Pericles the Athenian

by Rex Warner

  Yet now when I look back, I can see that even this scanty evidence should have been sufficient. The kings of Persia have often had brave soldiers and good generals; they have often themselves been wise, farsighted and ambitious. Yet all the intelligence (that guiding principle of creation) has come, as it were, from the top. It has not been interfused with the mass. The Persians obey laws; they do not make them. Politically they lack integration, even of a low order, as Pericles would say. For Pericles was perfectly well aware of the integration of courage and intelligence that was to be found in Sparta. Yet his own ideas of integration (a notion towards which I think, in our early philosophizing, I may have tended to guide him) were of a different order altogether. However, the fact that should have been evident in theory even before it was proved in practice is that mere numbers are not in themselves irresistible. This is obvious, but we tend through habit to neglect the obvious. We had seen the Persians so constantly and widely victorious that we could conceive no end to the process.

  By the time that I was eight years old the Great King’s son-in-law Mardonius had advanced as far as Macedonia. Next year a seaborne expedition set out from Samos towards Athens and Euboea. There were many Ionians serving aboard the ships and I can still remember hearing firsthand accounts of how the enormous Persian force had been utterly routed by the Athenians at Marathon. It was a portent, but scarcely anyone recognized it as such. We too, we reflected, had once won a victory over the Persians, but we had suffered for it later. Moreover, looking at Athens from a distance and observing her inaccurately, we seemed to detect in her the same symptoms of internal confusion which had helped to weaken us. The victor of Marathon, Miltiades, the father of Kimon, was prosecuted and fined, and died in disgrace within a year of the battle. Among his prosecutors was Xanthippus, the father of Pericles. And in subsequent years other important Athenians, including Xanthippus himself, were driven into honorable exile by that peculiar Athenian device of ostracism, by which if sufficient votes are cast against any individual, that individual is forced to leave the country for ten years. These ostracisms are not so stupid as they sound. Usually it is a question of choosing between two able statesmen with divergent policies, and the Athenians believe that if one policy rather than another is preferred, it will be best carried out when its most notorious opponent is unable to interfere. And in these years the policy of the Athenian democracy was consistent, though we in Ionia were not aware of it.

  Later on I was able to talk to many of those who had fought at Marathon, including the poet Aeschylus, whose brother died most gallantly in the battle. I found that these men were, on the whole, less interested in the great names and the great clans than I had expected. Their views differed widely (an Athenian is always versatile) and yet on certain subjects there was unanimity and the resolution that is born of it. They believed in this new democracy of theirs, and they believed in Athenian virtue or excellence. All they differed upon was the means by which it might be displayed. Of course there were also, as there have always been at Athens, keen personal rivalries. In these years the number of ostracisms alone will indicate the bitterness of these rivalries. Fortunately, however, both for Athens and for Greece, the statesman who showed the greatest power of survival was the most farsighted and the most consistent of them all. This was Themistocles, a new man, unconnected with any of the noble families, yet in his policies and his intelligence the precursor of Pericles himself. It was Themistocles who first saw that the future of Athens was upon the sea. He created Athenian naval power, and in doing so he widened the basis of Athenian democracy; for in a naval power the sailor, who need possess nothing, is at least as important as the man rich enough to afford the equipment of a cavalryman or a hoplite. Pericles, with greater enlightenment and greater social prestige, was to follow in the path of Themistocles and was to preserve for far longer a position of ascendancy, but no one, not even Pericles himself, showed greater practical intelligence than did Themistocles in these years of the Persian peril.

