Pericles of Athens (40 page)

F
rom the Renaissance right down until the beginning of the nineteenth century, Pericles
was seldom raised to the rank of a model. For most of the time, he was arrogantly
ignored and remained in the shadow of the great men of Sparta and Rome. When his memory
was recalled, it was mainly to his disadvantage; depicted, as he was, now as a corrupting
demagogue, now as a corrupt warmonger, for the elite groups of the modern era his
role was that of a scarecrow. That critical approach, inspired by Plutarch, became
even more entrenched in the eighteenth century and peaked at the time of the French
Revolution.

Yet it was at the point when those attacks became most virulent that a more favorable
view of the
stratēgos
was quietly taking shape. For not all the men of the Enlightenment were particularly
keen on austere Sparta or the moderate democracy of Solon. Although Charles Perrault
sought to compare “the age of Louis XIV” solely to that of Augustus, Voltaire insisted
that “the age of Pericles” would not be at all shamed by such a comparison. The famous
formula “the age of Pericles,” which was to enjoy a fine future, now made its appearance.

However, it was only in Germany that, as early as the eighteenth century, Pericles
became an undisputed icon. In the relationship to Antiquity, the Germans were already
following a
Sonderweg
, or path of their own, in that they preferred not only Greece to Rome, but also Athens
to Sparta, and it was, moreover, Classical—not Archaic—Athens that won all their attention.
As early as 1755, Winckelmann was presenting an enchanted view of the Athenian art
of the mid-fifth century, a view with which Pericles was closely associated.

Elsewhere in Europe, it was not until the following century that there appeared a
magnified image of Pericles in the guise of a great bourgeois
parliamentarian. The monumental
History of Greece
written by the liberal historian George Grote and published in the mid-nineteenth
century played a crucial role in this change of view. This work, which was rapidly
translated into French, in its turn inspired the reflections of European historians
such as Victor Duruy and Ernst Curtius. Within a few decades, Pericles became the
very embodiment of the Greek miracle, to the point of being celebrated as the genius
who had bequeathed to posterity two imperishable monuments: the marble creation of
the Parthenon and the verbal creation of the funeral oration.

For the Periclean myth to become rooted, it was necessary for two parallel developments
to come together. In the first place, a change in political practices and ideas: the
progress made by parliamentary democracy in the nineteenth century did much to boost
the new popularity of the
stratēgos
. Second, a new perception of historical time was needed: just as the model of a
historia magistra vitae
was receding, there emerged a mode of history that was, if not scientific, at the
least attentive to the succession of different ages and civilizations—their births,
their peaks, and their declines. In this new regime of historicity, Pericles found
a place of importance, as an essential player in the constitution of this Classical
age that presented Antiquity with its most beautiful monuments.

But the nineteenth century was also marked by the matter of nationalisms. This impassioned
interest in identities affected relations with Antiquity in a lasting fashion. Through
a strange kind of osmosis between interconnecting vessels, just as the French and
the English were rediscovering Pericles, the Germans seemed to be turning away from
him. Within the framework of Bismarck’s new State, the Athenian
stratēgos
was no longer surrounded by an aura of sanctity; the landowning and military elite
groups of Prussia, the Junkers, were now identifying with the Spartans, while the
Hohenzollern dynasty took its models from Alexander and the Hellenistic kings.

These divergent historiographical trajectories appeared in the full light of day in
the twentieth century. In World War I, for example, the British invoked the memory
of Pericles when faced with the Germans, who were converted to Spartans. But the allocation
of roles was not always so clearcut. Even as the memory of the
stratēgos
was cherished by European democrats, Pericles also elicited a certain fascination
among Nazi intellectuals, who were won over by his oratorical charisma, his great
architectural works, and his intransigent imperialism.

