Pericles of Athens (20 page)

This tension between
oikos
and
polis
, the private sphere and the public space, extended for the most part to the whole
of Pericles’ entourage. Not content to set his family at a distance, the
stratēgos
also appeared to break with his friends so as not to provoke the
phthonos
(envy) of the people.

P
ERICLES AND
P
HILIA
: H
ARMFUL
F
RIENDSHIPS

The Friend of All and Yet of None

According to Plutarch, when Pericles entered political life he decided to adopt a
transparent mode of public behavior and to set his old circle of friends at a distance:
“Straightway he made a different ordering in his way of life. On one street only in
the city was he to be seen walking—the one that took him to the market-place and the
council-chamber. Invitations to dinner and all such friendly and familiar intercourse
he declined, so that during the long period that elapsed while he was at the head
of the city, there was not a single friend [
ton philon
] to whose house he went to dine” (
Pericles,
7.4). As a stalwart member of the elite, Plutarch deplored the decision that led
the young Pericles to cut himself off from his former
philoi
—that is to say, the elite circle in which he had been raised (
Pericles
, 7.5). Yet the
stratēgos
’s behavior did make sense in the increasingly democratic framework of the mid-fifth
century. Perpetually placed before the eyes of the people, Pericles had decided ostensibly
to reject his private friendships and the sociability that went with them. In this
respect, his avoidance of private banquets—the
sumposion
—was a crucial element in the system that he adopted. In that
it was a microcosm that shut out the external world, the
sumposion
was an object of suspicion to the
dēmos
, which was excluded from it. A group of banqueters functioned as an alternative community,
more or less cut off from the civic and democratic order, as is clear from the works
titled
Symposium
written by Plato and Xenophon. It was certainly not by chance that, a few years after
Pericles’ death, those jovial groups of banqueters became involved in the oligarchic
revolutions that shook the Athenian city.
¹⁴

Throughout his career, Pericles set the friendship of the people before his personal
relationships. In any case, his public commitments were so absorbing that he could
not always spare the time to devote to his friends, even the closest of them. According
to an anecdote related by Plutarch, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae reproached him for this
neglect of the elementary rules of
philia
: “At a time when Pericles was absorbed in business, Anaxagoras lay on his couch all
neglected, in his old age, starving himself to death, his head already muffled for
departure, and when the matter came to the ears of Pericles, he was struck with dismay
and ran at once to the poor man and besought him most fervently to live, bewailing
not so much that great teacher’s lot as his own, were he now to be bereft of such
a counsellor in the conduct of the city. Then Anaxagoras—so the story goes—unmuffled
his head and said to him, ‘Pericles, even those who need a lamp pour oil therein’”
(
Pericles
, 16.7). So it was as a result of insufficient leisure time (
skholē
) as much as by his choice that the
stratēgos
cut himself off from his friends. Having devoted his career to the public interest,
the
stratēgos
no longer had time to maintain a sociable life among his friends, with all that this,
in the long term, involved in the way of reciprocal gestures and exchanges of favors.

To judge from Plutarch’s account, Pericles’ career was thus characterized by his marginalization
of his private friendships, so as to maintain contacts solely with the
dēmos
. Some historians, such as W. R. Connor, have detected in this a radical innovation
that reflects the democratic mutations that were taking place in the democracy during
the fifth century. Until Pericles arrived on the scene, politicians were happy to
depend on support in their affairs from their networks of
philoi
. But Connor suggests that a new political style emerged with Pericles, based on an
austere lifestyle in which one’s friends were deliberately relegated to the remote
fringes of political life.
¹⁵
However, such a contrast is to a large extent exaggerated. In the first place, upstream,
even before Pericles appeared upon the scene, Themistocles had, according to Aelian,
¹⁶
already behaved in this fashion. Second, downstream, Pericles’ successors continued
to make use of their circles of friends in order to secure their own power.
¹⁷
When Alcibiades arrived in Piraeus in 407 B.C., after eight years in exile, his first
reflex was anxiously to look around for his close
relatives; only when sure that they were indeed present, did he disembark and make
his way to the town, to be elected
stratēgos autokratōr.
¹⁸

