Pericles of Athens (6 page)

Nevertheless, the Alcmaeonids’ reputation was, to say the least, equivocal. Although
they enjoyed great fame, it was to some extent of a pernicious nature: they were accused
not only of being polluted (
enageis
) by the impiety of their ancestors but also of maintaining suspicious relations with
the tyrants of Athens. The accusation of impiety, first, dated from the earliest days
of Archaic Athens. In the 630s B.C., a certain Cylon, a victor in the Olympic Games,
intoxicated by his success, attempted to seize power in Athens, aided by the tyrant
of Megara. His attempt proved to be a lamentable failure: besieged by the Athenians,
the conspirators took refuge on the Acropolis, close to the statue (
agalma
) of the goddess, assuming the posture of suppliants who, as such, enjoyed the protection
of the gods.
¹⁰
Having agreed to leave this sanctuary, following assurances that they would be spared,
they were nevertheless massacred, at the instigation of the Alcmaeonids, who, because
of this, contracted a taint that would be passed down from generation to generation.

This episode acquired an ambivalent meaning: a glorious one if the emphasis was laid
upon the Alcmaeonids’ opposition to tyranny, but a shaming
one if it was laid upon the impiety implied by the murder of suppliants. Indeed, the
Spartans had no hesitation in invoking this old story as grounds for insisting on
two occasions that the Alcmaeonids, whom they judged to be embarrassing, should be
exiled: the first time was in 510 B.C., when King Cleomenes demanded, successfully,
that Cleisthenes be banished (Herodotus, 5.72); the second time was in 431, just before
the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, when the Spartans demanded, this time unsuccessfully,
that Pericles be exiled (Thucydides, 1.126.2).
¹¹

Over and above that original misdeed, the Alcmaeonids were also accused of maintaining
equivocal links with tyrants. To be sure, on several occasions they opposed Athenian
tyrants, not only at the time of Cylon’s abortive attempt but also when Pisistratus
seized power.
¹²
Furthermore, the Alcmaeonid Cleisthenes was one of the main instigators of the fall
of Hippias, the city’s last tyrant, in 510 B.C. However, far from simply representing
resistance to tyrants, the Alcmaeonids were associated with them through close matrimonial
relations. Even after clashing with Pisistratus, the Alcmaeonid Megacles had no qualms
at all about proposing his own daughter as a wife for him (Herodotus, 1.60). And it
should also be said that Megacles himself had married the daughter of yet another
tyrant, Cleisthenes of Sicyon, after a determined struggle to win her hand.
¹³
According to Herodotus, this was the marriage that made the Alcmaeonids famous throughout
the whole of Greece.
¹⁴
Nor is that all, for Cleisthenes had not always been a fierce opponent of tyrants.
Before he was exiled, he worked in close collaboration with the Pisistratids, for
he had been elected archon during the period when they were in power.
¹⁵
This smoldering reputation dogged the family right down to the Persian Wars: at the
time of the Battle of Marathon, in 490, the Alcmaeonids were accused of attempting
to betray their country at the point when Hippias, who had lived in exile since 510,
made the most of the Persian invasion in an attempt to return to power in the city.
¹⁶
And in the course of the years between the Persian Wars, several members of the Alcmaeonid
family fell victim to the newly introduced procedure of ostracism, which was designed
to remove Athenians who aimed for a return to tyranny.
¹⁷

This dubious notoriety is reflected in a condensed form in the story of Agariste’s
dream, which Herodotus relates (6.131). According to this historian, just before the
birth of the future
stratēgos
, the mother of Pericles dreamed that she gave birth to a lion. If regarded as a sign
sent by the gods, the dream seemed a mark of special favor, prefiguring an exceptional
destiny for the child about to be born. However, this was a sign that was, to say
the least, ambiguous: in the first place, because that dream evoked legends surrounding
the births of certain tyrants, in particular that of Cypselus of
Corinth;
¹⁸
and second, because the dream’s content was in itself equivocal. Ever since Homer,
the lion had been associated with royal power and, as such, clashed seriously with
the imaginary representations of democracy. In Athens, it sometimes happened that
politicians were described as “the people’s dogs” because they were the faithful guardians
of its interests; however, they could never be compared to lions without running the
risk of ostracism!
¹⁹

On his mother’s side, then, Pericles came from a lineage that was certainly illustrious
but whose fame was problematic. To invoke its prestige was to risk being reproached
not only for impiety at a religious level but also for tyrannical aspirations at a
political level. Within a democratic context, a prestigious birth was certainly a
doubleedged weapon that had to be handled very carefully indeed, humoring the people’s
touchiness as much as possible.

