Pericles of Athens (10 page)

The fact is that, in a Greece marked by the culture of the
agōn
, Pericles’ prudence was often interpreted by his opponents as pusillanimous or even
as cowardly. Although effective in the long run, his rejection of direct confrontation—and
of the laurels that could thereby be swiftly won—was bound to arouse strong resistance
in the city. In a way, the death of Pericles perfectly symbolized the position that
he had adopted: for the
stratēgos
did not perish on the field of battle, laden with honors, but was struck down by
the “plague” and died in his bed, obstinately remaining confined within the city and
refusing to enter into direct combat with the Spartan enemy.

All the same, it would be mistaken to make Pericles out to be a gentle lamb, let alone
a bleating pacifist who rejected any form of conflict. What the
stratēgos
rejected was not warfare in itself, but rather a particular way of waging it—that
is to say, ill-prepared and without taking into consideration the balance of power
between the forces involved. After all, Pericles shamelessly put down the revolts
of his allies,
³⁴
and himself played a crucial role in unleashing the Peloponnesian War, as Thucydides
confirms: “Being the most powerful man of his time and the leader of the State [
agōn tēn polit eian
], he was opposed to the Lacedaemonians in all things, and
would not let the Athenians make concessions, but kept urging them on to the war
.”
³⁵
Besides, we know of the accusations that the comic poets brought against him, judging
him to be responsible for starting the war in order to distract attention away from
misdemeanors of his own.
³⁶
Although he recommended a firm attitude when facing the Spartans, he was not willing
to set off to war regardless of the conditions that obtained. If it is victory that
one seeks, one has to prepare for war!
³⁷
That was the line of behavior adopted by the
stratēgos
who, at the start of the Peloponnesian War developed a strategy that was certainly
effective but was, at the same time, much contested in the Athenian ranks.

The Peloponnesian War: The Originality of Pericles’ Military Strategy

When hostilities against Sparta broke out in 431, Pericles managed to convince his
fellow-citizens generally to take refuge behind their walls, rather than clash head-on
with the Peloponnesian troops, who outnumbered them and were better trained. It is
true that the city benefited from its exceptional defensive position. Even before
Pericles entered upon the political scene, the Athenians had begun to fortify their
city and to link the urban core (
astu
) to their port, Piraeus, in such a way as to render the whole impregnable. The construction
of the Long Walls had been launched by Cimon,
³⁸
although the work on the northern wall was not completed until after his ostracism
(462/457). As for the southern wall, which doubled the earlier rampart, this was built
at Pericles’ suggestion, between 452 and 431 B.C. (it is not
possible to be more specific).
³⁹
Themistocles, Cimon, and Pericles all played their parts in these developments, and
by the time they were completed, the town of Athens had become a kind of fortified
island supplied with food from territory that included the cities of the Delian League
as well as the Attic countryside.

Periclean strategy constituted a coherent whole. It was founded upon the abandonment
of the rural territory, the avoidance of fighting on land and the prowess of the navy,
and it involved a number of closely related elements: direct confrontation on land
with the enemy’s army, which was undeniably more powerful than the Athenian one, was
to be avoided; the Athenian navy was to be used, rather than the hoplites; outside
the city territory, military operations were to be conducted using the fleet; the
allegiance of the allies was to be maintained but without seeking to extend the Athenian
Empire; the city was to rely on the products that were accessible thanks to Athenian
sea power; and, finally, properties situated in the
khōra
were to be abandoned so as to concentrate on defending the maritime supply routes
and the town of Athens (
astu
).
⁴⁰

It was this last decision that aroused the most resistance among the Athenians. For
a largely rural population, the idea of abandoning the territory to the ravages of
the enemy was hard to accept; moreover, this tactic was the more painful since the
Athenians maintained a special relationship with their own land. They regarded themselves
as autochthonous, the descendants of Erichthonius, who was the son of the Attic land
and Hephaestus.
⁴¹
For them, to abandon the
khōra
was to leave their life-giving mother defenseless.

