Pericles of Athens (42 page)

T
HE
P
ERICLEAN
M
YTH AT
I
TS
P
EAK

After the French Revolution, the status of Greek Antiquity changed in Europe. At this
point, a different relationship to history developed, involving not so much imitation
as distancing, an accurate assessment of which was provided by Benjamin Constant’s
1819 lecture on “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared to That of the Moderns.” From
now on, Greece was
approached as a period and a civilization within the history of the world rather than
a reservoir of
exempla
from which one could take one’s pick. This distancing was accompanied by an increasing
professionalization of historical writing, based on the development of philology and
a critical study of sources. Within this new historiographical framework, Thucydides
had his revenge on Plutarch to the point of becoming the archetype of a scientific
historian, passionate about truth and rigor. Periclean Athens profited from these
developments and was now recognized in Europe and the United States as the major model
of an ancient city. Two liberal historians played a crucial role in this great transformation—George
Grote in England and Victor Duruy, who introduced Grote’s theses into France.

The Birth of a Great Bourgeois Parliamentarian: The Pericles of the English Nineteenth-Century
Historians

The British Anti-Periclean Tradition

In the early nineteenth century, Periclean democracy still had a detestable reputation
among British elite groups raised on readings of Plutarch. The work of Sir George
Lyttleton is typical in this respect.

When he retired from political life, this former First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor
of the Exchequer wrote a collection of
Dialogues of the Dead
(1760), imitating Fontenelle and Fénelon, in which Pericles did not appear to advantage.
In dialogue XXIII, Pericles conversed with Cosimo dei Medici and passed severe judgement
on his own government:

We are now in the regions where Truth presides, and I dare not offend her by playing
the orator in defence of my conduct. I must therefore acknowledge that, by weakening
the power of the court of the Areopagus, I tore up that anchor which Solon had wisely
fixed to keep his republic firm against the storms and fluctuations of popular factions.
This alteration which fundamentally injured the whole State, I made with a view to
serve my own ambition, the only passion in my nature which I could not contain within
the limits of virtue. For I knew that my eloquence would subject the people to me,
and make them the willing instruments of all my desires.
⁴⁰

In the Underworld imagined by Lord Lyttleton, Pericles was condemned to wander like
a soul in pain, mocked by wise Athenians who accused him of having cast Athens into
irremediable corruption.
⁴¹

It is true that, in the same period, a few British scholars had tried to present a
more flattering vision of Athenian democracy.
⁴²
But that rehabilitation did not extend to Pericles himself, as can be seen from the
work of the Irish historian John Gast.
The Rudiments of the Grecian History
, published in Dublin in 1753, is presented as a series of thirteen dialogues between
three people: a master, a scholar who has made some progress as an ancient historian,
and, last, a novice. This unusual arrangement allows the author to present a critical
evaluation of Greek history from which Pericles does not emerge at all enhanced. In
dialogue XI, the government of the
stratēgos
is riddled with criticisms. The first remarks are laudatory: the Athenian is described
as “an accomplished statesman and a powerful speaker, beyond all that ever were in
Athens before him.”
⁴³
But the praises soon dry up: the
stratēgos
, spurred on by his all-consuming ambition, is said to have used his formidable powers
for the worse rather than for the better—in particular, manipulating the people in
order to obtain the condemnation of the noble Cimon, even at the risk of endangering
his own country. “He was a man, tho’ in arms as great as Cimon, and as to brightness
of parts and fine improvements of mind far greater, yet in most other respects the
reverse of him; sacrificing his country to his ambition, lavishing away the riches
of the State to obtain the suffrages of the multitude, seeking to establish his power
even on the ruins of the Public Wealth, and scheming destructive Wars.”
⁴⁴
And his speech for the prosecution continues in the same vein. Although himself a
man of frugal habits, Pericles is accused of giving the people corrupt habits, the
better to dominate it: “He sought to govern Athens; for this purpose he opened the
Exchequer to the craving multitude, he gratified their passions, he fed their voluptuousness,
he multiplied their wants. … The very virtues which he had, undid his country.”
⁴⁵

As for William Young (1749–1815), although he favored the Athenian democratic regime,
his description of the
stratēgos
was no kinder. In his
History of Athens
, published in 1777,
⁴⁶
Young accused Pericles of having unleashed the Peloponnesian War “to screen some
past malversation or to make his abilities necessary for the future, or even for meaner
motives.”
⁴⁷
The
stratēgos
is said to have been a master of intrigue who introduced “licentiousness in the State.”
⁴⁸
The only shaft of light in this somber picture is that Young does recognize Pericles’
genius in managing, through cunning and corruption, to hold together “the heterogeneous
and uncemented mass” that the Athenian people then was.

