The Classical World

by Robin Lane Fox

  Outside Athens, by contrast, Herodotus' Histories are full of stories of active women, wise or vengeful, but their setting is usually in a monarchical (or 'tyrannical') family world. In the different setting of a democratic community, the restrictions on Athenian citizen-women would surely have impressed him, as they were such a contrast with the Spartan women whom, as a visitor, he would have seen dancing naked. Among the male Athenian citizens, Herodotus would have noted the time given freely to democratic business, to assemblies (about four times a month), to the yearly council (up to twice in a lifetime) and to jury-service (for those on the yearly list of 6,000 volunteers). He did not think especially highly of the wisdom of a democratic crowd, but he would have had to respect the citizens' dedication. When he visited, the Athenians' Acropolis was being lav­ishly rebuilt with the support of the annual tribute received from their allies. Yet publicly elected committees were supervising all these public works and upholding the details of financial accountability on which the democracy insisted. Nothing so thorough and public would have been going on in his own Halicarnassus or in aristocratic Thessaly.

  Nonetheless, the architecture and the sculpture were not celebra­tions of democracy. A strengthened sense of political freedom under­pinned their artists' reasoned vision, but it did not provoke 'political sculptors': there were no representations of mass-meetings or 'crowd solidarity'. The Parthenon's fine sculpted frieze did not celebrate democracy. It showed elements of a festival-procession which had begun long before Cleisthenes: it included the mythical hero, Erichthonius, and, on one modern view, one section showed the sacri­fice of the legendary king's daughters to save the city in war. From the late 420's onwards they were joined by the supporting figures on the re-built Erechtheion temple, a famous image of classical Athens. But arguably, these figures represent women pouring libations to the dead Cecrops, the Athenians' legendary king, whose tomb lay below them.

  The religious life of the city also ran in largely pre-democratic channels. The Athenians, like all Greeks, had no weekend holidays (they did not even observe weeks), but they did have a calendar packed with religious festivals. By the 430s there were some 120 days of potential celebrations (the 'festival city', critics complained).6 Many of these days were long-established occasions and, in many cases, the families who provided the priests and priestesses were still the noble families of the pre-democratic past. Few of these jobs were filled by election or use of the lot. However, every Athenian male, female or slave could be initiated into the secret religious 'mysteries' at the nearby shrine of Eleusis, a rite which offered the promise of a happier afterlife beyond the grave. Yet this most inclusive feature of Athenian life went back long before the democracy too.

  Democracy had, however, made two clear cultural marks: in ora­tory and in drama. The big meetings of the assembly and the new law courts with their big juries gave a new scope for subtle oratory, both civic and forensic. Nothing like it is known from a non-democratic Greek state, although unfortunately we have no surviving Athenian example, first-hand, until 399 bc. In the wake of the Persian Wars, there had also begun the practice of a glorious Funeral Speech which was spoken by a picked orator in praise of the war-dead and their city. The best-known of such speeches is the one ascribed to Pericles in winter 431/0 bc. We do not know of this sort of speech in a non-democratic state, either.

  The relations between democracy and tragic drama have been much emphasized in recent cultural studies, but they are not at all direct. Indeed, the judges for the dramatic contests were now chosen by lot (to avoid bribery), but choice by lot was not exclusive to democrats. This theatre would be more 'democratic' if all citizens were receiving a state subsidy to enable them to buy theatre tickets, but the beginnings of this eventual Athenian practice are still disputed (in my view, the 440s are likely) and on any view, even the most optimistic, the free tickets only began when tragedies had been flourishing for some fifty years. Even when tickets were on offer, it is not at all certain that women could attend the performances too. But even if this eventual subsidy helped to broaden the social class of audiences, drama was not therefore 'democratic' by nature or unimaginable except as a democratic creation. The main festival for the god Dionysus had been introduced under the tyrants in the 530s bc and had begun with a simple programme of song and dance. No doubt it would have expanded under any form of government, even to the point (attained in the democratic era) when about a thousand male citizens sang and danced in the choral events each year. Probably, there would have been tragedies anyway under a different political system: they were, after all, dramas which explored the moral and religious conflicts not in everyday plots but in mythical tales from the 'royal' past. Certainly, Attic tragedy flourished perfectly well when it was composed or per­formed for non-democratic audiences abroad. If the Athenians had opted for an oligarchy of (say) 6,000 citizens in 508, surely they would have been enough of an audience to encourage dramatic contests ('democratic' audiences were probably often no more than 15,000 anyway, not all of whom were always citizens).