  To us in Clazomenai, however, even the name of Themistocles was, in the nine years after Marathon, virtually unknown. Athens we knew and respected as the motherland of Ionians. We admired her for her resistance at Marathon, but we scarcely envied her her probable fate. When I myself imagined the possibilities of settling in any other city I would think always of the Greek cities in the west, in Sicily or Italy, where it seemed that philosophy, born in Ionia, was now taking on a new life. For even in my boyhood I was, in my way, a philosopher, and long before my boyhood was over I paid reverence in my own mind not to the great dynasts but to the philosophers of my country. Polycrates of Samos had ruled the sea, and even in my childhood the splendor of his court had become a legend. But Thales of Miletus had ventured to ask, for the first time in history, a scientific question. Others, even under the Persian conquest, had continued his work at Miletus. I myself had listened to those who had been taught by Anaximenes. I had been delighted by the daring commonsense of Xenophanes, a native of nearby Colophon, who in a few short sentences made clear to me how absurd and unworthy are man’s views of the gods. For why should a god be in human form, and why should he speak Greek? One must note, however, that Xenophanes fails to give any account of motion. I had also discussed Pythagoras with my friends and had found him unsatisfactory. Some thirty years before my birth he had left Samos and settled in southern Italy. There, even today his followers have not only an intellectual, but a political influence. Their influence proceeds, I think, from the fact that they form a kind of secret brotherhood rather than from any political or scientific merits of their own. They combine admirable mathematical skill with a kind of superstition. Their discoveries in geometry are remarkable, but for some reason best known to themselves, they refuse to eat beans and would almost rather die than touch a white cock. Our great Ionian philosopher Heracleitus of Ephesus was right when he wrote: “The learning of many things does not teach understanding. Otherwise it would have taught Pythagoras and Xenophanes.”

  Heracleitus was the last of the Ionian philosophers with whose work I became acquainted in my boyhood and early youth. I still find him strangely impressive, though as I grow wiser I have less and less of an idea of what he means. He, as much as any of the others, excited me to the pursuit of wisdom. How often, lying in the sun or shade along the reedy banks of streams that go down to Clazomenai and the open sea and sky, have I repeated to myself over and over again, “Wisdom is one thing. It is to know the thought by which all things are steered through all things.” And I became somewhat indifferent to my father’s plans for me. I had no wish to be excessively burdened by public duties and by the management of an estate. I watched the stars, animals and birds, the sky and the sea. In the end, I was determined, I would give up my estate and devote my life to science, possibly in some Ionian city, possibly in one of the Greek cities of Italy or Sicily. But first I wished to travel and to see something of the world. It was for this reason that, at the age of eighteen, I took part in Xerxes’s expedition against Greece.

  And here, since I have been accused of being pro-Persian, a few words of explanation are necessary. Now, when all the islands and the Greek coast of Asia have been liberated (or, at least, are subject to Athens rather than to a foreign power), it may seem strange or even wicked to imagine a situation in which Greeks in the service of Persia marched against their fellow Greeks. But to us at the time it did not seem strange. We Ionians who, whether voluntarily or by compulsion, found ourselves in the Great King’s forces did not expect, in fact, any fighting at all. According to the reports which reached us, all Greece, except Athens and Sparta, had already sent tokens of submission — earth and water — to Persia; and these reports were not greatly exaggerated. It was expected that the expedition of Xerxes would be rather a triumphal procession than a military campaign. Nor were we conscious of any real opposition to our fellow countrymen. There were many Greeks with Xerxes ready to regain power in states from which, for one reason or another, they had been
exiled. The whole operation (so it seemed to us) would certainly end in an extension of the Great King’s dominions, but in practical terms of Greek politics only in the substitution of one party for another.

  We were, of course, wrong, and I myself am certainly ashamed to think of how lacking I was in political and indeed scientific perception. It is true that older and wiser men than I were at least equally mistaken, but I have never regarded the stupidity of others as any excuse for my own. I should on this point prefer to excuse my insensitivity rather on the grounds that I did not think at all than that I though like everyone else.

