Pericles of Athens (19 page)

In fifth-century Athens, a politician thus had to resolve a complex equation. Although
he needed his circle of family and friends in order to acquire power, he also had
to take precautions against the suspicion that his entourage was bound to arouse.
This delicate balance was hard to maintain, as the case of Pericles shows. On the
one hand, the
stratēgos
behaved like any other member of the elite, shamelessly making the most of his social
networks and establishing alliances with other powerful families, but on the other,
he wished to appear to be a man wholly devoted to the people’s cause, even to the
point of neglecting the most important family rituals.

Not content to hold his kin (
suggeneis
) at a distance, Pericles more generally neglected the traditional forms of friendship
(
philia
) and the sociability that was associated with them. So as not to arouse the people’s
jealousy, the
stratēgos
even avoided private banquets and such friendly entertainments. But even this did
not prevent him from being attacked for his equivocal friendships and, in particular,
his hospitality toward foreigners and even foreign women. The friends of Pericles,
who were often mocked by the comic poets and sometimes were even dragged before the
courts, paid the price for the people’s mistrust of Pericles. Around Pericles’ circle
of friends there circulated stories that revealed the people’s desire to monitor his
family and
friendly connections, even though these were indispensable for establishing and maintaining
their leader’s authority.

P
ERICLES AND
H
IS
O
IKOS
: T
HE
P
OLITICAL
W
AYS OF
E
XPLOITING
K
INSHIP

The Matrimonial Strategies of the Athenian Elite: Pericles’ Nameless Wife

Kinship was the basis of a diffuse and lasting solidarity, whether it was vertical
(between ancestors and descendants) or horizontal (between husband and wife). In this
respect, Pericles could rely not only on his prestigious ancestors (see earlier,
chapter 1
), but also on the matrimonial alliances that he contracted within the Athenian elite.
Plutarch refers tersely to Pericles’ successive unions: “His own wife was near of
kin to him and had been wedded first to Hipponicus, to whom she bore Callias, surnamed
the Rich; she bore also, as the wife of Pericles, Xanthippus and Paralus. Afterwards,
since their married life was not agreeable, he legally bestowed her upon another man,
with her own consent, and himself took Aspasia, and loved her exceedingly” (Plutarch,
Pericles
, 24.5). This account illuminates the main characteristics of marriage within the
Athenian elite. It testifies both to the structure of Greek marriage and also to its
more or less explicit purposes.

In the first place, it reflects the domination of men over women. Marriage was a private
contract between men in which the woman was a passive object: Pericles’ wife was,
exceptionally, only taken into account when she was passed on to a third husband.
A telling sign of this inferiority is her anonymity. It is only by dint of a series
of reinvestigations and hypotheses that Pierre Brulé has managed to restore her name
to her. Pericles’ wife seems to have been named Deinomache and is believed to have
been the grand-daughter of Cleisthenes, the lawgiver.
¹

Second, this marriage illustrates the principle of endogamy that prevailed within
the Athenian elite and that was further accentuated by the 451 law on citizenship.
Pericles’ wife belonged to a circle of close relatives. According to Pierre Brulé’s
reconstruction, Deinomache was the grand-daughter of Cleisthenes, while Pericles was
the grandson of one of Cleisthenes’ brothers, so his mother was the lawgiver’s niece.
Moreover, his wife’s father was none other than his own mother’s brother and so was
Pericles’ uncle; so Pericles and his wife were first cousins (see
figure 1
).

