The Classical World

by Robin Lane Fox

  Pericles' sons were thick and undistinguished, the home-life was nothing special, so what was 'Periclean' about what we call Periclean Athens? Pericles was elected as a general, and in the 430s he was elected year after year: he was, however, only one of a board of ten. He held no special position and his public achievements had to depend on his oratory in the big public assemblies. It is clear that he was only one voice among a much wider group of important leaders, some of whom advised some of his same policies. He could never decide something and impose it, as a modern Prime Minister does on his Cabinet. Nonetheless, there is a distinctive thread in what we know of the Athenians in the later 450s until c. 430. It is Pericles, surely, who put it into words and helped people to opt for what they had dimly wanted and would never have expressed so clearly.

  In their foreign policy, Athenians were (arguably) not just Pericle-ans. Like Pericles himself, they were loyal heirs of Themistocles. Peace was agreed with the Persian king in 450/49 bc, as the older Themis­tocles would have approved; so, too, approaches from potential allies in the Greek West were acted on in the 440s and 43 os and an Athenian general was even briefly active in Naples: there are hints, no more, that Themistocles, too, was interested in the scope of the Greek West. In Greece, Pericles was remembered for a truly Themistoclean remark: 'already I see war bearing down from the Peloponnese.'6 The Spartans, he meant, were the enemy and for the remark to have any point he must have uttered it long before the fateful war which began in 431.

  If Athenian expansion meanwhile upset Sparta's allies in the northern Peloponnese, so be it. As Themistocles' example had shown, there was scope for subverting their pro-Spartan governments and even for bringing them over to Athens' side. Pericles had lived through the slow war in Greece against the Spartans and their allies between 460 and 446. It would have convinced him of the scope for sheltering the Athenians behind their impregnable Long Walls, Themistocles' creation, and resisting Spartan land-invasions. They could survive there through their naval supremacy, Themistocles' legacy, and with it they could always import food. If they were allied to a friendly neighbouring Megara, they could anyway block Sparta's easy access into Athenian territory: they could 'win through' without a pitched battle. If Spartans did try to ravage Attica, cavalry would be turned on them to drive them off. The Periclean years see a sixfold increase in cavalry numbers and the new 'insurance' scheme for their horses.7 Pericles was not a lower-class bigot.

  Pericles' firm, reasoned insistence on this strategy went with some­thing new and more profound than Themistocles' opportunism on the international scene. When a noble Athenian colleague, Callias, pulled off the coup of a peace-agreement with Persia in 449, Pericles replied by summoning a Greek congress to Athens to discuss the rebuilding of Athens' ruined temples, the offering of new sacrifices to the gods and the free and peaceful use of the seas. The implication was that the Athenians' allies would continue to pay tribute to the Athenians for these ends, in a continuing Hellenic League which would have Athens at its centre. Predictably, Sparta refused to attend, but in 449 the new temples did start to be built on Athens' Acropolis, financed by her allies' continuing payments. The peace with Persia was presented as a 'victory', and so the Athenians' previous oath never to rebuild their ruined shrines was overtaken by a new building-programme. For Pericles, Athens was the great centre of the free Greek world and was deservedly the ruler of so many Greek allies. He was impressively hard-headed about the need to retain the Athenians' alliance, or 'Empire'. All attempted revolts were repressed: even her subjects, he says in Thucydides' memories of him, agreed that they were being ruled by 'people who were not unworthy to do so'.8 Athenians should 'love' their city and its power. Athens was remark­able for its new beauty, for the character of its inhabitants and their exceptional grace, skill and mutual tolerance (slaves, after all, were simply objects). With varying degrees of probability, we can ascribe to Pericles a scattered range of proposals for his fellow Athenians' benefit. From c. 448 bc onwards Athenian settlers were sent out to new settle­ments or to land-holdings in the territories of Athenian subjects: the policy was probably Pericles'. Most of the settlers were drawn from the poorest classes and by renting out their new land abroad they were raised to a better standard of living. Since the early 450s Athenians who served on the many juries in the city's law courts were paid a small daily fee for doing so: this state-pay is a Periclean proposal. In due course, all Athenians would be given the sum needed to buy their 'tickets' for the dramas and events at Athens' major city-festivals: it is disputed, but in my view probable, that Pericles was responsible.

