The Life of Greece

by Will Durant

  Since any form of government seems good that brings prosperity, and even the best seems bad that hinders it, Pericles, having consolidated his political position, turned to economic statesmanship. He sought to reduce the pressure of population upon the narrow resources of Attica by establishing colonies of poor Athenian citizens upon foreign soil. To give work to the idle,16 he made the state an employer on a scale unprecedented in Greece: ships were added to the fleet, arsenals were built, and a great corn exchange was erected at the Piraeus. To protect Athens effectively from siege by land, and at the same time to provide further work for the unemployed, Pericles persuaded the Assembly to supply funds for constructing eight miles of “Long Walls,” as they were to be called, connecting Athens with the Piraeus and Phalerum; the effect was to make the city and its ports one fortified enclosure, open in wartime only to the sea—on which the Athenian fleet was supreme. In the hostility with which unwalled Sparta looked upon this program of fortification the oligarchic party saw a chance to recapture political power. Its secret agents invited the Spartans to invade Attica and, with the aid of an oligarchic insurrection, to put down the democracy; in this event the oligarchs pledged themselves to level the Long Walls. The Spartans agreed, and dispatched an army which defeated the Athenians at Tanagra (457); but the oligarchs failed to make their revolution. The Spartans returned to the Peloponnesus empty-handed, dourly awaiting a better opportunity to overcome the flourishing rival that was taking from them their traditional leadership of Greece.

  Pericles rejected the temptation to retaliate upon Sparta, and instead, devoted his energies now to the beautification of Athens. Hoping to make his city the cultural center of Hellas, and to rebuild the ancient shrines—which the Persians had destroyed—on a scale and with a splendor that would lift up the soul-of every citizen, he devised a plan for using all the genius of Athens’ artists, and the labor of her remaining unemployed, in a bold program for the architectural adornment of the Acropolis. “It was his desire and design,” says Plutarch, “that the undisciplined mechanic multitude . . . should not go without their share of public funds, and yet should not have these given them for sitting still and doing nothing; and to this end he brought in these vast projects of construction.”17 To finance the undertaking he proposed that the treasury accumulated by the Delian Confederacy should be removed from Delos, where it lay idle and insecure, and that such part of it as was not needed for common defense should be used to beautify what seemed to Pericles the legitimate capital of a beneficent empire.

  The transference of the Delian treasury to Athens was quite acceptable to the Athenians, even to the oligarchs. But the voters were loath to spend any substantial part of the fund in adorning their city—whether through some qualm of conscience, or through a secret hope that the money might be appropriated more directly to their needs and enjoyment. The oligarchic leaders played upon this feeling so cleverly that when the matter neared a vote in the Assembly the defeat of Pericles’ plan seemed certain. Plutarch tells a delightful story of how the subtle leader turned the tide. “‘Very well,’ said Pericles; ‘let the cost of these buildings go not to your account but to mine; and let the inscription upon them stand in my name.’ When they heard him say this, whether it were out of a surprise to see the greatness of his spirit, or out of emulation of the glory of the works, they cried aloud, bidding him spend on . . . and spare no cost till all were finished.”

  While the work proceeded, and Pericles’ especial protection and support were given to Pheidias, Ictinus, Mnesicles, and the other artists who labored to realize his dreams, he lent his patronage also to literature and philosophy; and whereas in the other Greek cities of this period the strife of parties consumed much of the energy of the citizens, and literature languished, in Athens the stimulus of growing wealth and democratic freedom was combined with wise and cultured leadership to produce the Golden Age. When Pericles, Aspasia, Pheidias, Anaxagoras, and Socrates attended a play by Euripides in the Theater of Dionysus, Athens could see visibly the zenith and unity of the life of Greece—statesmanship, art, science, philosophy, literature, religion, and morals living no separate career as in the pages of chroniclers, but woven into one many-colored fabric of a nation’s history.

