Pericles of Athens

by Vincent Azoulay, Janet Lloyd

  Throughout his career, Pericles set the friendship of the people before his personal relationships. In any case, his public commitments were so absorbing that he could not always spare the time to devote to his friends, even the closest of them. According to an anecdote related by Plutarch, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae reproached him for this neglect of the elementary rules of philia: “At a time when Pericles was absorbed in business, Anaxagoras lay on his couch all neglected, in his old age, starving himself to death, his head already muffled for departure, and when the matter came to the ears of Pericles, he was struck with dismay and ran at once to the poor man and besought him most fervently to live, bewailing not so much that great teacher’s lot as his own, were he now to be bereft of such a counsellor in the conduct of the city. Then Anaxagoras—so the story goes—unmuffled his head and said to him, ‘Pericles, even those who need a lamp pour oil therein’” (Pericles, 16.7). So it was as a result of insufficient leisure time (skholē) as much as by his choice that the stratēgos cut himself off from his friends. Having devoted his career to the public interest, the stratēgos no longer had time to maintain a sociable life among his friends, with all that this, in the long term, involved in the way of reciprocal gestures and exchanges of favors.

  To judge from Plutarch’s account, Pericles’ career was thus characterized by his marginalization of his private friendships, so as to maintain contacts solely with the dēmos. Some historians, such as W. R. Connor, have detected in this a radical innovation that reflects the democratic mutations that were taking place in the democracy during the fifth century. Until Pericles arrived on the scene, politicians were happy to depend on support in their affairs from their networks of philoi. But Connor suggests that a new political style emerged with Pericles, based on an austere lifestyle in which one’s friends were deliberately relegated to the remote fringes of political life.15 However, such a contrast is to a large extent exaggerated. In the first place, upstream, even before Pericles appeared upon the scene, Themistocles had, according to Aelian,16 already behaved in this fashion. Second, downstream, Pericles’ successors continued to make use of their circles of friends in order to secure their own power.17 When Alcibiades arrived in Piraeus in 407 B.C., after eight years in exile, his first reflex was anxiously to look around for his close relatives; only when sure that they were indeed present, did he disembark and make his way to the town, to be elected stratēgos autokratōr.18

  This enables us to qualify Plutarch’s testimony. It probably reflects a democratic commonplace—namely, the leader’s devotion to the people’s interests alone, rather than the real practices of the elite. In fact, Pericles does not seem in practice to have renounced his many friendships. Rightly or wrongly, he was even accused by his enemies of maintaining a whole galaxy of more or less embarrassing philoi.

  Pericles’ Circle?

  The ancient sources attribute to Pericles a whole gallery of “friends,” as numerous as they were prestigious: among the Athenians, Damon, Phidias, and Sophocles; among the foreigners, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, Aspasia of Miletus, Protagoras of Abdera, Hippodamus of Miletus, Kephalus of Syracuse, the Spartan king Archidamus, and many others too.19 Pericles would therefore have been surrounded by a vast group of poets, philosophers, sophists, architects, and artists, all of whom helped him to make Athens “the school of Greece,” to borrow the expression said by Thucydides to have been used by Pericles in his funeral speech.

  However, historians have questioned the existence of a veritable “Pericles’ circle”—with all that such a notion presupposes in the way of stability and allegiance—and they are skeptical for two reasons. In the first place, not all those ties of friendship are attested. The relations established between Pericles on the one hand and Hippodamus of Miletus and Protagoras of Abdera on the other are, to put it mildly, nebulous.20 As for Kephalus of Syracuse, the father of the orator Lysias, even if he was indeed acquainted with Pericles, there is no evidence to suggest that he was a close friend of the stratēgos.21 It was clearly a posteriori that the ancient authors reconstructed those friendly relations between a number of famous fifth-century figures, gathering them around the figure of Pericles like bees clustered around their queen. Besides, even such friends as are reliably confirmed lack the stability required to constitute a veritable “circle.” Damon was ostracized early on; Phidias, an itinerant artist, was often away from Athens, carried to wherever his work took him—for example, to Olympia, where he worked from 437 to 433, sculpting the monumental statue of Zeus; and as for Anaxagoras, Plutarch himself stresses the fact that his relations with Pericles were frequently interrupted for long periods.

