Pericles of Athens (12 page)

When Pericles addressed the people with such imposing solemnity, he was bound to attract
virulent criticism from all those bent on representing such behavior as tyrannical
haughtiness. To counter that suspicion, the
stratēgos
devised a new stratagem to protect himself from similar accusations: he would take
care to limit his public declarations and appearances so as not to have the people
tire of him.

P
ERICLES
O
FFSTAGE
: K
NOWING
H
OW TO
K
EEP
Q
UIET

The Art of Delegation

Whoever intervened on every point on the political stage, was bound, eventually, to
aggravate his fellow-citizens. In his
Precepts of Statecraft
(811E), Plutarch enjoys reminding his readers of this fact: “Those who strip for
every political activity … soon cause themselves to be criticized by the multitude;
they become unpopular and arouse envy when they are successful, but joy when they
meet with failure.” Pericles seems to have been deeply aware of this
danger. In the course of his career, he limited the number of his public interventions
by getting his friends to speak in his place. It was often those close to him who,
in the Assembly, stepped up to the tribune to propose the decrees that Pericles wished
to submit for public approval. In this way, his authority was protected from envy
yet without being any the less effective. As Plutarch, again, remarks: “Pericles made
use of Menippus for the position of general, humbled the Council of the Areopagus
by means of Ephialtes, passed the decree against the Megarians by means of Charinus,
and sent Lampon out as founder of Thurii. For, when power seems to be distributed
among many, not only does the weight of hatreds and enmities become less troublesome,
but there is also greater efficiency in the conduct of affairs.”
³¹

So Pericles resorted to a practice that was well-attested in the fourth century. At
that time, certain citizens had no compunction whatever about selling their names
and proposing decrees of which they were not the true authors: “[Stephanos] was not
yet a public speaker, but thus far merely a pettifogger, one of those who stand beside
the platform and shout, who prefer indictments and informations for hire, and who
let their names be inscribed on motions made up by others.”
³²
Seen in this light, it is perhaps not simply by chance that no decree proposed by
Pericles is attested epigraphically among the dozens that cover the period in which
he is said to have wielded such decisive influence.

Cleverly delegating power in order to strengthen his own authority, Pericles made
use of a number of “straw men,” who functioned as so many lightning conductors that
distracted the people’s hatred. In this way, Metiochus (or Metichus), totally unknown
in any other respect,
³³
is described by Plutarch as the clumsy victim of his own activism. This understudy
of Pericles seems to have become the target of the comic authors, who mocked him mercilessly:
“Metiochus, you see, is general, Metiochus inspects the roads, Metiochus inspects
the bread and Metiochus inspects the flour, Metiochus takes care of all things and
Metiochus will come to grief.”
³⁴
As Plutarch correctly points out, “He was one of Pericles’ followers and seems to
have used the power gained through him in such a way as to arouse odium and envy [
epiphthonōs
]” (
Precepts of Statecraft
, 811F).

The same applies to the seer Lampon, another of the
stratēgos
’s trusted followers.
³⁵
The scene unfolds in 444/3 B.C., when the Greek world was finally enjoying some respite
from warfare. After trying in vain to convene a pan-Hellenic congress (
Pericles
, 17.1), Pericles made the most of the “Thirty Years’ Peace” signed with Sparta and
its allies and launched an ambitious project: the founding of a new colony at Thurii,
in Magna Graecia, on the site of the ancient Sybaris. Even though the Dorian cities
of the Peloponnese
did not take part, the expedition was a propagandist success, involving numerous Greeks
such as the architect Hippodamus of Miletus, the historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus,
and the sophist Protagoras of Abdera. Rather than take any leading role, Pericles
sheltered behind Lampon in carrying out this operation: the seer, placed at the head
of the colonists, even acted as one of the founders (
oikistēs
) of the colony (Diodorus, 12.10.3–4). However, this sudden notoriety of his made
him the butt of attacks from the comic poets, as can be seen from several fragments
of Cratinus.
³⁶
Concealed behind Lampon, Pericles was sheltered from attack at the very moment when
he had to confront the increasingly virulent opposition of Thucydides of Alopeke;
less than one year later, his opponent was ostracized, having failed to come to grips
with the
stratēgos
lying low in the shadows, carefully concealed behind his political allies.

