Pericles of Athens (2 page)

It was thus Thucydides who posed Plutarch the biographer with his greatest problem,
and Thucydides too who ultimately set up the problematic with which Dr. Azoulay grapples
in this intriguing, innovative, and justly prizewinning book.
¹
For Plutarch found it very hard to reconcile the sober-sided statesmanlike Pericles
of Thucydides with the scandalously self-indulgent and bohemian Pericles presented
in other contemporary, fifth-century B.C. sources, including both comic drama and
law court oratory. Dr. Azoulay, for his part, has several objectives in view, but
not the least of them is to deconstruct the image of Pericles that is now standard
both in scholarship and in more popular works—namely, that of a game-changer, the
“grand homme” and very epitome of not just Athens but also his “age.”
²

Let us therefore start this very brief introduction with that notion of Pericles as
secular hero, the ancient Greek answer to Voltaire’s Louis XIV: was there, really,
a “siècle de Périclès”? One of the many surprises that Dr. Azoulay can spring is to
show how recent that notion is—no more ancient, that is, than the era of Voltaire
himself. The phrase itself goes no further back than the future Frederick the Great’s
Anti-Machiavel
of 1739, published (anonymously) in Amsterdam in 1740 and vigorously distributed
by Voltaire himself. But, as Dr. Azoulay ably shows, it is not until very much more
recently that it has gained wide currency and been given, supposedly, material content.
Not the least of the many valuable historiographical services our author performs
is to show how shaky are the foundations of such an intellectual-ideological edifice.

Indeed, the prime virtue of this outstanding book is that it is resolutely historiographical
and problematizing. So far from attempting merely to set out “how it actually was”
in Pericles’ life and lifetime, Dr. Azoulay frames
his “biographical odyssey” in terms of a series of—roughly chronologically ordered—problems.
He begins (
chapter 1
) with the problem of how the young Pericles accommodated himself to the illustrious
but also notorious families into which he was born: on his mother’s side he was an
Alcmaeonid, and thus under an ancestral curse going back almost a century and a half,
on his father’s he was heir to a mega-feud with the no less aristocratic family of
Miltiades of Marathon. His second problem (
chapters 2
and
3
) is that of the twin military and rhetorical bases of his political power—and what
“power” meant or could mean in a democracy such as Athens was and, thanks not least
to Pericles’ own efforts, became. A third problem concerns the power and wealth of
Athens as that was expressed both externally and internally: how far was Pericles
himself responsible for the imperialism of Athens (
chapter 4
)? In what way and to what extent did the by Greek standards massive internal revenues
of Athens grease the wheels of democracy (
chapter 5
)? The fourth problem addressed by Dr. Azoulay is that of the relationship not so
much between the public and the private as between the personal and the communitarian:
in
chapter 6
are considered with great finesse Pericles’ interactions with relatives and friends;
in
chapter 7
the unconventional “erotics” of his scandal-ridden career; and in
chapter 8
his relations with the gods of the
polis
(“citizen-state”) of democratic Athens.
³

The final chapters are the most explicitly historiographical in content and flavor:
As the author states at the start of
chapter 11
, “One of the primary virtues of a historiographical inquiry is certainly its ability
to dispel automatic assumptions and show that traditions do themselves have a history.”
Chapter 9
explores the vision peddled particularly by Plato and inherited by Plutarch of Pericles
as not at all the Thucydidean statesman, but the ultimate demagogue, the vilest mis-leader
and immoral corruptor of the ordinary people of Athens. This is a vision that is shown
to owe more to snobbery and antidemocratic sentiment than to objective historical
evaluation and rational judgment. But it was also a vision that made it hard for Pericles
to ascend to the status and stature of “great man,” as he did in a complicated process
that Dr. Azoulay most skilfully untangles in
chapter 11
(fifteenth to eighteenth centuries) and
chapter 12
(eighteenth to twenty-first centuries). For Machiavelli and Bodin, Pericles was the
very incarnation of democratic instability, for Montaigne a model of trumpery rhetoric,
and indeed until after the French Revolution Pericles was deemed and doomed to remain
firmly in the historiographical-ideological shadows. No gloriously conquering Alexander,
no bravely fighting Cimon, no sagely legislating Solon he. And yet, as noted earlier,
it was in the 1730s that the “Age of Pericles” tag first saw the light or, as Dr.
Azoulay puts it, that the Periclean “myth” was born.