  The definition of Athenian citizenship was also tightened on his advice. It was Pericles' own proposal that only the children of an Athenian citizen-father and an Athenian mother would be Athenian citizens themselves. This law of Pericles was prospective, applying to children born from 451 bc onwards, and so it was popular enough to be voted in by the existing citizenry. Probably, as we have seen, its main aim was to encourage Athenian men to take Athenian brides, and the topic was more urgent when so many Athenians were receiving new plots of land to rent or cultivate abroad. Families, Pericles real­ized, did not want to be left with unmarried daughters while their males took foreign wives: the tighter requirements of citizenship would also keep up the Athenians' sense of group identity.

  Through all of these innovations runs a principled belief that the citizens of Athens are special, that each adult male is capable of responsible political duties, that they should be rewarded for their role, and that the arts help to honour the gods and to civilize their beneficiaries. Pericles himself served prominently on the commission to oversee the splendid new buildings on the Acropolis. He was a close friend of the great sculptor Pheidias and he was identified with the proper conduct of the building-programme. Under his general guidance, the robe which young Athenian girls wove for the goddess Athena was transferred to her new 'house', the Parthenon, where it would hang as a huge backcloth behind Pheidias' enormous new statue of the goddess.9 Just below the Acropolis, Pericles also proposed the building of a special Odeon, supported on a forest of columns. It became a venue for musical contests in the great festivals, although comic poets alleged that it was a conceit, modelled on the captured tent of the Persian King Xerxes.

  Between c. 560 and 510 the Athenian tyrants had had a vision of a grander Athens; now for the first time, we find a vision for Athenian citizens. No previous Athenian politician, not even Cleisthenes, is known to have associated with philosophers and intellectuals. Unlike previous aristocrats, Pericles asked for no poems or texts in his honour: he did not even try to inscribe his name on what were seen as the entire citizenry's buildings. He had an idea of a new community, enhanced by power and by the equal participation of male Athenians. His intellectual contacts extended to Protagoras the philosopher who was invited, posterity said, to write the laws for the new settlement which was sent out to Thurii in south Italy under Pericles' guidance. In music or political theory, in the use of oratory and sheer reason, Pericles applied a new intellectual clarity. It was the outcome of the Athenians' new promin­ence in his lifetime, which drew talented and intelligent experts to his city, attracted by its new power and rewards. He and his friends did not believe in that old archaic bogey, the gods' willingness to punish them for a distant ancestor's misdeeds. They had a new classical clarity.

  In this company, the random 'anger' of the gods was not a convinc­ing 'explanation of misfortune': descendants would not be considered liable for their ancestors' crimes. This clearer understanding of res­ponsibility is for us a hallmark of the change from an archaic to a classical age. At Athens, Pericles and his friends had such understand­ing, and the important point for our sense of a change is that a few people had it at all, not that most other people in 'classical Greece' still entertained the older archaic ideas. In the Greek West, at Selinus, citizens still feared 'avenging spirits' in their midst; at Cyrene, they believed a legend of the 'wrath' of Apollo which accounted for
the city's foundation and they bothered about rituals to cope with their fears of pollution. At Locri, citizens were still sending a group of their virgin daughters yearly to Troy so as to atone for a 'wrong' perpetrated by their ancestors in the mythical age of the heroes.10 The Periclean age was not an age of general Greek enlightenment, but it was an age when intellectuals and their enlightened thinking first flourished around a like-minded political leader.