Pericles’ marriage provides a splendid illustration of the way in which kinship structures
functioned in Athens. The ideal marriage was a union with
one’s closest relative. We even get the impression that Deinomache’s first marriage
was dissolved so that Pericles could “recover” the woman who was his cousin. However,
we should not overemphasize this characteristic, for exogamy and endogamy by no means
excluded one another. “The flexibility of the Athenian matrimonial system allowed
those involved to choose between the advantages of endogamy and exogamy according
to whatever was in their best interest.”
²

Over and above the structural elements—masculine domination and the principle of endogamy—this
account also illuminates the two principal aims of marriage. First, its explicit objective:
to produce legitimate children. With Pericles, Deinomache gave birth to Xanthippus
and Paralus. From this point of view, Cleisthenes’ grand-daughter seems to have been
endowed with a remarkable procreative ability: quite apart from the daughters that
she may have had, she provided sons for every one of her successive husbands! Next,
the implicit objective: this string of unions served to forge alliances between members
of the Athenian elite. Deinomache, initially married to Hipponicus II, was then passed
on to Pericles, and was finally given to Cleinias—as if she were nothing but a fine
trousseau. Her first husband, Hipponicus II, was himself endowed with a particularly
impressive pedigree. Through his father, he was descended from the priestly Kerykes
group, which provided one of the two priests who celebrated the mysteries of Eleusis.
Through his mother, he was also related to the Cimonid family, as the son of Elpinike,
Cimon’s sister. However, Pericles had no cause to envy him since he, himself, like
his wife, was part of the great Alcmaeonid family. As for Cleinias, the last of Deinomache’s
husbands, he belonged to one of the wealthiest families in Athens and could proudly
claim descent from the heroes Eurysakes and Ajax.
³

The effect of these successive marriages was to create more or less diffuse links
of solidarity between the various spouses. So, after the death of Cleinias—the last
of Deinomache’s husbands—in the battle of Coronea in 447, Pericles became the guardian
of the latter’s orphaned sons, most notably the scandalous Alcibiades. This widening
circle undeniably represented an advantage where political matters were concerned,
as Plutarch noted after mentioning the death of Xanthippus at the time of the plague
of 430 B.C.: “Pericles lost his sister also at that time, and of his relatives and
friends the largest part, and those who were most serviceable to him in his administration
of the city” (
Pericles
, 36.4).

However, we should not exaggerate the political impact of this network of alliances.
Even if they were related, some members of the elite did not hesitate to clash openly
within the public space. One example is provided by Pericles and his opponent Cimon,
both of whom were part of the same
network of alliances: Cimon had married a woman who came from the
oikos
of the Alcmaeonids, Isodike; and his sister, Elpinike, was the mother of the first
husband of Pericles’ wife. As for the
stratēgos
’s eldest son, Xanthippus, he married a daughter of Teisandrus, a member of the elder
branch of the family of Miltiades and Cimon. Yet this close interlacing of relations
did not prevent the two men from clashing time and again in the Assembly.
⁴
How can this animosity be explained? The fact is that, in the course of the fifth
century, the people’s rise to power had deeply upset the organized interplay of traditional
alliances. In order to win the support of the
dēmos
, some members of the elite, Pericles among them, did not hesitate to set aside their
kinship network, at least in their speeches, if not in their actions.

Without a Family? Pericles between
Oikos
and
Polis

Even if, in practice, Pericles was not averse to relying on the support of his relatives,
he nevertheless adopted in public a mode of behavior that tended to deny or at least
marginalize their role. The
stratēgos
presented himself as a man more or less estranged from his family circle. In the
first place, as we have seen, he separated from his wife and transferred her to the
oikos
of Cleinias; second, his relations with his legitimate heirs, particularly his elder
son, Xanthippus, were severely fraught. It is hard to credit the rumors spread by
Stesimbrotus of Thasos, according to whom the
stratēgos
slept with his daughter-in-law, the wife of his son. However, the fact remains that
Pericles refused to advantage his own children and to treat them as “Daddy’s boys,”
in all probability not so much out of stinginess as in order not to affront the people.
⁵
Perhaps we can thus interpret the choice of the name that he gave to his second son,
Paralus. This could be seen as a way of showing an interest in the navy and so to
manifest his allegiance to the thetes who manned the triremes. The Paralian was in
effect the name of one of the city’s two sacred ships.
⁶

