illustrious Athenian clans, but they
did not constitute a
genos
since no hereditary priesthood was associated with them. All the same, theirs was
a powerful
oikos
(the term used by Herodotus, 6.125.5), and that was no small matter. Their influence
was already evident even before the establishment of Pisistratus’s tyranny in 561
B.C. According to tradition, Alcmaeon, the eponymous ancestor of the lineage, was
the first Athenian to win the chariot race at Olympia,
⁸
thereby shedding glory upon his entire lineage. Then, a few years before Pericles’
birth—in 508/7 B.C.—another Alcmaeonid, Cleisthenes, initiated a thorough reform of
the civic organization, thereby establishing the bases of the future democratic system.
And it was Agariste, the niece of Cleisthenes the lawgiver, who married Xanthippus
and gave birth to Pericles.
⁹