Pericles of Athens (35 page)

Bodin began his investigations with a book that was published in 1566, titled
Methodus ad Facilem Historiarum Cognitionem
(
Method for the Easy Comprehension of History
). In
chapter 6
, devoted to the constitution of republics, Bodin set out to “compare the empires
of the Ancients with our own” in order, by establishing historical parallels, to discover
the best possible form of government. The Athenian system was scrutinized in a demonstration
in which Pericles played a key role by reason of his actions against the aristocratic
Areopagus and his introduction of payment for public services: “At length Pericles
changed a popular state into a turbulent ochlocracy by eliminating, or at least greatly
diminishing, the power of the Areopagites, by which the safety and dignity of the
state had been upheld. He transferred to the lowest
plebs
all judgments, counsel, and direction of the entire state by offering payments and
gratuities as a bait for dominion.”
²⁴
No good could come from this action of the
stratēgos
, whom Bodin found guilty of having put an end to the “constitutional and just” regime
that preceded the evil government by the
plebs
.

In his great work,
The Six Books of the Commonwealth
(1576), which was published in French a few years later, Bodin continued in the same
political vein, adding a number of new touches to his picture. As in the
Method
, Pericles was judged to be responsible for the decline of Athens: “As Pericles, to
gain the favor of the common sort, had taken away the authority from the Areopagites
and translated the fame to the people … shortly after, the state of that Commonwealth,
sore shaken both with foreign and domestic wars, began forthwith to decline and decay.”
²⁵
Worse still, the
stratēgos
was said to have dragged his city into warfare so as to avoid having to present his
accounts: “Pericles …, rather than he would hazard the account that [the people] demanded
of him for the treasure of Athens, which he had managed, and so generally of his actions,
raised the Peloponnesian war, which never after took end until it had ruined divers
Commonwealths, and wholly changed the state of all the cities of Greece.”
²⁶

This was certainly a dark picture, but Bodin did introduce one shaft of light into
it. He suggested that Pericles did nevertheless manifest a degree of genius in his
management of the people:

So the wise Pericles, to draw the people of Athens into reason, fed them with feasts,
with plays, with comedies, with songs and dances; and in time of dearth caused some
distribution of corn or money to be made amongst them; and having by these means tamed
this beast with many heads, one while by the eyes, another while by the ears, and
sometimes
by the belly, he then caused wholesome edicts and laws to be published, declaring
into them the grave and wise reasons thereof: which the people in mutiny, or in hunger,
would never have hearkened unto.
²⁷

Bodin, adapting a passage from Plutarch’s
Life of Pericles
(11.4), the tone of which was extremely critical, nevertheless turned it into praise
for the
stratēgos
. What can be the explanation for this paradoxical praise? The fact is that, between
The Method for the Easy Comprehension of History
(1566) and
The Six Books of the Commonwealth
(1576), the massacre of Saint Bartholomew had taken place (1572). Horrified by the
spectacle of those popular “emotions,” Bodin was forced to admire the way that Pericles
had managed to tame the people, “this beast with many heads” that was always ready
to launch into unbridled violence.

But despite that late correction of a detail, the picture as a whole was still a sinister
one: as described by Bodin, the
stratēgos
remained the symbol of an eminently detestable regime in which the monarchist jurist
could find nothing good.

Pericles the Flatterer: Montaigne’s Critique

Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) was equally critical of Pericles but adopted a different
angle of attack in order to denigrate the
stratēgos
—not that he was systematically hostile to Athens, for, influenced by Plutarch, he
was quite prepared to admire Aristides and Phocion. However, he regarded Pericles
as the archetype of rhetoricians and grammarians who were adept at “the science of
the gift of the gab.” In the
Essays
, the first two books of which were published in Bordeaux in 1580, Pericles thus found
himself accused of having used language to corrupt “the very essence of things”:

A rhetorician of times past said that to make little things appear great was his profession.
… They would in Sparta have sent such a fellow to be whipped for making profession
of a tricky and deceitful act; and I fancy that Archidamus, who was king of that country,
was a little surprised at the answer of Thucydides, the son of Melesias, when inquiring
of him which was the better wrestler, Pericles or he, he replied that it was hard
to affirm; for when I have thrown him, said he, he always persuades the spectators
that he had no fall and carries away the prize.
²⁸

Now Pericles was reduced to one single outstanding characteristic: he was expert in
“the art of flattery and deception” and was represented as a sophist who misled his
listeners by the sole power of his speech.

