Pericles of Athens (34 page)

The rediscovery of Plutarch dated from the early sixteenth century, when the humanist
Guillaume Budé, “the prince of Hellenists,” who was close to Francis I of France,
published a series of
Apophtegmes
(precepts), borrowed from Plutarch’s works. But his popularity really took off in
1559, when Jacques Amyot translated the
Parallel Lives
. Amyot was the Grand Chaplain of France and the Bishop of Auxerre and he gave the
work a new title,
Vies des hommes illustres Grecs et Romains comparées l’une avec l’autre
(The lives of illustrious Greeks and Romans compared to one another), dedicating
it to Henri II, who had appointed him tutor to the royal children. This was the launching
point of Plutarch’s incredible popularity both in France and
beyond—in fact, throughout the West. As early as 1572, Henri Estienne, in Geneva,
produced the first complete edition of the work. It was divided into two great tomes—on
the one hand the
Vies Parallèles
and on the other the
Oeuvres morales
(the
Moralia
), taking over a division that dated back to the work of the Byzantine monk, Maximus
Planudes.

The impact of Amyot’s translation was long-lasting. At the end of the sixteenth century,
Montaigne was writing, “We ignorant fellows had been lost had not this book raised
us out of the dirt; … ’tis our breviary.”
⁶
Montaigne even went so far as to turn Plutarch into a close friend, almost a brother:
“Plutarch is the man for me,”
⁷
he exclaimed, to some extent setting him up as a rival to La Boétie! Far from being
an isolated view, Montaigne’s admiration was shared across the board, from Machiavelli
to Jean Bodin. It was thus through the prism of the
Parallel Lives
that the members of the elite groups of the modern age saw the figure of Pericles.
⁸
But however much Plutarch admired Pericles’ great works, he denigrated the democrat
and was only too happy to record the traditions that were the most hostile to the
stratēgos
.
⁹

Should not a reading of Thucydides have somewhat redressed the balance? The Athenian
historian had been translated into Latin very early on by Lorenzo Valla and subsequently
into French by Claude de Seyssel (in a volume published posthumously, in 1527, under
the aegis of King Francis I). However, up until the late eighteenth century
The Peloponnesian War
reached no more than a limited readership. In the first place, the translations of
it left quite a lot to be desired. According to the scholar and publisher Henri Estienne,
Valla and Seyssel had “distorted” the historian (Seyssel did not even read Greek).
¹⁰
But above all, the work was out of step with the taste of the period. Occasionally,
it was judged to be sublime and full of majesty, but the general opinion was that
Thucydides’ style was austere and inelegant, and his dry, spare prose offended the
aesthetics of classicism which, in contrast, praised to the skies the elegant expansiveness
of Plutarch, which was even magnified by Amyot’s translation. Completed by a reading
of Plato and of Aristotle (the
Politics
), the education of a man of the modern age paid no attention to any texts that might
have corrected the detestable reputation of the
stratēgos
.

All this resulted in the creation of a filter that lastingly warped the reception
of Antiquity in general and of Pericles in particular. Plutarch held first place and
was followed by Plato and Aristotle. Clearly democracy and its leaders did not emerge
flatteringly from the selective process applied to the ancient texts.

Pericles, a Man without Merit: Not an Exemplary Figure

Plutarch’s great popularity was accompanied by another factor that was equally negative
for Pericles. This was a particular attitude to history that can be traced back to
Cicero. Up until the eighteenth century, history was regarded primarily as a “teacher
of life” (
magistra vitae
), as that Roman orator famously put it. It could be summed up as a collation of examples
which, when picked out (
ex-empla
) elicited either imitation or, on the contrary, execration.
¹¹
All that men remembered from history were characters and images, great tableaux,
and symbolic scenes that painters delighted in reproducing.
¹²

As an exemplary figure, Pericles did not seem an attractive model. He was not among
the colorful figures around whom analogies and comparisons crystallized. When the
stratēgos
was mentioned, it was seldom on his own account. Often enough he was cited in passing
among the rest of the politicians who embodied Athenian democracy: Themistocles, Aristides,
Cimon, and Alcibiades.
¹³
Neither a glorious conqueror such as Alexander the Great, nor a brave warrior such
as Themistocles or his own rival Cimon; neither a wise lawgiver such as the consensual
Solon nor a heroic martyr such as Socrates; not even as scandalous a
stratēgos
as his pupil Alcibiades—nothing about Pericles really caught the eyes and attention
of members of the modern elite. Even his death left them indifferent: how boring,
to die in one’s bed, consumed by disease! That is why there were so few pictorial
representations of the
stratēgos
. Apart from one timid appearance in Perugia, in the strange guise of a bearded old
man painted by Perugino (ca. 1497;
figure 10
) in the reception hall of a guild of money-changers,
¹⁴
Pericles was ignored by both the Renaissance painters and those of modern times.
In Raphael’s famous painting,
The School of Athens
(ca. 1509–1510), he is conspicuous by his absence despite the fact that he might
logically have found a place there since it was, after all, he who turned Athens into
“a living lesson.”

Shunned by painters and poets, Pericles remained in the shadow of other ancients who
were deemed more presentable. The glorification of those few figures affected the
image of Pericles himself disastrously. What the readers of Plutarch remembered was
that the great men of Athens were all dragged through the mud: Themistocles, Aristides,
and Cimon had all been ostracized; Socrates and Phocion were executed. It was hard
to cherish their memory without condemning the form of governance that had set them
aside or put them to death. The role of the anti-hero was therefore assigned to democracy
and to Pericles himself, who was more or less strongly associated with it.

