Pericles of Athens
Page 19
When stripped of their polemical thrust, Plato’s analyses lead one to take a different view of the death of Pericles within the history of Athens. Rather than regarding it as a sudden break—whether for better or for worse—Plato’s thinking encourages us to replace the life of Pericles within a great upheaval that encompasses and exceeds it—namely, the taming of the members of the elite at the hands of the Athenian people.
THE DEATH OF PERICLES AND THE RISE OF THE DEMAGOGUES
A Change in the Political Players?
Thucydides and Pseudo-Aristotle, each in his own way, detected a break in the political life of Athens. In the funerary appreciation of the dead leader that he composed, Thucydides drew a radical contrast between Pericles and his successors: “For so long as he presided over the affairs of the state in time of peace he pursued a moderate policy and kept the city in safety, and it was under him that Athens reached the height of her greatness … But the successors of Pericles, being more on an equality [isoi] with one another and yet striving each to be first, were ready to surrender to the people even the conduct of public affairs to suit their whims.”2 The author of the Constitution of the Athenians shares that view and interprets the history of the city in a fashion that unfolds in the same way: “So long, then, as Pericles held the leadership of the people [dēmos], the affairs of the state went better, but when Pericles was dead, they became much worse. For the people now, for the first time, adopted a head [prostatēs] who was not in good repute with the respectable men [epieikeis] whereas in former periods these always continued to lead the people [dēmagōgein].”3
Over and above differences in details,4 the two authors are in agreement on a twofold diagnosis: first, structurally speaking, the leaders had dominated politics in Athens and the people were merely the puppets of those who led them; second, at a circumstantial level, both reckon that Pericles’ death marked a decisive turning point. When the leaders of the dēmos came to resemble those whom they led and were no better than the latter, decadence was inevitable. The outcome of the Peloponnesian War—so terribly damaging to Athens—proved them right.
Let us make a detailed study of the argument set out in The Constitution of the Athenians. Up until the death of Pericles, the people’s leaders belonged to the group of the “well-born” (eupatrides), the respectable men (epieikeis); the leaders of the dēmos all belonged to the traditional Athenian elite, whose fortunes were based on the possession and exploitation of land. The death of Pericles, it is claimed, opened the door to “demagogues,” whose wealth was founded on craft activities: Cleon owned a tannery, Hyperbolus was a producer of lamps, and Cleophon made lyres. It was a switch from wealthy people to nobodies. This sociological evolution resulted in consequences that were catastrophic for the city. The new politicians corrupted the people not only symbolically, by their uncouth language and their undisciplined way of addressing the Assembly,5 but also materially, by introducing new civic wages for the poorest citizens.6
If one believes Thucydides or the Aristotelian school, Pericles’ death drew a line separating two distinct moments in Athenian political life: whereas the stratēgos had led the city to its greatest achievements, thanks to his wisdom and prudence (phronēsis),7 the new loutish leaders had led Athens to disaster. There was a definite, even caricatural contrast between a carefully controlled dēmos, dominated by a Pericles who set a brake on the people’s desires, and a dēmos beyond control, constantly flattered by Cleon and his successors.
That Manichean representation was not defended solely by the opponents of radical democracy, either writing in exile—as was Thucydides— or sheltered by the wall of the Lyceum—as was the author of the Constitution of the Athenians. It was reproduced in many of the comedies destined to be staged before the Athenians en masse. In the last third of the fifth century, the poet Eupolis was already contrasting the stratēgoi of the past to the current leaders in a striking mirror image: “And yet, despite the abundance of the subject-matter, I do not know what to say, so distressed am I by the spectacle of public life today. We, the older ones, used not to live like this. In the first place, in our day, the city had stratēgoi who came from the greatest houses [oikion] and were the first in both wealth and birth. We used to invoke them as though they were gods and indeed that is what they were. … But today, if we have to go to war, we elect as our stratēgoi polluted men [katharmata].”8 This grandiloquent paean of praise for the past certainly testifies to the disarray that some citizens felt, faced with the eruption of “nouveaux riches,” the neoploutoi,9 onto the Athenian political stage.