  Indeed, when I rode out from Clazomenai to join the king’s army in Sardis I thought of little except the excitement of foreign travel. And in the king’s army itself there was enough to excite any inquiring intelligence. This army included almost every race in the known world. I was told that more than five hundred languages were in use. And not only in language but in dress, equipment, armor, pigmentation, custom and religion there was an extraordinary variety. The Persian soldiers were, of course, familiar to me, with their trousers and mail coats, which looked like the scales of a fish; but I looked with amazement at contingents of other peoples of whom, up to then, I had known nothing — the Assyrians with their bronze helmets and wooden clubs studded with iron, the Indians with their cotton dresses and cane bows, the Ethiopians, who carried shields made from the skins of cranes and who wore on their heads horses’ scalps with the ears and manes dangling behind. Innumerable others too; but this is not the place to describe either the army or the march through Asia, over the Hellespont and into Greece. These events have already been well described by my young friend Herodotus, who was himself a baby at this time, and who has often in later years spent hours with me in Athens, questioning me on every detail of the expedition. With his great skill and considerable intelligence he has, I think, produced a literary masterpiece, though I doubt whether it deserved that enormous monetary prize which it was awarded, through the influence of Pericles, at Athens. The book is still in immense demand and people are prepared to pay exorbitant prices for it, whereas my own works on philosophy are available at Athens for the modest price of one drachma.

  Personally I am delighted with young Herodotus’s success and I am glad that I have, in a minor way, contributed to it. I wish, however, that in some ways he had adopted a more scientific attitude. I remember telling him, for instance, of the so-called skin of Marsyas, which is on show in the Phrygian city of Celaenai. Tourists are encouraged to admire this as the skin of the satyr, or silenus, Marsyas, who was flayed by Apollo after unsuccessfully competing with him in music. Now, as I told Herodotus, I have myself identified this skin as the skin of a rare species of Cappadocian mountain goat. Moreover, my studies in anatomy and reproduction have led me to believe that it is extremely unlikely that such creatures as satyrs have ever existed. But Herodotus, in his history, makes no mention of my identification of the skin. He prefers to subscribe to superstition by merely repeating the local story. However, in general, his work is greatly to be admired and his account of Xerxes’ expedition is excellent. Certainly there is no need for me now to recall to you in detail those tremendous experiences which he has so well described. Few, however, who have not seen it can imagine that great bridge across the Hellespont, packed with all the nations of the east marching to the conquest of Europe. And as we went on through Thrace and into Thessaly, we were joined by more and more contingents of troops — Greeks, Macedonians, Thracians and strange tribes from the unknown interior. Physically speaking, it appeared that this force was wholly irresistible.

  There were indeed three unexpected events. First the great storm in which four hundred ships of the king’s navy were destroyed, then the heroic resistance of the Spartans and their allies at Thermopylae; and, no less important, the fact that the small Greek fleet, consisting mostly of Athenian vessels, was able to engage the king’s fleet in the narrow waters between Euboea and the mainland and to hold its own. But these events were not decisive or even, it seemed, very important. The Spartan position was turned and the Persian fleet, even after the storm, was still more than three times as strong as any fleet that could be found to oppose it.

  So the army moved south into Attica, encountering no resistance. Late in the summer we came to Athens and found it deserted except for a few old men and temple attendants who, in a mistaken faith in an oracle, had barricaded themselves on the Acropolis. Their defense was overwhelmed and those of them who did not commit suicide were massacred. Then the temples on the Acropolis were set on fire and Xerxes sent a messenger back to Susa to announce to Persia that his victory, at least so far as the Athenians were concerned, was complete.