After the end of World War II, attitudes toward Pericles changed again. Once he had
been converted to an innocuous icon for school classrooms, within popular culture
the
stratēgos
came to arouse nothing but indifference.
Meanwhile, among historians, his image was deteriorating as decolonization speeded
up and the ideology of the rights of man—and woman—was increasingly forcefully affirmed.
Now, Pericles was sometimes presented as the promoter of an imperialist, slave-based,
and macho system in a mirror held up to a Western world that was now assailed by doubt
as to its founding values. Having for centuries been criticized for being too democratic,
now he was attacked for not being democratic enough.

T
HE
R
OOTS OF THE
P
ERICLEAN
M
YTH

The Genealogy of a Formula: “The Age of Pericles”

Even today, “the age of Pericles” formula is a cliché.
¹
That expression, along with the milder “Athens in Pericles’ day,” until recently
appeared in school syllabuses for sixth-grade students in France to indicate the study
of Athenian democracy as a whole. But, far from being neutral, it is a formula that
implies a particular way of thinking about time and historical developments; it is,
in itself, already an interpretation that suggests that one individual can model the
face of a whole period to the point of coming to embody it entirely.

To trace the genealogy of the expression, we need to go back to the early centuries
of the Christian era, when Eusebius, Jerome, and Augustine were proposing that historical
development should be envisaged as an immutable sequence of four “ages” or “centuries”:
²
the Assyrians (or Babylonians); the Persians (or Medes/Persians); the Macedonians;
and, finally, the Romans. The concept was based on an interpretation of the vision
of Daniel, in the Old Testament (
Daniel
7.2–8)—a vision that introduced four beasts that symbolized four future kings or
kingdoms.

In the sixteenth century, Jean Bodin recalled that ancient image, the better to dismiss
it. In
chapter 7
of his
Méthode de l’histoire
(
Historical Method
), he tried to refute “the theory of the four monarchies and the four golden ages
[
aurea secula
],”
³
which, according to him, was based on a mistaken interpretation of the sacred texts.
However, the notion of an “age” was not abandoned, even if, at this point, it was
profoundly rearranged. Instead of serving to suggest a succession of empires leading
up to the second coming of Christ, the formula came to characterize particular periods,
regardless of any concern to insert them into some historical continuum. For instance,
at the time of the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns (ca. 1680–1720), the
royal historiographers constructed “the age of Louis XIV” as a mirror of “the age
of Augustus,”
⁴
as if those two high points in human history reflected one another timelessly across
the intervening centuries.

The formula was applied to Pericles only quite late in the day, for it did not appear
until the mid-eighteenth century, when it was used for the first time—to my knowledge—by
the future Frederick II of Prussia. In 1739, the young prince had the idea of writing
a refutation of Machiavelli, underlining the need for a monarch to serve the State,
govern according to reason and reject all wars of conquest. Voltaire, won over by
this enlightened concept of power, showered endless praises upon the manuscript and
even found himself entrusted with the task of editing it. After many ups and downs,
that task was completed in 1741,
⁵
just as Frederick came to the throne. In his
Anti-Machiavelli
, the new sovereign tried to define an ambitious artistic policy, taking Athens as
his model: “Nothing makes a Reign more illustrious than the Arts that flourish under
its protection.
The age of Pericles is as famous for the great men of genius who lived in Athens as
for the Battles that the Athenians were then fighting
.”
⁶
In its first appearance, “the age of Pericles” thus found its unity in the flourishing
of its arts, not in the birth of politics—for democracy was certainly by no means
compatible with the ideals, however enlightened, of Frederick II. Several years before
Winckelmann and shortly after the publication of the
Ancient History
composed by Rollin (1731–1738), the
Anti-Machiavelli
thus heralded the pro-Periclean turning point reached by the members of the German
elite in the eighteenth century.
⁷

