Pericles of Athens (33 page)

Without doubt, heckling from the people had the power to counterbalance the rhetoric
of even the most distinguished orators: these inarticulate murmurs could neutralize
any
logos
, however persuasive it might be. It was in this way that the people tamed its elite
leaders: far from dominating their audience, the Athenian leaders found themselves
controlled by the
dēmos
, at the mercy of its more or less spontaneous reactions. Faced with ever possible
dissent, it was very difficult for the orators to propose points of view that were
too much at odds with popular expectations.

Persnickety institutional procedures, tumultuous popular interventions in the Assembly,
outrageous comic insults, and obsessive rumors: in the course of the fifth century,
all these progressively combined to promote the political and ideological dominance
of the Athenian
dēmos
. Plato, in the next century, was the writer who best described the powers by which
the elite groups were tamed by the people—a process that the philosopher considered
to be seriously pathological.
⁷³
Democracy was, in other words, for him a leveling downward. Plato developed an eminently
polemical
point of view toward the Athenian city, but he was fundamentally right, for in the
fourth century, orators could no longer openly distinguish themselves from the common
crowd on the basis of their supposed superiority.

Yet this evolution was by no means always interpreted as a crippling defect in Athenian
democracy. All that Plato denounced was, on the contrary, celebrated by Demosthenes
in his speech
On the Crown
(§ 280): “But it is not the diction of an orator, Aeschines, or the vigour of his
voice that has any value:
it is supporting the policy of the people
[
hoi polloi
] and having the same friends and the same enemies as your country.” Demosthenes recognized
the imperious need for the
rhētores
to fall into line with popular norms, which in effect, in the fourth century, meant
with the demagogues (in the neutral sense of that term) and to strive constantly to
diminish the social distance that separated them from the ordinary citizens.
⁷⁴

Was this conclusion reached by the fourth-century orators and philosophers something
that was already sensed by Pericles and the age in which he lived? Not entirely. The
life of the
stratēgos
testifies to the fragile balance maintained between, on the one hand, the persistent
prestige of members of the Athenian elite and, on the other, the growing power of
the people. But even if Pericles still stood out from the majority of the Athenians
by virtue of both his wealth and his charisma as an orator, his behavior also reflected
a desire to conform with the aspirations of the people. It was a provisional compromise
that continued to evolve in the decades that followed. In this respect, Pericles’
career symbolizes a point of equilibrium just as much as a moment of rupture: to the
Athenians, his death seemed to mark the end of an era. To be sure, it was far from
being a total reversal, for the demagogues who succeeded him were by no means newcomers
who had emerged from the gutter and now proceeded to turn the city upside down!
⁷⁵
Nevertheless, they were the first leaders who explicitly paraded their close social
and cultural ties with the people, thereby incurring the wrath of members of the traditional
elite, who still clung on to their own distinction. Indeed, the death of the
stratēgos
brought about not so much a revolution, but rather a revelation. Once Pericles had
gone, it was no longer possible to deny the plain fact:
pace
Thucydides, Athens certainly was now, in fact as well as in name, a democracy.

So, in order to speak dispassionately of Pericles, should we put aside Thucydides
and his biased judgements? It would be impossible to do so, if only for historiographical
reasons. However much of a caricature it may have been, the historian’s view has,
ever since Antiquity and right down to the present day, lastingly influenced the way
that the Periclean moment is interpreted. The fact is that, transmitted as it was
by Plutarch, that view soon
became a commonplace that was for the most part accepted totally uncritically by the
Moderns. However, Pericles did need to recover his status as a “great man,” and this
proved no easy matter. For a long time, the
stratēgos
occupied no more than a marginal place in references to Greek and Roman Antiquity:
the “Age of Pericles” was a very long time coming.

