Pericles of Athens
Page 13
Progressively, a democracy that was more radical but also more closed upon itself was thus being set in place. At the same time as the Athenians began to receive pay for participating in the city institutions, they hardened the criteria governing the attribution of citizenship. There is really nothing surprising about this: mutatis mutandis and to introduce a cautious anachronism, that measure of 451 evokes the early days of the Social Republic in France, at the end of the nineteenth century, when the first redistributive measures voted in under the Third Republic went hand in hand with a stricter differentiation between nationals and foreigners. At the very moment when the first social laws were passed, new techniques of documentation and police control were set in place—in particular, the invention of passports and identity cards.55
Through a historical irony, after the deaths of his two legitimate sons, Pericles was finally forced to beg the people to waive this law in the case of his own bastard son. Now without a male heir, the stratēgos wanted Pericles the younger, born from his union with Aspasia, to be allowed to enter a phratry—an essential move in the process of acquiring citizenship—in order for him to be entered in the deme register and to inherit his father’s fortune and social network. He was claiming that an exception should be made for his own family—he who liked to present himself as a man unaffected by the influence of family and friends. This tension that had grown between the oikos and the polis, relatives and the city, now needs to be examined.
CHAPTER 6
Pericles and His Circle: Family and Friends
In most human societies, an individual counts for nothing outside the several groups to which he or she belongs. The individual’s place in society depends largely on the influence of his or her family circle and his or her network of friends. The Greek cities were no exception to that rule: there were no “self-made men” in Antiquity! In Athens as elsewhere, one’s family and friends were indispensable sources of support for anyone desiring a political career. All the same, in a democratic context, what was normally a trump card could turn out to be a handicap. To come from an illustrious family, make a brilliant marriage, and have powerful friends was potentially to be suspected of acting contrary to the interests of the people or even of aspiring to tyranny.
In fifth-century Athens, a politician thus had to resolve a complex equation. Although he needed his circle of family and friends in order to acquire power, he also had to take precautions against the suspicion that his entourage was bound to arouse. This delicate balance was hard to maintain, as the case of Pericles shows. On the one hand, the stratēgos behaved like any other member of the elite, shamelessly making the most of his social networks and establishing alliances with other powerful families, but on the other, he wished to appear to be a man wholly devoted to the people’s cause, even to the point of neglecting the most important family rituals.
Not content to hold his kin (suggeneis) at a distance, Pericles more generally neglected the traditional forms of friendship (philia) and the sociability that was associated with them. So as not to arouse the people’s jealousy, the stratēgos even avoided private banquets and such friendly entertainments. But even this did not prevent him from being attacked for his equivocal friendships and, in particular, his hospitality toward foreigners and even foreign women. The friends of Pericles, who were often mocked by the comic poets and sometimes were even dragged before the courts, paid the price for the people’s mistrust of Pericles. Around Pericles’ circle of friends there circulated stories that revealed the people’s desire to monitor his family and friendly connections, even though these were indispensable for establishing and maintaining their leader’s authority.
PERICLES AND HIS OIKOS: THE POLITICAL WAYS OF EXPLOITING KINSHIP
The Matrimonial Strategies of the Athenian Elite: Pericles’ Nameless Wife
Kinship was the basis of a diffuse and lasting solidarity, whether it was vertical (between ancestors and descendants) or horizontal (between husband and wife). In this respect, Pericles could rely not only on his prestigious ancestors (see earlier, chapter 1), but also on the matrimonial alliances that he contracted within the Athenian elite. Plutarch refers tersely to Pericles’ successive unions: “His own wife was near of kin to him and had been wedded first to Hipponicus, to whom she bore Callias, surnamed the Rich; she bore also, as the wife of Pericles, Xanthippus and Paralus. Afterwards, since their married life was not agreeable, he legally bestowed her upon another man, with her own consent, and himself took Aspasia, and loved her exceedingly” (Plutarch, Pericles, 24.5). This account illuminates the main characteristics of marriage within the Athenian elite. It testifies both to the structure of Greek marriage and also to its more or less explicit purposes.
In the first place, it reflects the domination of men over women. Marriage was a private contract between men in which the woman was a passive object: Pericles’ wife was, exceptionally, only taken into account when she was passed on to a third husband. A telling sign of this inferiority is her anonymity. It is only by dint of a series of reinvestigations and hypotheses that Pierre Brulé has managed to restore her name to her. Pericles’ wife seems to have been named Deinomache and is believed to have been the grand-daughter of Cleisthenes, the lawgiver.1
Second, this marriage illustrates the principle of endogamy that prevailed within the Athenian elite and that was further accentuated by the 451 law on citizenship. Pericles’ wife belonged to a circle of close relatives. According to Pierre Brulé’s reconstruction, Deinomache was the grand-daughter of Cleisthenes, while Pericles was the grandson of one of Cleisthenes’ brothers, so his mother was the lawgiver’s niece. Moreover, his wife’s father was none other than his own mother’s brother and so was Pericles’ uncle; so Pericles and his wife were first cousins (see figure 1).