This opposition, magnified by the outbreak of the plague in Athens in 430,
⁴²
threatened the authority of the
stratēgos
, as is attested both by Thucydides’ account and by fragments from the contemporary
comic poets. In his play, the
Moirai
(
The Fates
), performed at the Lenaean Festival, in 430 B.C., the comic poet Hermippus deplored
Pericles’ policy as follows:

Thou king of the Satyrs, why, pray, wilt thou not

Take the spear for thy weapon, and stop the dire talk

With the which, until now, thou conductest the war,

While the soul of a Teles is in thee?

If the tiniest knife is but laid on the stone

To give it an edge, thou gnashest thy teeth,

As if bitten by fiery Cleon.
⁴³

This passage delights in dwelling upon the implied cowardice of Pericles, who, in
this context, is transformed into a latter-day Dionysus who prefers
to lead a theatrical chorus rather than his men into battle. The comparison may well
testify to Pericles’ interest in drama, but is designed above all to discredit the
stratēgos
, depicting him as a man concerned above all to promote his own pleasure rather than
defend his city.

Despite this underlying anger, Pericles’ prudent strategy was followed by the Athenians
even after the death of its promoter, for the fact was that it chimed with the interests
of the majority of the citizens. Had that not been the case, Pericles, despite all
his oratorical skills, would not have been able to carry the Assembly with him for
more than a few months. In truth, his policy did suit the realities facing the Athenian
democracy and also its imaginary representations. In the first place, in a city where
one-fifth of the citizens possessed no land at all and almost two-thirds of them owned
only fields of less than one hectare (around 2.5 acres), the abandonment of the
khōra
was the lesser evil.
⁴⁴
Only the large and medium-sized landowners, whom Aristophanes defended, were seriously
affected by the Spartans’ devastation of the fields and their crops.
⁴⁵
As Pericles himself proclaimed in his speech to the Athenians in 430, “You should
make light of them [the houses and the land], regarding them … as a mere flower-garden
or ornament of a wealthy estate.”
⁴⁶
Furthermore, far from avoiding all conflict, Pericles simply chose one particular
form of warfare—naval confrontation—rather than another—namely, hoplite combat. By
favoring the oarsmen rather than the hoplites, the
stratēgos
followed in the footsteps of Themistocles, who valued the poorest of the citizens
(the thetes), to the disadvantage of the hoplite class and the cavalrymen.
⁴⁷

It was because his policies responded to a profoundly democratic requirement that
Pericles, despite forceful criticism, was in the end able to resist the resentments
of the Athenian people and convince it of the correctness of his views—and to do so
not solely thanks to his talents as an orator capable of bewitching his fellow citizens.
⁴⁸
The fact nevertheless remains that his expertise in public speaking certainly was
a valuable asset to him in his pursuit of political authority.

CHAPTER 3

The Bases of Periclean Power: The Orator

I
n the funeral oration that Pericles delivered in 431, to honor the citizens who had
fallen during the first year of the Peloponnesian War, he praised the city, emphasizing
the role that speech played in deliberations and decision-taking: “We Athenians decide
public questions for ourselves or at least endeavor to arrive at a sound understanding
of them in the belief that it is not debate that is a hindrance to action, but rather
not to be instructed by debate before the time comes for action.”
¹
Unlike the laconic Spartans, the Athenians indeed never hesitated to enter upon long
discussions prior to voting, in the meetings of the Assembly that took place on the
Pnyx hill forty times a year.

Speak before doing anything and reflect before taking action: this characterization
of Athens is to some extent valid for Pericles himself who, under cover of his celebration
of the whole city, was implicitly praising himself. Thucydides often describes the
stratēgos
as an orator who enlightens the crowd and influences the decisions that it takes.
The art of speaking—or not speaking—was clearly a second basis upon which Periclean
power rested.