  Even if, strictly speaking, there was no “Pericles’ circle,” that did not stop the stratēgos’s opponents from criticizing him for it. In truth, the supposed Pericles’ circle was in the first place a creation by his enemies, who hoped in this way to instill suspicions in the minds of Athenians, for in the Greek world, it was tyrants that were known to maintain a circle around themselves, a court entirely devoted to singing their praises. And was this not, after all, the kind of relationship that was suggested by sources that recorded that the stratēgos’s companions (hetairoi) were called “the new Pisistratids” (Pericles, 16.1)?

  Whatever the case may be, the members of Pericles’ circle came under constant attack, both on the comic stage and in the city courts. The target, through them, was clearly Pericles himself. Plutarch explicitly recognizes this when he describes the accuser who had Anaxagoras dragged before the court for impiety, probably in the early 430s: “He [Diopeithes] targeted Pericles, through Anaxagoras.”22 The opponents of Pericles were pursuing two contrary objectives when they criticized his entourage. Sometimes, they sought to present the stratēgos as an all-powerful man, reigning over the courtiers who groveled at his feet; at other times, they depicted him as a mere puppet, surreptitiously manipulated by a set of éminences grises or even foreign powers.

  The accusations launched against the sculptor Phidias fell into the first of those two categories. He was depicted as Pericles’ right-hand man, ready to do anything to execute his base demands. Rumor had it that the sculptor even acted as a pimp, to serve the pleasures of the stratēgos-tyrant: “making assignations for Pericles with free-born women who would come ostensibly to see the works of art.”23 Furthermore, the sculptor too was dragged before the courts, probably for embezzlement, following a scandal the mud from which also bespattered Pericles. In his play The Peace, performed in 421 B.C., Aristophanes picked up on this affair (but, unfortunately, only in vague terms), even suggesting that it was one of the causes of the Peloponnesian War.24

  For the most part, though, Pericles was depicted not as a manipulating master, but as a man who was himself manipulated by his friends. For example, some sources represent Damon of Oa as the stratēgos’s eminence grise. According to the Constitution of the Athenians, it was he who persuaded Pericles to introduce pay for jurors.25 Plutarch develops this theme, depicting Damon as the mentor of Xanthippus’s son: “Damon seems to have been a consummate sophist, but to have taken refuge behind the name of music in order to conceal [epikruptomenos] from the multitude his real power, and he associated with Pericles, that political athlete, as it were, in the capacity of coach and trainer. However, Damon was not left unmolested in this use of his lyre as a screen, but was ostracized for being a great schemer and a friend of tyranny.”26 Damon consequently became the embodiment of a man of secrets or even plots, a shadowy counselor who handled his pupil, Pericles, like a puppet. The discovery of four potsherds bearing Damon’s name testifies, if not to the truth of the anecdote, at least to the influence that Athenians ascribed to Damon.27

  According to his detractors, Pericles was manipulated above all by foreigners, even—worse still—by female ones. He was certainly reputed to maintain numerous friendly relations outside the civic circle, as the comic poet Cratinus relates in a fragment cited by Plutarch: “Come, oh Zeus, patron of foreigners [xenios] and head of State [
Caranius]!”28 Pericles, who is often described as an Olympian, is here assimilated to Zeus Xenios, the god who protects and welcomes in foreigners. For the poet, this was a transparent way of deploring the links that bound the stratēgos to foreigners domiciled in the city. Aspasia came from Miletus, Chrysilla from Corinth, Anaxagoras from Clazomenae, and Kephalus from Syracuse. These relations were potentially dangerous ones. The stratēgos’s enemies could blame him for setting the interests of his foreign friends above those of the Athenian people.