  Herodotus would have seen these dramatic contests prefaced by religious sacrifices and by the display of imperial tribute which was brought to Athens by allied tribute-bearers. These 'extras' were appro­priate items on the programme because the occasion was so big and public, the biggest Athenian meeting in the entire year. But the plays which followed were not therefore religious rituals or expositions or explorations of democratic or imperial ideology. Set in the mythical royal past, they explored issues of family and community, sexual relations, religion and the temper of heroes. They moved their audi­ences, as their minds and emotions ranged over the extreme moral events in the plays and the complex singing and dancing of their chorus. But they were not confirming, or questioning, a 'democratic ethos' in their spectators or instilling a lesson in civic duties, like a long 'Marseillaise'. The tragedies which survive could perfectly well have been composed and performed before an oligarchy of richer Athenians only. Tragedy's presentation of divine and human nature, especially the nature of great heroes, was wonderfully bleak and awesome. It deeply moved audiences and enlarged their horizons, but, two days later, had it not all been pigeonholed and worn off?

  One possible link with democracy, however, lies in a formal aspect of some of the surviving tragedies. Since the 460s, in a democratic law court, Athenian orators debated the rights and wrongs of a case before citizen-jurors. In tragedies, a long debating scene then developed in the middle of the play (the agon), in which characters debated a case before the citizen-audiences, many of whom were jurors on holiday. This form had surely developed at such length in drama in response to the citizen-spectators' own law-court experience. Otherwise, there was only one truly democratic art-form: political comedy. In it, prominent Athenian politicians were hilariously satir­ized and attacked. It would certainly not have arisen in a restricted and wary oligarchy, and when democracy was checked by Macedonian generals, after 322, dramatists close to the resulting oligarchy pre­ferred to put on plays which were harmless, depersonalized 'situation comedies'.

  For us, Athenian democratic comedy is dominated by its one surviv­ing genius, Aristophanes (active from the 420s to the 380s), but his own comments, and those of others, suggest that the plays of his older rival Cratinus are some of the saddest losses in all ancient literature. Aristophanes' humour ranges from brilliant puns and wordplay through crude and sexual allusions (some of which are still being recovered) to fantasy, parody, jokes about drama itself and brilliant, but merciless, personal invective and satire. His plays' combination of witty obscenity and sweet, agitated choral song is unique in all surviving drama. It is through him that we can best share the scale of the Athenians' admirable self-awareness. They have a marvellous ability to enter into hilarious thought-experiments about gender-roles and male and female relations (the plots were even more hilarious when every part was played by male actors). They also have a complete callousness about slaves or about the battiness of philosophers (t
here is a really aggressive note in Aristophanes' famous comedy, the Clouds, about Socrates and his influence).