In this Athenian city rapidly moving toward democratization, persuasive oratory was
now playing a key role. In this respect, Pericles remained the incarnation, par excellence,
of an orator endowed with a power of rhetoric that combined both authority and pedagogy.
The ancient sources never cease to dwell upon his quasi-divine oratorical power, employing
a selection of metaphors the effects of which need to be assessed. When Pericles addressed
the people from the tribune of the Assembly, he abided by extremely elaborate codes
of oratory. The rhetoric and gestures that he adopted made him a measured orator whose
imperturbability was nevertheless interpreted by his opponents as arrogance or even
aristocratic disdain.

Pericles was a past master not only of public speaking but also of the art of remaining
silent or, to be more precise, of getting his political allies to speak in his place:
in order not to saturate the crowds with his own presence, often I
he would remain in the background so as to make his own rare public appearances more
solemn and striking. The combination of all these facets of his behavior rendered
his hold over the people well nigh irresistible.

P
ERICLES AND
R
HETORIC
: K
NOWING
H
OW TO
S
PEAK

Rhetoric and Democracy

The Athenian democracy respected the principle of
isēgoria
: equal access to public speech for all citizens. At the start of every Assembly meeting,
after the Pnyx had been purified by a sacrifice, the herald (
kērux
) stepped out before the Athenians, said a prayer and pronounced a curse on any orator
who attempted to mislead the people, and then asked, “Who wishes to speak?”. Whoever
came forward placed upon his head a myrtle crown that made him unassailable, and spoke
directly to the people, proposing a decree to be voted upon. Any citizen could, in
his turn, speak in answer to the preceding orator. The Assembly thus proceeded like
a competition (
agōn
) in public speaking, with the city gods looking on.

In truth, these egalitarian principles masked powerful internal hierarchies. In the
first place, according to the orator Aeschines, Athenian law ruled that turns for
speaking be determined by the speakers’ respective ages: the oldest citizens had the
right to speak first and this lent a particular force to their words.
²
Second, not many Athenians dared to speak in public. Unless a man had mastered the
art of oratory, he would soon expose himself to ridicule or even to
thorubos
, the kind of general tumult often mentioned in the speeches of the Attic orators.
³
Furthermore, speaking in public involved a legal risk: the orator was responsible
before the magistrates for the motions for which he requested the people’s assent.
Even if his point of view triumphed in the Assembly, he might then be pursued by his
opponents within the framework of a legal trial in which he was accused of illegality,
a
graphē paranomōn
that may have been instituted by Ephialtes’ reforms of 462/1. If found guilty by
the judges, the orator had to pay a heavy fine or was even condemned to
atimia
, total or partial privation of his civic rights. So nobody came forward to speak
without carefully weighing up the pros and cons.

Stepping up to the tribune involved personal initiative, and the risk was all the
greater given that the orator could not count on the support of any structured political
formation. Although historians are often inclined to reduce Athenian political life
to confrontation between two camps—the aristocrats and the democrats—we know of no
official political party possessed of a clearly defined policy and stable organization
in Athens.
⁴
Although
influential men were surrounded by factions that supported them, these were always
precarious and informal. Coalitions would form and disintegrate depending on the circumstances
and the questions debated.

Within such a fluctuating framework, mastery of the art of oratory represented an
essential trump card for anyone bold enough to ascend to the tribune. That is why
the lessons of the sophists were so successful among the Athenian elite of the second
half of the fifth century. The mission of these itinerant sages was, in return for
considerable fees, to teach a person how to handle speech, whatever the circumstances.
In the course of his long stay in Athens, the Sicilian sophist, Gorgias, from Leontini,
is even said to have defined rhetoric as follows: “the ability to persuade with speeches
either judges in the law courts or citizens in the Assembly or an audience at any
other meeting that may be held on public affairs.”
⁵
As can be imagined, in Athens the demand for such skills was particularly great.
“To control the people with one’s tongue”
⁶
was precisely the aim of Athenian orators schooled by the sophists.