Pericles of Athens (24 page)

Objections are raised against the Athenians because it is sometimes not possible for
a person, though he sit about for a year, to negotiate with the council or the assembly.
This happens at Athens for no other reason than that, owing to the quantity of business,
they are not able to deal with all persons before sending them away. For how could
they do this? First of all
they have to hold more festivals than any other Greek city
(and when these are going on it is even less possible for any of the city’s affairs
to be transacted)
.
⁸

Although it may be true that, placed end to end, the Athenian festivals occupied no
less than one-third of the year, this was, to say the least, an exaggerated way of
putting the matter. Only the major celebrations, such as the Great Dionysia and the
Panathenaea involved the whole community and led to the suspension of institutional
business.

More serious still, according to this ferocious opponent of democracy, these festivals
were designed simply to redistribute public wealth to the most poverty-stricken of
the citizens. “The Athenian populace realizes that it is impossible for each of the
poor to offer sacrifices, to give lavish feasts, to set up shrines and to manage a
city that will be beautiful and great, and yet the populace has discovered how to
have sacrifices, shrines, banquets and temples. The city sacrifices at public expense
many victims, but it is the people who enjoy the feasts and to whom the victims are
allotted.”
⁹

In his view, the sole purpose of the religious festivals was to allow the people to
indulge themselves whenever possible, at the expense of the city—that is to say, the
wealthiest citizens.

According to his detractors, Pericles’ actions simply aggravated this state of affairs.
Plutarch tells us that the
stratēgos
increased the number of religious banquets and entertainments in order to curry favor
with his fellow-citizens: “At this time, therefore, particularly, Pericles gave the
reins to the people and made his policy one of pleasing them [
pros kharin
], ever devising some sort of a pageant in the town for the masses, or a public meal
[
hestiasin
], or a procession ‘amusing them like children with delights in which the Muses played
their part.’”
¹⁰
Echoing a tradition hostile to the
stratēgos
, as it does, the preceding description is clearly much exaggerated if one bears in
mind that no religious festival was created on Pericles’ initiative except, possibly,
the one in honor of Bendis, a deity of Thracian origin.
¹¹

The fact nevertheless remains that the
stratēgos
did reorganize certain celebrations. He is said to have introduced a music competition
into the already extremely crammed festive ritual calendar, at the time of the Panathenaea,
adding a whole day to this, the most important of all the Athenian festivals.
¹²
But even this addition should be viewed with circumspection; in all probability,
Pericles simply reorganized an earlier musical competition, moving it into the Odeon
and possibly giving it official status.
¹³
However, even if the action of the
stratēgos
was more limited than Plutarch suggests, it does testify to a real desire to democratize
mousikē
, the culture of the Muses that was in principle reserved for the Athenian elite.

However, the oligarchs’ attacks focused less on the festivals supposedly instituted
by Pericles than on the program of constructions in which they were to take place.
On this score, they criticized him for acting in the manner of a munificent tyrant.

Great Works in the Service of the Gods

The architectural program of the “great works” is closely associated with the name
of Pericles. The impetus for this ambitious policy of monumental building is well
known: in 448, the
stratēgos
convened a congress of the Greek cities of Europe and Asia, to discuss the issues
of the temples destroyed by the Persians, the sacrifices due to the gods, freedom
of navigation, and peace. It was in the aftermath of the Persian Wars that they had
vowed not to reconstruct those devastated sanctuaries, so as to preserve forever the
memory of the impiety of the Persians.
¹⁴
In less than twenty years, numerous building sites were set up and, in many cases,
completed. As well as a total remodeling of the Acropolis, a number of sanctuaries
underwent more or less spectacular transformations: in eastern Attica, the sanctuary
of Artemis at Brauron was given a double portico; and in the west, a new
initiation hall (
telesterion
) was inaugurated at Eleusis.
¹⁵
Meanwhile, a number of medium-sized temples were constructed throughout the territory
in honor of a variety of deities: Poseidon was honored at Sunium, in the south; Nemesis
at Rhamnous and Ares at Acharnae, in the north; Athena at Pallene in central Attica;
and, finally, Hephaestus in the town of Athens itself, on the hill overlooking the
Agora. All these finely wrought buildings with clearly similar stylistic features
were probably executed by the same architect.
¹⁶
In this way, in the space of twenty years the whole of Attica was affected by this
epidemic of monuments.
¹⁷