Ploutos: An Illegitimate Fortune?

Wealth too seemed an advantage for a young Athenian seeking to enter political life,
but at the same time that fortune had to be regarded as legitimate by the
dēmos
. This it certainly was in Pericles’ case, even if embarrassing stories continued
to circulate about the lust for riches of his maternal family, the Alcmaeonids.

There can be no doubt that Pericles was rich, for he was a beneficiary of the “legitimate
inheritance” that he held from his father (
ton patrōion kai dikaion plouton
).
²⁰
What did this consist of? Land, essentially: the young man possessed country property
as well as the house in which he lived in Athens itself. That estate was probably
situated in the Cholargos deme, a few kilometers to the north of the town, and it
was farmed profitably by a well-trusted slave.
²¹
The size of this property must have been considerable, for at the time of the start
of the Peloponnesian War, Pericles promised to hand over “his land and his farms”
(
tēn khōran kai tas epauleis
) if the Spartan king Archidamus decided to spare his properties on account of the
links of hospitality by which he and Pericles were connected.
²²
Thucydides, who was a contemporary of these events, even refers to “his fields and
his properties [
tous de agrous tous heautou kai oikias
]”
²³
—the plurals used here are significant. Young Pericles’ fortune was thus shored up
by the possession of land—a form of wealth that was judged to be particularly legitimate
in the Athens of the early fifth century.

Another factor enables us to calculate the level of wealth that the family fortune
comprised. While still a very young man, in 472 B.C., Pericles was rich enough to
be expected to provide a liturgy—that is to say, a type of public service for which
only the most affluent Athenians and metics were liable.
²⁴
In the fourth century, out of several tens of thousands of taxpayers, barely one thousand
individuals were liable for liturgies; Demosthenes even declared that no more than
sixty individuals contributed liturgies each year (
Against Leptines
[20], 21).
²⁵
Even if those figures represent an underestimate, they do convey some idea of the
financial affluence of the young Pericles, who must certainly have been one of the
pentakosiomedimnoi
, the group of the richest men of Athens. Ever since the reforms attributed to Solon,
the lawgiver, at the beginning of the sixth century B.C., the citizens had been divided
into four census classes. These may well have been based on agricultural incomes,
and the
pentakosiomedimnoi
constituted the very top category. The right to participate in civic institutions
depended partly upon this classification, for the Council of the Areopagus was at
that time open only to the two top census classes.

Wealthy though he was, Pericles had to face a number of troubling rumors about the
manner in which his Alcmaeonid ancestors had acquired their fortune and had used it.
²⁶
An early anecdote recounted by Herodotus testifies to this latent hostility. In the
mid-sixth century, Alcmaeon, son of Megacles, had assisted King Croesus when the latter
went to consult the Delphic oracle. When the Lydian sovereign summoned him to Sardis
in order to recompense his services, he offered him as much gold as he could carry
away on his person. Thereupon, Alcmaeon had himself fitted out with made-to-measure
clothes and boots that would accommodate as much gold as possible. Worse still, he
had no compunction about rolling in a heap of gold powder so as to fill his hair with
it, and he even stuffed his mouth with the precious metal, “resembling anything on
earth rather than a human being, with his mouth crammed full and his entire body bulging.”
²⁷
Alcmaeon consequently became a figure of fun to Croesus and thereafter also to Herodotus’s
readers. This anecdote portrayed the Alcmaeonids as individuals with an inexhaustible
thirst for the riches obtainable from Eastern rulers, even at the cost of their dignity
as citizens. Alcmaeon’s attitude rebounded upon his descendants: at the end of his
digression on the Alcmaeonids, Herodotus took care to remind his readers that Alcmaeon
was an ancestor of Pericles, the son of Xanthippus (6.131.2).

