When the stratēgos does appear in the seventeenth century, it is in a very particular genre, that of Dialogues of the Dead, which flourished in the reign of Louis XIV. In these, we find a pensive or even saddened Pericles, meditating on his descent to the Underworld.
A Pericles in Torment: The Stratēgos in Dialogues of the Dead
Dialogues of the Dead were all the rage at the end of the seventeenth century. This narrative technique, inspired by Lucian of Samosata (A.D. 120–180) accommodated all kinds of encounters. Here, Ancients and Moderns could meet freely and talk together after their deaths. For those who adopted this format, imagining improbable postmortem encounters from which the heroes did not always emerge enhanced, it seemed an amusing way to undermine great figures of the past.
In 1685, Fontenelle (1657–1757), a well-established partisan of the Moderns, produced a series of Dialogues of the Dead in which, in the Elysian Fields of the Greek Underworld, figures from Antiquity met with more contemporary characters. For him, this was an ideal opportunity to confront ancient thought with modern ideas, rejecting the primacy so often accorded to the Ancients. In his third dialogue, Socrates and Montaigne are chatting in the Underworld and, ironically enough, it is the Greek philosopher who takes it upon himself to deflate the prestige of the great figures from Antiquity:
SOCRATES.—Take care you are not deceived; Antiquity is an Object of a peculiar kind; its distance magnifies it. Had you but known Aristides, Phocion, Pericles and myself (since you are pleased to place me among their number), you would certainly have found some to match us in your own Age. That which commonly possesses people so in favour of Antiquity is their being out of humour with their own times, and Antiquity takes advantage of their spleen. They cry up the Ancients in spite to their contemporaries. Thus, when we lived, we esteemed our ancestors more than they deserved; and, in requital, our posterity esteem us at present more than we deserve.41
However, the appearance of Pericles here is still very discreet. Although mentioned in passing, the stratēgos is not characterized at all, as if Fontenelle did not consider him worthy of being a major character in a dialogue of the dead. Five years later, in his Digression sur les Anciens et les Modernes, he did not even mention the stratēgos, but cited only Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes in support of his thesis.
It was not until the Dialogues of the Dead composed by Fénelon (1651–1715) that Pericles at last landed a leading role, even if this did not necessarily redound to his advantage. Fénelon, a latecomer to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, presented himself as a conciliator, refusing to take sides. He was appointed tutor to Louis XIV’s grandson (between 1689 and 1695), and during this period wrote his Dialogues des morts, which were, however, not published until after his disgrace.42 The purpose of this work, designed for the edification of the dauphin, was educational. The dauphin was presented with models either to emulate or, on the contrary, to shun. Freely inspired by an anecdote told by Plutarch,43 the eighteenth dialogue was entirely unambiguous in this respect. In it, Pericles held the role of a counterexample.
The stratēgos, here greeting his pupil Alcibiades upon the latter’s arrival in the Underworld, was depicted as a tormented man, bewailing his fate and his lost authority:
PERICLES.—You know very well, that could eloquence prevail (and this I may say without vanity) I should come off as well as any other: but talking to them is in vain. Those flatteries by which the Athenians were won, those subtle turns in discourse, those insinuating ways by which men are taken, by falling in with their humours and passions, are of no service here. Their ears are stopped, and their hearts of brass cannot be moved. Though I died in the unhappy Peloponnesian war, yet am I punished for it here below. They ought to have forgiven me such fault, in the commission of which I lost my life; and which I was led into by your persuasions.
ALCIBIADES.—True, I advised you to undertake this war, rather than be obliged to make up your accounts. … Can your judges here below be angry at such maxims?
PERICLES.—Yes, so very angry, that though in that cursed war I lost the confidence of the people, and died of the plague, yet have I suffered terrible punishments here, for having unseasonably disturbed the public quiet. By this you may judge, cousin, how well you are like to come off.44
Confessing himself guilty of unleashing the Peloponnesian War, Pericles thus ended up suffering in the Underworld, where his formidable rhetorical skills were of no avail to him and could not mollify his judges who remained deaf to all his fine words and judged only his actions.45 For once, he attracted attention at centerstage, but he was depicted as an unscrupulous politician, now punished for his reprehensible actions.