  In this respect, the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War placed Pericles in a particularly delicate position, for the stratēgos maintained links of hospitality (xenia) with the Spartan king Archidamus, who led his troops in an assault on Athens and laid waste its territory. At this point, Pericles solemnly promised, before the Assembly, that he would give the city his own properties should the Spartan leader leave them intact on account of the xenia that linked them.29 The stratēgos was thus forced to take preemptive action so as not to be regarded as a corrupt man who allowed the city territory to be laid waste, knowing that he himself had nothing to fear personally with respect to his land. In the context of war, conventional aristocratic hospitality became incompatible with the obligations dictated by the civic world.30

  However, his enemies concentrated most of their attacks on another of the stratēgos’s equivocal relationships. His love for Aspasia was deplored on many occasions. He was even accused of starting the Peloponnesian War for the sake of her lovely eyes. This was a matter of slipping from friendship into love or, to be more exact, from philia into eros.

  CHAPTER 7

  Pericles and Eros: Caught between Civic Unity and Political Subversion

  Eros, not love: this terminological choice is no mere flirtatious quibble. It is intended to draw attention to how far apart the two terms are. In the Greek world, eros did not correspond to any romantic sentiment, nor did it bear any similarity to the wishy-washy notion nowadays conjured up by “love.” Whether homosexual or heterosexual, eros was first and foremost a connective force or, at times, a disconnective one.1

  First, as a connective force: eros linked individuals together, as indeed did philia, friendship. However, whereas friendship presupposed a form of equality between the partners, eros functioned in a hierarchical and asymmetrical fashion. The erotic link depended on a form of reciprocity that was structurally inegalitarian, for it always brought together a free citizen, who was in the dominant position, and a woman or an erōmenos—an adolescent—whose status was inferior. When transposed into a political framework, eros retained those same characteristics: it encouraged the development of hierarchical links between on the one hand, the citizens, and on the other, the city.

  Next, as a force for disconnection: eros possessed a terrifying power capable of turning the normal functioning of social life upside down. Not content with snapping the very limbs of lovers,2 it was capable of destabilizing even the best-established forms of social balance. Eros could destroy relations of philia or lead to adultery or even to treason; it then threatened the very survival of the city, which is why eros and politics often worked together, for better or worse.

  Pericles’ life combined those two contradictory aspects of eros. First, the power of connection: the stratēgos was an ardent defender of a veritable civic eroticism, to the point of urging the Athenians to cherish their city as a lover cherishes his loved one. According to Pericles, the citizens should behave themselves as a community of active lovers, linked together by their common love for their country. Yet, far from leaving the people and their city to this loving tête-à-tête, the leader came and involved himself in that relationship. According to the ancient authors, Pericles aroused desire in the crowd both by his rhetoric and by his behavior, as his protégé Alcibiades was later to do. There was thus an erotic dimension to his authority. The citizens loved not only their city but also their leader. Next, a power of disconnection, for Pericles’ story also testifies to the subversive power of eros. The stratēgos was accused of having experimented with the entire range of heterosexual unions, even to the point of placing the city in danger through his multiple and transgressive love affairs. His opponents denounced him for having not only behaved as a seducer, perverting the wives of other citizens, but also for being a man seduced and manipulated by beautiful foreign women.

  Aspasia became the target of the barrage of criticisms aimed at Pericles. Presented, as she was, now as a hetaira or even a prostitute, now as a legitimate wife and a skilled mistress of rhetoric, this enigmatic woman deserved the whole study finally devoted to her in M. M. Henry’s Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical Tradition (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995). The ancient sources often portray her as a warmonger, a new Helen of Troy, bewitching Pericles and getting him to unleash the conflict against the Spartans. That biased image needs to be evaluated in the light of the prejudices that surrounded all women whose legal status was uncertain.

