Pericles of Athens (28 page)

The yawning gap between a rehabilitated Pericles and his despised successors seems
immense, if not unbridgeable. Yet, upon closer inspection, the break was less definitive
than the comic poets brutally depicted it to be and than the historians and philosophers
theorized.

A Seeming but Misleading Break

In the first place, the “new politicians” were not unknown men of low birth. Cleainetus,
the father of Cleon, had already been a
khorēgos
in 460/459 B.C.,
¹⁰
and around 440 his son made an advantageous marriage with the daughter
of Dikaiogenes, an Athenian of particular distinction.
¹¹
So his family had already been prosperous in the preceding generation. As for Cleophon’s
father, Cleippides, he had been elected
stratēgos
in 428 (Thucydides, 3.3.2). The “new” men were thus much less new than has been suggested
by authors both ancient and modern.

Second, that claim was based on a presupposition that is far from universally accepted—namely,
that in Athens only landed wealth was considered legitimate. To support that hypothesis,
historians invoke the virulent criticisms aimed at demagogues whose fortunes were
based on crafts. But those attacks, which emanated from certain specific circles,
those of Athenian intellectuals, did not reflect the opinions of the majority of citizens.
Besides, they were no more than relatively effective, since this new breed of demagogues
were not only elected but frequently reelected by the
dēmos
. To be a wealthy craftsman was, at least after 430 B.C., by no means a handicap for
anyone wishing to become one of the city’s leaders. To be sure, such individuals were
the butts of criticism and mockery, but no more so than a man such as Themistocles,
who was called a “bugger” on an
ostrakon
found in the Agora, or one such as Cimon, who was accused of incest with his sister
Elpinike.
¹²

Finally, if indeed there was a break, it certainly did not date from the death of
Pericles; the new politicians already held a definite influence in the city in the
lifetime of the
stratēgos
. Without going right back to Ephialtes, about whom little is known, a number of pointers
already suggest that the social origins of the Athenian political leaders were undergoing
a gradual evolution. As early as the 440/430s, the
stratēgos
Hagnon, the founder of the colony of Amphipolis in 437, fitted the stereotype of
a social climber suspected of having acquired his wealth by abusing his position in
power. In a fragment from the
Ploutoi
(
The Spirits of Wealth
), a play by the comic poet Cratinus,
¹³
Hagnon was accused of having amassed his fortune by doubtful means: “—Prosecutor:
‘This man is not wealthy in Athens in conformity with justice, so he should cook up
some wealth for his city.’—Witness for the Defence: ‘On the contrary, he has been
wealthy for a long time [or ‘he has grown rich from his magistracies (
arkhaioploutos
)’], he owns what he has had from the beginning [or ‘by reason of his power (
ex archēs
)’].’”

Here, the poet was playing on the polysemy of the word
arkhē
, which meant now “origin” or “ancient beginnings,” now “power” or “magistracies.”
¹⁴
The double meaning made it possible for Cratinus to raise a laugh from the spectators
by denigrating a
stratēgos
who had become suddenly rich; and this was well before Pericles’ death and Cleon’s
arrival on the scene.

At a sociological level, it is thus not possible to detect any radical break between
the period before Pericles’ death and the period after it. The continuity
of political practices was remarkable, contrary to the claims made by the author of
the
Constitution of the Athenians
. Can one honestly, in good faith, set up a contrast between Pericles’ policies and
those of his successors, arguing that the latter corrupted the people by providing
civic pay? Were not Cleon, Hyperbolus, and Cleophon simply imitating Pericles, who,
as early as the 450s, had introduced
misthos
for jurors? Besides, even if Cleon was somewhat more aggressive than the
stratēgos
and opposed his rival’s “wait-and-see” strategy, he and his fellows were, after all,
essentially in agreement with Pericles’ policy: keep on with the war against Sparta
and, at all costs, maintain the empire.
¹⁵

The comic poets were in no doubt at all about it; in his lifetime, Pericles was the
victim of attacks just as violent as those later directed against Cleon. Accused,
as he was, of aspiring to tyranny and having plotted Ephialtes’ death, depicted as
a corrupt demagogue and even an adulterer, Pericles was certainly not spared rumors,
defamatory gossip, and innuendos. If chance had so had it that the earliest preserved
comedy had been Cratinus’s
Dionysalexandros
, in which Pericles was shamelessly criticized, and not Aristophanes’
Acharnians
, in which it is Cleon who is the prime target of the poet, we should probably have
seen Pericles in a less favorable light.

