Pericles of Athens (3 page)

That famous declaration has for many years been taken quite literally, as if the history
of the Athenian democracy and the career of its leader could be superposed one upon
the other and completely fused.
⁴
But such personalization is eminently challengeable: Thucydides, himself a
stratēgos
, was far from being as “objective” as a certain line of historiography has long maintained.
In so far as historians today are more objective than their famous predecessor, it
is fair enough to declare “No, Thucydides is not a colleague,”
⁵
for the author of
The Peloponnesian War
was heir to a deep-seated tradition that tended to envisage history solely in relation
to the great men who, it was supposed, molded it.

So should we tip the scales in the opposite direction and dilute Pericles’ own actions
with those of the Athenian people? In order to render to Caesar that which is Caesar’s
and to the people that which is theirs, it would be tempting to write a history of
Athens animated by an anonymous collective: in short, to write a history not of Pericles,
but of 50,000 citizens. A number of studies on the
stratēgos
do have that tendency and, on the pretext of producing a life of Pericles, in fact
sketch in a portrait of fifth-century Athens.
⁶

All the same, that would be a simplifying, if not simplistic approach to the problem.
Rather than choose between the people and a single individual, it would better to
consider that very question as the subject to be studied. Even if Pericles did undeniably
weigh heavily upon the city’s collective decisions, on the other hand, reading between
the lines, the life of the great man
illuminates the influence that the Athemian
dēmos
exerted upon its leaders. In order to wield the slightest degree of power, the great
man was obliged to take popular expectations into account and to align, adjust, and
adapt his own behavior in response to them. It is precisely that complex interaction
between the crowd and its leaders that deserves to be placed at the heart of the inquiry.

A project centered on Pericles has to walk a tightrope. We should take care not to
idealize Athens but, at the same time, not to deny the rupture introduced by the invention
of democracy; if possible, we should also avoid misleading parallels without, however,
renouncing certain carefully controlled anachronisms, given that history, even when
positivist, always feeds on present-day debates; and finally, we should succumb neither
to the illusion of the power of one great man nor to that of the all-powerful masses.
Rather, we should inquire into the productive tension that developed between the
stratēgos
and the Athenian community. If we accept those three conditions, we have some hope
of plumbing the true historical depths of both Pericles and the city, at the same
time emphasizing the profound differences as well as the few resemblances that it
has with our own contemporary democratic life.

Instead of launching into a new biography of Pericles, we must instead seek to set
this great figure in context, reinserting it into the democratic political culture
of the fifth century B.C. Pericles, the man, is surrounded by numerous and sometimes
contradictory accounts where, reading between the lines, we find embedded
⁷
a picture of the social and historical world of classical Athens. Pericles thus seems
to operate as a good reagent—to borrow a chemical metaphor—that reveals the multiple
aspects of the workings of Athenian democracy.

In order to evaluate the extent and scope of these interactions, we must begin by
reconstructing the background against which Pericles’ life unfolded. These salient
chronological points are necessary in order to seize upon both the disagreements that
crystallized around his actions and also the degree to which he left his mark on the
destiny of Athens.

C
HRONOLOGY: A
B
RIEF
H
ISTORY OF
P
ERICLES

The city (
polis
), which appeared around the eighth century, constituted a new form of political and
territorial organization that rapidly spread throughout the Mediterranean region,
from the Black Sea right across to the shores of Andalusia. In the early fifth century,
the Greek world was composed of a mosaic of communities that were independent of one
another but were linked by their language and their cults. Among them was the city
of Athens, which
at that time appears to have been a community undergoing serious changes. At the time
of Pericles’ birth in 494/3 B.C.,
⁸
the city had recently freed itself from the domination of tyrants who, for the past
half-century, had held the reins of power. This was an important change. Once the
tyranny had collapsed, in 510 B.C., all forms of personal domination remained for
many years discredited—a factor that Pericles had to take into account throughout
his career. In 508/7 B.C., this upheaval acquired an institutional form: a series
of reforms, inspired by Cleisthenes, introduced profound changes into the political
organization of the city, laying down the bases of the democracy that then developed
in the course of the fifth century.

Pericles was related to Cleisthenes the reformer and so belonged to an extremely prestigious
family. However, very little is known of his youth except that he probably spent a
few years in exile, as his father Xanthippus was banished by the Athenian people when
he was ostracized. This was a procedure that made it possible temporarily to get rid
of any member of the elite considered to be too powerful and so prevent any return
to tyranny. That sanction of ostracism lapsed in 485, halfway between the two Persian
Wars, in which a fraction of the Greek cities stood against the Persian Empire.

Pericles grew up against the background of this struggle, which was, right from the
start, an unequal one. The imbalance between the two worlds was flagrant: on the one
side, disunited Greek communities of, at the most, a few thousand citizens, on the
other side, the immense Achaemenid Empire, the center of gravity of which was positioned
in the high Iranian plateaux but whose domination extended from the shores of the
Black Sea, in the West, all the way to Afghanistan in the East, encompassing Egypt
in the South. The First Persian War, in 490, was no more than a skirmish from which,
to general surprise, the Athenian heavy infantry (the hoplites) emerged as victors.
But the Second Persian War was a far greater confrontation. By land and by sea, the
Persian forces invaded the territory of continental Greece and, in the face of this
threat, no more than thirty-one cities—out of the hundreds that then made up Hellas—united
to resist the offensive. Although Sparta was nominally in command of the Greek forces,
Athens controlled most of the fleet, the construction of which had been financed by
the silver extracted from the Laurium mines, in southern Attica.

