Pericles of Athens (39 page)

Mirabeau’s reply to him in the Assembly came the very next day, pointing out the inadequacy
of that ancient analogy: “He [Barnave] has cited Pericles waging war so as not to
have to present his accounts. According to what he says, does it not seem that Pericles
was a king or some despotic minister? Pericles was a man who, knowing how to flatter
the passions of the populace and win its applause as he left the tribune, by reason
of his largesse and that of his friends, dragged Athens into the Peloponnesian War.
… Who did? The national Assembly of Athens.”
¹⁰⁸
In this way, Mirabeau put his opponent straight: in the first place, Pericles was
not the king of the Athenians; and second, it was the Athenian Assembly that voted
for this disastrous war—not some kind of sovereign. So Barnave’s reference to Pericles
did nothing to advance his own cause!
¹⁰⁹
All the same, over and above their differences, the two orators were in agreement
on one point: Pericles was indeed a corrupt and corrupting warmonger.

On the other side of the Atlantic, criticism was equally ferocious. The American republicans,
influenced as they were by their readings of Plutarch
and Plato, had no sympathy at all for fifth-century Athenian democracy, which they
judged to be unstable and anarchical. They far preferred that of Solon.
¹¹⁰
But it was the Romans who fascinated them the most. Significantly enough, when the
founding fathers of the American nation met in Philadelphia in 1787, they set up,
not a Council of the Areopagus, but a Senate that was to meet in the “Capitol.”

Even when not totally ignored, Pericles became a target of virulent attacks. Alexander
Hamilton (1757–1802), who founded the Federalist party and was an influential delegate
to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, launched a direct attack on the
stratēgos
in an article in the
Federalist Papers
on 14 November 1787. At this point, we should note the importance of this collection
of papers. It was designed to interpret the new American Constitution and promote
it. Using the pen-name “Publius,” a pseudonym chosen in honor of the Roman consul
Publius Valerius Publicola, Hamilton confirmed all the anti-Periclean clichés: “The
celebrated Pericles, in compliance with the resentments of a prostitute, at the expense
of much of the blood and treasure of his countrymen, attacked, vanquished and destroyed
the city of the Samians. The same man … was the primitive author of that famous and
fatal war which, after various vicissitudes, intermissions and renewals, terminated
in the ruin of the Athenian commonwealth.”
¹¹¹
On both sides of the Atlantic, Pericles was thus presented as an unscrupulous warmonger.
¹¹²

A Liberty-Killing Tyrant: The Pericles of the Terror

In France, the nature of the attacks against Pericles underwent a change in the Convention
period (1792–1795). After the king was deposed, Pericles came to embody not a corrupt
orator, but a liberty-killing tyrant. Abbé Grégoire was the first to make this accusation,
in his report to the Convention dated 8 August 1793. What was at stake at this point
was the justification of the suppression of all scholarly academies and societies,
on the pretext that they had placed themselves at the service of despotism: “Tyrants
have always adopted the policy of assuring themselves of vociferous fame; and so it
was in the case of Pericles who, after ravaging Acarnania in order to please his mistress,
through his example corrupted an Athens that was cowed by his skill and persuaded
historians to tell lies in his favor.”
¹¹³
According to Grégoire, Pericles in this way concealed his tyrannical power, thanks
to the scholars who served him and were prepared to misrepresent reality in their
works, just as did so many Academicians of the Ancien Régime.

Under the Terror, the
stratēgos
was yet again represented as a manipulating tyrant. However, he was invoked not as
a figure who encouraged a break with the monarchical past, but rather as one who anticipated
eventual
tyrannical consequences. That was, indeed, the purpose of Billaud-Varenne, a Montagnard
and member of the Committee of Public Safety, in his report dated 1 Floreal, Year
II (20 April 1794): “The wily Pericles clothed himself in popular colours in order
to conceal the chains that he was forging for the Athenians. For a long time, he made
the people believe that he never ascended to the tribune without telling himself,
‘Remember that you will be speaking to men who are free.’ And then that same Pericles,
having managed to seize absolute power, became the most bloodthirsty of despots.”
¹¹⁴
This was a transparent allusion to Robespierre, who was accused of pretending to
love the people, the better to obtain undivided power for himself. A few months later,
Billaud-Varenne broke off relations with “the Incorruptible Robespierre,” thereby
hastening the latter’s downfall.

After Thermidor and the execution of Robespierre, Abbé Grégoire turned that implicit
analogy into an explicit comparison: on 17 Vendémiaire, year III (8 October 1794),
in his
Rapport sur les encouragements, récompenses et pensions à accorder aux gens de lettres
et aux artistes
(
Report on the encouragement, rewards and pensions to be granted to scholars, literary
men and artists
), he associated the Athenian
stratēgos
and the French Revolutionary in a common condemnation: “And in what century have
talents been more atrociously persecuted than under Robespierre’s tyranny? Pericles
drew the line at just ejecting the philosophers.”
¹¹⁵
Abbé Grégoire thus added intolerance to the long list of Pericles’ vices, thereby
following in the footsteps of that other abbé, Jean-Jacques Barthélemy.

