Pericles of Athens (37 page)

Pericles Eclipsed: Overshadowed by Lycurgus

After 1720, the return to Antiquity took place in a selective manner, drawing a dividing
line within ancient history. Lycurgus’s Sparta and Republican Rome, both praised wholeheartedly,
were set in opposition to the Athenian democracy, threatened by anarchy, and imperial
Rome, “subjected to the bloodthirsty despotism of half-mad Caesars.”
⁵⁵
As a result of this great
division, the Spartans found themselves credited with every virtue, leaving the Athenians
very pallid by comparison.

A number of factors combine to explain the incredible success of Sparta in the Europe
of the Enlightenment. First, the persistent popularity of the same texts (with the
same lacunas) continued to produce the same effects. Thucydides remained the least
appreciated of all the ancient historians, so much so that he was even considered—somewhat
exaggeratedly—as “the major victim of the Enlightenment”
⁵⁶
:
The Peloponnesian War
was treated to no French translation between the “faithless beauty” by Nicolas Perrot
d’Ablancourt in 1662 and the version produced by Pierre Charles Lévesque in 1795.
Plutarch, in contrast, continued to enjoy the same prestige among cultivated elite
groups. Better still, it became easier to access his “Spartan works,” for in 1721
André Dacier offered a new translation of the
Life of Lycurgus
, in which the language was more accessible than that of Amyot’s 1559 translation.

In the
Parallel Lives
, Sparta also benefited from another advantage over Athens. The entire history of
Sparta was covered by the
Life of Lycurgus
and, more marginally, that of Lysander, whereas the image of Athens was spread over
eight different
Lives
, ranging from Solon to Demosthenes. Reduced to a single survey, the Spartan city
was able to accommodate philosophical generalizations more easily than Athens, embroiled
as it was in complex constitutional developments. The Spartan system, established
all at once and fixed forever, offered the philosophers of the Enlightenment a fascinating
model.

For the Athens of Pericles likewise to become “good to think with” required a quite
different attitude to erudition in order to escape from so caricatural a representation.
But the
philosophes
, on the contrary, developed a marked aversion to erudite scholars, accusing them
of accumulating knowledge without the ability to discriminate between what was valuable
and what was not. In the
Discours préliminaire
(preface) to the
Encyclopédie
, D’Alembert described an erudite scholar as “a kind of miser … who picks up the most
worthless metals along with the most precious of them” and, in order to do so, needs
nothing but a good memory, the faculty that is the first to be cultivated because
it is the easiest to satisfy.”
⁵⁷
In France, the
philosophes
in no way sought to expand the available range of ancient sources, preferring to
bask in the vision of a stylized Antiquity that was provided by Plutarch, with a little
Plato and Aristotle mixed in.

Sparta held a final trump card that made its attraction almost irresistible to the
philosophes
of the Enlightenment: its austere mores. Lycurgus’s city fueled the critique of luxury
that developed in reaction to the excesses of the Regency (1715–1723). Rousseau, among
many others, referred constantly
to the Spartan model in order to defend an ideal of frugality and to oppose the corruption
of his day.
⁵⁸

The Greece of the eighteenth century was therefore primarily Spartan. Rousseau, Mably,
Helvétius, Turpin, and the Encyclopédistes were all admirers of Sparta, ready to revile
fifth-century Athens by contrast. To be sure, a number of discordant voices were raised
and, in the Europe of the Enlightenment, Pericles’ fatherland was not solely denigrated
by detractors; Rollin and Voltaire presented a definitely positive view of this member
of the Alcmaeonid family, as we shall see in the next chapter. All the same, it was
not necessarily the
stratēgos
who caught the attention of the few intellectuals sympathetic to the democratic city.