This enables us to qualify Plutarch’s testimony. It probably reflects a democratic
commonplace—namely, the leader’s devotion to the people’s interests alone, rather
than the real practices of the elite. In fact, Pericles does not seem in practice
to have renounced his many friendships. Rightly or wrongly, he was even accused by
his enemies of maintaining a whole galaxy of more or less embarrassing
philoi
.

Pericles’ Circle?

The ancient sources attribute to Pericles a whole gallery of “friends,” as numerous
as they were prestigious: among the Athenians, Damon, Phidias, and Sophocles; among
the foreigners, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, Aspasia of Miletus, Protagoras of Abdera,
Hippodamus of Miletus, Kephalus of Syracuse, the Spartan king Archidamus, and many
others too.
¹⁹
Pericles would therefore have been surrounded by a vast group of poets, philosophers,
sophists, architects, and artists, all of whom helped him to make Athens “the school
of Greece,” to borrow the expression said by Thucydides to have been used by Pericles
in his funeral speech.

However, historians have questioned the existence of a veritable “Pericles’ circle”—with
all that such a notion presupposes in the way of stability and allegiance—and they
are skeptical for two reasons. In the first place, not all those ties of friendship
are attested. The relations established between Pericles on the one hand and Hippodamus
of Miletus and Protagoras of Abdera on the other are, to put it mildly, nebulous.
²⁰
As for Kephalus of Syracuse, the father of the orator Lysias, even if he was indeed
acquainted with Pericles, there is no evidence to suggest that he was a close friend
of the
stratēgos
.
²¹
It was clearly a posteriori that the ancient authors reconstructed those friendly
relations between a number of famous fifth-century figures, gathering them around
the figure of Pericles like bees clustered around their queen. Besides, even such
friends as are reliably confirmed lack the stability required to constitute a veritable
“circle.” Damon was ostracized early on; Phidias, an itinerant artist, was often away
from Athens, carried to wherever his work took him—for example, to Olympia, where
he worked from 437 to 433, sculpting the monumental statue of Zeus; and as for Anaxagoras,
Plutarch himself stresses the fact that his relations with Pericles were frequently
interrupted for long periods.

Even if, strictly speaking, there was no “Pericles’ circle,” that did not stop the
stratēgos
’s opponents from criticizing him for it. In truth, the supposed
Pericles’ circle was in the first place a creation by his enemies, who hoped in this
way to instill suspicions in the minds of Athenians, for in the Greek world, it was
tyrants that were known to maintain a circle around themselves, a court entirely devoted
to singing their praises. And was this not, after all, the kind of relationship that
was suggested by sources that recorded that the
stratēgos
’s companions (
hetairoi
) were called “the new Pisistratids” (
Pericles
, 16.1)?

Whatever the case may be, the members of Pericles’ circle came under constant attack,
both on the comic stage and in the city courts. The target, through them, was clearly
Pericles himself. Plutarch explicitly recognizes this when he describes the accuser
who had Anaxagoras dragged before the court for impiety, probably in the early 430s:
“He [Diopeithes] targeted Pericles, through Anaxagoras.”
²²
The opponents of Pericles were pursuing two contrary objectives when they criticized
his entourage. Sometimes, they sought to present the
stratēgos
as an all-powerful man, reigning over the courtiers who groveled at his feet; at
other times, they depicted him as a mere puppet, surreptitiously manipulated by a
set of
éminences grises
or even foreign powers.