A similar idealization of the past appears in Aristophanes. Although he treated Pericles badly in his Peace, staged in 422/1 B.C., this comic poet changed his tune in The Frogs, in 405 B.C., in which he had his character “Aeschylus” pronounce the following revealing tirade (1463–1465): “they [should] count the enemy’s soil their own, / And theirs the enemy’s: and know that ships /Are their true wealth, their so-called wealth delusion.”
This passage, placed right at the end of the play in a particularly strategic position, reflects a new—and positive—view of the Periclean defensive system that consisted in placing all the city’s hopes in the fleet, leaving the civic territory in the hands of the enemy. At this time, when the city was suffering one defeat after another both on land and at sea, Pericles was represented as the very embodiment of a past when Athens had been all-powerful.
The yawning gap between a rehabilitated Pericles and his despised successors seems immense, if not unbridgeable. Yet, upon closer inspection, the break was less definitive than the comic poets brutally depicted it to be and than the historians and philosophers theorized.
A Seeming but Misleading Break
In the first place, the “new politicians” were not unknown men of low birth. Cleainetus, the father of Cleon, had already been a khorēgos in 460/459 B.C.,10 and around 440 his son made an advantageous marriage with the daughter of Dikaiogenes, an Athenian of particular distinction.11 So his family had already been prosperous in the preceding generation. As for Cleophon’s father, Cleippides, he had been elected stratēgos in 428 (Thucydides, 3.3.2). The “new” men were thus much less new than has been suggested by authors both ancient and modern.
Second, that claim was based on a presupposition that is far from universally accepted—namely, that in Athens only landed wealth was considered legitimate. To support that hypothesis, historians invoke the virulent criticisms aimed at demagogues whose fortunes were based on crafts. But those attacks, which emanated from certain specific circles, those of Athenian intellectuals, did not reflect the opinions of the majority of citizens. Besides, they were no more than relatively effective, since this new breed of demagogues were not only elected but frequently reelected by the dēmos. To be a wealthy craftsman was, at least after 430 B.C., by no means a handicap for anyone wishing to become one of the city’s leaders. To be sure, such individuals were the butts of criticism and mockery, but no more so than a man such as Themistocles, who was called a “bugger” on an ostrakon found in the Agora, or one such as Cimon, who was accused of incest with his sister Elpinike.12
Finally, if indeed there was a break, it certainly did not date from the death of Pericles; the new politicians already held a definite influence in the city in the lifetime of the stratēgos. Without going right back to Ephialtes, about whom little is known, a number of pointers already suggest that the social origins of the Athenian political leaders were undergoing a gradual evolution. As early as the 440/430s, the stratēgos Hagnon, the founder of the colony of Amphipolis in 437, fitted the stereotype of a social climber suspected of having acquired his wealth by abusing his position in power. In a fragment from the Ploutoi (The Spirits of Wealth), a play by the comic poet Cratinus,13 Hagnon was accused of having amassed his fortune by doubtful means: “—Prosecutor: ‘This man is not wealthy in Athens in conformity with justice, so he should cook up some wealth for his city.’—Witness for the Defence: ‘On the contrary, he h
as been wealthy for a long time [or ‘he has grown rich from his magistracies (arkhaioploutos)’], he owns what he has had from the beginning [or ‘by reason of his power (ex archēs)’].’”
Here, the poet was playing on the polysemy of the word arkhē, which meant now “origin” or “ancient beginnings,” now “power” or “magistracies.”14 The double meaning made it possible for Cratinus to raise a laugh from the spectators by denigrating a stratēgos who had become suddenly rich; and this was well before Pericles’ death and Cleon’s arrival on the scene.