At this point, a historian is faced with two questions. First, what was Pericles’
precise role in this transformation of the Athenian religious landscape? It is a question
that calls for a nuanced reply. Far from acting as an all-powerful demiurge, the
stratēgos
was, in reality, simply one of many actors involved in this architectural metamorphosis.
Strictly speaking, only the Parthenon, the statue of Athena Parthenos, the Propylaea,
the Odeon, and the Telesterion at Eleusis can be credited to him.
¹⁸

Next, did all this involve a radical break from earlier building practices? In those
few operations of his, Pericles conformed to an already well-established tradition:
a few years earlier, his rival, Cimon, had launched the construction of a great public
sanctuary in the Agora, the Theseum, after having the bones of its founder brought
back from the island of Skyros
¹⁹
with great pomp and ceremony. However, two major novelties characterized this Periclean
moment. In the first place, the very scope of the operation was unmatched, with so
many building sites being set up simultaneously throughout the territory; and furthermore,
the new buildings testified as much to the city’s domination over its allies as to
the Athenians’ piety toward their gods. Between 450–440, Athenian imperialism took
to expressing itself in religious terms. As early as 450, Athens forced the cities
belonging to the Delian League to take part, every four years, in the Great Panathenaea
held in honor of Athena, bringing with them a heifer and a panoply as offerings to
the goddess.
²⁰
Then, in the 440s, the city confirmed its religious hold even beyond Attica, insisting
on the construction of a number of sanctuaries of Athena on land seized from the allies,
as is testified by several boundary markers discovered in Aegina, Chalcis, Cos, and
Samos.
²¹

Although Athena, the guardian goddess of the whole community, was the principal beneficiary
of these grandiose building sites, marginal deities in the Greek pantheon were also
honored. In this respect, Hephaestus was particularly favored, for he received a magnificent
temple in the Agora, ensconced at the very heart of the Athenian democratic system.
Nor was this choice at all fortuitous, for it should be understood in the light of
the
great story about autochthony and the origins of Athens, which was being reconstructed
in this same period.

Reconstruction of the Myth of Autochthony

All the indications suggest that this great story of origins took shape in its definitive
form between 450 and 430, at the very time when Pericles was in power and the religious
building sites were springing up all over Attica.
²²
It was at this point—not earlier, as is sometimes argued—that the Athenians began
to proclaim themselves to be born from the earth, so that they were all, collectively,
the descendants of the king Erechtheus, who was born from the very soil of Attica.
²³

To understand how this belief, central to Athenian imaginary representations, came
to be elaborated, we must start with a comment on vocabulary. In the fifth century,
the term
autokhthōn
did not mean people “born from the earth,” but simply people who had lived on their
territory from time immemorial, without ever migrating.
²⁴
According to Herodotus, such were the cases of the Arcadians in the Peloponnese,
the Carians in Ionia, and the Ethiopians and Libyans in Africa.
²⁵
The Athenians also belonged to this category since, already by the time of the Second
Persian War, they were claiming to have lived always in Attica.