However, despite these timid appearances in the Underworld, for most of the time Pericles remained confined to the margins of Western imaginary representations.
A Flash of Lightning in the Darkness: Hobbes’s Pericles
The work of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) presents an exception in this gloomy panorama. Before becoming the now famous great philosopher, the author of Leviathan made his name with a translation of The History of the Peloponnesian War, which was published in 1629 (figure 11). To translate this work by Thucydides was by no means an obvious thing to do, for the Greek historian aroused scant interest in Tudor England except among a few scholars, such as Francis Bacon. To be sure, the work had already been translated almost a century earlier, in 1550, by Thomas Nicoll. However, that translation was not at all trustworthy insofar as it was based on the faulty French translation by Seyssel, which was itself derived from the “faithless beauty” in Latin by Lorenzo Valla. “No doubt Hobbes was right in saying that Thucydides had been traduced rather than translated into English.”46
Hobbes, who came from a modest family, with neither fortune nor reputation, undertook this vast enterprise while employed as a tutor in the noble Cavendish family. In the humanist manner, he regarded history as a determining element in the education of the young aristocrat in his charge. Pericles, depicted as an honest man, motivated solely by virtue, emerged enhanced from a reading of this work. In contrast to Hobbes’s pessimistic diagnosis of human nature, Pericles did not appear as a bloodthirsty wolf but rather as an attentive shepherd, struggling against the impulses of his flock, with no concern for his own egoistic interests.47
Hobbes explained the mainsprings for his admiration for the stratēgos in a short text devoted to the life of Thucydides that accompanied the translation.48 According to him, the Athenian historian harbored no sympathy for democracy: “From his opinion touching the government of the state, it is manifest that he least of all liked the democracy.”49 According to Hobbes, Thucydides instead favored not only oligarchy but, even more, monarchy. In his view, Athens reached the peak of its glory when ruled by sovereigns, first Pisistratus, then Pericles: “He praiseth the government of Athens when it was mixed of the few and the many, but more he commendeth it both when Peisistratus reigned (saving that it was a usurped power) and when, in the beginning of this war, it was democratical in name, but in effect monarchical under Pericles. So that it seemeth that as he was of regal descent, so he best approved of the regal government.”50 Hobbes’s approval of the stratēgos was thus based on a particular reading of Thucydides, whom he considered to be a fervent supporter of monarchy. On those grounds, he interpreted the famous formula of book II—“It was in name a state democratical; but in fact a government of the principal man”—as a barely veiled monarchist slogan.51
FIGURE 11. Detail of the title page to Thomas Hobbes’s translation of Thucydides’ Eight Bookes of the Peloponnesian Warre, 1634 [first edition 1629]. Engraving by Thomas Cecill, 1634. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
In his old age, in 1672, Thomas Hobbes’s opinion remained unchanged. Looking back over his career, he claimed in his autobiography written in Latin verse that Thucydides pleased him “more than all the other” historians, because “he has shown that democracy was bad and [that] a single man was far wiser than the
crowd.”52 The rehabilitation of Pericles thus took place to the detriment of democracy, which was depicted as a pure simulacrum that concealed an acceptance of royalty or, at any rate, of personal power: “This was to be not only the position of Thucydides, but a great political discovery that was to make it possible, throughout history, for conservatives in all countries and all ages, to admire the greatness of Athens without approving of the popular regime.”53
By inventing this elegant solution (praising Pericles and at the same time stigmatizing the popular regime), Hobbes established the bases for the rehabilitation of the stratēgos in a Europe dominated by monarchist culture and ideals. So, a priori, the period seemed ready for Pericles’ return to grace, given that, in the years that followed, the ancient models made a triumphant return. But, alas, the chance was yet again missed, and anti-Periclean clichés even enjoyed a rejuvenation.
