In France, this positive view was relayed ten years later by Voltaire in his Le siècle de Louis XIV (The Age of Louis XIV). Right at the beginning of this work, the philosophe resuscitated the theory of the four ages of humanity, although he subverted the original meaning: “Whosoever thinks, or what is still more rare, whosoever has taste, will find but four ages in the history of the world. These four happy ages are those in which the arts were carried to perfection and which, by serving as an era of the greatness of the human mind, are examples for posterity.”8 Voltaire allotted ancient Greece a place of honor, mixing together politicians, philosophers, and artists in exuberant chronological disorder: “The first of these ages to which true glory is annexed is that of Philip and Alexander or that of a Pericles, a Demosthenes, an Aristotle, a Plato, an Apelles, a Phidias, and a Praxiteles.”9 So the writer did not, strictly speaking, isolate an “age of Pericles,” since this list of names amalgamated not only different periods—the fifth and the fourth centuries B.C.—but also antagonistic political regimes—the monarchy of Macedon and the democracy of Athens. In truth, Voltaire had no sympathy for Periclean democracy, as such, as he explained to Frederick the Great at the end of 1772: “When I begged you to restore the fine arts of Greece, my request did not go so far as to ask you to reestablish Athenian democracy; I have no liking for government by the mob.”10 If the philosophe valued Athens so highly, it was not so much for its political liberty but for its trade and opulence, in which he detected fertile ground that favored a blossoming of the arts and letters.11
In France, the expression “the age of Pericles” did not become common currency until the eve of the revolution; and when it did, it was not in a positive sense. Condillac, influenced by his brother, Mably, used the formula negatively in his Histoire ancienne, composed in 1775 for Louis XV’s grandson, the prince of Parma. In opposition to Voltaire’s paean of praise, Condillac declared, “The excesses to which luxury leads are always harbingers of the fall of empires. The ages in which it holds sway are those that come to be called fine ages and the age of Pericles was the first of those prized centuries. They would be valued more accurately if the clamour of those celebrating them allowed the groans of the people to be heard.”12
In 1788, Abbé Barthélemy, in his turn, employed the expression in his Voyage du jeune Anacharsis, using it as the title of a section of the introduction that preceded the story. Before tackling the book’s actual subject, the author reflected upon “the age of Solon” (630–490); “the age of Themistocles and Aristides” (490–444); and, finally, “the age of Pericles” (444–404), indicating the dates of each period in a note. This chronological arrangement was by no means favorable to the stratēgos. The short “age of Pericles,” which lasted no more than forty years, did not include the glorious Persian Wars but only the shameful Peloponnesian War. Barthélemy thus chose to link together what Thucydides had deliberately set apart—the time before and the time after Pericles and the glorious reign of the stratēgos that was followed by the sordid domination of the demagogues, which led to Athens’s undoing.
So it was not until the following century that the expression acquired a definitely positive connotation, with the elaboration of a representation of a bourgeois and liberal Athens that was in step with the political developments of the period. All the same, in the eighteenth century, Voltaire was neither the only one nor the first to sketch in a more favorable portrait of the stratēgos. Influenced by Thucydides, a number of the Enlightenment historians did likewise, without, however, jettisoning a number of prejudices that had resulted from the reading of Plutarch.
A Two-Faced Pericles: The Ambivalence of Enlightenment Historians
Although the partisans of Athens were certainly less numerous than Sparta’s admirers, their voices did not go unheeded. Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Condorcet all contrasted the frugality of Sparta to an Athens whose power rested not on weapons but on trade and luxury.13 Nevertheless, this alternative tradition does not necessarily redound to the credit of Pericles himself. The article titled “Luxury” composed by Saint-Lambert for the Encyclopédie is altogether symptomatic in this respect: while he rejected Rousseau’s idea that Athens was corrupted by the theater, it was certainly not so as to rehabilitate the stratēgos, for he went on to explain, “It was by bringing down the Areopagus, not by constructing theatres, that Pericles destroyed Athens.”14 Even in the eyes of the philosophes who were fascinated by Athenian elegance, the reputation of Pericles remained lastingly tarnished.
However, the Enlightenment historians were kinder to the stratēgos. One of them was Charles Rollin (1661–1741). In his monumental Histoire ancienne in thirteen volumes,15 which was read throughout scholarly Europe and was immediately translated into English, Athens was presented as an enlightened city, open to both arts and letters.16 In particular, Rollin admired its well-balanced political regime in which popular government was harmoniously combined with the influence of great men. The reign of Pericles naturally occupied a major place in his account, even though blame was still mixed in with praise for Pericles.