The accusations launched against the sculptor Phidias fell into the first of those
two categories. He was depicted as Pericles’ right-hand man, ready to do anything
to execute his base demands. Rumor had it that the sculptor even acted as a pimp,
to serve the pleasures of the
stratēgos
-tyrant: “making assignations for Pericles with free-born women who would come ostensibly
to see the works of art.”
²³
Furthermore, the sculptor too was dragged before the courts, probably for embezzlement,
following a scandal the mud from which also bespattered Pericles. In his play
The Peace
, performed in 421 B.C., Aristophanes picked up on this affair (but, unfortunately,
only in vague terms), even suggesting that it was one of the causes of the Peloponnesian
War.
²⁴

For the most part, though, Pericles was depicted not as a manipulating master, but
as a man who was himself manipulated by his friends. For example, some sources represent
Damon of Oa as the
stratēgos
’s
eminence grise
. According to the
Constitution of the Athenians
, it was he who persuaded Pericles to introduce pay for jurors.
²⁵
Plutarch develops this theme, depicting Damon as the mentor of Xanthippus’s son:
“Damon seems to have been a consummate sophist, but to have taken refuge behind the
name of music in order to conceal [
epikruptomenos
] from the multitude his real power, and he associated with Pericles, that political
athlete, as it were, in the capacity of coach and trainer. However, Damon was not
left unmolested in this use of his lyre as a screen, but was ostracized for being
a great schemer and a friend of tyranny.”
²⁶
Damon consequently became the embodiment of a man of secrets or even plots, a shadowy
counselor who handled his pupil, Pericles, like
a puppet. The discovery of four potsherds bearing Damon’s name testifies, if not to
the truth of the anecdote, at least to the influence that Athenians ascribed to Damon.
²⁷

According to his detractors, Pericles was manipulated above all by foreigners, even—worse
still—by female ones. He was certainly reputed to maintain numerous friendly relations
outside the civic circle, as the comic poet Cratinus relates in a fragment cited by
Plutarch: “Come, oh Zeus, patron of foreigners [
xenios
] and head of State [Caranius]!”
²⁸
Pericles, who is often described as an Olympian, is here assimilated to Zeus
Xenios
, the god who protects and welcomes in foreigners. For the poet, this was a transparent
way of deploring the links that bound the
stratēgos
to foreigners domiciled in the city. Aspasia came from Miletus, Chrysilla from Corinth,
Anaxagoras from Clazomenae, and Kephalus from Syracuse. These relations were potentially
dangerous ones. The
stratēgos
’s enemies could blame him for setting the interests of his foreign friends above
those of the Athenian people.

In this respect, the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War placed Pericles in a particularly
delicate position, for the
stratēgos
maintained links of hospitality (
xenia
) with the Spartan king Archidamus, who led his troops in an assault on Athens and
laid waste its territory. At this point, Pericles solemnly promised, before the Assembly,
that he would give the city his own properties should the Spartan leader leave them
intact on account of the
xenia
that linked them.
²⁹
The
stratēgos
was thus forced to take preemptive action so as not to be regarded as a corrupt man
who allowed the city territory to be laid waste, knowing that he himself had nothing
to fear personally with respect to his land. In the context of war, conventional aristocratic
hospitality became incompatible with the obligations dictated by the civic world.
³⁰

However, his enemies concentrated most of their attacks on another of the
stratēgos
’s equivocal relationships. His love for Aspasia was deplored on many occasions. He
was even accused of starting the Peloponnesian War for the sake of her lovely eyes.
This was a matter of slipping from friendship into love or, to be more exact, from
philia
into
eros.

CHAPTER 7

Pericles and
Eros
: Caught between Civic Unity and Political Subversion

E
ros
, not love: this terminological choice is no mere flirtatious quibble. It is intended
to draw attention to how far apart the two terms are. In the Greek world,
eros
did not correspond to any romantic sentiment, nor did it bear any similarity to the
wishy-washy notion nowadays conjured up by “love.” Whether homosexual or heterosexual,
eros
was first and foremost a connective force or, at times, a disconnective one.
¹