Pericles of Athens
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All the same, Curtius had no admiration for Athenian democracy as such—which is hardly surprising in the man who was the tutor of Frederick III, the heir to the throne of Prussia. The reason he so admired Pericles was precisely because the Athenian leader had removed all substance from the power of the people; under his leadership, “all the principles of democracy were virtually abolished, viz the constant change and the distribution of official power, and even the responsibility attaching to it and forming the strongest guarantee of the sovereignty of the people. … Pericles, alone invested with a continuous official authority which commanded all the various branches of public life, stood in solitary grandeur firm and calm above the surging State.”79 Curtius, who was both a liberal and a monarchist, thus constructed the image of an Athens without democracy, the popular institutions of which were tempered or even neutralized by an aristocracy of the virtue that was embodied by Pericles.
The vision defended by Curtius soon entered general circulation. His work was rapidly translated into English and French and was certainly the Greek history that was most widely read in the nineteenth century and that, in its turn, influenced a number of great German historians. One was Wilhelm Adolf Schmidt, who described Pericles as “the zenith of the entire ancient and classical world” and the cultural peak of human history.80
However, this idealized image soon faded away in the Germanic world. Two developments combined to marginalize or even discredit Pericles in Germany. In the first place, Athens was no longer alone in attracting the attention of historians, many of whom now turned to Rome or to the history of the Hellenistic kingdoms; and second, the progress made by the new “science of Antiquity” led to disenchantment with Pericles’ city, revealing hitherto unrecognized shortcomings.81
Following the Napoleonic occupation, one of the priorities of the Prussian government was to organize Altertumswissenschaft around subjects previously left aside in the Germanic world. Rome, for a long time the preserve of the French, now attracted the attention of German scholars. After Barthold Georg Niebuhr’s seminal study, published between 1811 and 1832, Theodor Mommsen flung himself into composing his Roman History in eight volumes, publication of which was spread over more than thirty years, from 1854 to 1886. Now that Germany assumed as its objective the constitution of a national state or even a unified empire, there could no longer be any question of ignoring Roman history.
That same quest for unity steered Germanic historians toward the study of Alexander the Great’s empire and the states that emerged from it. As early as the 1830s, Johann Gustav Droysen paved the way for this new “Hellenistic” history. In his Hellenistic History (Geschichte des Hellenismus), written between 1836 and 1843, this historian, who had sat in on the lectures given by Hegel, exalted the political work of Philip II, praising him for having unified all Macedonia into a homogeneous “nation” while, on the contrary, he had nothing but scorn for the Kleinstaaterei, the political fragmentation of the Greek world.82 In his Alexander, which appeared in 1833, he cast Pericles in a villainous role. Although he recognized that his reign had marked the peak of Athens’s glory, he accused him of having handed over all decisions to the people, “the people among which Pericles constantly encouraged a taste for democratic ideologies.”83 According to Droysen, that excessive liberty led to the establishment of a veritable tyranny over the allies, which eventually rebounded against itself, propelling the city into ruination.84 Seen from this teleological point of view, in which a unified State constituted the vanishing point, the figure of Pericles symbolized the Greek cities’ inability to achieve political unity and put an end to their internal quarrels.
