5. Perlman 1963; and Hamel 1995, 29–31.
6. See Ps.-Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians, 61.1. Five stratēgoi were assigned very precise tasks: defending the territory, leading the hoplites, and overseeing the symmories or guarding the Piraeus. Furthermore, the board of stratēgoi as a whole could no longer be sent off on expeditions, as used to happen in the fifth century.
7. However, this break should not be exaggerated. As is pointed out by Ober 1989, 91–93 and 120, orators (rhētores) and stratēgoi were considered to be a coherent group of powerful men who stood out from the mass of ordinary citizens—the idiōtai. See, for example, Demosthenes, On the Crown (18), 171; Hyperides, Against Dēmosthenes (5), fr. 6, col. 24; Dinarchus, Against Philocles (3), 19.
8. See Androtion, FGrHist 324 F 38 (= Strabo, 14.1.18). He was a member of the office of Hellēnotamiai—federal treasurers—in 443/2 (IG I3 269). See Develin 1989, 90; and Jouanna 2007, 23–27.
9. Ion of Chios, FGrHist 392 F 6 (= Athenaeus, 13.603E–604F).
10. See later, chapter 6. See also Jouanna 2007, 35–36, who emphasizes Pericles’ distrust of the poet’s military competence at the time of the war against Samos.
11. Pericles was also elected stratēgos three times in succession between 448/7 and 446/5.
12. Androtion, FGrHist 324 F 38. In his history of Athens, written in the mid-fourth century, Androtion provides eleven names. But this passage appears to be corrupt and one of those names should probably be suppressed, as almost all commentators agree—for example, Develin 1989, 89; and Harding 1994, 143–148. Only Brulé 1994, 85, claims that the people elected eleven stratēgoi: first ten ordinary stratēgoi, elected within each tribe, and then Pericles, voted by the whole people to be an exceptional supernumerary stratēgos. But there is no proof to support this.
13. On this matter, see Ehrenberg 1945.
14. See Hamel 1998, 86, following Fornara 1971, 71.
15. See Gomme 1956, 183 (ad loc.).
16. Pericles, 13.10. See also Plutarch, Precepts of Statecraft, 812C: “Pericles used Menippus to command his armies.”
17. Lycurgus, [Against Kephisodotos on the honours allotted to Demades], fr. 8.2. On these various successes, see later, chapter 4.
18. Pericles, 8.6; and Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1.7.1365a32–33. In this speech, Pericles resorted to hyperbole, for he evoked those who died in Samos not only by associating them with cosmic cycles (“The year has lost its spring”) but also by comparing them to the immortal gods.
19. See, for example, Lycurgus, Against Leocrates, 5. On this subject, see Azoulay 2009, 325.
20. Actually, he simply copied a strategy for glorification introduced by Cimon, following the victory over the Persians at Eurymedon: see Aeschines, Against Ctesiphon (3), 183; and Demosthenes, Against Leptines (20), 112.
21. Pausanias, 1.28.2.
22. Plutarch alludes to a physical abnormality in Pericles’ skull, which the stratēgos apparently concealed by his helmet (Pericles, 3.2): this is a late “medical” explanation for a type of statue that was no longer understood.
23. Comparison of Pericles and Fabius Maximus, 1.2.
24. On the careers of these stratēgoi who surrounded Pericles, see Podlecki 1998, 55–76.
25. Banfi 2003, 69.
26. Pericles, 28.4.
27. Thucydides, 2.41.4.
28. Pericles, 10.2.
29. Pericles, 29.1–3.
30. See Thucydides, 1.45.2, and IG I3 364 (= ML 61 = Fornara 126 = Brun 116), which cites the names of three stratēgoi dispatched on the mission: Lakedaimonius from the Lakiadai deme, Proteas from the Erchia deme, and Diotimus from the Euonymon deme. The Corcyraeans, threatened by a naval expedition of Corinthians, had contracted a defensive military alliance (epimakhia) with Athens in 433 B.C.
31. Pericles, 18.1.
32. Pericles may have been inspired by the strategy of Themistocles, at the time of the Persian Wars: see Krentz 1997, 62.
33. Thucydides, 1.113.
34. See later, chapter 4.
35. Thucydides, 1.127.3 (author’s italics).
36. Aristophanes, Peace, 605 ff.: “What started [the war] in the first place was Phidias getting into trouble. Then Pericles became frightened that he might share Phidias’s fate—for he was afraid of your character and your hard-biting temper—and before anything terrible could happen to him, he set the city ablaze by dropping in a tiny spark of a Megarian decree: and he fanned up so great a war that all the Greeks were in tears, in the smoke, both those over there and those over here” (trans. Sommerstein 1990).