Furthermore, the Athenians had long believed that one of their earliest kings was
born from the earth (
gēgenēs
), as is attested by the following lines from the
Iliad
: “And they that held Athens, the well-built citadel, the land of great-hearted Erechtheus,
whom of old Athene, daughter of Zeus, fostered, when the earth, the giver of grain,
had borne him.”
²⁶
The story of Erechtheus is well-known to us thanks to the eponymous tragedy by Euripides,
written in the late fifth century. Seized by a violent desire for Athena, the lame
Hephaestus attempted, unsuccessfully, to rape her. His semen did spatter the goddess’s
thigh, however, and she grabbed a twist of wool (
eru
) to wipe her leg, and then dropped it on the Attic ground (
khthon
). From that fertilized earth, Erechtheus emerged and was received and raised by Athena.
²⁷

There is, however, nothing to prove that, as early as the Archaic period, the Athenians
were considering themselves to be the descendants of Erechtheus. To believe in a king
born from the soil is one thing; to believe yourselves, collectively, to be his descendants
is quite another. It was not until the time of Pericles that the Athenians took to
presenting themselves as the offspring of Erechtheus, thereby giving a new sense to
the notion of autochthony. After a first fleeting appearance in the
Eumenides
of Aeschylus, the theme was developed by Sophocles in his
Ajax
, in the 440s. Here, the Athenians were
presented as men born from the earth, the offspring of Erechtheus. It was at that
point, and only then, that the various elements in the story of autochthony fused
together, enabling the citizens to pride themselves on not only having always lived
on the land of their fathers—their fatherland—but also being directly descended from
their mother earth, their motherland.
²⁸

Autochthony, now part and parcel of the Athenian identity, functioned as a tale of
collective ennoblement. This prestigious birth conferred upon the Athenians a very
particular solidarity: since they all shared the same mother, they were all brothers;
and on a social and ritual level, this was expressed by the
phratries
that united them all under the patronage of a common ancestor. Outside Athens, this
belief justified them thinking that they were superior to other cities which, as Euripides
put it, “were made up of elements imported from many origins, like counters set out
on a chequer-board.”
²⁹

It was this imaginary context that made sense of the construction, in the early 440s,
in the Agora, of a building consecrated to Hephaestus and Athena. Even though the
temple was completed only after the peace of Nicias in 421 and the cult statues were
not installed until 416/415, the project and the early stages of the construction
work were, if not Periclean, at least of the Periclean period.
³⁰
This edifice, built entirely of marble, was by far the most luxurious in the Agora,
and its sculpted ornaments spread over a larger area than any other Doric temple in
the Greek world, except for the Parthenon. The splendor of the temple was matched
by the munificence of the festival introduced in 421, when the great building was
completed. It included a solemn procession, a torch-race between the tribes, imposing
sacrifices and, possibly, a musical competition. The
Hephaesteia
celebrated the lame god with a lavishness unequaled anywhere in the Greek world.

While the celebration of Athena is perfectly explicable, should we not be astonished
at such a sumptuous outlay being devoted to “a rather secondary god”?
³¹
We should indeed be somewhat surprised if, as a deeply rooted historiographical tradition
has it, Hephaestus was celebrated in the Agora simply as the patron of craftsmen.
The craftsmen, who were concentrated within the Ceramicus quarter, did certainly play
a major role in the Athenian city, and it was probably by no means by chance that
the decree relating to the organization of the
Hephaesteia
was proposed by an owner of craftsmen slaves who had made a fortune, Hyperbolus.
³²
Nevertheless, it would be mistaken to reduce the significance of the festival and
the edifice solely to a celebration of the craftsmanship of Athens. The celebrations
did not give blacksmiths and potters pride of place, but mobilized the tribes of the
entire city, without privileging any particular category. And even if the metics,
of whom there were many among the craftsmen, did take part in the ceremony, they did
so
in a minor role: they received no more than a portion of raw meat and did not have
access to the sacrificial feasts, which were reserved solely for citizens. The point
is that, in the Agora, Hephaestus and Athena were honored not simply as the patrons
of the craftsmen, but as the protagonists in the story of autochthony that had now
been rearticulated. Significantly enough, the base upon which the statues of the cult
of Hephaestus and Athena rested represented the birth of Erechtheus (
figures 7
and
8
).
³³