  We hear some of it still in Pericles' Funeral Speech for 430 bc, which Thucydides presents in his own words while claiming to keep 'as close as possible' to the 'gist of what was actually said'. Behind Pericles' fine claims, we can also catch an answer to contemporary critics. 'We are lovers of beauty, yes, but without extravagance; we are lovers of wisdom, yes, but without being soft.' In our democracy, any man can contribute, whatever his background, but Athenians are tolerant of fellow Athenians' private ways and do not resent them if they act for personal pleasure. Freedom pervades both political and private life, but it is a freedom under the law. Athenian liberty is not 'licence'. The man, however, who refuses to participate in public life is 'useless'." As for women, they have no such participation. The speech ends with a brief mention of 'womanly virtue' for those who are now widows. They should be 'celebrated as little as possible for virtue or reproach among men', keeping out of attention as modestly as possible. For them 'great is the glory if they are not worse than their existing nature', with the implication, therefore, that their nature is not the best anyway. He is giving 'a purely negative injunction not to fall short of an innate limitation'. Here, as elsewhere, Pericles put into words what his citizen-hearers, but not many of his modern readers, accepted anyway. For males, the ideal is not 'public splen­dour, private squalor'. It is no disgrace to be poor, but it is a disgrace not to try to escape being poor in the first place. Throughout the 430s, the comic poets of Athens and the rival politicians tried to satirize and even to prosecute Pericles, Aspasia and his intellectual and artistic friends. The 'Olympian' Pericles, the comedians alleged, was under the sway of his mistress: he started the war with Sparta - why not? - to avoid scandal: his head, even, was 'squill-shaped'.12 As a 'squill', in the ancient Greek flora, was a flower with a rounded, smooth bulb, the meaning is that Pericles had a round, prematurely bald head. He was said to wear a military helmet very often in public, perhaps to hide his baldness as much as to evoke his constant service as a general. The comic satire and the prosecutions are evidence of the freedom for which Pericles spoke so wonderfully. The public loved the poets' 'tabloid' humour, but it is Pericles' vision which has outlived theirs.

  14

  The Peloponnesian War

  The [five] Spartan judges considered that their original ques­tion would he right, whether they had had anything good from them in the war ... so they took each one [of the Plataeans] aside and asked them the same thing again, whether they had done the Spartans and their allies any good in the war, and when they could not say that they had, they took them off and killed them, and they made not a single exception. Thucydides, 3.68.1, as the siege of Plataea ended in 42.7 bc

  During the last three decades of the fifth century bc the Athenians and the Spartans, with their respective allies, were at war again with one another. This war, known as the 'Peloponnesian War', may seem clear evidence of the ancient Greeks' political failure. More than twenty years of fighting, with seven years' 'uneasy truce' in the middle, killed tens of thousands of Greeks (perhaps half of the Athenian male population), destroyed homes and trees and cost large sums of money and manpower. The war was only resolved by help given by the Persian king to the Spartans which required, in return, the abandonment of all the Greek cities in Asia again to the Persian sphere. War, observers themselves said, increased human cruelty. There were spectacular acts of ferocity on either side, including the killing of prisoners by Spartan commanders and the massacre, after due warning, of the island popu­lation of Melos by the Athenians because the islanders had refused to join their Empire. The theme of freedom was sadly prominent throughout. It was promised initially to the Athenians' 'enslaved' allies by Spartan rhetoric, but it was grossly betrayed by the outcome.

  The eastern Greeks in Asia were handed over to the Persian king as tribute-paying subjects, while communities in the Aegean found themselves under the rule of hideous pro-Spartan juntas, the decarchies or the 'rule of ten' pro-Spartan men.