Now, at the end of this analysis, Pericles no longer seems so different from Cleon.
Both were skilful demagogues if, that is, the term is taken with its original meaning
of “leader of the people,” with no social or moral connotations. Initially, “demagogues”
simply designated all those who, from the time of the Persian Wars down to 411, put
themselves forward to lead the people. As Christian Mann has shown, the death of Pericles
did not radically upset the functioning of the Athenian democracy.
¹⁶
To be sure, the fourth-century Athenians confusedly felt that they were living in
a political world very different from that of the fifth century. However, most of
them did not correlate the change with the disappearance of Pericles. As we have seen,
at the end of the fifth century, Eupolis simply drew a contrast between the past and
the present; he did not mention the
stratēgos
by name. As for Demosthenes, in the mid-fourth century he certainly did discern a
change in Athenian political life, but he did not connect it with any particular moment
or individual:

I consider it right to set the welfare of the state above the popularity of an orator.
Indeed, the orators of past generations, always praised but not always imitated by
those who address you, adopted this very standard and principle of statesmanship [of
putting the safety of the city before winning the favor of the people by flattering
them]. I refer to the famous Aristides, to Nicias, to my own namesake and to Pericles.
But
ever since this breed of orators appeared, who ply you with questions such as “What
would you like? What shall I propose? How can I oblige you?” the interests of the
state have frittered away for a momentary popularity.
¹⁷

So this orator did not associate the end of the Golden Age with the death of Pericles,
but extended that enchanted age to the time of Nicias, who died sixteen years after
the
stratēgos
, in 413, during the expedition to Sicily.

However, it was Plato who most radically questioned any such break. According to him,
it is completely pointless to try to separate the grain from the chaff and to set
in contrast the period before Pericles and the period after him, quite simply because
no leader, however virtuous, ever had any chance of controlling the Athenian people,
given that it was so tyrannical and capricious.

T
HE
S
OCRATIC
C
RITIQUE
: A
S
TRATĒGOS
WITHOUT
I
NFLUENCE

The Periclean Moment: A General Pedagogical Failure

The Socratic authors—Plato, of course, but also Xenophon and Antisthenes—produced
an extremely negative image of Pericles. Far from associating the
stratēgos
with a golden age, they portrayed him as a man who was certainly exceptional but
was incapable of educating his contemporaries. Failing to dispense a suitable
paideia
for them, the
stratēgos
had no way of controlling the harmful desires of the masses.

To present that failure of Pericles, the Socratic authors chose to adopt one particular
line of attack. In order to emphasize his fundamental inability to educate anyone
at all, they concentrated their critiques on the
stratēgos
’s difficult relationship with his own children. It must be said that his children,
in particular his elder son, Xanthippus, had not hesitated to criticize their father
or even, according to Stesimbrotus of Thasos, to circulate the most appalling rumors
about him.
¹⁸
The Socratics thus had a fine time opposing the discord (
stasis
) that reigned in the
stratēgos
’s family to the necessary unity that was believed to prevail in the city.
¹⁹

Plato reproached Pericles in particular for not having taught his children the art
of government. To the philosopher, this seemed truly scandalous, for he believed that
politics stemmed from an overarching knowledge regime (
epistēmē
): “In private life, our best and wisest citizens are unable to transmit this excellence
of theirs; for Pericles, the father of these young fellows here, gave them a first-rate
training in the subjects for which he found teachers,
but in those of which he is himself a master [the political art], he neither trains
them personally nor commits them to another’s guidance, and so they go about grazing
at will like sacred oxen, on the chance of their picking up excellence here or there
for themselves.”
²⁰