This rejection of Athens was further emphasized by the evolution of Altertumswissenschaft scholarship. As early as the start of the nineteenth century, Pericles had been a target of criticism, breaking with Winckelmann’s kind of admiration. In 1817, Augustus Böckh, in his scholarly treatise on The Public Economy of Athens (Die Staatshaushaltung der Athener), was declaring that “depravity and moral corruption were rife throughout the Athenian community.”85 And Pericles was certainly not excepted from this bitter observation. On the one hand, Böckh recalled the various accusations of corruption leveled at him, reassessing their credibility but not wholly rejecting them;86 on the other, he criticized the stratēgos for his sumptuary expenditure on the people, even though, backed up by his sources, he did recognize that Pericles never offered pay for attending the Assembly.87
From 1870 onward, criticism increased, as knowledge about Athens became more detailed thanks to the acquisition of a large epigraphic corpus and, above all, the discovery of the Constitution of the Athenians in 1891. As early as 1884, Karl Julius Beloch was distancing himself from “the unilateral views of Grote’s school” and “the cult of radical democracy” that had become fashionable.88 Moreover, in Beloch’s Greek History, which appeared in 1893, Pericles was even subjected to an all-out attack. The German historian, who was skeptical about the real power possessed by “great men,” considered that the son of Xanthippus was even inferior to his predecessors, Themistocles and Cimon. He was no more than “a great parliamentarian” (ein großer Parlamentarier),89 lacking any military talent. In the new Germany of Wilhelm II, disdain for representative democracy was now expressed openly. But Beloch did not limit his attack to this, for he went on to accuse Pericles of plunging Greece into a fatal internal war; even if sentencing the stratēgos to pay a hefty fine in 430 was legally unjust, it was nevertheless basically justified in that it was aimed at the politician “who had unleashed the fratricidal Hellenic conflict for personal reasons and had thereby been guilty of the greatest crime ever known in the whole of Greek history.”90 Pericles was the destroyer of the unity of the Hellenic world; in the recently unified Germany, this was the gravest of accusations.
In 1898, the Swiss German Jacob Burckhardt, for his part, returned to a more traditional vein, accusing the Athenians of having used their power in an unjust manner both inside the city and beyond it. He claimed that slavery and various handouts of pay gave rise to laziness, depravity, and excessive luxury: “The most demoralizing tax was the theorikon, doled out to the poorer citizens for theatre tickets, for celebrating festivals and games, and for sacrifices and public meals. The waste caused by this tax was relatively as great as that at the most sumptuous courts, and later wars were lost for lack of money because this sacrosanct tradition could not be abolished.”91 Pericles, “responsible for most of the taxes just mentioned,” was powerless to oppose such deadly tendencies. Far from being an educator of the people, “he was also forced to humour their greed with pleasures of all sorts—not to satisfy it would have been impossible.”92 The outbreak of the Peloponnesian War may even have seemed to him desirable, for it offered him an opportunity to avoid the anger that the people felt against him.
At the turn of the century, the elective similarities formerly detected between Pericles and the Germans had had their day. Now transformed purely into a parliamentarian and reviled for having stirred up ill-feeling in the Greek world, his image was repudiated and other models more in tune with the ideology of the Second Reich took its place. By the time of the outbreak of World War I, the divorce was complete: clearly rejected by the Germans, the stratēgos was now enrolled in the service of British propaganda. This prompted a renewed use of the figure of Pericles that sometimes took unexpected turns, not only in England, but once again in Germany when that conflict came to an end.
THE DETERIORATION OF THE PERICLEAN MYTH
The Exploitation of the Periclean Myth: Pericles amid the Turmoil of the Two World Wars
During World War I, the Germans showed scant interest in Pericles. If ever they did evoke the democratic city, it was, rather, in order to denigrate fourth-century Athens and its loquacious orators. In 1916, Engelbert Drerup published a book that attacked Demosthenes and the ancient “Republic of lawyers” (Advokaten-republik) in which the most inflammatory of modern issues rose to the surface. By means of an analogy,
Drerup explicitly targeted the Entente leaders, first and foremost “the lawyer, Lloyd George,” who was then Minister for War in Great Britain.93 It was also a way of countering Clemenceau, who was devoting a veritable cult to Demosthenes, whom he presented as championing the resistance to Philip II of Macedon.94
Pericles remained mostly uninvolved in this battle between great men. Significantly enough, it was not until the day after the armistice, on 12 November 1918, that the stratēgos made a timid appearance on the Parisian stage, in an operetta by Henri Christiné titled Phi-Phi. Although it was an instant success, Pericles did not emerge favorably from this lighthearted comedy that enjoyed a three-year run in the “Bouffes parisiens” theater. His role was no more than that of a foil, which was eclipsed by that of Phidias (alias Phi-Phi), the play’s real hero. The latter mocked the stratēgos, who was prepared to dye his hair in order to marry the “charming young” Aspasia. And this new “arch-countess” of Athens then proceeded to cheat on her husband with the sculptor, who teased her, saying, “You need so many men that our statesman does not satisfy you!”95 Pericles was thus mobilized, not as a figure of resistance and heroism, but as one that represented loose moral behavior. This play founded the genre of musical comedies and started off the “Flapper Years.”