  This war and all its ferocity were not driven by religion or national­ism: there were no crusades and there was no genocide. There were, however, real principles at stake, rather than killing for killing's sake. At first sight, the conflict appears to be one only of power. The war arose from the continuing expansion of the Athenians' power, especially as it turned in more detail to opportunities in Sicily and the Greek West. During the 430s these foreign ambitions increasingly alarmed Sparta's important ally Corinth, the mother-city of the domi­nant state in Sicily, Syracuse. Corinth also had important colonies on the coast of north-west Greece, which lay on the natural route for warships to the West. Against this background of anxiety, the Corin­thians were in no mood to give Athenian ambitions the benefit of any doubt. Suspicions intensified during a diplomatic clash over the Corinthian colony Corcyra (modern Corfu). Unless the Spartans would go to war against Athenian interventions, Corinthian envoys threatened to desert the Spartans' alliance, an act which would expose the Peloponnese to a much greater risk of subversion and the conse­quent breaking of the Spartans' hold on it. A chain of events unfolded, in which the Athenians did not technically break the prevailing treaty, sworn in 446, with the Spartans and their allies. But without Athenian ambitions outside this treaty's area, the pressure for war would not have arisen at this point. The final flashpoint was Corinth's neighbour Megara, an ally of the Spartans. The Athenians issued a decree with commercial intent against her, banning Megarians from walking in to Athens' market-place or sailing into the harbours of her many allies. The aim, surely, was to destabilize the Megarians' ruling oligarchy indirectly, without actually declaring war. If the Megarians could be turned into a democracy, they might become allies of the Athenians. The recent wars between 460 and 446 had shown what a vital strategic ally they could be, as they could block their mountain-passes against Spartan invaders and close the natural route for invasions of Attica.

  More than five hundred years later the Emperor Hadrian still met memories of this famous feud. On visiting Megara, he found that,

  only recently in his reign, the Megarians had been refusing to allow Athenians and their families, ancestral enemies, into their houses. Behind these territorial conflicts lay something more fundamental, the complete difference of lifestyle, culture and mentality between Pericles' Athenians and the Spartans to whom Megara in that era had been aligned. Hadrian would have needed reminding how in the 430s classical Spartans had continued to crush and occupy their Greek neighbour, Messenia, and to maintain the harsh way of life which had been imposed by their lawgivers since the seventh century bc. Around Sparta's vulnerable territories, her kings and elders worked to main­tain a cordon of loyal oligarchies, in which a relatively few citizens ruled firmly over all others and denied them political rights. Athens, by contrast, was the great democracy, the seat of a culture which could be said to be the 'education of Greece'. The thinking, the theatre, the arts, the varied lifestyle which we still admire were all Athenian or based in Athens. The Spartans did not trust it, fearing it would infiltrate and overthrow the protective cordon of allies on which their own way of life depended. If only the few oligarchs who ruled her northern Peloponnesian allies, especially Corinth, could have had the nerve to desert Sparta and join the Athenian allies, their fellow sea­farers. Forty years later brave democrats were indeed active among the Spartans' Isthmian allies, even in Corinth. Together with the Athenians, they could have mounted an unstoppable expedition to Sicily, south Italy and beyond. With the Greeks of Sicily as their allies, they could then have attacked the furthest point of Athenian ambitions, Carthage. Carthage's
dependence on hired troops would probably have failed her; the Greek community in Carthage would have helped the Greek allies, and Carthage, the richest, most powerful alternative to the Greek way of life in the Mediterranean, would have submitted. Athenian values, democracy and prosperity would have blossomed all the way from north Africa to the Black Sea. Eminent Athenians would have found a new outlet abroad for their talents. The flamboyant aristocrat Alcibiades, the suspect hero of Athenian audi­ences, would have fitted well as the governor of Athenian Carthage, among the gold, the girls and the city's famous carpets.

  By contrast, the years of war became a dull, damaging stalemate. In 431 bc Greek opinion had expected a swift Athenian surrender, but the Athenians, on Pericles' advice, retreated behind their city's Long Walls which were far too strong for the Spartans' poor grasp of siege-warfare. Pericles had talked of 'winning through', but a man of his intelligence had sutely more than a plan for survival in mind. The Athenians' fleet was some three hundred warships strong and was still brilliantly manned and trained (even if a few slave-'attendants' sometimes rowed too). It continued to dominate the sea, to assist imports of food into the city and to maintain security among the Athenians' allies. The Spartans' naval skills, by contrast, were minimal and they lacked the money to build and maintain first-class ships. They had helot-serfs, but no free lower-class citizens to serve as row­ers. Their supreme strength lay in traditional hoplite warfare by land, conducted by their superb infantry who marched in step to music, still chanting the repulsive verses of the poet Tyrtaeus, with their purple cloaks still fluttering in the wind.