  The affections of Pericles wavered between art and philosophy, and he might have found it hard to say whether he loved Pheidias or Anaxagoras the more; perhaps he turned to Aspasia as a compromise between beauty and wisdom. For Anaxagoras he entertained, we are told, “an extraordinary esteem and admiration.”18 It was the philosopher, says Plato,19 who deepened Pericles into statesmanship; from long intercourse with Anaxagoras, Plutarch believes, Pericles derived “not merely elevation of purpose and dignity of language, raised far above the base and dishonest buffooneries of mob eloquence, but, besides this, a composure of countenance, and a serenity and calmness in all his movements, which no occurrence whilst he was speaking could disturb.” When Anaxagoras was old, and Pericles was absorbed in public affairs, the statesman for a time let the philosopher drop out of his life; but later, hearing that Anaxagoras was starving, Pericles hastened to his relief, and accepted humbly his rebuke, that “those who have occasion for a lamp supply it with oil.”20

  It seems hardly credible, and yet on second thought most natural, that the stern “Olympian” should have been keenly susceptible to the charms of woman; his self-control fought against a delicate sensibility, and the toils of office must have heightened in him the normal male longing for feminine tenderness. He had been many years married when he met Aspasia. She belonged to—she was helping to create—the type of hetaira that was about to play so active a part in Athenian life: a woman rejecting the seclusion that marriage brought to the ladies of Athens, and preferring to live in unlicensed unions, even in relative promiscuity, if thereby she might enjoy the same freedom of movement and conduct as men, and participate with them in their cultural interests. We have no testimony to Aspasia’s beauty, though ancient writers speak of her “small, high-arched foot,” “her silvery voice,” and her golden hair.21 Aristophanes, an unscrupulous political enemy of Pericles, describes her as a Milesian courtesan who had established a luxurious brothel at Megara, and had now imported some of her girls into Athens; and the great comedian delicately suggests that the quarrel of Athens with Megara, which precipitated the Peloponnesian War, was brought about because Aspasia persuaded Pericles to revenge her upon Megarians who had kidnaped some of her personnel.22 But Aristophanes was not an historian, and may be trusted only where he himself is not concerned.

  Arriving in Athens about 450, Aspasia opened a school of rhetoric and philosophy, and boldly encouraged the public emergence and higher education of women. Many girls of good family came to her classes, and some husbands brought their wives to study with her.23 Men also attended her lectures, among them Pericles and Socrates, and probably Anaxagoras, Euripides, Alcibiades, and Pheidias. Socrates said that he had learned from her the art of eloquence,24 and some ancient gossips would have it that the Statesman inherited her from the philosopher.25 Pericles now found it admirable that his wife had formed an affection for another man. He offered her her freedom in return for his own, and she agreed; she took a third husband,26 while Pericles brought Aspasia home. By his own law of 451 he could not make her his wife, since she was of Milesian birth; any child he might have by her would be illegitimate, and ineligible to Athenian citizenship. He seems to have loved her sincerely, even uxoriously, never leaving his home or returning to it without kissing her, and finally willing his fortune to the son that she bore him. From that time onward he forewent all social life outside his home, seldom going anywhere except to the agora or the council hall; the people of Athens began to complain of his aloofness. For her part Aspasia made his home a French Enlightenment salon, where the art and science, the literature, philosophy, and statesmanship of Athens were brought together in mutual stimulation. Socrates marveled at her eloquence, and credited her with composing the funeral oration that Pericles del
ivered aher the first casualties of the “Peloponnesian War.27 Aspasia became the uncrowned queen of Athens, setting fashion’s tone, and giving to the women of the city an exciting example of mental and moral freedom.

