Pericles of Athens (46 page)

In the field of historical studies, enthusiasm for Pericles was nevertheless tempered
by a double fundamental movement. In the first place, the intellectual hegemony of
the
Annales
school tended to marginalize or even discredit the study of great men. Instead of
taking an interest in the lives of State leaders, it was now a matter of assessing
long-term developments, those of the
longue durée
, without being distracted by the froth produced by individual actions. Revealingly
enough, in France no specialist in Greek history saw fit to devote a biography to
Pericles in the second half of the twentieth century; the only writers to undertake
such a task were a historian of Rome (Léon Homo) and a philosopher (François Chêtelet).
¹⁴⁴
From the 1960s onward, the development of historical anthropology further accentuated
the lack of interest in the
stratēgos
. Turning its back on political and institutional history, this new way of tackling
the Greek world focused on rituals rather than individual events, and on mental representations
rather than the history of battles. And even when it did turn to politicians, it was
in order to rehabilitate figures that had been forgotten—such as the enigmatic Cleisthenes,
of Athens, or the obscure Ephialtes—and, taking them as its starting point, to reflect
on the mental structures of classical Athens: space and time, in the case of Cleisthenes;
memory and forgetting, in that of Ephialtes.
¹⁴⁵
The Greece of great men was done for. Besides, historical anthropology rejected idealization
of Athens in any form and set out to study “the Greeks without miracles” (to use Gernet’s
expression), denying them any ontological privileges over other peoples.

Pericles’ democracy was now regarded as a mirage rather than a miracle. From the 1970s
onward, attacks multiplied on a democracy that, like a magnifying mirror, reflected
all the shortcomings of an imperialist and male-chauvinist West. Quite apart from
slavery, which had already for some time been arousing indignation,
¹⁴⁶
the treatment of women now attracted criticism. And Pericles was accused of having
encouraged the enslavement of half of humanity given that, in his funeral oration,
he had invited women to be neither seen nor heard, “thereby reducing them to a state
of non-being.”
¹⁴⁷

However, it was on the score of imperialism that the Athenian leader was chiefly taken
to task. The Belgian historian Marie Delcourt (1891–1979) had, as an enlightened pioneer,
already sharply criticized Periclean imperialistic policy in the biography that she
devoted to the
stratēgos
in 1939.
¹⁴⁸
This great Greek scholar, a professor at the University of Liège, attacked in particular
the cleruchies, which were condemned simply as a means of seizing
land with no regard for its existing occupants, just like “the Europeans in Africa
and the New World”: “It is strange that Pericles never noticed that the spread of
cleruchies was both dangerous and ineffective. It generated hatred for Athens and
gave it the reputation of treating the States of the Delian League like conquered
countries.”
¹⁴⁹
In Marie Delcourt’s works, the criticism of Western colonialism (Belgium itself was
a colonial power) spread to affect Periclean foreign policy as a whole.

Tormented by the memory of Nazism, German historians too cast doubt upon Pericles’
supposed moderation in his management of the Delian League.
¹⁵⁰
And elsewhere attacks increased as decolonization proceeded and the Cold War conflicts
developed. At this point, some Anglo-Saxon historians questioned the opposition that
Thucydides identified between, on the one hand, the moderate imperialism of Pericles
and, on the other, the radical imperialism of his successors. At the end of the 1960s,
Victor Ehrenberg—who had left Nazi Germany via Prague and settled in England—argued
that the central element in the Periclean legacy had been, quite simply, imperialism.
¹⁵¹
One year after the end of the Vietnam War, the American historian Chester Starr expressed
the following disenchanted opinion that was not unaffected by the political failures
of Nixon’s policies: “In view of Pericles’ promotion of arrogant imperialism and his
serious mistakes in foreign policy, which in the end ruined Athenian power, his reputation
may well be overrated.”
¹⁵²
The same conclusion, albeit expressed less polemically, was reached by Simon Hornblower
in the work that he devoted to Thucydides in the late 1980s: “The real mistakes [that
led to the defeat of Athens] were after all mistakes of the 430s and earlier. That
means that they were Periclean mistakes.”
¹⁵³
Hornblower suggests that Thucydides, so fascinated by the
stratēgos
, misjudged the real moment when Athens lurched into the delirium of omnipotence and
the
pleonexia
that caused its downfall.

