Pericles of Athens

by Vincent Azoulay, Janet Lloyd

  The advent of the Third Reich increased the glorification of Pericles. At first sight, this may seem strange or even grotesque. Clearly, the Nazis both used and abused Antiquity: the arts, costumes, architecture, and sport all now took on an antique veneer. However, Athenian democracy was, for the most part, eclipsed by imperial Rome and, above all, by Dorian Sparta. Whereas Humboldt, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Burckhardt harbored nothing but scorn for Sparta, which they considered to be a backward state, resistant to any refined culture, the Nazis rehabilitated the Spartans, radicalizing the theses developed in the nineteenth century by Karl-Otfried Müller. The Dorians were now assimilated to a superior race, set up as ancestor to the Aryans. Their essentially Nordic vitality was represented as even regenerating the Greek race, which had been bastardized as a result of the long contact with Asia.112 For the Nazis, the exaltation of Sparta was doubly gratifying politically: the city was “for them, the archetype of an elitist, racist, and eugenicist Nordic State, pretotalitarian in its concept and practice of education, but at the same time the finest illustration of the virtues of military obedience and self-denial.”113 So it was in no way surprising that Hitler himself made Sparta the model for the future Third Reich and even went so far as to regard it as “the first racist State in history.”114

  All the same, Pericles was not neglected by Hitlerian propaganda, for the fact is that it had no respect for the principle of noncontradiction: just as the Nazis celebrated both Augustan imperial Rome and Arminius’s heroic resistance to the legions of Augustus in the forest of Teutoburg,115 they venerated the Spartan city even as they continued to sing the praises of the Athenian stratēgos.

  However, their admiration for Pericles was selective, focusing on two characteristic features, to the exclusion of all others. First, in the wake of Pohlenz and Jaeger, Nazi scholars celebrated the charismatic leader, drawing a direct parallel with Hitler. As early as 1933, in a collective volume sponsored by the new National-Socialist State, Fritz Schachermeyr maintained that the Athenian leader had arisen at a time of crisis for the democracy, a crisis “exactly similar to that which we experienced before Adolf Hitler came upon the scene.”116 According to this Austrian historian, the reforming will manifested by Pericles had nevertheless hit a snag in the form of the “Mediterranean substratum that was foreign to the Nordic race,” represented by Pericles and the Indo-Germanic elite groups of Athens. The implication was clear: if Athens had had the courage to rid itself of its parasitic elements—as Germany was doing—it would never have lost the Peloponnesian War.

  Another Nazi Hellenist, Hermannhans Brauer, developed a similar line of argument in 1943. But the wind had changed and now it was a matter of exonerating Hitler from any responsibility for the defeat at Stalingrad. With such apologetic aims, this historian claimed that if Athens had been defeated, it was no fault of Pericles but, rather, in spite of him: for “he had embodied the ‘Nordic values: courage, honour, fidelity and patriotism’ that the Athenians had not managed to honour when the moment of truth came.”117 Slipping from enthusiasm into open resentment, the Athenian people, it was claimed, was guilty of a great mistake: “In a life-and-death struggle, it rejected its support of its leader and denied him its loyalty because it placed too much value on temporal things and neglected the eternal values to which the country subscribed.”118 The analogy was clumsy but effective. In this way, it suggested that the Stalingrad defeat could be imputed to the weakness of the troops and betrayal on the part of the German General Staff, which was incapable of rising to the level of its genius of a Führer.

  Quite apart from the charismatic leader, the Nazis above all admired Pericles, the man of great architectural works. In his Memoirs, Albert Speer recalled that Hitler himself liked to be seen as a latter-day Pericles: the Athenians had erected the Parthenon and the Long Walls, just as he had constructed the Autobahnen.119 The fact was that architecture was an essential element in Hitlerian policy and, in Mein Kampf, the Nazi leader was already declaring that “a strong state should leave its imprint upon space and not allow private edifices to proliferate.”120 In this respect, Antiquity provided a model to imitate or even to surpass. Although Hitler was, above all, intent on outdoing the monumental policy of the Roman Empire—the great Berlin Stadium was designed to outdo the Colosseum—he was nevertheless impressed by the classical Greek style and, in particular, the Doric order, for Hitler “believed that in the Dorian people he had discovered a number of points in common with the Germanic world.”121 He was full of admiration for the Parthenon, which he regretted never having visited; the monument was even reproduced on the tableware used for meals in his Austrian retreat, the Berghof.122 It was therefore perfectly logical that certain historians of art, as good courtiers, should bring the two monument-builders together so as to have two artistic moments of unequaled artistic flourishing mirror one another.123