  The conservatives were shocked at all this, and turned it to their purposes. They denounced Pericles for leading Greeks out to war against Greeks, as in Aegina and Samos; they accused him of squandering public funds; finally, through the mouths of irresponsible comic dramatists abusing the free speech that prevailed under his rule, they charged him with turning his home into a house of ill fame, and having relations with the wife, of his son28. Not daring to bring any of these matters to open trial, they attacked him through his friends. They indicted Pheidias for embezzling, as they alleged, some of the gold assigned to him for his chryselephantine Athena, and apparently succeeded in convicting him; they indieted Anaxagoras on the ground of irreligion, and the philosopher, on Pericles’ advice, fled into exile; they brought against Aspasia a like writ of impiety (graphe asebeias), complaining that she had shown disrespect for the gods of Greece.29 The comic poets satirized her mercilessly as a Deianeira who had ruined Pericles,* and called her, in plain Greek, a concubine; one of them, Hermippus, doubtless in turn a dishonest penny, accused her of serving as Pericles’ procuress, and of bringing freeborn women to him for his pleasure.30 At her trial, which took place before a court of fifteen hundred jurors, Pericles spoke in her defense, using all his eloquence, even to tears; and the case was dismissed. From that moment (432) Pericles began to lose his hold upon the Athenian people; and when, three years later, death came to him, he was already a broken man.

  III. ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY

  1. Deliberation

  These strange indictments suffice to show how real was the limited democracy that functioned under the supposed dictatorship of Pericles. We must study this democracy carefully, for it is one of the outstanding experiments in the history of government. It is limited, first, by the fact that only a small minority of the people can read. It is limited physically by the difficulty of reaching Athens from the remoter towns of Attica. The franchise is restricted to those sons, of two free Athenian parents, who have reached the age of twenty-one; and only they and their families enjoy civil rights, or directly bear the military and fiscal burdens of the state. Within this jealously circumscribed circle of 43,000 citizens out of an Attic population of 315,000, political power, in the days of Pericles, is formally equal; each citizen enjoys and insists upon isonomia and isegoria—equal rights at law and in the Assembly. To the Athenian a citizen is a man who not only votes, but takes his turn, by lot and rote, as magistrate or judge; he must be free, ready, and able to serve the state at any time. No one who is subject to another, or who has to labor in order to live, can have the time or the capacity for these services; and therefore the manual worker seems to most Athenians unfit for citizenship, though, with human inconsistency they admit the peasant proprietor. All of the 115,000 slaves of Attica, all women, nearly all workingmen, all of the 28,500 “metics” or resident aliens,* and consequently a great part of the trading class, are excluded from the franchise.†

  The voters are not gathered into parties, but are loosely divided into followers of the oligarchic or the democratic factions according as they oppose or favor the extension of the franchise, the dominance of the Assembly, and the governmental succor of the poor at the expense of the rich. The active members of each faction are organized into clubs called hetaireiai, companionships. There are clubs of all kinds in Periclean Athens—religious clubs, kinship clubs, military clubs, workers’ clubs, actors’ clubs, political clubs, and clubs honestly devoted to eating and drinking. The strongest of all are the oligarchic clubs, whose members are sworn to mutual aid in politics and law, and are bound by a common passionate hostility to those lower enfranchised ranks that press upon the toes of the landed aristocracy and the moneyed merchant class.31 Against them stand the relatively democratic party of small businessmen, of citizens who have become wage workers, and of those who man the merchant ships and the Athenian fleet; these groups resent the luxuries and privileges of the rich, and raise up to leadership in Athens such men as Cleon the tanner, Lysicles the sheep dealer, Eucrates the tow seller, Cleophon the harp manufacturer, and Hyperbolus the lampmaker. Pericles holds them off for a generation by a subtle mixture of democracy and aristocracy; but when he dies they inherit the government and thoroughly enjoy its perquisites. From Solon to the Roman conquest this bitter conflict of oligarchs and democrats is waged with oratory, votes, ostracism, assassination, and civil war.