PERICLES AS JUDGED BY THE ENLIGHTENMENT
After the Moderns’ victory over the Ancients in the last years of the seventeenth century, the century that followed was marked by a sudden “return to Antiquity.” Europe was seized by a veritable mania for the ancient world, which was sharpened by the discovery of the towns buried beneath the lava from Vesuvius: Herculaneum in 1738 and Pompeii ten years later: “for the first time, people penetrated, as if committing a burglary, right into Antiquity.”54 And this was not simply a return to the status quo ante. The eighteenth century helped to “repoliticize” the relationship to the Ancients and, in particular, to focus on Greece. However, this “repoliticization” process took place through the intermediary of the Sparta of Lycurgus, not the Athens of Pericles.
Pericles Eclipsed: Overshadowed by Lycurgus
After 1720, the return to Antiquity took place in a selective manner, drawing a dividing line within ancient history. Lycurgus’s Sparta and Republican Rome, both praised wholeheartedly, were set in opposition to the Athenian democracy, threatened by anarchy, and imperial Rome, “subjected to the bloodthirsty despotism of half-mad Caesars.”55 As a result of this great division, the Spartans found themselves credited with every virtue, leaving the Athenians very pallid by comparison.
A number of factors combine to explain the incredible success of Sparta in the Europe of the Enlightenment. First, the persistent popularity of the same texts (with the same lacunas) continued to produce the same effects. Thucydides remained the least appreciated of all the ancient historians, so much so that he was even considered—somewhat exaggeratedly—as “the major victim of the Enlightenment”56: The Peloponnesian War was treated to no French translation between the “faithless beauty” by Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt in 1662 and the version produced by Pierre Charles Lévesque in 1795. Plutarch, in contrast, continued to enjoy the same prestige among cultivated elite groups. Better still, it became easier to access his “Spartan works,” for in 1721 André Dacier offered a new translation of the Life of Lycurgus, in which the language was more accessible than that of Amyot’s 1559 translation.
In the Parallel Lives, Sparta also benefited from another advantage over Athens. The entire history of Sparta was covered by the Life of Lycurgus and, more marginally, that of Lysander, whereas the image of Athens was spread over eight different Lives, ranging from Solon to Demosthenes. Reduced to a single survey, the Spartan city was able to accommodate philosophical generalizations more easily than Athens, embroiled as it was in complex constitutional developments. The Spartan system, established all at once and fixed forever, offered the philosophers of the Enlightenment a fascinating model.
For the Athens of Pericles likewise to become “good to think with” required a quite different attitude to erudition in order to escape from so caricatural a representation. But the philosophes, on the contrary, developed a marked aversion to erudite scholars, accusing them of accumulating knowledge without the ability to discriminate between what was valuable and what was not. In the Discours préliminaire (preface) to the Encyclopédie, D’Alembert described an erudite scholar as “a kind of miser … who picks up the most worthless metals along with the most precious of them” and, in order to do so, needs nothing but a good memory, the faculty that is the first to be cultivated because it is the easiest to satisfy.”57 In France, the philosophes in no way sought to expand the available range of ancient sources, preferring to bask in the vision of a stylized Antiquity that was provided by Plutarch, with a little Plato and Aristotle mixed in.
Sparta held a final trump card that made its attraction almost irresistible to the philosophes of the Enlightenment: its austere mores. Lycurgus’s city fueled the critique of luxury that developed in reaction to the excesses of the Regency (1715–1723). Rousseau, among many others, referred constantly to the Spartan model in order to defend an ideal of frugality and to oppose the corruption of his day.58
The Greece of the eighteenth century was therefore primarily Spartan. Rousseau, Mably, Helvétius, Turpin, and the Encyclopédistes were all admirers of Sparta, ready to revile fifth-century Athens by contrast. To be sure, a number of discordant voices were raised and, in the Europe of the Enlightenment, Pericles’ fatherland was not solely denigrated by detractors; Rollin and Voltaire presented a definitely positive view of this member of the Alcmaeonid family, as we shall see in the next chapter. All the same, it was not necessarily the stratēgos who caught the attention of the few intellectuals sympathetic to the democratic city.