The case of Montesquieu is the most telling in this respect. In his
Esprit des lois
(1748), Athens, along with Rome, was presented as the model for “good democracies.”
⁵⁹
But we should be clear about the meaning of those words—in this case, what Montesquieu
had in mind was not Pericles’ city but the voting qualifications established by Solon.
This was the “democracy” that was close to his heart. In it, only the wealthy could
become magistrates, the Council of the Areopagus supervised the regime’s stability,
and commerce flourished without obstruction.
⁶⁰
In this entire work of his, there was no mention of Pericles either at this point
or, indeed, later! For the author of
L’Esprit des lois
the
stratēgos
was the very embodiment of an excessive liberty that leads to decadence. In book
VIII,
chapter 4
, Montesquieu considered that “the victory over the Persians at Salamis corrupted
the republic of Athens” by engendering “the spirit of extreme equality, which leads
to the despotism of one alone.”
⁶¹
Even among the rare defenders of Athens, Pericles thus found himself eclipsed by
more irenic figures such as the wise lawgiver Solon.
⁶²

Turgot proposed an equally ambivalent view. Before famously becoming Louis XVI’s great
reformist minister, in about 1750 he had favored an on the whole positive view of
Athens in his fragmentary universal historical sketch of the progress of science and
the arts.
⁶³
All the same, that praise did not extend to the democratic regime as such: “Athens,
governed by the decrees of the multitude, whose tumultuous excesses the orators calmed
or encouraged as they saw fit, Athens where Pericles had taught its leaders to buy
the State at the expense of the State itself and to dissipate its treasures so as
not to have to render accounts; Athens, where the art of governing the people was
the art of amusing it and feeding its ears, eyes and curiosity, always greedy for
novelties, festivals, pleasures and constant spectacles: Athens owed to the very vices
of its government that led to its defeat by the Spartans all the eloquence, taste,
magnificence and the splendour in all the arts that made it the model of all
nations.”
⁶⁴
This was, to put it mildly, an ambiguous paean of praise: even if, through its dazzling
cultural achievements Athens had risen to the rank of “the model of all nations,”
it owed that success to a vitiated culture that ineluctably condemned it to decadence
and destruction. This was how Turgot contributed to the famous “quarrel about luxury”
that led many other
philosophes
of the Enlightenment to mock the splendors of Periclean Athens in the name of the
sacrosanct frugality of Sparta.
⁶⁵

Pericles under Attack: The Critique of the Sparta-Loving
Philosophes

Rousseau and Mably: Pericles and the Corrupting Effects of Luxury

Jean-Jacques Rousseau admired Sparta so much that, in his
Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts
, he described the city of Lycurgus as “a Republic of demi-gods rather than of men.”
⁶⁶
In the view of the
philosophe
of Geneva, the city of Sparta had managed to combine austere mores with well-balanced
institutions. It had seized a fortunate initiative and had “expelled the Arts and
Artists, the Sciences and Scientists from [its] walls,” making itself “equally famed
for its happy ignorance and for the wisdom of its Laws.”
⁶⁷
Athens was seen as an absolute foil to this model of austerity and sobriety. Rousseau,
influenced by Montaigne’s
Essays
, could see Athens only as a land of “vices” and “fine arts.” This
philosophe
did not even deign to consider it a true democracy: “Athens was, in fact, not a democracy,
but a most tyrannical aristocracy governed by learned men and orators.”
⁶⁸

In this dark picture, Pericles occupied a special position, as an orator in love with
the fine arts rather than with virtue. “Pericles had great talents, much eloquence,
grandeur and taste; he embellished Athens with excellent sculptures, lavish buildings
and masterpieces in all the arts. And God knows how much he has been extolled as a
result by the writing crowd! Yet it still remains to be seen whether Pericles was
a good magistrate, for in the management of leading States, what matters is not to
erect statues but to govern men well.”
⁶⁹
Echoing Plato’s attacks in the
Gorgias
and the
Alcibiades
, Rousseau deplored the
stratēgos’
s fundamental inability to improve his fellow-citizens in any way at all.

