by Rex Warner
11
Activity in Leisure
In the following year I saw more of Pericles and his household than I had seen for some time. This was because Pericles himself had more leisure than usual, for it was one of the few years in which he was not elected to the board of generals. He correctly estimated that after the terms of the peace were known his popularity would decline and that it would soon be recovered. For the Athenians are not always rational. Most of them were glad to have peace and many of them were aware that in making it Pericles had gained much and lost little. Yet still they found it almost intolerable to withdraw from any position which they had once occupied. So, for a very short time, Pericles was out of favor, though before the end of the year the people were listening to him with all their old eagerness and attention whenever he spoke in the Assembly.
In his private life he had some disappointments and, apart from his friends, one great consolation and delight. He could feel no pride in his two sons, Paralos and Xanthippus, both of whom were extravagant and one of whom was rude, bad-tempered and uncouth. Obviously neither of them was fitted for any position of distinction. They were resentful of their father for his economic habits and indeed expected nothing from him except money. They were quite incapable of following his thought or understanding his character. His two wards, the sons of Kleinias, who had died with Tolmides at Koroneia, were no more satisfactory. One of these boys, called after his father, was almost halfwitted. The other, Alcibiades, had all the charm, brilliance and energy of the Alcmaeonidae. He was good-looking, strong, ambitious and remarkably intelligent. He was also ruthless, extravagant, self-willed and vicious. His aim was always for distinction — a good aim, if pursued with virtue and humanity. But Alcibiades would be, by any means, the first in everything. They say that once, when wrestling with a stronger boy, he was in danger of being thrown and, to avoid defeat, fastened his teeth into the other boy’s arm. The boy was shocked and astonished. “Alcibiades,” he said, “you bite like a girl.”
“No,” said Alcibiades. “Like a lion.”
In my view, if Alcibiades had been able to feel sympathy for his guardian, he might, with all his fine qualities (for he was not only physically but intellectually admirable), have become a man of whom Pericles himself might be proud. His patriotism is as great as that of Pericles; his intellectual powers not much inferior. Yet while Pericles was absorbed in Athens, Alcibiades, I think, would absorb Athens in himself. He is like one of those lovers who, rather than lose the object of their affections, would destroy it. Such lovers describe themselves as devoted, but they are devoted more to their own passions than to the thing which excites them.
Very different was the love which Pericles felt both for Athens and for individual men and women. And his love for one woman would be remarkable in any man. Almost equally remarkable is the fact that Aspasia not only returned bud deserved his affection. It was about this time that she first came to live with him, and she remained his companion for the rest of his life. She is, of course, an Ionian from Miletus and she had not been long in Athens before she attracted the attention of Pericles. She was then a young woman about twenty years old and belonged to that class which is called in Athens the “Hetairai.” These women are very different from common prostitutes, though they too make their living by the pleasures of their company. But in their case the pleasures which they confer are not entirely or even mainly physical. Most of them are intelligent, used to the company of men and at ease in conversation. For these reasons the ordinary Athenian housewife expresses contempt for them, but feels envy. Aspasia in particular inflamed their anger because she had none of the faults which they attribute indiscriminately to her class. She remained faithful to one man (which is more than can be said of most housewives) and, since Pericles was known for his moderate style of living, she could scarcely be accused of seeking him out for the sake of money. It was easier to make jokes at the expense of Pericles himself and to say that he, who was now fifty years old, was weakly yielding to an infatuation unsuited to his age and experience, behaving like the great Heracles when enslaved by Omphale, or like Zeus himself who, under the spell of Hera’s attractions, was lulled to sleep when he should have been active. Some even suggested that if he could show such extraordinary devotion to one woman he must necessarily feel the same devotion to a great many more and be a secret libertine, constantly in pursuit of other men’s wives. Such gossip was, as a rule, harmless. The Athenians enjoy nothing so much as finding what they imagine to be a weak point one of their leaders whom they most admire. But, as I know from my own experience, there are times in Athens when people become wholly swayed by prejudice, and at such times they will believe any scandal, however stupid and however demonstrably untrue. I myself and many others, including Aspasia, have suffered from these outbreaks of malice and unreason.
It seems to me that in his conduct toward Aspasia, Pericles was setting a standard which, like all his standards, was unusually high and which is deserving of imitation. He was in the habit of giving her a kiss when he left the house and when he returned to it. People regarded this as most peculiar, but to my mind there is nothing at all peculiar in demonstrations of affection that are both graceful and sincere. It is undoubtedly rare for a man not to soon grow tired of a woman, but it is impossible to maintain that everything rare is undesirable. I believe that Pericles and Aspasia enjoyed more satisfaction from each others’ company and conferred more genuine benefits, each on each, than any other pair of human beings belonging to opposite sexes with whom I have been acquainted. And I think that if such a state of mutual enjoyment and understanding were more common, it would be an advantage not only to the parents but to the children. Certainly the child who was born later to Pericles and Aspasia was in every way a much finer character than either Xanthippus or Paralos.