The case of Montesquieu is the most telling in this respect. In his Esprit des lois (1748), Athens, along with Rome, was presented as the model for “good democracies.”59 But we should be clear about the meaning of those words—in this case, what Montesquieu had in mind was not Pericles’ city but the voting qualifications established by Solon. This was the “democracy” that was close to his heart. In it, only the wealthy could become magistrates, the Council of the Areopagus supervised the regime’s stability, and commerce flourished without obstruction.60 In this entire work of his, there was no mention of Pericles either at this point or, indeed, later! For the author of L’Esprit des lois the stratēgos was the very embodiment of an excessive liberty that leads to decadence. In book VIII, chapter 4, Montesquieu considered that “the victory over the Persians at Salamis corrupted the republic of Athens” by engendering “the spirit of extreme equality, which leads to the despotism of one alone.”61 Even among the rare defenders of Athens, Pericles thus found himself eclipsed by more irenic figures such as the wise lawgiver Solon.62
Turgot proposed an equally ambivalent view. Before famously becoming Louis XVI’s great reformist minister, in about 1750 he had favored an on the whole positive view of Athens in his fragmentary universal historical sketch of the progress of science and the arts.63 All the same, that praise did not extend to the democratic regime as such: “Athens, governed by the decrees of the multitude, whose tumultuous excesses the orators calmed or encouraged as they saw fit, Athens where Pericles had taught its leaders to buy the State at the expense of the State itself and to dissipate its treasures so as not to have to render accounts; Athens, where the art of governing the people was the art of amusing it and feeding its ears, eyes and curiosity, always greedy for novelties, festivals, pleasures and constant spectacles: Athens owed to the very vices of its government that led to its defeat by the Spartans all the eloquence, taste, magnificence and the splendour in all the arts that made it the model of all nations.”64 This was, to put it mildly, an ambiguous paean of praise: even if, through its dazzling cultural achievements Athens had risen to the rank of “the model of all nations,” it owed that success to a vitiated culture that ineluctably condemned it to decadence and destruction. This was how Turgot contributed to the famous “quarrel about luxury” that led many other philosophes of the Enlightenment to mock the splendors of Periclean Athens in the name of the sacrosanct frugality of Sparta.65
Pericles under Attack: The Critique of the Sparta-Loving Philosophes
Rousseau and Mably: Pericles and the Corrupting Effects of Luxury
Jean-Jacques
Rousseau admired Sparta so much that, in his Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, he described the city of Lycurgus as “a Republic of demi-gods rather than of men.”66 In the view of the philosophe of Geneva, the city of Sparta had managed to combine austere mores with well-balanced institutions. It had seized a fortunate initiative and had “expelled the Arts and Artists, the Sciences and Scientists from [its] walls,” making itself “equally famed for its happy ignorance and for the wisdom of its Laws.”67 Athens was seen as an absolute foil to this model of austerity and sobriety. Rousseau, influenced by Montaigne’s Essays, could see Athens only as a land of “vices” and “fine arts.” This philosophe did not even deign to consider it a true democracy: “Athens was, in fact, not a democracy, but a most tyrannical aristocracy governed by learned men and orators.”68
In this dark picture, Pericles occupied a special position, as an orator in love with the fine arts rather than with virtue. “Pericles had great talents, much eloquence, grandeur and taste; he embellished Athens with excellent sculptures, lavish buildings and masterpieces in all the arts. And God knows how much he has been extolled as a result by the writing crowd! Yet it still remains to be seen whether Pericles was a good magistrate, for in the management of leading States, what matters is not to erect statues but to govern men well.”69 Echoing Plato’s attacks in the Gorgias and the Alcibiades, Rousseau deplored the stratēgos’s fundamental inability to improve his fellow-citizens in any way at all.
Rousseau’s reflections, in their turn, inspired the ferocious attack of Abbé Mably, who was Condillac’s brother. In his writings, this philosophe railed against the inequality of conditions and fortunes and yearned for a more egalitarian and virtuous society. Seen from this critical point of view, Pericles’ splendid Athens operated as an anti-model: it was nothing but a place of vice; the citizens of which clearly cared nothing for the common good. In his Observations sur l’histoire de la Grèce ou Des causes de la prospérité et des malheurs des Grecs (Observations on the history of Greece or On the causes of the prosperity and misfortunes of the Greeks), which appeared in 1766, this philosophe accused the arts and letters, in particular, of having encouraged debauchery and sensuality.70
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