Montaigne’s critique conveyed a political point: according to him, rhetoric was “an
engine invented to manage and govern a disorderly and tumultuous rabble,” and it was
primarily a feature of “discomposed States,” “such as that of Athens.”
²⁹
Montaigne contrasted this anti-model to Sparta, the virtue of which lay precisely
in a sparing use of speech: “the republics that have maintained themselves in a regular
and well-modelled government, such as those of Lacedaemon and Crete, had orators in
no very great esteem.”
³⁰
The laconic Spartans, who refused to indulge themselves with words, emerged all the
greater from being compared to the
stratēgos
.

Pericles the flatterer: By assimilating the
stratēgos
to a fast talker, Montaigne set up a stereotype that was lastingly to haunt the imagination
of members of the European elite, when, that is, they deigned even to consider the
case of the
stratēgos
. For he now interested hardly anyone; at the threshold of the seventeenth century,
the name of Pericles evoked above all the hero of a tragicomedy by Shakespeare. In
this play, written around 1608, William Shakespeare set on stage the ups and downs
of Pericles, prince of Tyre, who, like a latter-day Odysseus, traveled around the
Mediterranean, meeting with extraordinary adventures, before returning home to reign
over his country. The fact that the name “Pericles” could be given to an Eastern prince
in this way testifies to the oblivion into which Pericles had sunk in the imaginary
representations of the western world.

P
ERICLES
, F
ORGOTTEN IN THE
G
REAT
C
LASSICAL
A
GE

Pericles Nowhere to Be Found: The Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns

At the turn of the seventeenth century, relations with the Ancients imperceptibly
changed. With the advent of the Classical age—the age of princes, the national interest,
and absolutism—the great figures of Antiquity were considered no longer as political
models but rather as a collection of admirable modes of behavior and incarnations
of moral virtues such as heroism, self-control, and a sense of honor and obedience.
³¹

In this new situation, Pericles was seldom mentioned. Even the most erudite of authors
tended to pass over his actions in silence, one of them being Jacob Spon, the great
Protestant scholar who produced one of the very first collections of Latin inscriptions,
the
Miscellanea eruditae antiquitatis
. In his
Voyage d’Italie, de Dalmatie, de Grèce et du Levant fait aux années 1675 & 1676
, which he wrote in collaboration with George Wheler, the
stratēgos
appeared nowhere except where the Parthenon was described as “a temple built by Pericles.”
³²

Among the Greeks, it was now Alexander the Great who was the center of attention.
In France, the great Condé and Turenne were both likened to the Macedonian king as,
after the siege of La Rochelle (1627–1628), was Richelieu, who was called “the French
Alexander.” But of course it was chiefly the French monarch who was compared to Alexander.
Louis XIV even assigned him a key role in royal propaganda: in the 1660s, the painter
Charles Le Brun, at the king’s request, produced a great cycle of paintings depicting
the achievements of Alexander; and in 1665, the tragedian Racine played explicitly
on the analogy when he dedicated his play,
Alexandre le Grand,
to the king.
³³

In the early 1670s, the wind of history suddenly veered. Parallels with the ancients
were abandoned. Now Louis XIV would advance alone in all his majesty, refusing to
be compared to anyone else, even Alexander. The court rapidly fell into line. In 1674,
Jean Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, in his
Triomphe de Louis et de son siècle
thus berated the Ancients, accusing them of not having displayed “the love and respect
that they owed their country.” In 1687, the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns
took off. In a session at the Académie Française, Charles Perrault had his poem
Le Siècle de Louis le Grand
read out, to celebrate the recovery of the convalescent king. Its opening lines became
famous:

La belle antiquité fut toujours vénérable
Mais je ne crus jamais qu’elle fût adorable.
Je vois les anciens, sans plier les genoux;
Ils sont grands, il est vrai, mais hommes comme nous
Et l’on peut comparer, sans craindre d’être injuste,
Le siècle de Louis au beau siècle d’Auguste.