Rousseau’s reflections, in their turn, inspired the ferocious attack of Abbé Mably,
who was Condillac’s brother. In his writings, this
philosophe
railed against the inequality of conditions and fortunes and yearned for a more egalitarian
and virtuous society. Seen from this critical point of view, Pericles’ splendid Athens
operated as an anti-model: it was nothing but a place of
vice; the citizens of which clearly cared nothing for the common good. In his
Observations sur l’histoire de la Grèce ou Des causes de la prospérité et des malheurs
des Grecs
(
Observations on the history of Greece or On the causes of the prosperity and misfortunes
of the Greeks
), which appeared in 1766, this
philosophe
accused the arts and letters, in particular, of having encouraged debauchery and
sensuality.
⁷⁰

In this process of accelerated decadence, Pericles was given a crucial role: “Elevated
to the sublime views of Themistocles, [Athens] falls a dupe to Pericles, who leads
her to the brink of her ruin.”
⁷¹
Because he was extraordinarily talented, Xanthippus’s son was all the more effective
as a corrupter: “A great captain, a great statesman and a still greater orator, Athens
had never yet had a citizen who re-united in himself so many talents; but all these
accomplishments employed to serve his ambition proved fatal to his country.”
⁷²
Mably then pinpointed his attack, accusing the
stratēgos
of having persuaded his fellow-citizens to replace their concern for republican virtue
by a love of servile politeness: “[Pericles] foresaw with pleasure that Athens, in
the midst of festivals, entertaining spectacles and pleasures, would abandon the customs
suitable for a free State and that arts that were useless soon would become those
most respected; the Athenians, distracted from their duties, would eventually aspire
only to the puerile and dangerous glory of being the most polished and amiable people
in Greece.”
⁷³
Mably thus added a Rousseauist touch to the generally accepted traditional picture
derived from Plutarch, for, as Rousseau saw it, nothing could be worse than “this
uniform and treacherous veil of politeness” that smothered republican liberty.

Mably even regarded Pericles as a veritable despot who sought the people’s support
only the better to crush his own opponents: “This talented tyrant of Athens was too
skilful to rely on the stability of their affections if he did not continually labour
to fix them upon an immovable basis … He held the Great in subjection through the
abasement wherein he had thrown the Areopagus and all the Magistracies so that no
question was decided but conformably to his own will.”
⁷⁴
Having dispelled all competition, according to Mably, Pericles surrounded himself
with insignificant and fawning courtiers: “Pericles had always banished merit from
high places and employed only such persons in the Administration as were incapable
of exciting his jealousy.”
⁷⁵

Pericles, “the scourge of his country and of Greece,” “the adroit tyrant of Athens,”
a corrupt and corrupting
stratēgos
: there could be no appeal against such a verdict. In contrast to this terrible ogre,
Abbé Mably sang the praises of an austere fourth-century Athenian, Phocion. It was
a by no
means fortuitous choice. Phocion, an ally of the Macedonians, possessed what Mably
considered to be two inestimable qualities. In the first place, before being sentenced
by the people to die by drinking hemlock, he had put a stop to democratic disorders
by establishing a voting system based on tax qualifications. But above all, he had
manifested Spartan virtues: “even in corrupt Athens, he retained the simple and frugal
ways of ancient Sparta.”
⁷⁶
In this respect, Phocion constituted an exception in an Athens that had been corrupted
by its orators. Mably represented him as heralding his own indictment of the
stratēgos
: “Pericles, whose superior genius might have made not only Athens but all Greece
happy, did not stick at corrupting our morals, to cajole and gain the commonality;
he made us the tyrants of our allies to make himself be thought necessary; and lastly
kindled the fatal Peloponnesian War to shore up his tottering interest, and save himself
from being called to an account for his maladministration.”
⁷⁷
Mably thus bestowed a whole new dimension upon the critique sketched in by Rousseau.

However, it was another Abbé (and another Jean-Jacques too) who, on the eve of the
revolution, put the finishing touches to this dark portrait of the Pericles of the
Enlightenment.

Abbé Barthélemy: Pericles, the Father of All Vices

In 1788, Abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy published his
Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce
. This work caused a great stir and attracted widespread attention throughout Europe.
⁷⁸
Instead of producing a conventional historical treatise, the author chose to approach
Antiquity in a quite original manner. Readers discovered the world of Greek cities—its
places, inhabitants, customs, and way of life—through the innocent eyes of a young
Scythian traveling through Greece in the mid-fourth century. The work was also noticeably
unusual in another respect. It was the result of thirty years of research and was
based on first-hand knowledge that the author had acquired from work in the medallions
section of the King’s Library in Paris.