Pericles’ marriage provides a splendid illustration of the way in which kinship structures functioned in Athens. The ideal marriage was a union with one’s closest relative. We even get the impression that Deinomache’s first marriage was dissolved so that Pericles could “recover” the woman who was his cousin. However, we should not overemphasize this characteristic, for exogamy and endogamy by no means excluded one another. “The flexibility of the Athenian matrimonial system allowed those involved to choose between the advantages of endogamy and exogamy according to whatever was in their best interest.”2
Over and above the structural elements—masculine domination and the principle of endogamy—this account also illuminates the two principal aims of marriage. First, its explicit objective: to produce legitimate children. With Pericles, Deinomache gave birth to Xanthippus and Paralus. From this point of view, Cleisthenes’ grand-daughter seems to have been endowed with a remarkable procreative ability: quite apart from the daughters that she may have had, she provided sons for every one of her successive husbands! Next, the implicit objective: this string of unions served to forge alliances between members of the Athenian elite. Deinomache, initially married to Hipponicus II, was then passed on to Pericles, and was finally given to Cleinias—as if she were nothing but a fine trousseau. Her first husband, Hipponicus II, was himself endowed with a particularly impressive pedigree. Through his father, he was descended from the priestly Kerykes group, which provided one of the two priests who celebrated the mysteries of Eleusis. Through his mother, he was also related to the Cimonid family, as the son of Elpinike, Cimon’s sister. However, Pericles had no cause to envy him since he, himself, like his wife, was part of the great Alcmaeonid family. As for Cleinias, the last of Deinomache’s husbands, he belonged to one of the wealthiest families in Athens and could proudly claim descent from the heroes Eurysakes and Ajax.3
The effect of these successive marriages was to create more or less diffuse links of solidarity between the various spouses. So, after the death of Cleinias—the last of Deinomache’s husbands—in the battle of Coronea in 447, Pericles became the guardian of the latter’s orphaned sons, most notably the scandalous Alcibiades. This widening circle undeniably re
presented an advantage where political matters were concerned, as Plutarch noted after mentioning the death of Xanthippus at the time of the plague of 430 B.C.: “Pericles lost his sister also at that time, and of his relatives and friends the largest part, and those who were most serviceable to him in his administration of the city” (Pericles, 36.4).
However, we should not exaggerate the political impact of this network of alliances. Even if they were related, some members of the elite did not hesitate to clash openly within the public space. One example is provided by Pericles and his opponent Cimon, both of whom were part of the same network of alliances: Cimon had married a woman who came from the oikos of the Alcmaeonids, Isodike; and his sister, Elpinike, was the mother of the first husband of Pericles’ wife. As for the stratēgos’s eldest son, Xanthippus, he married a daughter of Teisandrus, a member of the elder branch of the family of Miltiades and Cimon. Yet this close interlacing of relations did not prevent the two men from clashing time and again in the Assembly.4 How can this animosity be explained? The fact is that, in the course of the fifth century, the people’s rise to power had deeply upset the organized interplay of traditional alliances. In order to win the support of the dēmos, some members of the elite, Pericles among them, did not hesitate to set aside their kinship network, at least in their speeches, if not in their actions.
Without a Family? Pericles between Oikos and Polis
Even if, in practice, Pericles was not averse to relying on the support of his relatives, he nevertheless adopted in public a mode of behavior that tended to deny or at least marginalize their role. The stratēgos presented himself as a man more or less estranged from his family circle. In the first place, as we have seen, he separated from his wife and transferred her to the oikos of Cleinias; second, his relations with his legitimate heirs, particularly his elder son, Xanthippus, were severely fraught. It is hard to credit the rumors spread by Stesimbrotus of Thasos, according to whom the stratēgos slept with his daughter-in-law, the wife of his son. However, the fact remains that Pericles refused to advantage his own children and to treat them as “Daddy’s boys,” in all probability not so much out of stinginess as in order not to affront the people.5 Perhaps we can thus interpret the choice of the name that he gave to his second son, Paralus. This could be seen as a way of showing an interest in the navy and so to manifest his allegiance to the thetes who manned the triremes. The Paralian was in effect the name of one of the city’s two sacred ships.6
More radically still, throughout his political career, Pericles refused to take part in even the most elementary rituals of family sociability. He would no longer attend the wedding banquets that provided the cement par excellence that welded together the bond of kinship. Plutarch mentions only one exception to this rule: apparently, Pericles did attend the wedding of Euryptolemus, his cousin, but he stayed only until the libations—the first phase of the ritual. In the first place, this was a way of preserving his dignity and his solemn bearing. By attending too many banquets and taking part in too many festive celebrations, one risked slipping into drunkenness and possibly attracting ridicule.7 For the stratēgos, though, it was above all a matter of avoiding the ceremonies in which families flaunted their power, their wealth, and their networks of relations to such a degree that sumptuary laws had been introduced so as to maintain a modicum of order by dint of limiting the number of guests that could be invited.8
In similar fashion, the stratēgos chose not to respect the current funerary conventions, even when his own children were carried off by death: “he did not give up nor yet abandon his loftiness and grandeur of spirit because of his calamities, nay, he was not even seen to weep or to perform the funeral rites even at the grave of one of his close relatives [tōn anangkaiōn], until indeed he lost the very last one of his own legitimate sons, Paralus” (Plutarch, Pericles, 36.4: translation B. Perrin, modified). At this point, we need to assess the degree of transgression that such behavior implied. To be sure, at the death of a relative, the men were expected to hold back their tears, unlike the women, who would express their grief in ritualized lamentations. The funeral procession (ekphora) had to pass through the city before sunrise and not include too many participants.9 Nevertheless, it was unheard of for a relative, let alone a father, to withdraw from this crucial moment in the funerary ritual. On the contrary, the closest relatives were expected not only to be present but furthermore to lead the funerary procession!10
If Pericles chose not to accompany members of his own family to their entombment, it may not have been solely on account of his remarkable fortitude, as Plutarch suggests, but also above all because he wished to avoid affronting the people. In the same way as a wedding ceremony, a funeral procession presented an opportunity for a public demonstration of an oikos’s power, as is attested by the many regulations imposed upon such manifestations, even as early as the archaic period.