  In his inaugural lecture as rector of the University of Leipzig, in February 1940, Helmut Berve pushed the parallel between Pericles and Hitler even further.124 This historian, the author of a work on Thucydides, held an eminent position in the Nazi hierarchy. He had been a member of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) ever since 1933 and, in 1940, was appointed “war minister of the German science of Antiquity [Kriegsbeauftrager der deutschen Altertumswissenschaft].”125 In his speech devoted to Pericles, Berve began by justifying the subject, taking care to represent the stratēgos as a good Aryan: his government, he claimed, constituted “the unique acme of Indo-Germanic humanity.” There then followed a dense interplay of implicit analogies between the Nazi Führer and the Athenian stratēgos. First, Pericles’ democratic policy was said to be to get every Athenian to participate in the life of the city, the aim being to provide work and subsistence for one and all. Between the lines, everyone recognized this as an allusion to Hitler’s Arbeit und Brot. This policy of economic revival depended on the great architectural works into which Pericles flung himself, body and soul. As Johann Chapoutot has rightly stressed, “the parallel between the Pericles-Phidias relationship and the Hitler-Speer duo is very striking, as is the assimilation of the new Athens project and that of Germania.”126

  According to Berve, this ambitious monumental policy depended on a pitiless exercise of violence: “So it was the brutal force of Athens and the iron will of its Führer that made it possible to erect these marvels, the Parthenon and the Propylaea on the Acropolis, which, still today, and even in their ruined state, represent the most sublime evidence of the creative force of man.”127 For Pericles was not only a captivating orator but also a warrior who fought until his last breath: “He had hardened himself throughout fifteen years spent in a bath of steel, so that he possessed a strength of resistance that was hard to overcome despite internal oppositions and external difficulties.”128 Like all Nordic leaders, Pericles had experienced all the trials of warfare, even “looking into the eyes of death in the course of battles.” Those lines were written during the Phoney War and they were intended to be prophetic: which, indeed, they were, although not in the way that Berve had hoped. Like Periclean Athens, Hitlerian Germany was eventually completely vanquished.

  The Myth Destroyed? Pericles and the End of the Greek Miracle

  By the end of World War II, the reference to Sparta as a model, having been overmanipulated by the Nazis, was definitively disqualified. In contrast, Athenian democracy emerged enhanced from the conflict; the association between Hitler and Pericles had not been established firmly enough to blemish the reputation of the stratēgos, particularly given that the allies—led by Churchill—had likewise enrolled Pericles in their struggle against the Axis forces.129 In France, for example, Pericles continued to benefit from the persistent influence of the Histoire grecque published by Gustave Glotz (1862–1935) in 1931. For this historian, who was close to Durkheim and had long been a professor at the Sorbonne, Pericles’ governance was laudable in all its aspects. Not only did Glotz praise Pericles’ “pacific imperialism”—a most revealing combination of words—but he a
lso celebrated the “State Socialism” set in place by the Athenian leader and ended by concluding that Pericles “was the soul of the city at a time when that city was the very soul of Greece.”130

  In Italy, the work of Gaetano De Sanctis (1870–1957) took a similar idealizing line.131 Abandoning Roman history, which had become the preserve of Mussolinian historians, De Sanctis—one of the rare university professors who had refused to swear allegiance to the Fascist regime—devoted a flattering biography to Pericles, which appeared in 1944. In it, the stratēgos was described as a man devoted to the interests of his city, a friend of the philosophers and possessed of “great spiritual audacity,” who had led Athens into a veritable Golden Age.132 On many points, his analysis agreed with that of Gustave Glotz, particularly on the great works that, according to De Sanctis, were designed not only to render the city more beautiful, but also “to wipe out unemployment among the working classes”133 and to “establish greater social justice.”134 That closeness to Glotz is also evident in his celebration of Pericles’ “pacific imperialism”—an expression that De Sanctis took over.135 This irenic view of Athenian domination is not surprising, for, although antiFascist, De Santis adhered to the myth of a “civilizing” Italian colonialism, and it is by this yardstick that we should judge his praise of Periclean policy toward the allies.136