  It was at this time that I, with a few other Ionians who shared my views, deserted the king’s army and, after having bribed the captain of one of the small craft attached to the king’s fleet, sailed across to Salamis, where the Athenian fleet was based and where most of the Athenian noncombatants had taken refuge. Our action sprang, I think, rather from the natural adventurousness of youth than from any nobler motive. It is true that we had begun to feel somewhat ashamed at the prospect of having to fight our fellow countrymen. Here, perhaps, the propaganda of Themistocles had affected us. For, owing to his instructions, there had been engraved or painted on the rocks, both on the land and sea routes by which the Persians had advanced, appeals to the Greeks serving in the army or fleet not to incur the guilt of helping to destroy their own mother country. There were also assurances that final victory would go to the Greeks and that those who had collaborated with the Persians would be punished. Few, I think, believed these assurances. We did not know precisely what would happen, but certainly anticipated a Persian conquest of the mainland. As for ourselves, we hoped that if we survived we should have an opportunity of sailing westward, to Italy or Sicily, either to some Greek city already established or to some new settlement which would be founded by the Athenians to replace their own city now occupied and half destroyed by the Persians. It did not occur to me that I should spend the greater part of my adult life in a new Athens, far more glorious than the old, and established on the same spot.

  So we reached Salamis and were welcomed both for ourselves (my father had certain relations of hospitality with some of the leading Athenian families) and for the information which we brought with regard to the Persian forces. Among those who questioned me was Xanthippus, the father of Pericles. He had been in exile, but had been recalled in the general amnesty of the year before. He behaved most generously to me, and it was through him that I made the acquaintance of Pericles himself, then a boy of about fourteen.

  2

  Victories

  I can see him now as I saw him then — a boy of quite extraordinary beauty, of unusual intelligence and of the sweetest disposition. When I met him first (and we made friends at once) he was angry and embittered, but in his anger and his bitterness there was nothing uncouth, nothing coarse, nothing stupid. He was angry about his dog, and in his anger there were several points that I found remarkable. First, the anger had lasted for some weeks (an unusual thing in a boy of his age); and then his feeling, while intense, was, in a way, generalized. He bitterly disapproved of his father’s behavior in this instance, but without any real personal animosity. His attitude was like that of a god who condemns and perhaps violently punishes the deed while looking calmly on the doer of it. Yet he was not aloof (as gods are said to be) and was far from being insensitive.

  It appears that what had happened was this. When evacuating his family and household from his estate near Athens to Salamis, Xanthippus had given orders that no animals were to be taken aboard the first boat. Horses, hounds and other livestock were to be ferried over later, supposing transport to be available. It was a sensible enough order, considering the shortage of space, but one of the hounds, a particular favorite of Pericles’s, refused to be left behind. This animal sprang into the water and began to swim after the ship, which, of course, rapidly wen
t ahead. Soon nothing could be seen but a speck in the distance, which was the dog’s head, and in the general hurry and confusion, no one would listen to Pericles’s entreaties and demands that they should put about and rescue the creature. Unavailing attempts were made to reassure the boy by pointing out that the dog would soon get tired and swim back again. In fact the dog did nothing of the kind. By some sense, whether of sight or smell, he kept contact with the vessel for the whole distance, and when they had nearly finished unloading the cargo at Salamis, he was to be seen again still swimming toward the shore. Pericles, and Xanthippus too, ran down to the beach in delight to welcome the animal. But the dog was exhausted. He crawled up on to the sand, put back his ears, as though expecting to be stroked, collapsed and died. I was told that for a week after this Pericles would not speak to his elder brother Ariphron, who had taken the event lightly. He was furious too with his father, whom he regarded as responsible for the death, though in the end he became mollified when Xanthippus, who was genuinely sorry for the boy and at the same time proud of the distinction won by the dog, had a tomb built for the animal on the shores of Salamis. It is to be seen there to this day.

  I mention this incident in order to illustrate an aspect of Pericles’s character which is not generally known. People who saw him only in public are apt to think of him as austere or, as they used to say, “Olympian”; they do not recognize that tenderheartedness of his which was very evident in his private relationships and which extended, as we have seen, even to animals.

  It was in the company of Pericles that from some high ground in Salamis I watched the great naval battle in the straits. The boy was eager to be in the fighting himself. So indeed was I; but the ships were already fully manned. I had no equipment, and so was given some small administrative post ashore. Xanthippus, of course, was in command of a trireme and Pericles’s elder brother was with him.