All the same, Pericles’ strange behavior cannot be explained solely by his desire not to affront the dēmos. We should regard it, more positively, as a way for the stratēgos to present himself as the parent of all Athenians: by setting aside his real family links, he could devote himself entirely to imaginary kinship relations that linked him with all his fellow-citizens through the device of the myth of autochthony that was now back in favor.11 This, we should remember, converted all the citizens to brothers born from the same mother, the soil of Attica. The Athenians imagined themselves to be collectively endowed with a prestigious ancestry and consequently to stand on a footing of equality with one another;12 the hierarchies of birth gave way before the belief of an origin common to all. In this context, the law of 451 on citizenship made sense, voted in, as it was, on Pericles’ initiative. It chimed with the Athenian myth of autochthony, transforming the city into an endogamous community with no foreign additions.13 There can be no doubt that the stratēgos’s entire policy aimed to place civic fraternity above real kinship.
However, for the stratēgos there was a psychological if not political price to pay for denying the importance of the family. In Athens, as elsewhere, such a rejection was hard to maintain to the bitter end. When, in 430, he learned of the death of his last legitimate heir, Paralus, the imperturbable stratēgos was brutally overcome by emotion and “broke out into wailing, and shed a multitude of tears, although he had never done any such thing in all his life before” (Plutarch, Pericles, 36.5). For a long time, he remained prostrate with grief in his oikos, rather than going to speak in the Assembly (Pericles, 37.1), and when he eventually reassumed his place as stratēgos, it was in order to request that his private interests be placed above the law of the city: he urged that the law on bastards (nothoi) that he himself had proposed in the past should be annulled “in order that the name and lineage [genos] of his house might not altogether expire through lack of succession” (37.2). The Athenians, whose hearts were touched, eventually allowed him “to enrol his illegitimate son in the phratry-lists and to give him his own name—Pericles” (ibid.).
This tension between oikos and polis, the private sphere and the public space, extended for the most part to the whole of Pericles’ entourage. Not content to set his family at a distance, the stratēgos also appeared to break with his friends so as not to provoke the phthonos (envy) of the people.
PERICLES AND PHILIA: HARMFUL FRIENDSHIPS
The Friend of All and Yet of None
According to Plutarch, when Pericles entered political life he decided to adopt a transparent mode of public behavior and to set his old circle of friends at a distance: “Straightway he made a different ordering in his way of life. On one street only in the city was he to be seen walking—the one that took him to the market-place and the council-chamber. Invitations to dinner and all such friendly and familiar intercourse he declined, so that during the long period that elapsed while he was at the head of the city, there was not a single friend [ton philon] to whose house he went to dine” (Pericles, 7.4). As a stalwart member of the elite, Plutarch deplored the decision th
at led the young Pericles to cut himself off from his former philoi—that is to say, the elite circle in which he had been raised (Pericles, 7.5). Yet the stratēgos’s behavior did make sense in the increasingly democratic framework of the mid-fifth century. Perpetually placed before the eyes of the people, Pericles had decided ostensibly to reject his private friendships and the sociability that went with them. In this respect, his avoidance of private banquets—the sumposion—was a crucial element in the system that he adopted. In that it was a microcosm that shut out the external world, the sumposion was an object of suspicion to the dēmos, which was excluded from it. A group of banqueters functioned as an alternative community, more or less cut off from the civic and democratic order, as is clear from the works titled Symposium written by Plato and Xenophon. It was certainly not by chance that, a few years after Pericles’ death, those jovial groups of banqueters became involved in the oligarchic revolutions that shook the Athenian city.14