At this point, Pericles vanished from the revolutionary scene. The fact was that,
under the Directoire, a few scholars occasionally challenged the use that had so copiously
been made of ancient references ever since 1789. In his
Lectures on History
, delivered in the Ecole normale supérieure in 1795, Volney launched into a violent
attack against “the new sect [who] swear by Sparta, Athens and Titus Livy.”
¹¹⁶
This orientalist sought to correct the ideas of his listeners and readers by presenting
a more realistic picture of Antiquity: “Eternal wars, the murder of prisoners, massacres
of women and children, breaches of faith, internal factions, domestic tyranny and
foreign oppression are the most striking features of the pictures of Greece and Italy
during five hundred years, as it has been portrayed to us by Thucydides, Polybius
and Titus Livy.”
¹¹⁷
Pericles’ Athens was by no means exonerated in this depressing judgment. According
to Volney, the masterpieces of Athenian art were “the primary cause” of Athens’s downfall
“because, being the fruit of a system of extortion and plunder, they provoked both
the resentment and defection of its allies and the jealousy and cupidity of its enemies,
and because those masses of stones, although well cut, everywhere represented a sterile
use of
labour and a ruinous drain on wealth.”
¹¹⁸
Periclean Athens, denigrated both before and after Thermidor, certainly was a major
victim of the Revolution.

An Alternative Tradition? Camille Desmoulins’s Liberal Pericles

Even though it was hard for them to emerge from such an ocean of criticisms, a few
rare signs do suggest the existence of an alternative tradition that was more favorable
to the Athenian
stratēgos
. At the pictorial level, the painter Augustin-Louis Belle (1757–1841) exhibited an
Anaxagoras and Pericles
(today in the Louvre) in the 1796 Salon (
figure 12
). The painting illustrated the scene in which the old philosopher, believing that
his friend has forgotten him, allows himself to starve to death (Plutarch,
Pericles
, 16.7). Although the choice of this episode testified to a certain interest in the
stratēgos
, it was nevertheless ambiguous, for it tended to underline the shortcomings of
Pericles. Anaxagoras’s extended arm was highly symbolic; it was as if the philosopher
was bidding the
stratēgos
to exit from the scene.

It is definitely in the writings of Camille Desmoulins that the only positive view
of Pericles is to be found. When elected to the National Convention, Desmoulins took
his seat amid the Montagnards, but he felt nothing but disdain for Sparta. In truth,
he was one of the rare revolutionaries who possessed a solid knowledge of Greek culture.
¹¹⁹
Having progressively distanced himself from his great friend Robespierre, he founded
a new newspaper
Le Vieux Cordelier
(The Old Friar) in which he attacked the
Enragés
(“the Angry Ones”) and, in particular, their unbridled enthusiasm for Sparta: “What
do you mean with your black broth and your Spartan freedom? What a fine lawgiver Lycurgus
was, possessing knowledgeable skill that consisted solely in imposing privations upon
his fellow-citizens and who made them all equal just as a storm renders all who are
shipwrecked equal?”
¹²⁰
In opposition to the mirage of Sparta, Desmoulins set up an idealized Athenian city.
According to him, only the Athenians had been “true republicans, lasting democrats
by both principle and instinct.”
¹²¹

However, it was not until the seventh and last number of
Le Vieux Cordelier
, dated Pluviose, Year II (early February1794) that Desmoulins celebrated Pericles
openly, praising his steadfast opposition to all forms of censorship. In particular,
he admired his ability to accept criticism instead of wiping it out: “So rare, in
both Rome and Athens, were men like Pericles. When attacked by insults as he left
the assembly, he was accompanied home by a Father Duschesne-figure endlessly screeching
that Pericles was an imbecile, a man who had sold himself to the Spartans. Even in
these circumstances, Pericles summoned up sufficient self-control and calm to say
coldly to his servants, ‘Take a torch and accompany this citizen back to his home.’”
¹²²

We should, however, assess this praise correctly. In the first place, Desmoulins praised
Pericles only insofar as he protected freedom of expression, not as a promoter of
direct democracy. What he liked about Athens was, above all, “the freedom for each
man to live as he wished to and for poets and singers to laugh at contemporary politicians.”
¹²³
Second, the impact of his writings was minimal, for this last issue of
Le Vieux Cordelier
circulated only in proof-form and was published only posthumously. One month later,
on 5 April 1794, Camille Desmoulins was guillotined, and his praise of Pericles resounded
hardly at all and remained without parallel.

Really without parallel? Perhaps not. Another member of the Convention, Marc-Antoine
Baudot (1765–1837), also seems to have swum against the anti-Periclean tide. Trained
as a doctor and a staunch Montagnard, he nevertheless had leanings toward the “Indulgent”
group, and after Robespierre’s
fall he was forced into exile, from which he returned only with the advent of Louis-Philippe,
in 1830. In one of his plans for an epitaph for his tomb, Baudot described himself
as
republicanus Periclidis more
, a republican in the manner of Pericles.
¹²⁴
So was this a second revolutionary who was declaring loud and strong his preference
for a Periclean Athens? To believe so would be mistaken. That epitaph dated from the
1830s, not from the revolution itself. Baudot was probably kidding even himself when,
in his
Notes historiques
, he declared “I wanted a Republic in the manner of Pericles, that is to say one with
luxury, the sciences, the arts and trade. Poverty, in my opinion, is good for nothing
at all and I would join with Dufrêne in declaring it to be not a vice but even worse.”
¹²⁵
In his youth, Baudot was in truth by no means a lover of Athenian luxury but on the
contrary poured anathema upon the wealthy. His exaltation of a bourgeois Pericles
does not date from the Revolutionary period. Rather, it reflects the tempered ideals
of Baudot in his twilight years. The fact is that, between 1789 and the July Revolution
(1830), there had been a radical change in paradigms: the nineteenth century saw the
construction of a bourgeois Athens, and here, Pericles once more headed the field.

CHAPTER 12

Pericles Rediscovered: The Fabrication of the Periclean Myth (18th to 21st Centuries)