At a sociological level, it is thus not possible to detect any radical break between the period before Pericles’ death and the period after it. The continuity of political practices was remarkable, contrary to the claims made by the author of the Constitution of the Athenians. Can one honestly, in good faith, set up a contrast between Pericles’ policies and those of his successors, arguing that the latter corrupted the people by providing civic pay? Were not Cleon, Hyperbolus, and Cleophon simply imitating Pericles, who, as early as the 450s, had introduced misthos for jurors? Besides, even if Cleon was somewhat more aggressive than the stratēgos and opposed his rival’s “wait-and-see” strategy, he and his fellows were, after all, essentially in agreement with Pericles’ policy: keep on with the war against Sparta and, at all costs, maintain the empire.15
The comic poets were in no doubt at all about it; in his lifetime, Pericles was the victim of attacks just as violent as those later directed against Cleon. Accused, as he was, of aspiring to tyranny and having plotted Ephialtes’ death, depicted as a corrupt demagogue and even an adulterer, Pericles was certainly not spared rumors, defamatory gossip, and innuendos. If chance had so had it that the earliest preserved comedy had been Cratinus’s Dionysalexandros, in which Pericles was shamelessly criticized, and not Aristophanes’ Acharnians, in which it is Cleon who is the prime target of the poet, we should probably have seen Pericles in a less favorable light.
Now, at the end of this analysis, Pericles no longer seems so different from Cleon. Both were skilful demagogues if, that is, the term is taken with its original meaning of “leader of the people,” with no social or moral connotations. Initially, “demagogues” simply designated all those who, from the time of the Persian Wars down to 411, put themselves forward to lead the people. As Christian Mann has shown, the death of Pericles did not radically upset the functioning of the Athenian democracy.16 To be sure, the fourth-century Athenians confusedly felt that they were living in a political world very different from that of the fifth century. However, most of them did not correlate the change with the disappearance of Pericles. As we have seen, at the end of the fifth century, Eupolis simply drew a contrast between the past and the present; he did not mention the stratēgos by name. As for Demosthenes, in the mid-fourth century he certainly did discern a change in Athenian political life, but he did not connect it with any particular moment or individual:
I consider it right to set the welfare of the state above the popularity of an orator. Indeed, the orators of past generations, always praised but not always imitated by those who address you, adopted this very standard and principle of statesmanship [of putting the safety of the city before winning the favor of the people by flattering them]. I refer to the famous Aristides, to Nicias, to my own namesake and to Pericles. But ever since this breed of orators appeared, who ply you with questions such as “What would you like? What shall I propose? How can I oblige you?” the interests of the state have frittered away for a momentary popularity.17
So this orator did not associate the end of the Golden Age with the death of Pericles, but extended that enchanted age to the time of Nicias, who died sixteen years after the stratēgos, in 413, during the expedition to Sicily.
However, it was Plato who most radically questioned any such break. According to him, it is completely pointless to try to separate the grain from the chaff and to set in contrast the period before Pericles and the period after him, quite simply because no leader, however virtuous, ever had any chance of controlling the Athenian people, given that it was so tyrannical and capricious.
THE SOCRATIC CRITIQUE: A STRATĒGOS WITHOUT INFLUENCE
The Periclean Moment: A General Pedagogical Failure
The Socratic authors—Plato, of course, but also Xenophon and Antisthenes—produced an extremely negative image of Pericles. Far from associating the stratēgos with a golden age, they portrayed him as a man who was certainly exceptional but was incapable of educating his contemporaries. Failing to dispense a suitable paideia for them, the stratēgos had no way of controlling the harmful desires of the masses.