CHAPTER 11

Pericles in Disgrace: A Long Spell in Purgatory (15th to 18th Centuries)

T
he
Oeuvres Complètes
(Complete Works) of Voltaire, published in 1771, contain an intriguing conversation
between Pericles, a Russian, and an eighteenth-century Greek.
¹
After such a long time in the Underworld, the
stratēgos
is keen to find out what modern men think of him. Addressing his compatriot, he naively
asks, “But tell me, is not my memory still venerated in Athens, the town where I introduced
magnificence and good taste?” To his great disappointment, his Greek companion has
never heard either of him or even of Athens: “So you are as little acquainted with
the famous and superb town of Athens as with the names of Themistocles and Pericles?
You must have lived in some underground place, in an unknown part of Greece.” The
Russian, who is less ignorant than his companion, intervenes to explain to the
stratēgos
how much the world has changed since his death: the Greeks, now subjects of the Ottomans,
no longer know even the name of Athens. The opulent city has been replaced by “a wretched,
squalid little town called Setines.” Contemplating the ravages of time with horror,
the disillusioned
stratēgos
concludes, “I hoped to have rendered my name immortal, yet I see that it is already
forgotten in my own land.”

This conversation from beyond the tomb strikingly condenses Pericles’ uneven trajectory
in the Western world. Having suffered a long eclipse up until the eighteenth century
(this chapter), the
stratēgos
progressively made a comeback. Even as he confirmed the fact that Pericles had been
forgotten, Voltaire contributed toward his rehabilitation, and helped to forge the
expression “the age of Pericles” (
chapter 12
).

A disgraced, even forgotten Pericles: the very idea will come as a surprise to readers
accustomed to identify Athens with the prestigious figure of the
stratēgos
. One of the primary virtues of a historiographical inquiry is certainly its ability
to dispel automatic assumptions and show that traditions do themselves have a history.
No, Pericles was not always an admired icon.
In the accounts of Athens from Antiquity right down to the eighteenth century, the
stratēgos
, ignored and sometimes discredited, became no more than a marginal figure.

How can one understand that journey across a desert without memories? By way of explanation,
a number of factors may be considered. In the first place, there is the crushing influence
on Western culture of Plutarch’s
Parallel Lives
: the success of this work played a major role in the relative marginalization of
the
stratēgos
. Second, a particular kind of relationship to the past: Pericles was the victim of
a kind of history that was designed as “a lesson for life” and that above all looked
to Antiquity to provide moral and aesthetic models. The moderns found Pericles too
slippery a character and preferred more straightforward types. Moreover, last but
not least, Pericles was a victim of the anti-democratic prejudice that pervaded the
monarchical Europe of the modern period. In such a context, this Athenian leader certainly
did not constitute an attractive model for those in power or for their cultural representatives.

So, after receiving an early, rather timid burst of acclaim in the Renaissance, Pericles
was totally ignored by the Moderns. If his figure ever was evoked, it was as a foil—now
as an embodiment of democratic instability (Machiavelli and Jean Bodin), now as a
model of misleading eloquence (Montaigne). And in the great quarrel between the Ancients
and the Moderns that gathered momentum at the end of the seventeenth century, the
stratēgos
remained for the most part sidelined, being considered unworthy of comparison to
Louis XIV. Tellingly enough, his rare appearances were limited to “dialogues of the
dead”—as if Pericles could be imagined only in the Underworld, relegated to the kingdom
of ghosts and oblivion.

The Enlightenment tempered this representation no more than marginally. Up until the
end of the French Revolution, the
stratēgos
remained in the shadow of an Antiquity that was, to be sure, glorified, but that
resolutely remained either Spartan or Roman. Amid the chorus of authors fascinated
by Lycurgus or the Gracchi, a few dissenting voices nevertheless began to be heard,
preparing the way for Pericles’ return to favor, in the nineteenth century, in totally
different historiographical circumstances.

An inquiry such as the present one must clearly be based on no more than a drastic
selection from the vast body of documentation that is available. So it will above
all be a matter of sketching in the main guiding lines in a quite exceptional historiographical
itinerary, sometimes proceeding in a series of “skips and jumps” (
à sauts et à gambades
), as Montaigne famously put it.