  Every voter is of right a member of the basic governing body—the ekklesia, or Assembly; there is at this level no representative government. Since transportation is difficult over the hills of Attica, only a fraction of the eligible members ever attend any one meeting; there are rarely more than two or three thousand. Those citizens who live in Athens or at the Piraeus come by a kind of geographical determinism to dominate the Assembly; in this way the democrats gain ascendancy over the conservatives, who are for the most part scattered among the farms and estates of Attica. The Assembly meets four times a month, on important occasions in the agora, in the Theater of Dionysus, or at the Piraeus, ordinarily in a semicircular place called the Pnyx on the slope of a hill west of the Areopagus; in all these cases the members sit on benches under the open sky, and the sitting begins at dawn. Each session opens with the sacrifice of a pig to Zeus. It is usual to adjourn at once in case of a storm, earthquake, or eclipse, for these are accounted signs of divine disapproval. New legislation may be proposed only at the first session of each month, and the member who offers it is held responsible for the result of its adoption; if these are seriously evil another member may within a year of the vote invoke upon him the graphe paranomon, or writ of illegality, and have him fined, disfranchised, or put to death; this is Athens’ way of discouraging hasty legislation. By another form of the same writ a new proposal may be checked by a demand that before its enactment one of the courts shall pass upon its constitutionality—i.e., its agreement with existing law.32 Again, before considering a bill, the Assembly is required to submit it to the Council of Five Hundred for preliminary examination, very much as a bill in the American Congress, before discussion of it on the floor, is referred to a committee presumed to have especial knowledge and competence in the matter involved. The Council may not reject a proposal outright; it may only report it, with or without a recommendation.

  Ordinarily the presiding officer opens the Assembly by presenting a probouleuma, or reported bill. Those who wish to speak are heard in the order of their age; but anyone may be disqualified from addressing the Assembly if it can be shown that he is not a landowner, or is not legally married, or has neglected his duties to his parents, or has offended public morals, or has evaded a military obligation, or has thrown away his shield in battle, or owes taxes or other money to the state.33 Only trained orators avail themselves of the right to speak, for the Assembly is a difficult audience. It laughs at mispronunciations, protests aloud at digressions, expresses its approval with shouts, whistling, and clapping of hands, and, if it strongly disapproves, makes such a din that the speaker is compelled to leave the bema, or rostrum.34 Each speaker is allowed a given time, whose lapse is measured by a clepsydra or water clock.35 Voting is by a show of hands unless some individual is directly and specially affected by the proposal, in which case a secret ballot is taken. The vote may confirm, amend, or override the Council’s report on a bill, and the decision of the Assembly is final. Decrees for immediate action, as distinct from laws, may be enacted more expeditiously than new legislation; but such decrees may with equal expedition be canceled, and do not enter into the body of Athenian law.

  Above the Assembly in dignity, inferior to it in power, is the boule, or Council. Originally an upper house, it has by the time of Pericles been reduced in effect to a legislative committee of the ekklesia. Its members are chosen by lot and rote from the register of the citizens,
fifty for each of the ten tribes; they serve for a year only, and receive, in the fourth century, five obols per day. Since each councilor is disqualified for re-election until all other eligible citizens have had a chance to serve, every citizen, in the normal course of events, sits on the boule for at least one term during his life. It meets in the bouleuterion, or council hall, south of the agora, and its ordinary sessions are public. Its functions are legislative, executive, and consultative: it examines and reformulates the bills proposed to the Assembly; it supervises the conduct and accounts of the religious and administrative officials of the city; it controls public finances, enterprises, and buildings; it issues executive decrees when action is called for and the Assembly is not in session; and, subject to later revision by the Assembly, it controls the foreign affairs of the state.

  To perform these varied tasks the Council divides itself into ten prytanies, or committees, each of fifty members; and each prytany presides over the Council and the Assembly for a month of thirty-six days. Every morning the presiding prytany chooses one of its members to serve as chairman of itself and the Council for the day; this position, the highest in the state, is therefore open by lot and turn to any citizen; Athens has three hundred presidents every year. The lot determines at the last moment which prytany, and which member of it, shall preside over the Council during the month or the day; by this device the corrupt Athenians hope to reduce the corruption of justice to the lowest point attainable by human character. The acting prytany prepares the agenda, convokes the Council, and formulates the conclusions reached during the day. In this way, through Assembly, Council, and prytany, the democracy of Athens carries out its legislative functions. As for the Areopagus, its powers are in the fifth century restricted to trying cases of arson, willful violence, poisoning, or premeditated murder. Slowly the law of Greece has been changed “from status to contract,” from the whim of one man, or the edict of a narrow class, into the deliberate agreement of free citizens.