  The plots of Aristophanes' comedies probably arose from specific news stories or public statements of the moment which are now lost to us, rather than from the sort of concern with abstract 'issues' which is familiar to us in the modern satires by Brecht. The surviving plays, nonetheless, span anything from a fond hope for peace during war to a sex-strike by women in order to bring it about, and a classic attempt to find and bring back the best dramatic poet from beyond the grave. Like Aristophanes, other contemporary comic dramatists were cap­able of almost any hilarious subversion. In 423 bc, old Cratinus' play the Wine Flask showed himself married to Comedy as his wife, but Comedy was wanting a divorce as Cratinus cared more for being drunk than he did for her.7 This promising self-parody has sadly not survived for us in any more detail. In 421 Eupolis even staged a comedy whose chorus was divided into two halves, the rich and the poor, while the plot satirized a leading popular politician as the eunuch-slave of the Athenian people, presented as his 'Persian' master.8 The mercurial minds of Athenians in this era could subvert and enjoy almost any fact of social and political life: freedom is, above all, democratic, and the proof that it exists is whether or not an Aristophanes is politically and culturally possible. He is the true symp­tom of a 'classical' age.

  If Herodotus had been in Athens in spring 438 bc, he would have appreciated Euripides' enchanting drama the Alcestis, which was first performed in that year. He would readily have entered into its presen­tation of the dilemmas and devotion of a mythical king and queen, conducted under the kind patronage of Apollo. No doubt he would also have laughed at the year's salacious comedies, although one side of him would have been telling himself that they went much too far. From his own 'enquiries', however, he would remember how he knew dozens of much more recent tragic 'dramas', reported to him as real-life conflicts between fathers, sons and wives all over the world, between gods and mortals, between people like the Lydian King Gyges or the blinded shepherd Euenius in north-west Greece, or Hermotimus the Chiote who had avenged his own awful castration with a similar act against his castrator and the cruel man's sons. Outside Athens, there were so many real Greek tales in the recent past which contained the germ of real-life tragedies. Lacking Herodotus' wide researches, the Athenians found this germ and darkened and deepened it, but only in the world of legendary myths.

  13

  Pericles and Athens

  Only Athens, among city-states of our day, is superior to the reports of her when she comes to the test; she alone causes no indignation in any enemy who comes against her, such are those from whom he suffers damage; nor is she blamed by those who are her subjects, as if they are being ruled by those who are unworthy to rule. Our power has great testimonies to it and is not without witness, so we will be admired both by those of our own time and those to come. We do not need Homer to praise us nor anyone else whose poetry pleases for a moment, whereas the truth will damage the impression the poet gives of the facts. For we have compelled all the land and the sea to be accessible to our daring and everywhere we have, together, set memorials of our successes and our failures.

  Pericles, in the Funeral Speech of 431/0, according to Thucydides, 1.41.2,-3

  From the 450s until 429 the most famous Athenian politician was Pericles, so much so that this era is often known nowadays as the age of 'Periclean Athens'. The Emperor Hadrian was well aware of Pericles' example. Among his special favours for Athens, Hadrian may even have modelled his 'Panhellenic' role for the city on a project which biographers had ascribed to Pericles himself. Pericles has continued to inspire the modern world. In 1915, during the war with Germany, buses in London displayed a translation of the fine words on freedom which were ascribed to Pericles' famous Funeral Speech.

  The real Pericles is more elusive. He was born in the mid-49os to a noble father, Xanthippus, and a mother of the noble, but contro­versial, Alcmeonid lineage. As a young man, he was shaped by two particular changes: the Athenians' new prominence, won by their role in defeating the Persian invasions, and the growing confidence of their democracy since Cleisthenes' reforms in 508 bc. Athenians, Pericles saw, were special, as even their fellow Greeks conceded, sometimes grudgingly. Democracy was now the well-founded setting for a poli­tician's career and it was a fantasy of the 'good' to believe that it would disappear. It was in Pericles' youth, in the 480s, that popular activity had intensified, with the spate of ostracisms proving that the Athenian people could now vote to expel even the most noble individuals from their assemblies. In 489 Pericles' father had already exploited popular opinion by prosecuting no less a hero than Milti-ades, the great victor of Marathon, before a popular court. In their assemblies, as Cleisthenes intended, the majority voting of the people was now the judge of what should happen. Someone, therefore, who could win the people's trust would be far more effective than an old-fashioned aristocrat, however brave he might be in war and ath­letics and however well connected in the wider Greek world.