In the section devoted to the “character of Pericles,” Rollin started off by considering all the clichés produced about Pericles’ supposed demagogy. He noted that, in order to discomfit his rival Cimon, the stratēgos had distributed plots of land, multiplied entertainments, and distributed pay to the people. His opinion, which was influenced by Plutarch, was by no means flattering to Pericles: “It is impossible to say how fatal these unhappy politics were to the republic and the many evils by which they were attended. For these new regulations, besides their draining the public treasury, gave the people a luxurious and dissolute turn of mind; whereas before they were sober and modest, and contented themselves with getting a livelihood by their sweat and labour.”17 More surprisingly, Rollin even cast doubt on the advisability of the great construction works launched by Pericles: “Was it just in him to expend in superfluous buildings and vain decorations the immense sums intended for carrying on the war?”18 Following the example of Plato, the historian even declared “that Pericles, with all his grand edifices and other works, had not improved the mind of one of the citizens in virtue, but rather corrupted the purity and simplicity of their ancient manners.”19
However, criticism then gave way to praise. We are told that, having rid himself of his last great rival in 443, Pericles began “to change his behavior. He now was not so mild and tractable as before, nor did he submit or abandon himself any longer to the whims and caprices of the people, as so many winds.”20 In marking this change, Rollin was clearly following the account that Plutarch gives in his Life of Pericles;21 but he was also drawing upon other sources and, in particular, based his remarks upon a close reading of Thucydides: “It must nevertheless be confessed that the circumstance that gave Pericles this great authority was, not only the force of his eloquence but, as Thucydides observes, the reputation of his life and great probity.”22 Having exalted the incorruptibility of the stratēgos, Rollin again referred to the Athenian historian in order to exonerate Pericles from any responsibility in starting the Peloponnesian War: “But Thucydides, a contemporary author, and who was very well acquainted with all the transactions of Athens, … is much more worthy of belief than a poet who was a professed slanderer and satirist.”23 And it was again Thucydides who inspired Rollin’s final eulogy after he had described Pericles’ death—at precisely the same point as in the Athenian author’s account:
In him were united almost all the qualities which constitute the great man; as those of admiral, by his great skill in naval affairs; of the great captain, by his conquests and victories; of the high-treasurer, by the excellent order in which he put the finances; of the great politician, by the extent and justness of his views, by his eloquence in public deliberations, and by the dexterity and address with which he transacted the affairs; of a minister of state, by the methods that he employed to increase trade and promote the arts in general; in fine, of father of his country, by the hap
piness that he procured to every individual and which he always had in view as the true scope and end of his administration. But I must not omit another characteristic which was peculiar to him. He acted with so much wisdom, moderation, disinterestedness and zeal for the public good; he discovered in all things, so great a superiority of talents, and gave so exalted an idea of his experience, capacity and integrity, that he acquired the confidence of all the Athenians; and fixed, in his own favour, during the forty years that he governed the Athenians, their natural fickleness and inconstancy.24
It was one of the first times since the rediscovery of Greek writings that Pericles benefited from a panegyric so full and well argued. By paying unprecedented attention to Thucydides, Rollin’s Histoire ancienne paved the way for the rehabilitation of the stratēgos.
At the end of the eighteenth century, another historian succeeded in engineering a decisive rehabilitation of Thucydides and, along with him, Pericles. Pierre Charles Lévesque, who was a professor at the Collège de France and a member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, published a new translation of the Peloponnesian War in 1795—more than a century after the “faithless beauty” by Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt that had appeared in 1662; and it was in Lévesque’s version, in the following century, that Thucydides, “of all the ancient historians the one who deserves most to be trusted,”25 was read and reread. Even so, in his Etudes d’histoire ancienne Lévesque did not manifest unconditional admiration for the Athenian leader: “The Greece of Pierre-Charles Lévesque is a composite construction in which the heritage of Isocrates and Plutarch, that is to say Abbé Barthélemy, coexists, not without a number of glaring contradictions, alongside his readings of Thucydides. Thus, on the very same page in the Etudes, Lévesque describes Pericles both as the demagogue who changed the democracy of Theseus and Solon into a ‘violently conflict-ridden regime’ and also as an irreplaceable statesman, whose death delivered up the Athenians to ‘upstart wretches such as Cleon.’”26 Despite his real admiration of Thucydides, the historian still remained partly dependent on the clichés produced by Plutarch. Scorched as he was by the Terror, Lévesque was doubtless wary of the excesses of direct democracy and rejected any servile imitation of Antiquity in the manner of his colleague Volney.
To find an unalloyed paean of praise for Pericles in the eighteenth century, one must leave France and cross the Rhine. It was, in fact, in the German world that, for the first time, the stratēgos became an indisputable model in the writings of Winckelmann.
Pericles in the Germanic World: Selective Similarities
At the start of the eighteenth century, there were no visible signs of the philhellenic vogue that was about to seize Germany. What is the explanation for this fascination that took hold around 1750 and peaked at the turn of the century? It was a craze that cries out for an explanation all the more because it ran counter to all the uses to which Antiquity was currently being put.