P
ERICLES IN THE
R
ENAISSANCE

A False Start: An Isolated Eulogy from Leonardo Bruni

Yet it had all started well. In the fifteenth-century Italian republics—in particular,
Florence—the humanists drew directly upon Greek works in which, among the Ancients,
they found models that they could follow. They lived on an equal footing with Antiquity,
using it as a means to break away from their own past (which was to become known as
the Middle Ages). In this way, there emerged “a vision of a new world reconstructed
from the words of Antiquity.”
²
It was in this civic context that, in the West, the figure of Pericles was first
mobilized.

Leonardo Bruni was one of the main vectors of this early acclimatization. He was born
in Arezzo and was one of the brilliant generation of humanists grouped around Coluccio
Salutati, whom he later succeeded as head of the chancellery of Florence. Immersed
in Greek literature, as he was, he translated Aristotle, Plutarch, Demosthenes, and
Plato and even produced a theoretical account of his experience of translation in
a treatise titled
De interpretatione recta
. He used his intimate knowledge of the ancient sources in his
Laudatio Florentinae urbis
(In praise of the city of Florence), composed in 1404.
³
At the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Florentines had just expelled
the Visconti and adopted a republican form of government. Leonardo Bruni, the humanist,
composed his
Laudatio
in order to legitimate this development and, naturally enough, it was the Athenian
model to which he turned. He drew his inspiration from Thucydides’
Peloponnesian War
and the
Panathenaic Oration
of Aelius Aristides—two texts that unambiguously exalted the institutions of Athens.
In a clear imitation of the funeral speech, Bruni celebrated the geographical position
of Florence, the crucial role that it had played against the foreign autocrats (the
struggle against Milan was then raging), the superiority of the political institutions
of Florence and its cultural supremacy.
⁴
The humanist Leonardo Bruni was treading in the footsteps of the
stratēgos
.

Two decades later, in 1428, it was again to the Periclean model that Bruni turned
when he composed the funeral oration for Nanni degli Strozzi.
⁵
Taking advantage of this funeral in order to celebrate the city of Florence as a
whole, in this speech Bruni extolled the liberty and equality of citizens ruled by
an exemplary government that offered opportunities to every good man who deserved
them. Even if Pericles was not explicitly mentioned, it was certainly his thinking
and heritage that Leonardo Bruni used to promote his own political project.

Not long after this, the thinking of Pericles received more publicity. Around 1450,
at the request of Pope Nicholas V, the great humanist Lorenzo Valla completed the
first translation of Thucydides into Latin, thereby making the text more accessible.
This Latin version was diffused in printed form. It was published in Treviso in 1483,
and several more editions appeared in the course of the sixteenth century, incorporating
the corrections made by Henri Estienne in 1564. The stage thus seemed set for the
promotion of a positive view of Athens and its leader.

It all came to nothing, however. As a result of a number of structural factors, the
memory of Pericles remained in limbo in the Western imagination. The first of those
factors was the incredible success of Plutarch: traditions favorable to the
stratēgos
for a long time remained overshadowed by
The Parallel Lives
. The second was the prevalence of a particular attitude toward the past that was
fueled by a perpetual quest for exemplary heroes; in the perspective of
historia magistra vitae
, the figure of Pericles was widely judged to be too lackluster or even repulsive.

The Reasons for a Long Eclipse

Lost in Translation: The Distorting Filter of Ancient Translations

In order to understand Pericles’ failure to engage with modern Europe, we need to
recognize a somewhat shocking fact: even when the ancient texts were translated, they
were not necessarily read. Out of all the formidable efforts that were devoted to
publishing and translating in the Renaissance, only a limited number of works eventually
rose to the surface and were selected as required reading in the education of a gentleman.
The works of Plutarch in particular must be picked out, along with those of Livy on
the Roman side. For whole centuries,
The Parallel Lives
, more or less on their own, provided all that members of the cultivated elite knew
about Greece and its successive leaders.