  Such trust would only be won by public speaking, proposing policies to the assembly which appealed and were then found to succeed. Political successes had not started to depend on the written word and its dissemination. Admittedly, the decrees passed by the assembly were displayed prominently on whitened boards in the public agora so that 'anyone who wished' could look at them. More Athenians could read, in my view, than could write, but it is likely that most of the assembly-voters had never troubled to read a literary text. Somebody could be found to read a decree on display and recite it for the less able, but if Pericles had tried to campaign by issuing written manifestos, he would have missed most of his political voters: at Athens, political writings were left to theorists and oligarchic sympathizers who were not in the political mainstream. The circulation of book-scrolls, the scenes of reading and writing on Athenian vases, the texts of the orally performed masterpieces which we now read and admire are evidence of the literate habits of only a small educated minority.1 Political culture was oral.

  The two lessons of Pericles' youth, the pre-eminence of Athens and the public role of each adult Athenian male, were to shape his political

  vision. Our supreme evidence for his words and deeds lies in the histories of his admiring younger contemporary, Thucydides (born c. 460-455 bc). Thucydides revered Pericles' oratory, his cool applied intelligence, his immunity to bribes and corruption and his ability (the young Thucydides thought) to control and lead the fickle people so that politics among the Athenians 'were becoming the rule of one man'.2 In Thucydides' eyes, it also helped that Pericles was 'one of us', an aristocrat who was a brave and able general. But Thucydides did not go unchallenged and the views of Plato the philosopher proved more powerful, though written a generation after Pericles' death.

  No democrat himself, Plato insisted that Pericles had been a flatter­ing 'demagogue' who had misled the Athenians and corrupted them. He could not be exempted from the blame for the Athenians' eventual defeat by the Spartans in the ensuing Peloponnesian War. Later authors tried to reconcile these opposing views by claiming that Pericles had begun as a 'demagogue', as Plato complained, but had then attained the Olympian pre-eminence which the young Thucyd­ides so admired. The most suggestive personal memoir of Pericles survives from a non-Athenian contemporary, the amiable Ion of Chios. On meeting Pericles, Ion found his company 'insolent and extremely conceited and there was considerable disdain and contempt for others mixed in his arrogant manners'.' Other famous Athenians, including the dramatist Sophocles, were much more to Ion's taste.

  Pericles, we may infer, knew that he was gifted with no ordinary aims and responsibilities. He was said to be a single-minded politician who would walk only down the street which led from his house to the city's political centre. He is also said to have avoided social occasions if possible: popular politics were a serious, full-time business. His best friends included visiting intellectuals, people like Damon the musical theorist or t
he philosopher Anaxagoras who enraged the common man by claiming that the 'divine' sun was only a lump of burning matter. If Pericles relaxed, it was not with his wife, whom he divorced amicably, but with his famous mistress, Aspasia, who had come over from elegant east Greek Miletus. We hear of Aspasia as a wise auth­ority on the pitfalls of matchmaking between couples or on the secrets of being a good 'wife'. The comic poets in Athens had a field day, claiming that she coaxed Pericles into various foreign wars, that she taught him oratory and philosophy, that she procured girls for him, that she ran a brothel on the side and even, in a mock trial-scene, that she was guilty of 'impiety' against the gods. Posterity has liked to imagine her running a salon of good taste and intelligent talk, but actually we know nothing about her. With delicious malice, Plato later credited her with an eloquent 'Funeral Speech' of her own, in praise of Athens.4 Wickedly, he was making fun of the real Funeral Speeches by Pericles, one of which had been immortalized by Thucydides' Histories. At least we can say that Pericles did love the woman. He is the first man in history who is said to have always given his lady friend a passionate kiss on his way out to work in the morning and another on his return home each evening.5 No source connects him with any homoerotic interest in boys.