A Strategy of Light and Darkness

To preserve his authority, Pericles felt it necessary to secure a shadowy zone for
himself: “Pericles, seeking to avoid the satiety which springs from continual intercourse,
made his approaches to the people by intervals, as it were, not speaking on every
question, nor addressing the people on every occasion, but offering himself like the
Salaminian trireme, as Critolaus says, for great emergencies” (
Pericles
, 7.5). Skilfully handled, this measure of obscurity was not solely designed to disarm
the envy of the people; it also had the advantage of imparting a particular dignity
to Pericles’ rare appearances.

In a very attenuated way, such behavior was reminiscent of a “hidden king,” who reigned
in his palace, sheltered from the eyes of the masses. Being shut away and kept secret
indeed constituted means whereby royal authority was strengthened—this voluntary seclusion
being the essential element in the “imperial mysteries” that the Greeks could observe
from their contact with the palaces of eastern potentates. In his account of the Persian
Wars, Herodotus had, precisely, described how the Median king, Deiokes, had adapted
an imposing ceremonial that cut him off from his subjects in such a way that he remained
surrounded by a quasi-divine aura. Many decades later, Xenophon likewise emphasized
the role played by ceremony in the construction of the authority of Cyrus, the founder
of the Persian Empire: the great king chose to live partly cloistered away, so as
to appear only at particularly ritualized and majestic moments. To some extent, Pericles
appropriated certain elements of that Eastern tradition, adapting it to the democratic
context—just as he seems to have been inspired by the architecture of the Persian
Empire when he built the Odeon on the slopes of the Acropolis.
³⁷

In truth, the fourth-century Athenians were not fooled by such stratagems and were
wary of men who calculated their public appearances too carefully. When accused of
speaking in the
Ekklēsia
in too parsimonious a fashion, Aeschines, for example, found himself obliged to justify
his behavior to his fellow-citizens: “You blame me if I come before the people not
constantly but only at intervals … [yet] the fact that a man speaks only at intervals
marks him as a man who takes part in politics because of the call of the hour and
for the common good; whereas to leave no day without its speech is the mark of a man
who is making a trade of it and talking for pay.”
³⁸
So, to convince his audience that he was behaving as a perfect democrat, Aeschines
presented himself as an ordinary citizen—not a professional orator—who spoke in the
Assembly only from time to time, as circumstances demanded. He hoped in this way to
disarm critics who regarded his fleeting appearances as a sign of his unconfessed
and unconfessable oligarchic aspirations.

Even if such calculated reticence sometimes aroused suspicions, it clearly benefited
Pericles. His measured appearances impressed the masses all the more because they
evoked not just an imperial ceremony, but possibly even a form of religious epiphany.
That is the implication of the comparison that Plutarch draws between, on the one
hand, Pericles and, on the other, the Salaminian and Paralian triremes—two sacred
vessels used only for exceptional events. Plutarch makes his meaning clear in his
Precepts of Statecraft
when, without actually naming Pericles, he declares: “Just as the Salaminia and the
Paralus ships at Athens were not sent out to sea for every service, but only for necessary
and important missions, so the statesman should employ himself for the most momentous
and important matters,
as does the King of the Universe
.”
³⁹
Political leaders and deities in the same boat! It is in this context of a quasi-divine
apparition that the nickname given to Pericles—he was called “the Olympian”—deserves
to be analyzed.
⁴⁰

In this interplay of shadow and light, there were inevitably both winners and losers.
Metiochus, about whom nothing is known, or even Ephialtes, reduced to a mere silhouette,
are the forgotten ones in this story of light and darkness. Having been exposed to
the full glare of publicity, they were condemned to remain in the glorious shadow
of Pericles, the past master of both speech and silence.