We Ionians like to think (and we have reason for it) that our women are remarkable for their grace of manner and of person, their strong affections and their pleasant vivacity. Aspasia possessed all these qualities to the full and also had intellectual qualities which would be exceptional in either sex or in any country. She had a naturally quick intelligence and much knowledge; nor was she satisfied, as many people far less informed than she was often are, with the knowledge that she possessed. She would discuss philosophy with me as readily as poetry with Sophocles or politics with Pericles, and her conversation on these subjects was at least as stimulating to us as in all probability ours was to her. No wonder that we took pleasure in her company!
A regular guest of Pericles at this time was the sculptor Pheidias, a man who, apart altogether from his extraordinary genius in the working of bronze, marble, gold and ivory, was gifted with an original and farseeing mind. He was older than Pericles and indeed not much younger than I, but was only just beginning to come into his fame. He was known then chiefly for the great bronze statue of Athene the Champion which had recently been completed. All of you who have visited Athens will have seen this statue, famous not only for its size (it is at least thirty feet in height) but for the splendor of its conception. His later statues in gold and ivory of Athene in the Parthenon and of Zeus at Olympia are, of course, known and admired throughout the world. They are rightly regarded as the finest representations of divinity that have ever been produced by man. Some people regard this as odd, because Pheidias, like myself, was prosecuted for impiety, and it is only in a rather special sense that either of us can be said to believe in the gods. For the gods are not objects of natural inquiry. I have yet to meet a man who has seen a god, except in dreams, and it seems obvious that Xenophanes is right in saying that the qualities which we attribute to the gods cannot be other than those which we know ourselves. If horses had gods, these gods would partake of the nature of a horse. It is therefore evidently mistaken to suppose that the gods have faces and limbs like ours, are either male or female, or that they speak Greek. Many people, on the basis of such consideration, have concluded either that no gods exist or that, if they
do, they must be totally incomprehensible to us, but neither of these conclusions seems to me legitimate. Apart from man there are other existences in nature which we recognize and, in varying degrees, understand. No man, or anything like a man, controls the movements of the moon and stars or the process by which one state of being is transformed into another. The events of human life too do not wholly conform to a pattern of reason and of justice. Most men are disquieted when they observe such facts, and the more simple-minded attribute what is incomprehensible to the actions, beneficent, malevolent or capricious, of various deities. This merely adds one problem to another, for if we are to believe in gods at all, we must believe them to be wiser and better than men. I, as you know, have put forward the theory of a creative force, which I call intelligence, and which I assume to bring order out of disorder, justice out of injustice and to be the principle, in various modifications, of change and of motion. That such a thing exists we cannot, in the nature of things, be certain, but a good man, unless he can find some better explanation for things, will not be mistaken in believing that there is some truth in what I say.
Pericles, Pheidias, Damon and Euripides (among others) have all been deeply interested in my views and all of them have been accused by the ignorant of atheism. In fact we are looking for principles more exalted and consistent than are to be found in the self-contradictions and crudities of mythology and the effect of our speculations will be to purify, not to debase, popular religion. For one can imagine no kind of god capable of approving a man who believes in what is demonstrably untrue.
Yet even error can, by the force of intelligence, be shaped in the direction of truth, and Pheidias as much as any man has succeeded in doing this. He knows as well as I do that gods do not have arms and legs, hair and eyes; but it is also true that there do genuinely exist in nature qualities which we rightly think of as higher than others beauty, for instance, intelligence, goodness and serenity. To depict a god in any kind of shape — human, animal, vegetable or mineral is, of course, inaccurate; but so long as the shape is endowed with such qualities as those I have mentioned, it will provoke a kind of reverence and the result will be, from a human point of view, both delightful and useful, and, from a philosophical point of view, not necessarily misleading. If one wishes merely to illustrate the variety and contradiction of the universe, with its alternations of good and evil, beauty and disfigurement, being and not-being, it may be more appropriate to do as the Egyptians do and produce images of men with the heads of crocodiles, dogs and cats. And from the old temples of the Acropolis which were destroyed by the Persians there still survive fragments of sculptured monsters which are not without significance. Those works which emphasize the forces of vision, creation and stability are more significant, however, and more useful than those which merely signify the strength and terror of what is uncontrolled and, because disorderly, savage. This, at least, is the view of an Ionian and a Greek, and, as is shown by the tremendous reputation of Pheidias, it is a view that is very generally held.
Such considerations as these frequently formed the theme of our conversations at this time, for it was now, in the years of peace, that were begun and so rapidly completed those great schemes of building, sculpture, decoration and amenity which have made Athens incomparably the finest city in the world. Pheidias was the general supervisor of all these works and he owed this splendid opportunity to his friendship with Pericles, who would discuss with him every detail, help him in all branches of administration, and supply and defend vigorously in the Assembly the whole ambitious plan against his political opponents who complained of waste of money and unjustifiable diversion of the tribute of the allies to the glorification of Athens.
