Pericles of Athens (18 page)

Despite a tenacious tradition that denies the historical reality, Pericles clearly
took measures that were advantageous to craftsmen, as Max Weber was one of the first
to recognize.
³⁷
The great construction works benefited all those who, to varying degrees, were involved
on the building sites, and they did so regardless of the status of the workers.
³⁸
There were many noncitizens present on those public building sites, as can be deduced,
with very little risk of error, by extrapolating from the construction accounts relating
to another Athenian temple, the Erechtheum. The accounts preserved are those for the
years 409/8 and 408/7 B.C., but the actual building had commenced as early as 421.
In 408, the building site employed 107 individuals, mostly stonemasons and carpenters.
Their legal statuses varied considerably, since epigraphists have worked out that
there were definitely 23 citizens, 42 metics, and 20 slaves among them. All the various
components of the Athenian population were thus represented on the building site.
However, those statutory differences were not reflected at the level of wages, for
every worker received one drachma per day, although the slaves no doubt handed their
wages over to their master, who in most cases would himself be working on the same
building site.
³⁹

Let us now try to evaluate the aims and the scope of those great building works. Some
historians have interpreted them in terms of modern economic behavior. Was it a matter
of relaunching economic activity? Was it an attempt to establish a veritable “State
socialism,” as Gustave Glotz claimed in his day?
⁴⁰
It seems to me that that would be to adopt a misleading point of view and to slip
into anachronism, for the Greek cities in truth had no economic policies, as such.
If a city intervened in economic life, it was above all so as to increase its
prosodoi
, its revenues, even if it did then redistribute them among members of the community;
it was not ever a matter of investing and increasing economic activity; in the Greek
world, growth and the fight against unemployment were not, as such, political objectives.

The monumental policy initiated by Pericles in truth had a twofold purpose: In the
first place, it was intended to adorn the city with imposing monuments
and, once and for all, wipe out the outrages of the Persian Wars. So the primary ambition
of the “great works” was at once political and symbolic. Second, the intention was
to proceed to share the common benefits between all the members of the community.
In this respect, these building sites were part of a policy to redistribute wealth
to the people on a scale never before seen in history.

Although the redistributions that stemmed from the great works benefited both the
citizens and the metics who worked side by side on the building sites, Pericles also
promoted measures destined to benefit solely the Athenians, for it was they who were
the principal supporters of his policies and, as malicious gossip did not fail to
point out, he needed to make sure that they would vote for him.

The Creation of Civic Pay

In the first place, the
stratēgos
is said to have increased the number of banquets and religious spectacles laid on
for his fellow-citizens and he did so at a by no means negligible cost.
⁴¹
It was a way to win the favor of the poorest citizens who, on the occasion of a sacrifice,
would receive a portion of the sacrificed animals. The
stratēgos
was said, for the same reason, to have created a public fund, the
theorikōn,
grants from which were designed to cover the costs of citizens who attended the festivals
of Dionysus. According to one late text, “Given that many wished to go to the theatre
so competition for places was fierce among both citizens and foreigners, Pericles
wished to please the people and the poor and decreed that city revenues should be
devoted to the festivals.”
⁴²
The assertion should nevertheless be considered with a degree of caution, for the
theorikōn
is not attested until the mid-fourth century, so some historians doubt that its creation
should be attributed to Pericles.
⁴³

What is certain, on the other hand, is that the
stratēgos
submitted to the Assembly the proposal that a number of grants, receiving of
misthoi
, should be created as remuneration for citizens for the time that they devoted to
serving the city. These
misthoi
were so closely associated with the actions of Pericles that, in the
Gorgias
, Socrates confides to Callicles: “What I for my part hear is that Pericles has made
the Athenians idle, cowardly, talkative, and avaricious, by starting the system of
public payments [
misthophoria
].”
⁴⁴

Clearly, the
stratēgos
did play a pivotal role in this development that enabled the poorest citizens to
take part in the functioning of democracy without fear of forfeiting their means of
livelihood.

But again, we should consider what this innovation really amounted to. In the first
place, contrary to Plato’s assertion, the
stratēgos
did not introduce such payment for
all
public services. Only the dicasts, the judges of the people’s
lawsuits, benefited from them, and possibly the council members;
⁴⁵
attendance at the
ekklēsia
was not remunerated until the beginning of the fourth century.

Furthermore, initially, the sum paid as
misthos
was not enough to compensate for the loss of even the most modest of wages. Not only
were the 6,000 dicasts only paid when they were actually sitting, and this did not
happen every day,
⁴⁶
but the two obols initially paid as compensation and even the three later paid under
Cleon, by no means equaled the pay of a skilled manual worker, which was at least
three times greater (about one drachma per day).

Despite those limitations, the establishment of this kind of pay marked a further
stage of the city’s democratization, at a date that is hard to specify; the measure
was probably introduced after the reforms of Ephialtes, in 462, which certainly gave
more power to the lawcourts, and probably before the death of Cimon in 451, if it
is true that the compensation system was introduced, as Plutarch claims, in a context
of rivalry between Cimon and Pericles.
⁴⁷

Whatever the exact number of these payments introduced by Pericles, as a result of
them citizenship became a privilege that found expression in the pecuniary gain of
those who received them. From then on, the Athenians became keen to restrict the number
of those who potentially possessed such rights. Access to the first
misthoi
coincided with restrictions on citizenship.