  Such idealization persisted in the postwar years, particularly in the Pericles written by Léon Homo (1872–1957) in his twilight years.137 Abandoning the domain in which he had specialized—Roman history—this French historian now represented the Athenian stratēgos as a hero possessed of every virtue: as a great general, a great admiral, an intelligent economist, and an honest man through and through, Pericles was “one of the most luminous spirits ever produced by the Greek race.”138 According to Homo’s analyses, Pericles was the leader of a “directed democracy” in which the citizens enjoyed an “illusion of liberty” even as they were subjected to a “legal dictatorship.”139 For this politically conservative historian, admiration for Pericles was thus accompanied by a devaluation of the democratic regime. And, like his predecessors, Homo was careful to justify Periclean imperialism, for which he found ‘serious excuses.”140

  In 1960, François Chêtelet (1925–1985) adopted a similar line in the biography that he devoted to the stratēgos. In this youthful work of his, this French philosopher portrayed Pericles as a Hegelian hero, shining in the firmament of human history as did the “blazing light of Greece.”141 Even a Marxist historian such as Pierre Lévêque confessed to huge admiration for the Athenian leader, as is testified by the vast fresco that he devoted to L’Aventure grecque, published in 1964. Although he deplored Athenian imperialism and the exploitation of slaves, he nevertheless praised the stratēgos for his great architectural works, saying, “after all, should we not salute this first experiment in ‘State Socialism’ (G. Glotz)?”142 For this generation of leftist intellectuals, “State Socialism” in the Periclean mode exercised an irresistible attraction, for it testified to “the great hope that for the first time illuminated Greece.”143

  In the field of historical studies, enthusiasm for Pericles was nevertheless tempered by a double fundamental movement. In the first place, the intellectual hegemony of the Annales school tended to marginalize or even discredit the study of great men. Instead of taking an interest in the lives of State leaders, it was now a matter of assessing long-term developments, those of the longue durée, without being distracted by the froth produced by individual actions. Revealingly enough, in France no specialist in Greek history saw fit to devote a biography to Pericles in the second half of the twentieth century; the only writers to undertake such a task were a historian of Rome (Léon Homo) and a philosopher (François Chêtelet).144 From the 1960s onward, the development of historical anthropology further accentuated the lack of interest in the stratēgos. Turning its back on political and institutional history, this new way of tackling the Greek world focused on rituals rather than individual events, and on mental representations rather than the history of battles. And even when it did turn to politicians, it was in order to rehabilitate figures that had been forgotten—such as the enigmatic Cleisthenes, of Athens, or the obscure Ephialtes—and, taking them as its starting point, to reflect on the mental structures of classical Athens: space and time, in the case of Cleisthenes; memory and forgetting, in that of Ephialtes.145 The Greece of great men was done for. Besides, historical anthropology rejected idealization of Athens in any form and set out to study “the Greeks without miracles” (to use Gernet’s expression), denying them any ontological privileges over other peoples.

  Pericles’ democracy was now regarded as a mirage rather than a miracle. From the 1970s onward, attacks multiplied on a democracy that, like a magnifying mirror, reflected all the shortcomings of an imperialist and male-chauvinist West. Quite apart from slavery, which had already for some time been arousing indignation,146 the treatment of women now attracted criticism. And Pericles was accused of having encouraged the enslavement of half of humanity given that, in his funeral oration, he had invited women to be neither seen nor heard, “thereby reducing them to a state of non-being.”147

  However, it was on the score of imperialism that the Athenian leader was chiefly taken to task. The Belgian historian Marie Delcourt (1891–1979) had, as an enlightened pioneer, already sharply criticized Periclean imperialistic policy in the biography that she devoted to the stratēgos in 1939.148 This great Greek scholar, a professor at the University of Liège, attacked in particular the cleruchies, which were condemned simply as a means of seizing land with no regard for its existing occupants, just like “the Europeans in Africa and the New World”: “It is strange that Pericles never noticed that the spread of cleruchies was both dangerous and ineffective. It generated hatred for Athens and gave it the reputation of treating the States of the Delian League like conquered countries.”149 In Marie Delcourt’s works, the criticism of Western colonialism (Belgium itself was a colonial power) spread to affect Periclean foreign policy as a whole.