To present that failure of Pericles, the Socratic authors chose to adopt one particular line of attack. In order to emphasize his fundamental inability to educate anyone at all, they concentrated their critiques on the stratēgos’s difficult relationship with his own children. It must be said that his children, in particular his elder son, Xanthippus, had not hesitated to criticize their father or even, according to Stesimbrotus of Thasos, to circulate the most appalling rumors about him.18 The Socratics thus had a fine time opposing the discord (stasis) that reigned in the stratēgos’s family to the necessary unity that was believed to prevail in the city.19
Plato reproached Pericles in particular for not having taught his children the art of government. To the philosopher, this seemed truly scandalous, for he believed that politics stemmed from an overarching knowledge regime (epistēmē): “In private life, our best and wisest citizens are unable to transmit this excellence of theirs; for Pericles, the father of these young fellows here, gave them a first-rate training in the subjects for which he found teachers, but in those of which he is himself a master [the political art], he neither trains them personally nor commits them to another’s guidance, and so they go about grazing at will like sacred oxen, on the chance of their picking up excellence here or there for themselves.”20
Over and above the mediocre education provided for Pericles’ own sons, Plato also complained about the paideia—or rather absence of any paideia—dispensed to Pericles’ wards, Alcibiades and his brother, Cleinias II. As their official guardian, the stratēgos had failed to check the disorderly behavior of his young protégés—at least, that is the point of view that Plato’s Socrates defends in his dialogue with the young Alcibiades. According to him, Pericles could not be considered a wise man since he had transmitted no wisdom either to his sons or to Cleinias. In the course of this conversation, Alcibiades himself actually acknowledges that the two sons of the stratēgos are stupid and that his own brother is crazy (Alcibiades I, 118d). Pressing his advantage, Socrates then asks the young man: “But tell me of any other Athenian or foreigner, slave or freeman, who is accounted to have become wiser through converse with Pericles?” (Alcibiades I, 119a). Unable to find an answer, Alcibiades is struck dumb, in his silence acknowledging the point made by the philosopher.
When he composed this exchange, Plato was clearly pursuing a number of objectives. In the first place, he wanted to lay the blame for the failure of the education of Alcibiades and his brother solely at Pericles’ door. Alcibiades, involved as he was in a number of religious, political, and sexual scandals, became the symbol of the stratēgos’s failure as a teacher. Second, by launching this counter-assault, Plato aimed to exonerate Socrates of any responsibility in this pedagogic catastrophe, in reply to all those who were accusing his master of playing a harmful role in the young man’s education.21 And finally, Plato was widening his attack and denying Pericles the ability to educate anyone at all; his misdemeanors in the private sphere were prefigurations of his failure in the public sphere. Plato was so keen on this idea that he returned to the attack in the Gorgias: “Whether the Athenians are said to have become better because of Pericles, or quite the contrary, to have been corrupted by him? … what I, for my part, hear is that Pericles has made the Athenians idle, cowardly, talkative and avaricious, by starting the system of public payments” (Gorgias, 515d–e). Worse still, he
even suggested that Pericles had made his fellow-citizens “even wilder than they were when he took them in hand” (Gorgias, 516c). Far from putting a break on the corruption inherent in the democratic system, the stratēgos had actually accelerated it.
In order to illustrate the decline of Athens, the Socratic authors sometimes even went so far as to use Pericles the Younger in their demonstration. Here again, it was a matter of using the son in order to criticize the father. Aspasia’s bastard did indeed, by his very existence, embody the blunders of Periclean policies: had not Pericles obtained his naturalization in flagrant contradiction to the law on citizenship that he himself had proposed in 451? Carried away by their enthusiastic demolition exercise, the Socratics carried irony to the point of making the son a ferocious critic of the radical democracy established by his parent. Pericles the Younger, having himself been appointed stratēgos (and destined to suffer an unjust death after the battle of Arginusae, in 406 B.C.), is thus represented in Xenophon’s Memorabilia as lamenting the decadence of the city of Athens. Comparing the Athenians to athletes, formerly energetic but now lackadaisical, in order to reverse this doom-laden trend he proposes a return to the ancestral mores, just like those of … the Spartans.22 Under the malicious pen of Xenophon, the son of Pericles was reduced to praising the sworn enemies of his father and celebrating their oligarchic political system.