Redistributions and Redefinition of the Civic Body

In 451, the Athenian political community was redefined more strictly. Not only were
women and domiciled foreigners excluded, as was customary elsewhere in Greece, but
now the city also rejected bastards (
nothoi
) with only one Athenian parent or who were born from an extramarital liaison between
Athenians.
⁴⁸
In the wake of Aristotle and echoing his words, Plutarch explicitly attributed this
initiative to the
stratēgos
:

Many years before this, when Pericles was at the height of his political career and
had sons born in wedlock, … he proposed a law that only those should be reckoned Athenians
whose parents on both sides were Athenians. And so, when the king of Egypt sent a
present to the people of forty thousand measures of grain, and this had to be divided
up among the citizens, there was a great crop of prosecutions against citizens of
illegal birth by the law of Pericles, who had up to that time escaped notice and been
overlooked.
⁴⁹

This restrictive measure, earlier mentioned by the author of the
Constitution of the Athenians
, Pseudo-Aristotle, should be understood bearing several
parameters in mind. The first was of a political and ideological order: the new law
chimed with one of the founding Athenian myths—namely, that of autochthony. From the
mid-fifth century onward, Athenians took to calling themselves “autochthonous,” born
from the very soil of Attica, unlike most of the rest of the Greeks, who were considered
to be the descendants of invaders, such as the Spartans, who were said to be descended
from the Dorians.
⁵⁰
In rejecting those of “mixed blood,” the Athenian citizens were emphasizing their
own prestigious origin, their
eugeneia
, thereby collectively laying claim to a distinctive attribute, birth, which had,
in principle, been the preserve solely of the aristocracy.
⁵¹
This illustrious birth of theirs moreover constituted one of the bases upon which
the Athenians relied to claim their hegemony over the rest of the Greeks. In the eyes
of the Athenians, their noble ancestry justified their domination within the framework
of the Delian League.

Within the city, that law may have reflected a certain hardening in the Athenians’
attitude to the growing influence of its metics.
⁵²
It is difficult to put a precise figure to the domiciled foreigners in Athens, but
in the second half of the fifth century, they represented between one-fifth and one-half
of the city’s citizen population—between 10,000 and 20,000 individuals.
⁵³
Socially, they were well integrated and some of them were probably married to Athenians—and
to Athenian women—producing children who, by law, had citizen status. The law of 451
was intended to exclude “those with mixed blood” from the civic community.
⁵⁴
However, there is no indication that this should be regarded as the result of an
identity-crisis on the part of alarmed or xenophobic Athenians, for there is no mention
of any such fear in the ancient sources; again, that would be to transfer certain
contemporary anxieties onto the societies of the past.

The purpose of the measure introduced by Pericles seems to have been above all of
a socioeconomic nature: it was voted in so as to limit the number of potential beneficiaries
of the civic redistributions of wealth “because of the excessive number of citizens,”
as the
Constitution of the Athenians
explains (26.3–4). Was it prompted by any particular event? Plutarch’s assertion
should be viewed with caution: it is by no means certain that the vote on this measure
was linked to the gift of wheat from the Egyptian Psammetichus, for the consignment
from the pharaoh was sent in 445/4 B.C., six years after the introduction of the law
on citizenship. All the same, even if he is mistaken about the details, Plutarch the
moralist hits on the basic truth: the reason why the Athenians decided to redefine
their civic body certainly was because it was necessary to regulate the sharing of
the city’s wealth, in particular, the distribution of the many instances of compensatory
pay that had
just been approved—for the members of the
heliaea
and of the
boulē
—and all the types of advantages that stemmed from the increasing imperialism of the
city. A restrictive redefining of the circle of potential beneficiaries now became
a matter of the first importance.

Progressively, a democracy that was more radical but also more closed upon itself
was thus being set in place. At the same time as the Athenians began to receive pay
for participating in the city institutions, they hardened the criteria governing the
attribution of citizenship. There is really nothing surprising about this:
mutatis mutandis
and to introduce a cautious anachronism, that measure of 451 evokes the early days
of the Social Republic in France, at the end of the nineteenth century, when the first
redistributive measures voted in under the Third Republic went hand in hand with a
stricter differentiation between nationals and foreigners. At the very moment when
the first social laws were passed, new techniques of documentation and police control
were set in place—in particular, the invention of passports and identity cards.
⁵⁵

Through a historical irony, after the deaths of his two legitimate sons, Pericles
was finally forced to beg the people to waive this law in the case of his own bastard
son. Now without a male heir, the
stratēgos
wanted Pericles the younger, born from his union with Aspasia, to be allowed to enter
a phratry—an essential move in the process of acquiring citizenship—in order for him
to be entered in the deme register and to inherit his father’s fortune and social
network. He was claiming that an exception should be made for his own family—he who
liked to present himself as a man unaffected by the influence of family and friends.
This tension that had grown between the
oikos
and the
polis
, relatives and the city, now needs to be examined.

CHAPTER 6

Pericles and His Circle: Family and Friends

I
n most human societies, an individual counts for nothing outside the several groups
to which he or she belongs. The individual’s place in society depends largely on the
influence of his or her family circle and his or her network of friends. The Greek
cities were no exception to that rule: there were no “self-made men” in Antiquity!
In Athens as elsewhere, one’s family and friends were indispensable sources of support
for anyone desiring a political career. All the same, in a democratic context, what
was normally a trump card could turn out to be a handicap. To come from an illustrious
family, make a brilliant marriage, and have powerful friends was potentially to be
suspected of acting contrary to the interests of the people or even of aspiring to
tyranny.