Pericles in an England at War: A Call to Arms
Only in England was Pericles truly honored during World War I. One year after the start of the conflict, in the autumn of 1915, all the London buses carried an advertisement bearing an extract from the funeral oration in which the stratēgos called upon his fellow-citizens to imitate the bravery of the soldiers who had fallen in defense of their city (figure 16): “For you now it remains to rival what they have done and, knowing the secret of happiness to be freedom, and the secret of freedom a brave heart, not idly to stand aside from the enemy’s onset.”96
Cited in the fine translation by the British historian Alfred Zimmern,97 this passage rested on a set of implicit references that suggested that the English were identified with the Athenians, the Germans with the Spartans. The analogy was the more apposite given that a number of Germanic historians had rehabilitated the Spartans in the course of the nineteenth century, even going so far as to represent those harsh warriors as “the Prussians of Antiquity,” as Karl Otfried Müller put it.98
What can be the explanation for the remarkable interplay of roles between the French, fascinated by Demosthenes, and the English, committed to Pericles? Or, to put that another way, why did Clemenceau, after retiring from political life, write a life of Demosthenes rather than a biography of Pericles? The explanation is easy enough to find when one reflects upon the identities of Athens’s enemies. For the French, the struggle against the Macedonian kings provided a more attractive parallel than the struggle against the Spartan oligarchy. As a reflection of French resistance to Kaiser Wilhelm II, the war against Macedonia could be likened to a republican crusade against the despotism of Philip II. The English, however, had nothing against royalty as such; the Peloponnesian War offered them a chance to play upon a different register—not the opposition between a republic and a monarchy, but the confrontation between a liberal sea-power and an aggressive continental power.99
FIGURE 16. “Pericles on the Athenians” (1915), by unknown artist. Published by Underground Electric Railway Company Ltd, 1915. Printed by the Dangerfield Printing Company Ltd, 1915. Panel poster. Reference number: 1983/4/8159. © TfL from the London Transport Museum collection.
Periclean Athens remained a model for English politicians right up to 1945. In his Memoirs, Winston Churchill showered praise upon Lord Beaverbrook (then minister for food supplies), who, in one of his letters, had quoted the last sentence from Pericles’ last speech: “Open no more negotiations with Sparta. Show them plainly that you are not crushed by your present afflictions. They who face calamity without wincing and who offer the most energetic resistance, these, be they States or individuals, are the truest heroes.”100 Impossible not catch an echo of the famous “We shall never surrender” pronounced by the English prime minister in June 1940. In that same speech, Churchill too promised to continue the battle, whatever the cost, with the help of “our Empire beyond the seas,” in the same way as Pericles did in the Peloponnesian War.101 English historians were quick to set the two situations in parallel. At the end of World War II, the Greek scholar Gilbert Murray wrote of the outbreak of hostilities between Sparta and Athens as follows: “Just as in 1914 or 1939, a rich democratic sea-power with a naval empire, full of interest in all forms of social, artistic and intellectual life, was pitted against a reactionary militarist land power, which had sacrificed most of its earlier culture to stark efficiency in war.”102
Yet we should not exaggerate the relevance of such comparisons. In the first place, those “Anglo-Periclean” affinities were by no means exclusive, for Gilbert Murray also quoted Demosthenes in support of his thesis.103 Furthermore, not all British leaders felt the same admiration for the stratēgos. In 1940, the future director of the Intelligence Service cited the funeral oration in an official report, with a view to stigmatizing the dangers of open democracy in times of war: “Athens lost the war,” he reminded his correspondent, so Pericles’ city could surely not constitute a model to be followed.104 Finally, the English were not alone in referring to the Athenian leader. Ever since the second half of the nineteenth century, the Americans too had claimed the figure of the stratēgos, with a view to turning him into one of the guardianheroes of American democracy. President Abraham Lincoln has been shown to have been inspired by the funeral oration when composing the famous “Gettysburg Address” in honor of the dead who fell in battle in July 1863.105
Paradoxically, however, it was in Germany that the exploitation of the Periclean myth was carried furthest, in particular after Hitler’s accession to power. The upshot of a strange alliance between Altertumswissenschaft and Nazi propaganda was that the stratēgos became the archetype of the charismatic Führer, stamping his imprint upon both time and space with his monumental constructions.