More radically still, throughout his political career, Pericles refused to take part
in even the most elementary rituals of family sociability. He would no longer attend
the wedding banquets that provided the cement par excellence that welded together
the bond of kinship. Plutarch mentions only one exception to this rule: apparently,
Pericles did attend the wedding of Euryptolemus, his cousin, but he stayed only until
the libations—the first phase of the ritual. In the first place, this was a way of
preserving his dignity and his solemn bearing. By attending too many banquets and
taking part in too many festive celebrations, one risked slipping into drunkenness
and possibly attracting ridicule.
⁷
For the
stratēgos,
though, it was above all a matter of avoiding the ceremonies in which families flaunted
their power, their wealth,
and their networks of relations to such a degree that sumptuary laws had been introduced
so as to maintain a modicum of order by dint of limiting the number of guests that
could be invited.
⁸

In similar fashion, the
stratēgos
chose not to respect the current funerary conventions, even when his own children
were carried off by death: “he did not give up nor yet abandon his loftiness and grandeur
of spirit because of his calamities, nay,
he was not even seen to weep or to perform the funeral rites even at the grave of
one of his close relatives
[
tōn anangkaiōn
], until indeed he lost the very last one of his own legitimate sons, Paralus” (Plutarch,
Pericles
, 36.4: translation B. Perrin, modified). At this point, we need to assess the degree
of transgression that such behavior implied. To be sure, at the death of a relative,
the men were expected to hold back their tears, unlike the women, who would express
their grief in ritualized lamentations. The funeral procession (
ekphora
) had to pass through the city before sunrise and not include too many participants.
⁹
Nevertheless, it was unheard of for a relative, let alone a father, to withdraw from
this crucial moment in the funerary ritual. On the contrary, the closest relatives
were expected not only to be present but furthermore to lead the funerary procession!
¹⁰

If Pericles chose not to accompany members of his own family to their entombment,
it may not have been solely on account of his remarkable fortitude, as Plutarch suggests,
but also above all because he wished to avoid affronting the people. In the same way
as a wedding ceremony, a funeral procession presented an opportunity for a public
demonstration of an
oikos
’s power, as is attested by the many regulations imposed upon such manifestations,
even as early as the archaic period.

All the same, Pericles’ strange behavior cannot be explained solely by his desire
not to affront the
dēmos
. We should regard it, more positively, as a way for the
stratēgos
to present himself as the parent of all Athenians: by setting aside his real family
links, he could devote himself entirely to imaginary kinship relations that linked
him with all his fellow-citizens through the device of the myth of autochthony that
was now back in favor.
¹¹
This, we should remember, converted all the citizens to brothers born from the same
mother, the soil of Attica. The Athenians imagined themselves to be collectively endowed
with a prestigious ancestry and consequently to stand on a footing of equality with
one another;
¹²
the hierarchies of birth gave way before the belief of an origin common to all. In
this context, the law of 451 on citizenship made sense, voted in, as it was, on Pericles’
initiative. It chimed with the Athenian myth of autochthony, transforming the city
into an endogamous community with no foreign additions.
¹³
There can be no doubt that the
stratēgos
’s entire policy aimed to place civic fraternity above real kinship.

However, for the
stratēgos
there was a psychological if not political price to pay for denying the importance
of the family. In Athens, as elsewhere, such a rejection was hard to maintain to the
bitter end. When, in 430, he learned of the death of his last legitimate heir, Paralus,
the imperturbable
stratēgos
was brutally overcome by emotion and “broke out into wailing, and shed a multitude
of tears, although he had never done any such thing in all his life before” (Plutarch,
Pericles
, 36.5). For a long time, he remained prostrate with grief in his
oikos
, rather than going to speak in the Assembly (
Pericles
, 37.1), and when he eventually reassumed his place as
stratēgos
, it was in order to request that his private interests be placed above the law of
the city: he urged that the law on bastards (
nothoi
) that he himself had proposed in the past should be annulled “in order that the name
and lineage [
genos
] of his house might not altogether expire through lack of succession” (37.2). The
Athenians, whose hearts were touched, eventually allowed him “to enrol his illegitimate
son in the phratry-lists and to give him his own name—Pericles” (ibid.).