(Fine antiquity was always venerable
But I never considered it adorable
At the sight of the ancients I do not bend the knee;
True, they are great but just men as are we;
And we may, with no fear of seeming unjust, Compare our age of Louis to that fine
age of Augustus.)

In 1688, one year later, Perrault’s first dialogue on the
Parallel between the Ancients and the Moderns
, which underpinned and justified that poem, was published. It was followed by three
further dialogues that appeared, respectively, in 1690, 1692, and 1697. Perrault did
not attack Antiquity as such, but denied it his allegiance. Convinced that there is
“nothing that is not improved by time,” the courtier-poet proclaimed the Moderns’
superiority
over the Ancients. The present became the supreme yardstick that had to be considered
as both a reference and the pattern to be followed.
³⁴
Meanwhile Boileau and La Bruyère, as partisans of the Ancients, on the contrary continued
to regard Antiquity as an essential resource and, above all, a model that encouraged
Moderns not to be carried away by an excess of self-satisfaction.

It was, of course, not the first time that Greek Antiquity had come under attack.
³⁵
As early as the Renaissance, the Greek language had been accused by a Catholic and
Latin Europe of being the vehicle of ancient paganism, the Byzantine schism, and,
later, Lutheran heresy. Despite the eventual success of the humanists, in the Europe
of the Counter-Reformation, Greek literature remained lastingly suspect. Criticism
of Greek literature now again became fashionable, thanks to Charles Perrault, who
lambasted Homer and the corrupt religion of the Greeks.
³⁶
However, what was new was that now the prestige of Rome too was being, if not questioned,
at least challenged. Sometimes the discredit of the Ancients reached a ridiculous
level: Father Hardouin, prompted by a radical skepticism, even suggested that most
of the Greek and Roman texts were in truth the work of fourteenth-century Dominican
forgers!
³⁷

In this long drawn-out quarrel, the figure of Pericles played an extremely marginal
role. He was seldom targeted by the moderns but nor was he enrolled by the defenders
of the Ancients. Attracting so little interest, the
stratēgos
remained in the shadows, or even in Hades, and he made no more than a few fleeting
appearances in the Quarrel.

In his great poem on
Le Siècle de Louis le Grand
, Charles Perrault never even mentioned Pericles, whereas he did refer, each in turn,
to Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, and Menander. More significantly still, in his works
as a whole, which accumulate so many references to the Ancients, allusions to the
stratēgos
can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and, even then, he is never cited on his
own. In the
Parallèle entre les Anciens et les Modernes
, Pericles is merely one of the many ancient orators that, according to Perrault,
pedants use quite irrelevantly: “They make an appalling din and with the grandiose
words of Demosthenes, Cicero, Isocrates and Pericles that are constantly on their
lips and that they emit with an altogether unnatural pronunciation, they astonish
even the cleverest people and sweep along the common folk to whom these kinds of ghosts
always seem grander than the real scholars who possess both minds and life.”
³⁸
In this way, Perrault belittled Pericles even without targeting him in particular,
along with other representatives of a hoary old rhetorical culture.

The same goes for a letter addressed to a friend, in which Perrault derides the pompous
eloquence of the Ancients:

As for Prose, you complain that one no longer dares to mention the names of Cambyses
or Epaminondas in a speech. Such a great shame! … Have not those two names,
along with those of Themistocles, Alcibiades, and Pericles, sufficiently tired the
ears of all our Princes, in the speeches that are addressed to them
? Do you expect the King, when the good of the State obliges him to travel here and
there in his kingdom, to suffer the same persecution in every town with a mayor or
dignitary who fancies himself as an eloquent speaker? Just imagine how exhausting
it must be to be assailed twice a day by Themistocles or Epaminondas or even both
of them at once!
³⁹