Pericles in Defeated Germany: The Quest for a Führer
In the immediate postwar years, a humiliated Germany again turned to Athens in order to think through its own present situation. As Anthony Andurand has shown, Germanic historians identified the situation of their vanquished country with the fate of the Athenian city in 404: in both cases, the military defeat was accompanied by a change of political regime.106 In September 1919, in a lecture titled “Thucydides and Ourselves,” the historian Max Pohlenz drew a contrast between the glorious Athens of 430 and the broken city of 404, in a bid to find lessons for the Germany of his own day. He was a supporter of the conservative Right, who regarded Periclean democracy as the archetype of a Volkstadt, a state in which the sovereignty of the dēmos was limited by all the citizens’ blind obedience to the law. According to Pohlenz, this “democracy of duty” implied a Führer in whom the people could believe. Whereas Pericles had ideally filled that role, his successors had turned out to be incapable of carrying on his work: “There was no longer any statesman who possessed the qualities necessary to be the people’s leader [Führer des Volkes]. Now there were only Party leaders [Parteiführer],” “purely professional politicians [reine Berufsparlamentarier],”107 all fighting one another with no thought for the interests of the community as a whole (des ganzen). As Pohlenz presented Pericles, the latter was the embodiment of a glorious but bygone period. However, the evocation of his memory indicated a path to follow, even a political solution: reading between the lines, the historian’s compatriots were invited to elect a new Führer, one capable of breaking with the Weimar Republic and all its useless partisan squabbles.
A similar quest inspired Werner Jaeger, then a professor at the University of Berlin, in the first volume of his Paideia, which appeared in 1934. Calling for the birth of a “third humanism,” this Greek scholar proposed a return to the Greeks, which he envisaged as a cure for the German decline—for the parliamentary Rep
ublic with all its “vulgarity” failed to win his approval. Faced with such a depressing present, he exalted “the genius of Athens,” whose funeral oration seemed to him to encapsulate its quintessence.108 But that was not all: according to Jaeger, Pericles’ speech pleaded for the emergence of a charismatic Führer. “In Athens, says he, every man is alike before the law, but in politics the aristocracy of talent is supreme. Logically, that implies the principle that if one man is supremely valuable and important he will be recognized as the ruler of the State.”109 Jaeger suggested that the stratēgos was just such an exceptional man who, by combining power (Macht) and spirit (Geist), Dorian discipline and Ionian creativity, turned Athens into an unsurpassable model. Such was the political lesson provided by the case of Pericles: “History has shown that this solution depends on the appearance of a genius to lead the state [des genialen Führers]—an accident as uncommon in a democracy as in other types of state.”110 This proposal, advanced at the very moment when Hitler was democratically elected to power, inevitably took on a particular resonance. Jaeger himself certainly had no respect for the Nazis, whose popularism he detested. Nevertheless, he did share their fascination with charismatic heroes and leaders; and the reason why this Greek scholar eventually, in 1936, exiled himself to the United States was in order to protect his Jewish wife from persecution, not for any ideological reasons.111
Pericles, a Mirror-Image of Hitler: The Builder-Leader