  THE DEMOCRATIC AMOROUS TRIANGLE: THE CITY, THE LEADER, AND THE PEOPLE

  Athens (not Hiroshima), Mon Amour

  In the funeral speech that he delivered, according to Thucydides’ version, Pericles urged all Athenians to demonstrate their desire for their city. In this case, the purpose of eros was not to link citizens to one another, but to unite them all, collectively, with their country, the object of all their attentions: “You must daily fix your gaze upon the power of Athens and become lovers [erastai] of her.”3 This is how the stratēgos transposed into the civic register the vocabulary associated with erotic masculine relationships. The fact is that, in the Greek world, ritualized pederastic links could connect an older citizen—the erastēs—with a young adolescent—the erōmenos—who was still in the flower of his youth. The importation of this vocabulary now used to describe the links between citizens and their city masked a number of implications. In the first place, this metaphor made it possible to set women radically apart; they were, of course, already excluded from the political scene. No symbolic compensation was offered to them in that speech, since what was proposed for the Athenians to meditate upon was a homoerotic model. Furthermore, that image presupposed the existence of a link of reciprocity between the two parties present: in a pederastic relationship, the erastēs was expected to educate and protect the erōmenos who, in return, offered him his company and favors. As Pericles saw it, the citizens should take the erastēs’ role as guardian of the city, the erōmenos whom one contemplated with passion.

  At first sight, this choice may seem surprising. The city appears to be relegated to a passive and subordinate role, leaving on the front of the stage the Athenians, who are described as a “vigorous elite” at the service of their country.4 According to Sara Monoson, the metaphor may even conceal more disturbing implications. In their capacity as the erastai, the citizens may act in a shameful way and take advantage of the city, a naive and defenseless erōmenos.5 That is, in fact, how the more or less declared opponents of democracy unhesitatingly interpreted the image, profoundly subverting its original meaning. In the first place, they applied the metaphor not to the links between the Athenians and their city, but to the relations that obtained between the citizens and their political leaders.6 In the plays of Aristophanes, it is the demagogues who declare their love for the dēmos: “I love you, Demos, I am your erastēs,”7 declares the Paphlagonian—a transparent caricature of Cleon,8 in The Knights. Later, the comic poets portrayed those erastai as dangerous corrupters: with their self-interested love, the demagogues did nothing but debase the people, which, for its part, was portrayed as an aging erōmenos, at once capricious and depraved.9 According to those ironical criticisms, Athens’s leaders were guiding the city to its downfall, skillfully manipulating feelings and reactions.

  However, that polemical view corresponded to a deliberately biased reading of the metaphor used by Pericles. When he resorted to that image, the orator had no intention of depicting a passive Athens, forced to accept whatever its ci
tizens wanted; there is nothing to suggest that the metaphor had to be understood to the advantage of its citizens-erastai. As Mark Golden has shown, the supposed subordination of the erōmenos to the erastēs is not at all obvious if, without any preconceptions, one considers the texts and images that have come down to us.10 In plenty of cases, the erōmenos seems to possess virtues characteristic of dominant personalities, while, in contrast, the erastēs, gripped by desire, frequently adopts a submissive or even miserable position. He finds himself at the mercy of his erōmenos, who is perfectly free to deny him his favors. Some authors even portray the youth as a tyrant, ruling harshly over his helpless lover.11 Figurative codes repeatedly proclaim the paradoxical superiority of the erōmenos. On vases, instead of being represented as submissive, the adolescent is often facing up to his partner. He stands erect while the erastēs bends his knees and, in some cases, bows his head.12 Sometimes, the latter is even presented in the traditional position of a suppliant, attempting to touch the youth’s chin.13

  In this context, the Periclean metaphor takes on a quite different meaning. By resorting to the language of pederastic love, the orator was in reality urging the citizens to offer their city extraordinary gifts, in the way that erastai were accustomed to shower their erōmenos with presents. Quite simply, instead of proffering hares or goblets, the citizens ought to offer the city their time, their money, even their lives, by performing many public services of both a financial and a military nature.

  The role played by such a metaphor in Athenian democratic ideology no doubt needs to be qualified. This pederastic image is never directly repeated in the other funeral speeches that have come down to us. Generally, these mobilize a different if equally asymmetrical image, representing the city as the father of the citizens: the citizens are urged to sacrifice themselves for the “country,” the land of their fathers.14 So how should we explain why Pericles chose to resort to this erotic vocabulary? Perhaps it was because he wanted to become the object of desire of his fellow-citizens, so charmed were they by his rhetoric and his behavior.