It was natural, therefore, that in these days we talked much of the problems of architecture, sculpture and painting. These problems are interesting in themselves, but what was surprising and exciting was to see them being solved so rapidly and so perfectly. I myself found these conversations most interesting from a philosophical point of view; for it has always seemed to me that the principles of art are the same as the principles of nature. What we see depends on what is unseen, and a state of perfection is a state of balanced contradiction, of a synthesis of opposites, of tension resolved in peace. In the Parthenon, for instance, the tremendous weight of the structure, which is evident if one examines it with one’s vision limited to one section or estimates the sheer quantity of marble that has been used, has, when seen as a whole, a quality of supernatural lightness. The lines seem to soar into the sky and then to cease at an upper limit; yet in the whole building there is not one straight line, and one can hardly say there is a limit, since this work of art is made miraculously in adjustment with its natural surroundings, the sea, the sky, the mountains and the plain. But here again I digress. All of you who have been to Athens will know and will have wondered at these productions. They are works made possible by the most precise exercise of mathematics, by the keenest and most humane intelligence. Pheidias was the master artist, Callicrates, Ictinus and Mnesicles were architects of the most extraordinary brilliance, subtlety, insight and imagination. The inspiration was that of Pericles, and the force and impetus was from the directed energy and enthusiasm of the Athenian people. If anything on earth can be immortal, these constructions of flesh, blood and intellect will remain so.
These works were done once and were done forever. A due consideration of them may lead one into speculation upon the nature of time and of motion, and I hope, before I die, to set down something of what I have been able to think or imagine on these enormously important subjects. The memory of that time still fills me with wonder, even though I was then occupied in very different and, it now seems to me, subordinate pursuits. Not that the researches which I was making into the rarefaction and condensation of air are insignificant. Obviously they are of very great importance indeed. The difference between a Greek and a barbarian is, apart from the language, in the fact that a Greek wants to know and to explain. And for knowledge both observation and experiment are necessary. Yet in knowledge and beyond knowledge, in the final act of explanation, the mind must, as it were, leap into darkness and find there a bright place to rest. Pheidias in his great works and Sophocles too and Pericles seem to have done something like this. Out of the ferment, energy and contradiction of life they have constructed intellectual shapes of beauty, satisfaction and truth.
I myself at this time had already been working for some years in collaboration with my friend the Athenian Archelaus, whom you know. Others apart from our old circle would often come to take part in our philosophical discussions and investigations. Among the young men who used to visit us regularly I remember one in particular, since he, almost in the same way as the artists whom I have mentioned, seems to combine very great strength of intellect with a singular freshness and adventurousness of spirit. His name is Socrates and I should not be surprised if in the end he becomes better known than he is now. When I first met him I thought him the ugliest young man I had ever seen. He looks not only as strong as a bear but rather like one. But one has only to be with him for a few minutes to become amazed and delighted by his wit, his charm, his ready consideration for others and his extraordinarily keen intelligence. He had taken part in the recent campaign of Andokides in the Megarid when great dangers had been escaped by almost incredible exertions on the part of the army. Even in this army he had impressed his fellow soldiers with his apparently total indifference to heat, cold, danger or fatigue. It was not that, it seems, like many young soldiers, he was trying to gain a reputation for courage and endurance; it was simply, they said, that it never occurred to him to think of cowardice or weariness. Socrates used to reply that if this was true, he deserved no credit at all; it was impossible to know one quality or experience one sensation without also knowing the opposite one; a man who knows nothing of cowardice can know nothing of courage either; if, therefore, his conduct had really been what it was described, he should be treated with commiseration rather t
han with honor, for no one can be called virtuous who is so stupid and insensitive as not to be able to tell good from evil.
But I am digressing, led astray by the many and happy memories of that time. Now Pericles is dead; Pheidias, Damon and I are in exile; Socrates has, for all I know, died in battle or of the plague. Yet whether in death or exile the fact stands that we lived in Athens at that time and were uniquely happy in doing so. Now Sophocles and Euripides still produce their plays, and when I read them I consider that they write with greater skill and wisdom than ever; yet still I find lacking some element that was always present in those days. I am reminded of a phrase that Pericles once used in one of the official speeches made in honor of those who had died in battle. “The spring,” he said, “has gone out of the year.” The fleets of Athens still control the sea; the people still react to disaster with resolution and to opportunity with ambition. Yet now I seem to detect a kind of feverishness in their enterprise, a lack of ease in their confidence. Athens too, no doubt, insofar as it is an organization of men, is subject to the general laws of growth and decay. Yet there is a sense in which it may be said that she has already transcended those laws. Like other states, she has been guilty of crime and injustice. Unlike any other state, she has aimed at an excellence that may prove to be beyond the powers of human nature, and, however the process ends, her success has been more than partial. To those of us who know her, her faults seem, if regrettable, incidental. What we love in her is something which, through being faultless, must prove eternal.