37. See Rhodes 2006, 88.
38. Plutarch, Cimon, 13.6–7. The Phaleron wall had been constructed earlier: see Thucydides, 1.107.1.
39. On this phase of the construction (known as 1b), see Conwell 2008, 77.
40. These different elements are stressed in Thucydides’ account (1.143.4–1.144.1). See Conwell 2008, 81.
41. See later, chapter 8.
42. The “plague” that struck Athens at the beginning of the war was apparently a form of typhus, although this is still a subject of debate among specialists.
43. Hermippus, Moirai, fr. 47 K.-A. (= Plutarch, Pericles, 33.7). The poet Cratinus launched into similar attacks in this same period. See Tatti 1986, 325–332, and the nuances introduced by Bakola 2010, 181–208.
44. On these various area sizes, see Bresson 2007, 150.
45. Ps.-Xenophon, Constitution of the Athenians, 2.14.
46. Thucydides, 2.62.3.
47. See Ober 1985, 171–188.
48. See Thucydides, 2.65.
CHAPTER3. THE BASES OF PERICLEAN POWER: THE ORATOR
1. Thucydides, 2.40.2.
2. Aeschines, Against Ctesiphon (3), 2.
3. Aeschines, ibid. For an analysis of this democratic tumult, see later, chapter 10.
4. The fact that two men proposed the same decree in no way implied that they agreed on the city’s policies as a whole—as was the case, for example, of Demades and Lycurgus, in the fourth century. See Brun 2000, 135–136.
5. Gorgias, 452e. This dialogue, composed in the fourth century by Plato, describes a clash between Socrates and Gorgias in the late 410s. Although the term “rhetoric,” for a specific tekhnē, was probably invented by Plato, as early as the mid-fifth century the arts of discourse were not unknown to the Athenians: Schiappa 1990, 457–470.
6. Euripides, Suppliant Women, 425.
7. These speeches, constructed with great care, contain numerous allusions to the works of the sophists and the tragic authors. To mention but one example, Pericles, in one of the speeches ascribed to him by Thucydides (2.61.2), uses a metric trimeter that probably came from a tragedy well-known to the Athenians. See Haslam 1990, 33.
8. Thucydides, 1.22.1.
9. See, for example, Thucydides, 2.61.2: “For my part, I stand where I stood before and do not recede from my position; but it is you who have changed. For it has happened, now you are suffering, that you repent of the consent that you gave me when you were still unscathed, and in your infirmity of purpose my advice to you now appears wrong.”
10. “By instruction and reason, Pericles tries to discourage all mistaken popular action and to transform the crowd into a collection of responsible individuals”: Tsakmakis 2006, 168.
11. Plutarch, Pericles, 8.5. See earlier, chapter 1.
12. Kentron often denotes the masculine phallus. See Henderson 1975, 122. See also Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.3.12, where Socrates compares a kiss to the sting of a spider: “Don’t you know that the scorpion, though smaller than a farthing, if it but fasten on the tongue, inflicts excruciating and maddening pain?” Speech, like beauty, can produce a sting from a distance.
13. Pericles, 8.3. See also Aristophanes, Acharnians, 530–531.
14. See Detienne and Vernant 1991, 75–79.
15. Cratinus, fr. 171 K.-A., I, 18–22. See Bakola 2010, 49–53 and 317 (the passage is unfortunately very mutilated and the sense is not certain). On the implications
of this identification with Zeus, see later, chapter 8.
16. In Athens, this way of distinguishing oneself was very ambivalent: although the Athenians were fascinated by the power of language, they also deeply distrusted it. In the fourth century, the speeches of Attic orators even testify to the existence of “an anti-rhetoric rhetoric,” the aim of which was to criticize the excessive skill of their opponents in such a way as to make the people mistrust them. See Hesk 1999, 208–218.
17. Pericles, 5.1.
18. Ps.-Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians, 28.3.
19. Respectively, Thucydides, 3.36.6, and Aristophanes, Knights, 137.
20. Aeschines, Against Timarchus (1), 25–26.
21. Plutarch, Pericles, 34.1. See earlier, Thucydides, 2.60.1.
22. Plutarch, Pericles, 5.2–3. It was this singular ability to tolerate insults that prompted Plutarch to compare Pericles to Fabius Maximus, who was himself expert at doing this: see Plutarch, Pericles, 2.4. See Bloomer 2005, 224.