J.-J. Winckelmann’s pioneering art history of “Antiquity” of 1764,
Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums
, privileged the classical “Periclean” moment of fifth-century Greece and Athens,
where and when as he saw it political, social, and intellectual conditions conduced
most favorably to fostering eternally valuable aesthetic creativity. But it was the
English private scholar and historian George Grote, ex-MP, who did most to establish
the story of Athens and Athenian (quasi-parliamentary) democracy as the master-narrative
of Western enlightenment in his originally twelve-volume
History of Greece
(1846–1856; esp. vol. VI, ch. XLVII), in the process permanently displacing from
that role the rival city of Sparta—whose cause was not helped by its being so fervently
embraced by reactionaries and nationalists from William Mitford in the late eighteenth
century, through the pedagogues of the Royal Prussian Cadet-Corps of the later nineteenth,
to those of the National Socialist elite schools sponsored in Hitler’s name by his
academic lapdogs in the twentieth.
⁴

A central chapter (
chapter 10
) addresses explicitly the problematic of the “great man” or event-making hero. It
would be wrong for me to spoil the party by revealing Dr. Azoulay’s own take on that,
although I can safely disclose that his Pericles is not that of Evelyn Abbott, author
in the “Heroes of the Nations” series of
Pericles and the Golden Age of Athens
(New York/London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1891), nor indeed that of Thucydides. I can
also add that here, as indeed throughout this book, he writes with great clarity,
and with an impressive depth of interpretative sophistication, both qualities that
have been expertly captured in this excellent translation by the
doyenne
of nontraducers, Janet Lloyd.

Acknowledgments

O
n the threshold of this work, I should like to express my great gratitude to Maurice
Sartre who, with his communicative enthusiasm, convinced me to embark upon this adventure
and whose unfailing support enabled me not to lose my way. I also owe a great deal
to the history students of Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, who were the first to accompany
me as we paced up and down those Periclean paths in the wan early mornings of Bois
de L’Etang; their reactions often helped me to refine, develop, and clarify my hypotheses
and arguments.

I should also like to thank all those who were patient and kind enough to reread the
early versions of this work, helping me to avoid many historical, orthographic, and
logical pitfalls—in particular, Marie-Christine Chainais, Pascal Payen, and Jérôme
Wilgaux, who allowed me to benefit from their precious expertise. Two long-suffering
scholars deserve a special mention: Paulin Ismard, who followed my tentative progress
step by step and assumed the friendly role of a critical mirror, and Christophe Brun,
who, with his customary humor and his salutary objectivity, toppled many of my firm
convictions.

Finally, nothing would have been possible without Cécile Chainais, who was at my side
throughout the gestation of this
Pericles
and thanks to whom I discovered the keys to paternity.

P
ERICLES OF
A
THENS

Introduction

P
ericles is a familiar figure in school textbooks and books on Greece. He enjoys the
rare privilege of, on his own, embodying a whole “age,” condensing within his name
the peak of Athens’s glory and the flowering of the first democracy in history. We
know him from a bust made in the Roman period: the impenetrable face seems to defy
the efforts of any historian. What angle can one adopt in order to apprehend this
bust without prejudice? How can one suggest a new way of looking at a figure so often
scrutinized? Confronting a monument such as this clearly involves a risk: that of
wandering for ages over wave after wave of historiography, with the risk of never
reaching a safe harbor.

M
ETHOD: A
B
IOGRAPHICAL
I
NQUIRY
C
ONSIDERED AS AN
O
DYSSEY

Many a pitfall lies in wait for the rash or unsuspecting historian who launches himself
into this adventure. First, he needs to steer between two symmetrical perils: idealization
and its opposite, relativism. With the ballast of such a weighty laudatory tradition,
it is hard for historians of Antiquity to approach Pericles without eminently positive
preconceptions. Since the nineteenth century, this figure has often been regarded
as one of the principal creators of the “Greek miracle,” the very embodiment of “an
ideal of beauty crystallized in the marble of Pentelicus,” to borrow the famous words
of Ernest Renan.
¹
Pericles, at the head of a peaceful and harmonious city, appears as the model of
a wise and incorruptible leader, just as he is portrayed in the laudatory portrait
of him presented by the historian Thucydides.