CHAPTER 4

Pericles and Athenian Imperialism

T
he power of Pericles, founded on speech as much as on action, developed within the
framework of an Athenian city that, from 450 onward, was caught up in a rapid process
of democratization. Yet the increasing liberty of the
dēmos
was accompanied by the enslavement of its allies within the framework of the Delian
League. This league, founded in 478 B.C., progressively became an instrument in the
service of Athens. The democratization of the city progressed at the same rate as
its increasing power over its allies.

What exactly was the role that Pericles played in the establishment of Athenian imperialism?
Did he try to check the imperial dynamic or did he, on the contrary, act as its catalyst?
And, anyway, is it possible to speak already of Athenian imperialism at the time when
the
stratēgos
was exercising a decisive influence on the destiny of the city? Today historians
are still arguing about these questions. Some represent Pericles’ “reign” as the pivotal
moment in the construction of Athenian imperialism, while other scholars, on the contrary,
endeavor to exonerate the
stratēgos
from all responsibility in this matter, either by emphasizing his personal moderation
or by maintaining that the cusp of imperialism was reached only after his death.

However, it will not do to look no further than that alternative. The
stratēgos
was swept up in a dynamic that, both upstream and downstream, shaped far more than
his own individual actions, for it had already involved what was, broadly speaking,
a policy embraced by Cimon and it would affect Cleon’s rise to power. Pericles was
simply continuing an imperialist system that was initiated before him and that went
on after him, a system that was backed by a general consensus both among the Athenian
elite and also more widely in the city of Athens.

Pericles took part in running the empire with no misgivings at all. His military exploits
in Euboea, Samos, and Aegina were all against rebellions that he simply crushed with
a considerable degree of bloody force. If there was any specifically Periclean aspect
to the situation, it lay not in imperial practices but rather in what he said about
them. Pericles was probably the first to theorize the need for Athenian imperialism
and publicly display the
city’s domination over the league allies by organizing the construction of the Odeon
and the Parthenon.

P
ERICLES AND THE
E
STABLISHMENT OF THE
A
THENIAN
E
MPIRE

The Delian League: From
Summakhia
to
Arkhē

In 478 B.C., at the end of the Second Persian War, the Athenians, with the cooperation
of a large number of the cities dotted around the Aegean, founded a league (a
summakhia
), the seat of which was the small and sacred island of Delos. According to Thucydides
(1.95.1), membership was at that time voluntary. The cities spontaneously chose to
unite their forces under the leadership of Athens, in order to prevent the Persians
returning to the Aegean. To this end, members had to contribute to the war effort
in proportion to their resources, either directly, with ships and soldiers, or indirectly,
by paying tribute (
phoros
) representing the monetary equivalent of the ships to be supplied (Thucydides, 1.98.3).
The overwhelming majority of the cities chose the second option: as far as we can
tell from the
stēlē
on which the contributions of the league’s member cities were recorded in 454, only
thirteen or fourteen of the contributing cities were still paying tribute in the form
of triremes or military contingents. In short, Athens did the fighting, while the
allies paid.

Also according to Thucydides, the total sum of tribute was fixed at 460 talents in
478 by the Athenian Aristides. In order to calculate the contributions of each of
the cities, Aristides no doubt took over the framework of the Achaemenid system of
taxation that was set in place after the revolt of Ionia in 493: to a certain extent,
the allies had simply switched masters. However, at this juncture, the members of
the alliance were still deciding on its general policies all together, with each contributor
possessing a vote in the league’s council (
sunedrion
).

A number of crucial dates mark out the Delian League’s development and its slide into
imperialism. First there was the battle of Eurymedon, fought between 469 and 466 B.C.
by the Athenian fleet, commanded by the
stratēgos
Cimon. This great victory de facto sealed the end of the Persian threat in the Aegean.
Next came the peace negotiated by Callias between the Athenians and the Persians in
449 B.C. Following the failure of the Athenian expedition to Egypt, the Athenians
sent Callias as an ambassador to Susa, where a peace treaty was signed, with the Persians
agreeing to leave the Aegean and the cities of Asia Minor under the control of the
Athenians, while the Athenians, for their part, undertook not to launch any more expeditions
against
the royal territories. The peace of Callias thus, de facto, if not
de iure
, put an end to the Persian threat.
¹