It was in this dramatic context that Pericles’ father, Xanthippus, was recalled by
the Athenians who, in the face of danger, momentarily desisted from their quarrelsome
divisions. Led by the
stratēgos
Themistocles, the Greek troops destroyed the Persian fleet in September 480 B.C.,
in the straits of Salamis, not far from Athens. The Athenian oarsmen, recruited from
among the poorest citizens (known as “thetes” in the classification established by
Solon the lawgiver at the start of the sixth century), were responsible for this decisive
victory, and this encouraged them to lay claim to a political role in keeping with
their military importance. As for Pericles’ father, Xanthippus, he lost no time in
excelling himself personally in the conflict by leading the Athenian fleet to victory
off Cape Mycale, in 479 B.C., in one of the war’s last engagements.

At this stage, nothing precise is known about the young Pericles, and it would be
another twenty years before he came to the fore of the political scene. Ever since
the ostracism of Themistocles, who was accused in 471 B.C. of having treated with
the Persian enemy, it had been the
stratēgos
Cimon who exerted the most influence in the city of Athens, thanks to the military
prestige that he had acquired within the framework of the Delian League, founded in
478 B.C. After the Second Persian War, Athens had in effect taken the lead in an alliance
designed to prevent a return of the Persians to the Aegean. This was centered on the
little island of Delos, in the middle of the Cyclades archipelago. Although it began
as an alliance freely joined, the league soon developed into an instrument in the
service of the Athenians, who exploited the allied cities on the pretext of defending
them against the Persian threat. Although the Athenian poorer citizens derived considerable
material profit thanks to this advantageous position, their political influence within
the city remained limited. To maintain the status quo, Cimon could depend upon the
support of the venerable Council of the Areopagus, the seat of the city’s most prestigious
magistrates: retired archons and members of the traditional Athenian elite.

It was within that roughly sketched-in context that, in 463 B.C., Pericles entered
upon the political stage as an opponent of Cimon, laying accusations against him.
Once he had kicked this bothersome rival decisively into touch, there followed thirty
or so years in the course of which Pericles clearly took over all the major roles
in the city, while the democracy gradually became stronger. All the same, his authority
at no point went unchallenged. At first he suffered attacks from all those who, led
by a relative of Cimon’s, Thucydides of Alopeke (who should not be confused with the
historian of the same name), opposed the rise to power of the people (the
dēmos
) in the city. Even after the ostracism of this dangerous rival, in 443 B.C., Pericles
was assailed by virulent criticisms, as is testified by the attacks launched, in the
course of the 430s, against several of those close to him—namely, Anaxagoras the philosopher;
Aspasia, Pericles’ partner; and the sculptor Phidias.

The mark that Pericles made upon the city was nevertheless undeniable. In the first
place, it was he who pressed for the most prestigious magistracies to be open even
to the most poverty-stricken of the citizens; next, the
census disqualifications that had been established at the beginning of the sixth century
were progressively removed, although access to the post of archon continued to be
denied to the thetes. It was also thanks to Pericles’ initiative that pay, in the
form of
misthoi
, was for the first time introduced as remuneration for taking part in civic life.
By the end of the 450s, the juries serving in Athenian courts were reimbursed so that
the least wealthy citizens could be in a position to serve in lawsuits without fear
of losing a day’s wages. From being purely a formality, democracy gradually became
a reality. Meanwhile, Pericles initiated a policy of major public works, the building
of the Parthenon between 447 and 438 B.C. being its most dazzling manifestation; and,
finally, he completed the construction of the Long Walls that linked the town to its
port, Piraeus, and also built a war-fleet, to the great advantage of the thetes, who
manned the triremes and received a wage for this. In this respect, internal democratization
and external imperialism kept in step as they developed.

So it was by no means by chance that Pericles also became a passionate defender of
Athenian interests within the Delian League. In, at the latest, 454 B.C., at the height
of its influence, the federal treasury was transferred to the Acropolis. Now the Athenians
could draw on it as they wished, in order to finance the functioning of their democracy.
But among their allies, these developments gave rise to discontent that was all the
more fervent given that the Persian peril had been dispelled as early as the 460s.
With the swearing of the Peace of Callias in 449 B.C., the situation became critical.
This treaty drew a final line under the confrontation that began with the Persian
Wars, thereby rendering the maintenance of the Delian League pointless. However, Athens
refused to dissolve this alliance, from which it acquired substantial profits; and
Pericles had no compunction about putting down the uprisings that followed, in Euboea
in 446 B.C. and then a long war against Samos, which lasted from 441 to 439.

Meanwhile, over and above these sporadic revolts, the democratic city had to cope
with the growing hostility of Sparta and its Peloponnesian allies. Alarmed by Athens’s
rise to power, the Spartans headed an alliance designed to counter its influence.
After a series of clashes between their respective allies, followed by a brief interlude
of calm—the “Thirty Years’ Peace” of 446 B.C.—tensions rose again until, in 431 B.C.,
the conflict erupted openly. This was the start of the Peloponnesian War. It was to
last for twenty-seven years and end in the defeat of Athens in 404 B.C. It was Pericles
who elaborated the strategy that, during the early years, made it possible for the
Athenians to resist the Peloponnesians despite the latter’s numerical superiority
and their redoubtable infantry. Thanks to their own superiority at sea
and their impregnable defense system, the Athenians even appeared to be in a good
position to triumph. But from 430 onward, a serious “plague” ravaged the city, and
one year later Pericles was dead, carried off by this scourge.

Those few milestones trace a complex biographical path, the subtle twists and turns
of which it is hard to pinpoint. The fact is that the ancient sources are full of
gaps and can seldom convey a clear idea of the role that Pericles played in the evolution
of the city of Athens in the mid-fifth century.

S
OURCES:
T
HE
A
NCIENT
C
ONSTRUCTION OF THE
F
IGURE OF
P
ERICLES