This critical tradition has lost none of its rigor. Indeed, Loren Samons has recently
carried it to a climax, echoing an anti-Periclean tone unheard since the late eighteenth
century. In his indictment, titled
What’s Wrong with Democracy?
, this American historian targets the two major pillars upon which admiration for
Pericles rests: the Parthenon and the funeral oration. The Parthenon, which was partly
financed by the allies, serves simply as an ode to the imperial excesses of Athens.
The colossal statue of Athena sums this up in striking fashion: the winged Victory
(
nikē
) placed in her right hand, symbolizes the city’s imperialism, while the representation
of Pandora, engraved on the soles of her sandals, recalls the despised nature of women,
the better to justify their political relegation. As for the funeral oration, it is
nothing but a militant or even militarist propagandist speech expressing “a
fervent nationalism designed to underpin Athenian power.”
¹⁵⁴
Samons’s verdict allows for no appeal: Pericles, responsible as he was, through his
intransigence, for the unleashing of the war, is “one of the most charismatic—and
dangerous—leaders in Western history.”
¹⁵⁵

This vein of anti-Periclean literature, still very much alive, is often accompanied
by virulent attacks against Thucydides, who is accused of misrepresenting historical
truth the better to praise the
stratēgos
. For instance, in a book published in 2011, Robert Luginbill declares that the main
purpose of
The History of the Peloponnesian War
was to exonerate Pericles of any responsibility for Athens’s defeat. Following up
this theme, the American historian defends an extremely dark picture of the
stratēgos
, whom he accuses not only of having unleashed the Peloponnesian War for ill-founded
reasons, but above all for having pursued it, committing Athens to a path leading
to ineluctable defeat: “in fact, Pericles doomed Athens.”
¹⁵⁶

The Myth Sterilized: A Pericles for the Classroom

Despite the preceding citations, it would be mistaken to conclude that Pericles is
now somewhat discredited in the Western world, for, on the contrary, the idealization
of the
stratēgos
still continues today, sometimes quite openly—as in the case of the biography by
Donald Kagan, for example
¹⁵⁷
—sometimes in a covert manner, if one thinks of Harold Mattingly’s attempt to redate
Athenian decrees, which tends to exonerate Pericles from all responsibility for the
extreme development of Athens’s imperialism.
¹⁵⁸
Today still, very few historians fail to bend a knee before the icon of Pericles,
following the example of Hermann Bengtson: “Without the initiative of Pericles, Athens
would have remained as it had been: a typical provincial town which, under Pericles,
became not only the wealthiest but also the most beautiful town in the whole of Greece.”
¹⁵⁹
And in French school textbooks, Pericles still occupies a prime place, eclipsing
all the other Athenian political leaders of the classical period. A bust of the
stratēgos
, an image of the Parthenon, and a passage from the funeral speech: few textbooks
sidestep that stereotypical triptych.
¹⁶⁰

The
stratēgos
thus continues to enjoy a brilliant career in occidental schools and universities,
while regularly being mobilized in arguments about the European identity and its supposed
Greek origins.
¹⁶¹
But there is another side to this gleaming medallion; this “official” Pericles now
arouses only indifference in popular culture worldwide. As a result of being used
as a mouthpiece for democratic values, the
stratēgos
has become a mere symbolic sketch, a silhouette possessing neither substance nor
charm, a symbol that, although, to be
sure, admirable, is insipid. One might apply to him Marguerite Yourcenar’s remark
about Greek studies in general: “We have no use for this all too perfect statue sculpted
from marble that is all too white.”
¹⁶²

Transformed into a didactic implement, Pericles is, in effect, conspicuous by his
absence from contemporary imaginary representations: no costume drama, no video game,
virtually no comic strip is devoted to him. In the cinema, it is the Romans, the Spartans,
and mythical heroes who are favored by the public.
¹⁶³
A list of recent Hollywood productions speaks for itself:
Gladiator
,
Troy
,
Alexander
,
The Three Hundred
; nothing that deals, even remotely, with Pericles or even Athens.
¹⁶⁴
The fact is that what seems to be fascinating about Antiquity is above all its violence
and its urge to acquire power: by this yardstick, the
stratēgos
seems rather a dim subject. How can one get excited about an orator who died in his
bed and was famous for his prudence rather than as a heroic warrior? And although
we find a character named Pericles in a recent film made by Tim Burton, it is no more
than a derisory name given to a primate trained to be an astronaut, in
The Planet of the Apes
(2001)!