First, why choose Greece rather than Rome? Precisely so as to be original and different: in the great European interplay of affiliations to Antiquity, Rome had already been taken over by Italy and, worse still, by the imperialistic and universalist France of Louis XIV, the revolution and, finally, the empire.27 Greece, on the other hand, seemed a model that was available to Germans in quest of an identity. But a mere desire to be different cannot explain everything. More positively, Greece represented a model of non-state-based civilization that was united by its language and culture—in short, a plausible ancestor for a German nation that was divided into several hundred states that were virtually independent but shared a common linguistic and cultural horizon.28
But why did German authors prefer Athens to Sparta? Here too, it was a matter of distancing themselves from the dominant cultural model, the better to affirm Germanic originality. But this preference for the city of Athens did not result solely from a choice by default. It was also based on a specific relationship to Antiquity that was founded, not on literature, but on the visual arts. German authors focused not on a purely literary Greece—that of Homer or of Plutarch—but on a tangible Greece, above all that of sculpture and architecture. In this particular respect, Sparta clearly could not compete with Athens.
If Frederick II of Prussia was the first to sing the praises of the fine “age of Pericles,” it nevertheless fell to a young librarian, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), to provide a historical and scientific basis for German philhellenism. In less than ten years, Winckelmann published two works that produced an immense effect throughout scholarly Europe: in 1755, the Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works of Painting and Sculpture, and, in 1764, the monumental History of Ancient Art in Antiquity, which was very promptly translated into French. In it, Winckelmann, inspired by “an obsessive quest for origins,”29 exalted Greek art to the point of turning it into a source [Quelle] and model [Urbild] for his German readership.30
And in Winckelmann’s eyes, it was the Athens of Pericles that constituted the pinnacle of Greek art and, consequently, of the human spirit.
The happiest time for art in Greece, and especially in Athens, were the forty years in which Pericles ruled the republic—if I may so express myself—and during the obstinate war that preceded the Peloponnesian War, which had its beginning in the eighty-seventh Olympiad. … [Pericles] sought to introduce wealth and superfluity into Athens by giving employment to all sorts of men. He built temples, theatres, aqueducts, and harbours and was even extravagant in ornamenting them. The Parthenon, the Odeon and many other buildings are known to the whole world. At that time art began to receive life, as it were, and Pliny says that sculpture as well as painting now began.31
Winckelmann’s study closely associated “beauty (natural and artistic), well-being (individual and collective) and liberty (personal and political).”32 Athenian art was thus certainly not set apart from the fertile political terrain that had favored its blossoming.
A few decades later, this “politicization of aesthetics” peaked in the work of Johann Gottfried von Herder. In 1791, this German philosopher published his Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit), in which he proclaimed an equal dignity of all the civilizations that had appeared on Earth. This display of relativism did not, however, prevent him from paying emphatic homage to Greece “whose monuments speak to us with a philosophic spirit.”33 Referring explicitly to Winckelmann, Herder stressed the degree to which, in Athens, the artistic flowering and the democratic regime were linked: “But the republican constitutions, which in time were diffused throughout all Greece, gave a wider scope to the arts. In a commonwealth, edifices for the assembly of the people, for the public treasure, for general exercise and amusement were necessary …, as Winckelmann no doubt considered when he esteemed the liberty of the Grecian republics was the golden age of the arts.”34
In support of his argument, following a remarkable change of attitude, Herder cited the precise case of Pericles. Instead of criticizing the stratēgos’s demagogy, he represented it as the very motor that produced the artistic climax of Athens: “Pericles flattered the people with these notions of fame, and did more for the arts, than ten kings of Athens would have done.”35 It was in order to please his fellow-citizens that the stratēgos had launched his policy of great architectural works: without his frantic pursuit of popularity, there would have been no Parthenon, no Odeon, no Propylaea! Even the oppression of the allies met with Herder’s approval, given that “even these grievances were subservient to the public arts.”36
Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the German fascination with Pericles’ city never flagged. Through the voices of writers such as Schiller and Hölderlin, the German bourgeoisie set about “speaking Greek,” since it was too weak to “speak German” (that is, to constitute its own national State).37 Meanwhile, over and above philosophy and poetry, this enthusiasm also found expression in architecture. German builders adopted a neoclassical styl
e of openly Greek inspiration, in particular in Berlin and Munich. The Brandenburg Gate, set up in 1788 and 1791, today still testifies to this, for its architect Carl Gotthard Langhans took the Propylaea as the model for his project (figure 13).
In Germany, the flattering reputation of Pericles lived on into the first decades of the nineteenth century. Hegel, for instance, praised the stratēgos unhesitatingly in his lectures on The Philosophy of History, which he delivered between 1822 and 1830. Won over by the Athenian spirit—which he admired more than Spartan rigidity—the philosopher sang the praises of the democratic leader, even straying into hyperbole: “Pericles is the Zeus of the human pantheon of Athens,” “the most profoundly accomplished, genuine, noble statesman.”38 All the same, Hegel no longer regarded Periclean Athens as a model for Germany to follow. Unlike Winckelmann and Herder, this philosopher did not believe that such an imitation would be possible or even desirable. The Greek cities, which embodied the adolescence of Reason, could offer no political perspective for the future.39 So Hegel’s praises had all the characteristics of an embalming; Pericles was certainly canonized but was turned into a relic from the past that was definitely now beyond reach. At this point, a distance developed between the Germans and the stratēgos, at the very point when English and French historians were rehabilitating him and turning him into the patron saint of parliamentary democracy.
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