In France, this positive view was relayed ten years later by Voltaire in his
Le siècle de Louis XIV
(
The Age of Louis XIV
). Right at the beginning of this work, the
philosophe
resuscitated the theory of the four ages of humanity, although he subverted the original
meaning: “Whosoever thinks, or what is still more rare, whosoever has taste, will
find but four ages in the history of the world. These four happy ages are those in
which the arts were carried to perfection and which, by serving as an era of the greatness
of the human mind, are examples for posterity.”
⁸
Voltaire allotted ancient Greece a place of honor, mixing together politicians, philosophers,
and artists in exuberant chronological disorder: “The first of these ages to which
true glory is annexed is that of Philip and Alexander or that of a Pericles, a Demosthenes,
an Aristotle, a Plato, an Apelles, a Phidias, and a Praxiteles.”
⁹
So the writer did not, strictly speaking, isolate an “age of Pericles,” since this
list of names amalgamated not only different periods—the fifth and the fourth centuries
B.C.—but also antagonistic political regimes—the monarchy of Macedon and the democracy
of Athens. In truth, Voltaire had no sympathy for Periclean democracy, as such, as
he explained to Frederick the Great at the end of 1772: “When I begged you to restore
the fine arts of Greece, my request did not go so far as to ask you to reestablish
Athenian democracy; I have no liking for government by the mob.”
¹⁰
If the
philosophe
valued Athens so
highly, it was not so much for its political liberty but for its trade and opulence,
in which he detected fertile ground that favored a blossoming of the arts and letters.
¹¹

In France, the expression “the age of Pericles” did not become common currency until
the eve of the revolution; and when it did, it was not in a positive sense. Condillac,
influenced by his brother, Mably, used the formula negatively in his
Histoire ancienne
, composed in 1775 for Louis XV’s grandson, the prince of Parma. In opposition to
Voltaire’s paean of praise, Condillac declared, “The excesses to which luxury leads
are always harbingers of the fall of empires. The ages in which it holds sway are
those that come to be called fine ages and
the age of Pericles was the first of those prized centuries. They would be valued
more accurately if the clamour of those celebrating them allowed the groans of the
people to be heard
.”
¹²

In 1788, Abbé Barthélemy, in his turn, employed the expression in his
Voyage du jeune Anacharsis
, using it as the title of a section of the introduction that preceded the story.
Before tackling the book’s actual subject, the author reflected upon “the age of Solon”
(630–490); “the age of Themistocles and Aristides” (490–444); and, finally, “the age
of Pericles” (444–404), indicating the dates of each period in a note. This chronological
arrangement was by no means favorable to the
stratēgos
. The short “age of Pericles,” which lasted no more than forty years, did not include
the glorious Persian Wars but only the shameful Peloponnesian War. Barthélemy thus
chose to link together what Thucydides had deliberately set apart—the time before
and the time after Pericles and the glorious reign of the
stratēgos
that was followed by the sordid domination of the demagogues, which led to Athens’s
undoing.

So it was not until the following century that the expression acquired a definitely
positive connotation, with the elaboration of a representation of a bourgeois and
liberal Athens that was in step with the political developments of the period. All
the same, in the eighteenth century, Voltaire was neither the only one nor the first
to sketch in a more favorable portrait of the
stratēgos
. Influenced by Thucydides, a number of the Enlightenment historians did likewise,
without, however, jettisoning a number of prejudices that had resulted from the reading
of Plutarch.

A Two-Faced Pericles: The Ambivalence of Enlightenment Historians

Although the partisans of Athens were certainly less numerous than Sparta’s admirers,
their voices did not go unheeded. Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Condorcet all contrasted
the frugality of Sparta to an Athens whose power
rested not on weapons but on trade and luxury.
¹³
Nevertheless, this alternative tradition does not necessarily redound to the credit
of Pericles himself. The article titled “Luxury” composed by Saint-Lambert for the
Encyclopédie
is altogether symptomatic in this respect: while he rejected Rousseau’s idea that
Athens was corrupted by the theater, it was certainly not so as to rehabilitate the
stratēgos
, for he went on to explain, “It was by bringing down the Areopagus, not by constructing
theatres, that Pericles destroyed Athens.”
¹⁴
Even in the eyes of the
philosophes
who were fascinated by Athenian elegance, the reputation of Pericles remained lastingly
tarnished.