Those who did deign to take an interest in him dwelt on his disturbing aspects; only
the most equivocal events in his life were selected, all with a view to criticizing
him. Presented as he was, now as a war-monger, now as a corrupter of the people, he
seemed the very embodiment of both democratic instability and deceptive eloquence.

Pericles, or the Democratic Anti-model

Even in the small Italian city-states of the Renaissance, Pericles never became a
positive model; in this respect, Leonardo Bruni was far more of an exception than
a general rule. Moreover, even he did not explicitly praise the
stratēgos
, but drew his inspiration solely from his funeral speech. The fact
was that the political thinkers of the Italian Renaissance displayed a marked preference
for the Roman Republic and the government of Sparta. In view of the constant revolutions
of Athenian democracy, they loudly and strongly proclaimed their admiration for the
stability of the Spartan regime and its well-balanced constitution. In the writings
of Machiavelli (1469–1527), the armed camp on the banks of the Eurotas River was presented
as an ideal to imitate, while the city of Athena was an example to be avoided.
¹⁵

Pericles in Italy: A Bad Counselor or a Virtuous Citizen?

In his
Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius
, published between 1512 and 1517, the great political thinker Machiavelli set up
the following striking parallel:

Amongst those justly celebrated for having established such a constitution, Lycurgus
beyond doubt merits the highest praise. He organized the government of Sparta in such
manner that, in giving to the king, the nobles and the people each their portion of
authority and duties, he created a government which maintained itself for over eight
hundred years in the most perfect tranquillity, and reflected infinite glory upon
this legislator. On the other hand, the constitution given by Solon to the Athenians,
by which he established only a popular government, was of such short duration that
before his death he saw the tyranny of Pisistratus arise (1.2).
¹⁶

According to Machiavelli, Solon was the sole inventor of democracy: so
exit
Pericles, along with all the other Athenian leaders. But, as it happened, that mattered
little since, according to the Florentine writer, the Athenian regime was vitiated
right from top to bottom.

When Machiavelli cites Pericles by name (the only time in his entire work), it is,
moreover, to mock his views. He criticizes his military ideas, declaring them to be
totally misconceived: “History proves in a thousand cases what I maintain, notwithstanding
that Pericles counselled the Athenians to make war with the entire Peloponnesus, demonstrating
to them that by perseverance and the power of money they would be successful. And
although it is true that the Athenians obtained some successes in that war, yet they
succumbed in the end; and good counsels and the good soldiers of Sparta prevailed
over the perseverance and money of the Athenians.”
¹⁷
He claims that the
stratēgos
proved himself incapable of correctly evaluating the balance of power on the eve
of the Peloponnesian War. Overconfident in the financial resources of his country,
he forced it into a conflict that it was bound to lose.

In the writings of Guicciardini (1485–1540), a friend of Machiavelli’s and a Florentine
politician, blame gave way to praise. Pericles makes no more than a discreet appearance
in his writings, but he does so to his advantage. The author draws attention to the
incorruptibility of the
stratēgos
, thereby justifying his view that there was “no citizen more worthy and glorious”
than Pericles, who governed Athens for thirty years “thanks solely to his authority
and his reputation for virtue.”
¹⁸
Did this amount to an exception to the doubtful reputation of the
stratēgos
? Not altogether. His praise was somewhat qualified: even if he gladly acknowledged
Pericles’ virtue, Guicciardini criticized his demagogic views and maintained that
to come to power thanks to the Senate was preferable to depending on the people in
order to do so.
¹⁹

One generation later, Carlo Sigonio (1523–1584), a native of Modena, returned to a
negative view of the
stratēgos
, in the very first monograph to be devoted to the city of Athens, the
De Republica Atheniensium
(1564).
²⁰
Having been a teacher in Venice, where its powerful fleet reminded him of Athens,
Sigonio was very well informed about the ancient sources and stuffed his text with
Greek, citing not only philosophers but also the Athenian historians and orators.
However, this scholar remained extremely reserved on the subject of Pericles, whom
he accused of having ruined Solon’s admirable constitution: “As for Aristides, who
acquired great authority through these [Persian] wars and, after him, Pericles, a
man adept at speaking and action, both amplified the constitution of this popular
republic and granted to the
plebs
and the incompetence of the multitude all that Solon’s laws had denied them.”
²¹
A few pages later, Sigonio made his criticisms more explicit: “Pericles made the
people more insolent and arrogant by assigning to the
plebs
the financial means to set up courts and to construct theatres for their entertainment,
thereby toppling the power of the Areopagus through the intermediary of Ephialtes.”
²²
Despite Sigonio’s admiration for the democratic city, which was very rare in his
day, he remained captivated by Plato’s vision, which spared neither Pericles nor even
Aristides.
²³

“The Ruination of the Republic”: The Disenchanted View of Jean Bodin

In France, at the end of the sixteenth century, Jean Bodin (1530–1596) seized upon
Pericles, making him the execrated emblem of all republican regimes. This remarkable
jurist endowed with an encyclopedic mind was writing in a France rent apart by the
religious quarrels between the Catholics and the Huguenots. Faced with the Religious
Wars, Bodin chose to exalt the royal State that alone was capable of bringing those
internecine struggles to an end. It was he who set out the bases of the first real
doctrine of sovereignty,
having engaged in an in-depth historical inquiry in the course of which he investigated
the political regimes of the past.