  Tormented by the memory of Nazism, German historians too cast doubt upon Pericles’ supposed moderation in his management of the Delian League.150 And elsewhere attacks increased as decolonization proceeded and the Cold War conflicts developed. At this point, some Anglo-Saxon historians questioned the opposition that Thucydides identified between, on the one hand, the moderate imperialism of Pericles and, on the other, the radical imperialism of his successors. At the end of the 1960s, Victor Ehrenberg—who had left Nazi Germany via Prague and settled in England—argued that the central element in the Periclean legacy had been, quite simply, imperialism.151 One year after the end of the Vietnam War, the American historian Chester Starr expressed the following disenchanted opinion that was not unaffected by the political failures of Nixon’s policies: “In view of Pericles’ promotion of arrogant imperialism and his serious mistakes in foreign policy, which in the end ruined Athenian power, his reputation may well be overrated.”152 The same conclusion, albeit expressed less polemically, was reached by Simon Hornblower in the work that he devoted to Thucydides in the late 1980s: “The real mistakes [that led to the defeat of Athens] were after all mistakes of the 430s and earlier. That means that they were Periclean mistakes.”153 Hornblower suggests that Thucydides, so fascinated by the stratēgos, misjudged the real moment when Athens lurched into the delirium of omnipotence and the pleonexia that caused its downfall.

  This critical tradition has lost none of its rigor. Indeed, Loren Samons has recently carried it to a climax, echoing an anti-Periclean tone unheard since the late eighteenth century. In his indictment, titled What’s Wrong with Democracy?, this American historian targets the two major pillars upon which admiration for Pericles rests: the Parthenon and the funeral oration. The Parthenon, which was partly financed by the allies, serves simply as an ode to the imperial excesses of Athens. The colossal statue of Athena sums this up in striking fashion: the winged Victory (nikē) placed in her right han
d, symbolizes the city’s imperialism, while the representation of Pandora, engraved on the soles of her sandals, recalls the despised nature of women, the better to justify their political relegation. As for the funeral oration, it is nothing but a militant or even militarist propagandist speech expressing “a fervent nationalism designed to underpin Athenian power.”154 Samons’s verdict allows for no appeal: Pericles, responsible as he was, through his intransigence, for the unleashing of the war, is “one of the most charismatic—and dangerous—leaders in Western history.”155

  This vein of anti-Periclean literature, still very much alive, is often accompanied by virulent attacks against Thucydides, who is accused of misrepresenting historical truth the better to praise the stratēgos. For instance, in a book published in 2011, Robert Luginbill declares that the main purpose of The History of the Peloponnesian War was to exonerate Pericles of any responsibility for Athens’s defeat. Following up this theme, the American historian defends an extremely dark picture of the stratēgos, whom he accuses not only of having unleashed the Peloponnesian War for ill-founded reasons, but above all for having pursued it, committing Athens to a path leading to ineluctable defeat: “in fact, Pericles doomed Athens.”156

  The Myth Sterilized: A Pericles for the Classroom

  Despite the preceding citations, it would be mistaken to conclude that Pericles is now somewhat discredited in the Western world, for, on the contrary, the idealization of the stratēgos still continues today, sometimes quite openly—as in the case of the biography by Donald Kagan, for example157—sometimes in a covert manner, if one thinks of Harold Mattingly’s attempt to redate Athenian decrees, which tends to exonerate Pericles from all responsibility for the extreme development of Athens’s imperialism.158 Today still, very few historians fail to bend a knee before the icon of Pericles, following the example of Hermann Bengtson: “Without the initiative of Pericles, Athens would have remained as it had been: a typical provincial town which, under Pericles, became not only the wealthiest but also the most beautiful town in the whole of Greece.”159 And in French school textbooks, Pericles still occupies a prime place, eclipsing all the other Athenian political leaders of the classical period. A bust of the stratēgos, an image of the Parthenon, and a passage from the funeral speech: few textbooks sidestep that stereotypical triptych.160