23. Demosthenes, Against Midias (21), 32–33.
24. As Aristotle states, in Nicomachean Ethics, 1126a6–8, “it is considered servile [andrapodōdes] to put up with an insult or to suffer one’s friends to be insulted.”
25. Tanner 2006, 128–129.
26. Ion of Chios, FGrHist 392 F 15 (= Plutarch, Pericles, 5.3).
27. In Hippolytus, 91–96, Euripides explicitly underlines the risks of a solemnity that may soon be taken for arrogance.
28. Cratinus, fr. 348 K.-A.: anelktais ophrusi semnon. See Banfi 2003, 41.
29. Demosthenes, On the Embassy (19), 314 (author’s italics). See Tanner 2006, 129–130.
30. Frowning brows such as these characterize both tragic kings in South Italian fourth-century painting and the effigy of Philip of Macedon, exhibited in the Copenhagen Glyptotek (a Roman bust, a copy of an original of the late-fourth century).
31. Precepts of Statecraft, 812C–D. See also Pericles, 7.7: “the rest of his policy, he carried out by commissioning his friends and other public speakers.”
32. Ps.-Demosthenes, Against Neaera (59), 43. See Ps.-Aristotle, The Constitution of the Athenians, 29.1–3 for an example that goes back to the fifth century: at the time of the establishment of the regime of the Four Hundred, in 411, Melobius addressed the people, but it was Pythodorus who made the proposal. On this, see Hansen 1991, 145–146.
33. Metiochus may have been the brother-in-law of Cimon, Pericles’ great opponent, which shows that hostile relations between great families were by no means definitive in Athens (Herodotus, 6.41.2).
34. Adespota [author unknown], fr. 741 K.-A.
35. See Plutarch, Pericles, 6.2–3.
36. Cratinus, Drapetides (The Runaway Female Slaves), fr. 57–58 and 62 K.-A.
37. See later, chapter 4.
38. Aeschines, Against Ctesiphon (3), 220.
39. Precepts of Statecraft, 811C–D.
40. See later, chapter 8.
CHAPTER4. PERICLES AND ATHENIAN IMPERIALISM
1. Diodorus Siculus, 12.4.4–6. Even if the existence of such a treaty is not entirely certain—since Thucydides makes no mention of it—the fact is that from 449 B.C. onward the Persians and the Greeks were no longer de facto at war.
2. See Lewis 1992, 121–146.
3. IG I3 34 = ML 46 = Fornara 98 = Brun 9.
4. See later, chapter 5.
5. The term is used for the first time by Thucydides (1.117.3) in connection with Byzantium. See Raaflaub 2004, 118–122.
6. See, for example, Mattingly 1992.
7. Brun 2003, 24. On this thorny question, see the helpful assessment by Papazarkadas 2009.
8. This is, in particular, the position adopted by Mattingly 1996, 147–179 (“Periclean imperialism”): “None of the inscriptional evidence for fully organized Athenian imperialism can be dated before 431 B.C. Even the very language of imperialism does not seem to have been current until the last years of Pericles’ ascendancy” (p. 178).
9. See Banfi 2003, 64.
10. Thucydides, 1.100.2–101.3.
11. IG I3 14 = ML 40 (ca. 453/2 B.C.?).
12. Gauthier 1973, 163–178.
13. That is the hypothesis of Briant 1995, 51–52.
14. See Kagan 1991, 141, on Samos: “There must have been some sentiment in Athens for a harsher punishment, but Pericles was able to convince the Athenians to restrain their anger. This moderation was characteristic of Pericles’ management of the empire in the remaining years before the Peloponnesian War. By the standards of the time, and sharply in contrast with Athenian practice after Pericles’ death, his was a firm but reasonable policy.” The American historian joins a long tradition going back to George Grote and Victor Duruy in the mid-nineteenth century, analyzed later, in chapter 12.
15. See also Romilly 2000.
16. Thucydides, 1.114.1. See Diodorus, 12.22.2.
17. Plutarch, Pericles, 23.2.
18. See IG I3 39–40 (decrees for the Euboean cities of Eretria and Chalcis).
19. Clouds, 211–213. See Aristophanes, Wasps, 715, and the anonymous comic author [adespota], fr. 700 K.-A. (= Plutarch, Pericles, 7.8): after Ephialtes, “the people were rendered unruly, just like a horse, and, as the comic poets say, ‘no longer had the patience to obey the rein, but nabbed Euboea and trampled on the islands.’”
20. See Meritt 1984, 123–133.
21. IG I3 363 (= ML 55). On this repayment, see Thucydides, 1.117.3. The Samians subsequently became a model of fidelity up until the end of the Peloponnesian War, for they remained committed to the Athenians despite the progressive dislocation of the Delian League.