Over and above the mediocre education provided for Pericles’ own sons, Plato also
complained about the
paideia
—or rather absence of any
paideia
—dispensed to Pericles’ wards, Alcibiades and his brother, Cleinias II. As their official
guardian, the
stratēgos
had failed to check the disorderly behavior of his young protégés—at least, that
is the point of view that Plato’s Socrates defends in his dialogue with the young
Alcibiades. According to him, Pericles could not be considered a wise man since he
had transmitted no wisdom either to his sons or to Cleinias. In the course of this
conversation, Alcibiades himself actually acknowledges that the two sons of the
stratēgos
are stupid and that his own brother is crazy (
Alcibiades
I, 118d). Pressing his advantage, Socrates then asks the young man: “But tell me
of any other Athenian or foreigner, slave or freeman, who is accounted to have become
wiser through converse with Pericles?” (
Alcibiades
I, 119a). Unable to find an answer, Alcibiades is struck dumb, in his silence acknowledging
the point made by the philosopher.

When he composed this exchange, Plato was clearly pursuing a number of objectives.
In the first place, he wanted to lay the blame for the failure of the education of
Alcibiades and his brother solely at Pericles’ door. Alcibiades, involved as he was
in a number of religious, political, and sexual scandals, became the symbol of the
stratēgos
’s failure as a teacher. Second, by launching this counter-assault, Plato aimed to
exonerate Socrates of any responsibility in this pedagogic catastrophe, in reply to
all those who were accusing his master of playing a harmful role in the young man’s
education.
²¹
And finally, Plato was widening his attack and denying Pericles the ability to educate
anyone at all; his misdemeanors in the private sphere were prefigurations of his failure
in the public sphere. Plato was so keen on this idea that he returned to the attack
in the
Gorgias
: “Whether the Athenians are said to have become better because of Pericles, or quite
the contrary, to have been corrupted by him? … 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” (
Gorgias
, 515d–e). Worse still, he even suggested that Pericles had made his fellow-citizens
“even wilder than they were when he took them in hand” (
Gorgias
, 516c). Far from putting a break on the corruption inherent in the democratic system,
the
stratēgos
had actually accelerated it.

In order to illustrate the decline of Athens, the Socratic authors sometimes even
went so far as to use Pericles the Younger in their demonstration. Here again, it
was a matter of using the son in order to criticize the father.
Aspasia’s bastard did indeed, by his very existence, embody the blunders of Periclean
policies: had not Pericles obtained his naturalization in flagrant contradiction to
the law on citizenship that he himself had proposed in 451? Carried away by their
enthusiastic demolition exercise, the Socratics carried irony to the point of making
the son a ferocious critic of the radical democracy established by his parent. Pericles
the Younger, having himself been appointed
stratēgos
(and destined to suffer an unjust death after the battle of Arginusae, in 406 B.C.),
is thus represented in Xenophon’s
Memorabilia
as lamenting the decadence of the city of Athens. Comparing the Athenians to athletes,
formerly energetic but now lackadaisical, in order to reverse this doom-laden trend
he proposes a return to the ancestral mores, just like those of … the Spartans.
²²
Under the malicious pen of Xenophon, the son of Pericles was reduced to praising
the sworn enemies of his father and celebrating their oligarchic political system.

As represented by the Socratics, Pericles thus appeared, at best, as an exceptional
man who was nevertheless incapable of educating anyone at all, at worst as a despicable
demagogue who flattered the base instincts of the people. So should we regard these
acerbic criticisms simply as a form of an obsessional attack on the foremost leader
of a despised regime? Maybe, but there is more to it. Over and above the case of the
stratēgos
, Plato aimed, in this work of his, to point the finger at the failure of the entire
Athenian political personnel.