Nor are the creators of video games any more charitable to the
stratēgos
. In this cultural industry, the budget of which now exceeds that of the cinema and
music, there is no trace of Pericles; in the 157 titles that relate either closely
or distantly to Antiquity, Alexander and ancient Rome take the lion’s share, leaving
no more than a few crumbs to the rest.
¹⁶⁵
The same disappointing tally relates to comic strips, with but one exception: the
Orion
series launched by Jacques Martin, the creator of
Alix
. However, Pericles is no more than a secondary character in the plot and is, moreover,
not a sympathetic figure, for he betrays the confidence of the young hero, in the
name of national interests; he is left out of the latest volume.
¹⁶⁶

Although embalmed or even canonized by official culture, Pericles elicits boredom
rather than fantasy. Indeed, it is only in bureaucratic imaginary representations
that the
stratēgos
still arouses some interest, albeit in an unexpected manner. His name has become
one of the favorite acronyms used by national and European administrations. In Wallonia,
there is a Partenariat Economique pour le Redéploiement Industriel et les Clusters
par l’Economie Sociale (PERICLES); the European Union has launched a Programme Européen
de Renforcement des Institutions des Collectivités Locales et de leurs Services (likewise
PERICLES); and as for UNESCO, it has set up a Programme Expérimental pour Relancer
l’Intérêt de la jeunesse en faveur des Cultures et des Langues limitrophes à partir
de l’Environnement naturel et des Sites patrimoniaux (PERICLES again)! More disturbing
is the fact that the name of the Athenian leader has also been given to a number of
repressive projects, such as the
programme de lutte contre le faux monnayage ou le futur
fichier informatisé
(the European program to counteract counterfeit coinage and the future computerized
database envisaged by the law of “internal security”) adopted in January 2010. Transformed
into a name devoid of content, Pericles has become the symbol of an Antiquity that
hardly makes any sense today beyond a close circle of specialists—except as a jokey
wink or a decontextualized citation.

Faced with such a diagnosis, what room for maneuver remains for a historian? Should
one launch into an apology for Pericles or, on the contrary, expose him to public
contempt in the hope of provoking some debate? To limit oneself to such an alternative
would be intellectually questionable and, in any case, be doomed to failure. Rather
than attempt by any means to reconnect Pericles to the present world and establish
him as our great ancestor, perhaps it would be better first to accept his radical
strangeness so as to restore to his “all too white statue” the vivid colors that it
has lost and, above all, accept that he has no useful lessons for our times. Only
if we recognize all these differences will Pericles be able to return to the present
day, liberated from the problems surrounding the whole question of the Greek origins
of Western democracies.

NOTES

F
OREWORD
: I
NTRODUCING
A
ZOULAY’S
P
ERICLES

 
1.
For his
Périclès.
La Démocratie athénienne à l’épreuve du grand homme
(Paris: Armand Colin, 2010), Dr. Azoulay was awarded the Prix du Sénat du Livre d’histoire.
This was not his first monograph; that was
Xénophon et les grêces du pouvoir: De la charis au charisme
(Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2004), the book of his 2002 Sorbonne
thèse
directed by Professeure Pauline Schmitt Pantel, for which—I declare an interest—I
was one of the examining “jury” that granted him the degree of Doctor with highest
distinction. Dr. Azoulay is currently Maître de conférences en histoire grecque at
l’Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée and a leading member of the research “Equipe
Anhima,” which devotes itself to studying “Anthropologie et histoire des mondes antiques.”