Similar but even greater prejudice prevails in the two great syntheses that appeared
at the end of the eighteenth century: John Gillies’s
The History of Ancient Greece
, which appeared in 1786, and William Mitford’s
The History
of Greece
, a vast fresco in multiple volumes, published in various editions between 1784 and
1829. These two works shared the common hostility toward the city of Athens. Gillies,
the official historiographer of the Royal House of Scotland, was appalled by the “democratical
licentiousness and tyranny introduced by Pericles”
⁴⁹
and even accused the
stratēgos
of having initiated the decadence of the entire Hellenic world: “In one word, the
vices and extravagances, which are supposed to characterise the declining ages of
Greece and Rome, took root in Athens during the administration of Pericles, the most
splendid and most prosperous in the Grecian annals.”
⁵⁰
As for William Mitford, he professed a greater scorn for the democratic regime, criticizing
“the inherent weakness and the indelible barbarism,” although he did also confess
to a sneaking admiration for the Athenian leader.
⁵¹

A Change of View: George Grote’s Moment

In his monumental publication,
A History of Greece
, which appeared between 1846 and 1856, George Grote (1794–1871) attacked those widespread
attitudes. This work by an erudite ex-banker opens with a predictable attack on Mitford
and goes on to defend a liberal and democratic view of the Greek city, following the
example set by Connop Thirlwall.
⁵²
Grote, a former member of the English parliament, was close to utilitarian philosophers
such as John Stuart Mill, and he admired Pericles without reserve. His eulogy was
founded on close scrutiny of the ancient texts, and, as far as possible, he favored
the judgments of Thucydides, “our best witness in every conceivable respect,”
⁵³
above all other ancient sources. This led him not only to reject the generally accepted
distinction, drawn originally by Plutarch, between the first and the second parts
of the
stratēgos
’s political career, but also to exonerate Pericles of all responsibility for the
outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, sweeping aside all the accusations of the comic
poets.
⁵⁴
And while Grote did criticize the Athenians’ treatment of their allies, he considered
that “it was beyond the power of Pericles seriously to amend,” even maintaining that
“practically, the allies were not badly treated during his administration.”
⁵⁵
In conclusion, the historian, in one lengthy sentence, gathered together the essence
of the praises showered upon Pericles in the course of his book:

Taking him altogether, with his powers of thought, speech and action—his competence
civil and military, in the council as well as in the field—his vigorous and cultivated
intellect, and his comprehensive ideas of a community in pacific and many-sided development—his
incorruptible public morality, caution, and firmness, in a country where all those
qualities were rare, and the union of them in the same individual of
course much rarer—we shall find him without parallel throughout the whole course of
Grecian history.
⁵⁶

This enchanted view of Periclean Athens was supported by John Stuart Mill, who produced
an enthusiastic review of the work, carrying in his wake the flower of the British
intelligentsia.
⁵⁷
The fact is that George Grote was by no means a scholar without influence. This British
historian had been the leader of the “Philosophic Radicals” Party in the House of
Commons, and, even though he wrote his work after his retirement from politics in
1841, he retained many supporters willing to spread his theories.

In any case, his success was such that the English of the second half of the nineteenth
century sometimes saw themselves as Athenians dressed in frock coats and top hats.
This trend to draw comparisons peaked in George Cox’s
History of Greece
, published in 1874, in which Periclean Athens was presented as a blueprint for Victorian
England and its maritime empire. On the basis of the Thucydidean funeral oration,
Cox declared, somewhat sanctimoniously,

All the special characteristics of English policy—its freedom of speech, the right
of people to govern themselves … may be seen in equal development in the policy of
Athens.
⁵⁸

The Liberal and Republican Pericles of the French: From Duruy to Gambetta

In France, Grote’s work was a resounding success. As early as 1848, Prosper Mérimée
was spreading the word and relating the book’s major message to the current political
situation. “For us, who live under a government founded upon universal suffrage, the
study of Greek history is of particular interest and the example of the little republic
of Athens may well be profitable for the great republic of France.”
⁵⁹
Mérimée found in the theses developed by Grote a means of breaking away from a deeply
rooted French orthodoxy: “M. Rollin and many others have accustomed us to regard the
Athenians as the most flighty people in the world, frivolous, cruel, careless and
bent solely on pleasure. Yet this flighty and frivolous people elected Pericles as
their
stratēgos
or president year after year. This great man laughed good-naturedly at the comedies
that mocked him but, upon leaving the theatre, he still found his power respected.”
⁶⁰
With Mérimée, the rehabilitation of democratic Athens—and its leader—took off.

This turn of events is the more remarkable given that, up until 1850, the French had
shown scant interest in Pericles, as can be seen from their pictorial art. Although
Aspasia was the object of a certain vogue in the early nineteenth century, painters
never showed her in the company of the
stratēgos
, but always at the side of the handsome Alcibiades or the wise Socrates.
⁶¹

It is true that Pericles did appear in the famous
Apotheosis of Homer
that Ingres painted in 1827, to decorate one of the ceilings of the Charles X Museum
in the Louvre (
figure 14
). But his portrait was only roughly sketched in and was lost among the crowd of figures
to the left of the poets, where he was almost entirely blocked out by Phidias. It
was not until 1851 that François Nicolas Chifflart did him the honor of placing him
in the foreground of his painting titled
Pericles at the Deathbed of His Son
,” exhibited at the
Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts (
figure 15
).
⁶²
The fact that this oil painting won the Grand Prix de Rome for a historical painting
seems symbolic, for in that same year, Hachette published the first edition of the
Histoire grecque
by Victor Duruy (1811–1894), which devoted particular attention to Pericles.