22. Pericles, 26.3–4. The lexicographer Photius (s.v. Samiōn ho dēmos) tells the story, attributing it to Douris of Samos (FGrHist 76 F 66). In the Babylonians (fr. 71 K.-A.), Aristophanes also alludes to this episode: “This people of Samos, how rich in letters [polugrammatos] it is!” This remark probably refers to the coinage of the island, for there was a Samian monetary series (class VII, identified by Barron 1966), marked with different letters of the alphabet, possibly indicating the year of coinage. These coins were minted either by the aristocrats before 440, or else by the democrats after that date, possibly for paying the indemnities of war. See Shipley 1987, 114 (and n. 12).
23. Jones 1987, 149.
24. See Suda, s.v. Samiōn ho dēmos. We know of a Samian currency, dated 493–489, representing the prow of a Samian ship, with a ram that is an extension of the keel. The prow of this vessel is particularly wide and the ram is very large. See Basch 1987, no. 520. See also von Reden 1997, 174.
25. Douris of Samos, FGrHist 76 F 67 (= Plutarch, Pericles, 28.1–2). Significantly enough, Donald Kagan chooses not to mention this episode that is so inconvenient for his exposition.
26. See Allen 2000, 199–200. This punishment is marked by a series of distinct stages: exposure in a public place (the Agora); attachment to a piece of wood; torture and death; and finally the abandonment of the corpses without any funerary rituals.
27. Herodotus, 9.120.4. See also 7.33.
28. See Tracy 2002, 315–319 and Balot 2001a, 126.
29. Pericles, 34.1. In his description of this episode, Thucydides (2.27.1–2) does not mention Pericles by name, perhaps out of respect for the stratēgos, whom he admires.
30. The reason why, in 483 B.C., Themistocles managed to persuade his fellow-citizens to use the money discovered in the Laurium mines to construct a fleet of triremes, was not in order to face up to a hypothetical Persian invasion, a notion at that point still in limbo, but rather in order to go and subdue the Aeginetans; see Herodotus, 7.7.
31. Plutarch, Pericles, 8.5.
32. See earlier, Bloedow 2000.
33. This argument may seem strange. According to Pericles, the least sign of submission represents a form of slavery. He cannot conceive of anything in between arkhē and douleia, domination and dependence: either one dominates or else one is dominated.
34. See Thucydides, 3.47; Aristophanes, Knigh
ts, 1111 (424 B.C.), who presents the people, adorned by splendors worthy of the Great King and “feared by all as if it were a tyrant.” See Tuplin 1985, and Balot 2001a, 172–175.
35. Cratinus, The Women of Thrace, fr. 73 K.-A. (= Pericles, 13.6). The ostrakon refers to the exile of his opponent Thucydides of Alopeke in 443 B.C.
36. Some historians even believe that the royal tent served as scenery in the performance of Aeschylus’s Persians, of which Pericles was the khorēgos. From there to detecting an interplay of influences is but a step that nothing, however, authorizes one to take.
37. Briant 2002, 256–258.
38. Miller 1997, 218–242.
39. Ibid., 242.
40. See Raaflaub 2009, 111.
41. See later, chapter 5.
42. At first, the monument itself was simply called “the great temple” or “the temple.” It was only at the end of the fourth century, from the time of Demosthenes onward, that the expression was used to refer to the temple as a whole.
43. We should remember that the cult-statue of Athena was to be found, not in the Parthenon, but in the Erechtheion. The colossal statue by Phidias was an offering, not a cult-statue. See Holtzmann 2003, 106.
CHAPTER5. A PERICLEAN ECONOMY?
1. Saller 2005, 233.
2. See Bresson 2007, 150–151.
3. See earlier, chapter 1.
4. See Kurke 1999. On this peculiarly Periclean way of managing an oikos, see Burn 1948, 125.
5. Pericles, 16.5.
6. Bresson 2000.
7. Descat 1995, 969.
8. Pericles, 16.4.
9. These boundary markers came in various types. The most common model consisted of a mortgage guaranteeing a loan of money: it took the form of a sale “on the condition of a liberating repurchase” (prasis epi lusei). The borrower “sold” his property to a creditor, promising to buy it back within an agreed period, by repaying the borrowed sum plus interest (12 to 18 percent per year). In the meantime, the debtor owner retained the usufruct (right of use) of his property.
10. Finley 1981, 62–76. However, returning to the evidence, Shipton 2000 has shown that wealthy Athenians were also deeply involved in nonagricultural sectors.
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