However, over the past fifty or so years, that enchanted vision has been battered
by numerous studies. To be sure, in Pericles’ day Athens was the scene of intense
political and cultural fervor: direct democracy was lastingly established and meanwhile
the Acropolis was covered with grandiose monuments that, in our eyes, still today
proclaim that Greece had reached the peak of its glory. All the same, those undeniable
successes cannot mask the
limitations of the Athenian system. Its democracy had nothing to do with human rights,
for it was solely concerned with the rights of citizens. In Pericles’ day, the civic
community remained an exclusive club from which slaves, metics, and women were all
excluded and that, moreover, had no hesitation in tyrannizing its allies within the
framework of a maritime empire that became increasingly hegemonic.

So, as the scales abruptly tip the other way, should we now topple the statue of Pericles
that tradition has sculpted so carefully? In a switch from miracle to mirage, does
the Athenian general (
stratēgos
) deserve to be relegated to a forgotten page of history, as no more than an emblem
of a macho, slave-based, and colonialist world—in short, as a prefiguration of the
Western imperialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? To do so would be to
lurch from Charybdis to Scylla, from unbridled idealization to radical relativism.
For in truth, that negative vision is just as reductive as what it replaces, for it
judges the ancient city by the yardstick of contemporary realities.

The other reef that a historian must endeavor to avoid in an inquiry such as the present
one is anachronism. To condemn Pericles in the name of today’s values would be to
make a remarkable error in perspective. To reduce the past to the present would be
to view one’s prey with only one eye, like the
Odyssey
’s Cyclops. The whole perspective is distorted … We should bear in mind that slavery
was not abolished in Europe until the nineteenth century, and, in France, women did
not acquire the right to vote until the end of World War II. But should we, on that
account, deny the role played by the Second and the Third Republics in the democratization
of the French nation? To gauge the break that occurred in the time of Pericles, we
should, in truth, compare it, not to the situation today, but to that which then prevailed
in the ancient world. A “one-eyed” view definitely tells us far more about today’s
obsessions than about fifth-century Athens. Such anachronisms can, in a more insidious
fashion, often be traced to the analogies to which historians resort in order to evoke
the Greek world and its “great men.” It is probably totally pointless to regard Pericles
as the leader of a political party—as if any such structures existed in Athens—or
to interpret the building site on the Acropolis as the fruit of Keynesian policies
avant la lettre
, with Pericles assuming the mantle of Roosevelt.
²

Should we, then, simply draw attention to the radical difference of the Greek world,
at the risk of boring readers confronted with an Antiquity shrouded in its singularity?
If Pericles resembles our contemporary politicians not at all, why continue to take
an interest in that figure? Yet is it possible totally to shed the preoccupations
of the present day, as we confront
the past? Again, it is all a matter of balance. The present book favors an un-Cyclopean,
two-eyed view founded upon a constant “toing and froing” between the present and the
past. Provided it is kept under control, anachronism may have pedagogic or even heuristic
virtues.
³
The narrow path that I intend to follow involves drawing comparisons with the present,
without, however, succumbing to the dizzying prospects of analogy.

In this odyssey strewn with pitfalls, there is one last trap that is particularly
hard to avoid—namely, personalization, which is an inherent part of all biographical
projects. Like the traveler who, enraptured by the siren’s songs to the point of losing
all recollection of his family and homeland, a biographer often tends to neglect the
social and political environment in which his hero moves. By focusing on a single
individual, a historian risks leaving in the shadows the role played by the collectivity.
That would, to put it mildly, be paradoxical when one is tackling the first democracy
in history. It has to be said that the ancient sources do nothing to dispel such an
enchantment. By the end of the fifth century, already Thucydides was declaring that
“Athens, though in name a democracy, gradually became in fact a government ruled by
its foremost citizen” (2.65).