That was not the only shady story that circulated about the Alcmaeonids’ wealth. The
Alcmaeonid Cleisthenes, who was rich enough to finance the reconstruction of the temple
of Apollo in Delphi after this had been burned down in 548 B.C., was accused by hostile
gossip (Herodotus, 5.66) of having corrupted the Delphic Pythia, bribing her with
the family fortune to ensure that his lineage always received favorable oracles.

Pericles’ ancestors thus formed an object of suspicion on the score not only of the
origin of their fortune, but also the way that they handled it.
Wealth, like birth, was an advantage that, to be effective, had to appear legitimate
in the eyes of the Athenian people.

Paideia
: A Rhetorical Athlete

One last element lay at the root of the superiority to which members of the Athenian
elite laid claim: education (
paideia
). This was a capital asset that was not inherited, but acquired. Far from being innate,
eloquence resulted from a lengthy apprenticeship. As one comic fragment put it, “Speaking
is a gift of nature, speaking well a product of art [
tekhnē
].”
²⁸
It was therefore essential to benefit from a careful—and often costly—education in
order to acquire such competence as was indispensable in a democracy in which speech
was playing an increasingly important role.

Pericles received a thorough education in rhetoric and clearly preferred oratorical
exertion to physical exertions. That, at least, is what is suggested by a spicy dialogue
reported by Stesimbrotus of Thasos and recorded by Plutarch,
²⁹
in which Archidamus, the king of Sparta, questions Pericles’ main opponent, Thucydides,
the son of Melesias, wanting to know which of the two men is the better at wrestling.
Somewhat embarrassed, Thucydides apparently replied: “Whenever I throw him in wrestling,
he disputes the fall, and carries his point, and persuades the very men who saw him
fall.” To discredit his adversary, Thucydides here resorts to two arguments that were
often employed to denigrate the sophists, the masters of eloquence who offered their
lessons to the highest bidders: on the one hand, their excessive evaluation of speech
over action and, on the other, their obvious disdain for physical prowess.
³⁰
Pericles thus found himself dismissed as a mere manipulative sophist. Quite apart
from its polemical aspect, this anecdote drew attention to the exceptional quality
of the education received by Pericles, to whom two famous teachers were attributed,
one a foreigner, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, the other an Athenian, Damon of Oa.
³¹

The former, Anaxagoras, developed a rationalist or even secular line of thought that
valued experimentation. It was he, according to Plato’s
Phaedrus
, who taught Pericles rhetoric.
³²
However, the links between the two men are so tenuous that some historians doubt
whether they even existed.
³³
In the case of the latter, Damon, we are on firmer ground. This Athenian initiated
Pericles into
mousikē
, a combination of arts linked with music, singing, and dancing.
³⁴
The comic poets even represent him as the principal teacher of Xanthippus’s son.
In a fragment preserved by Plutarch, Damon is addressed as follows: “First, then,
reply to me, please, for it is said that you are the Chiron who raised Pericles.”
³⁵
His influence over the young man was
thus compared to that of the fabled centaur, Chiron, who educated so many Greek heroes,
including Achilles and Jason!

How can we explain how it was that a musician was so important in Pericles’ education?
Here, we must be careful to avoid any anachronism. Among the Greeks,
mousikē
had absolutely nothing to do with “art for art’s sake.”
Mousikē
was linked to mathematics and poetry and it exerted considerable power over its listeners,
thereby influencing city life in the same way as public speaking did.
³⁶
So
mousikē
and politics were more closely linked than one might imagine, and the Athenians seem
to have been perfectly well aware of the fact. Indeed, they may have condemned Damon
to exile on that very account: several
ostraka
found by archaeologists lend a measure of credibility to the episode that Plutarch
relates, without, however, producing any formal proof.
³⁷