Pericles of Athens (41 page)

However, the Enlightenment historians were kinder to the
stratēgos
. One of them was Charles Rollin (1661–1741). In his monumental
Histoire ancienne
in thirteen volumes,
¹⁵
which was read throughout scholarly Europe and was immediately translated into English,
Athens was presented as an enlightened city, open to both arts and letters.
¹⁶
In particular, Rollin admired its well-balanced political regime in which popular
government was harmoniously combined with the influence of great men. The reign of
Pericles naturally occupied a major place in his account, even though blame was still
mixed in with praise for Pericles.

In the section devoted to the “character of Pericles,” Rollin started off by considering
all the clichés produced about Pericles’ supposed demagogy. He noted that, in order
to discomfit his rival Cimon, the
stratēgos
had distributed plots of land, multiplied entertainments, and distributed pay to
the people. His opinion, which was influenced by Plutarch, was by no means flattering
to Pericles: “It is impossible to say how fatal these unhappy politics were to the
republic and the many evils by which they were attended. For these new regulations,
besides their draining the public treasury, gave the people a luxurious and dissolute
turn of mind; whereas before they were sober and modest, and contented themselves
with getting a livelihood by their sweat and labour.”
¹⁷
More surprisingly, Rollin even cast doubt on the advisability of the great construction
works launched by Pericles: “Was it just in him to expend in superfluous buildings
and vain decorations the immense sums intended for carrying on the war?”
¹⁸
Following the example of Plato, the historian even declared “that Pericles, with
all his grand edifices and other works, had not improved the mind of one of the citizens
in virtue, but rather corrupted the purity and simplicity of their ancient manners.”
¹⁹

However, criticism then gave way to praise. We are told that, having rid himself of
his last great rival in 443, Pericles began “to change his behavior. He now was not
so mild and tractable as before, nor did he submit or abandon himself any longer to
the whims and caprices of the people, as so many winds.”
²⁰
In marking this change, Rollin was clearly following the account
that Plutarch gives in his
Life of Pericles
;
²¹
but he was also drawing upon other sources and, in particular, based his remarks
upon a close reading of Thucydides: “It must nevertheless be confessed that the circumstance
that gave Pericles this great authority was, not only the force of his eloquence but,
as Thucydides observes
, the reputation of his life and great probity.”
²²
Having exalted the incorruptibility of the
stratēgos
, Rollin again referred to the Athenian historian in order to exonerate Pericles from
any responsibility in starting the Peloponnesian War: “But Thucydides, a contemporary
author, and who was very well acquainted with all the transactions of Athens, … is
much more worthy of belief than a poet who was a professed slanderer and satirist.”
²³
And it was again Thucydides who inspired Rollin’s final eulogy after he had described
Pericles’ death—at precisely the same point as in the Athenian author’s account:

In him were united almost all the qualities which constitute the great man; as those
of admiral, by his great skill in naval affairs; of the great captain, by his conquests
and victories; of the high-treasurer, by the excellent order in which he put the finances;
of the great politician, by the extent and justness of his views, by his eloquence
in public deliberations, and by the dexterity and address with which he transacted
the affairs; of a minister of state, by the methods that he employed to increase trade
and promote the arts in general;
in fine
, of father of his country, by the happiness that he procured to every individual
and which he always had in view as the true scope and end of his administration. But
I must not omit another characteristic which was peculiar to him. He acted with so
much wisdom, moderation, disinterestedness and zeal for the public good; he discovered
in all things, so great a superiority of talents, and gave so exalted an idea of his
experience, capacity and integrity, that he acquired the confidence of all the Athenians;
and fixed, in his own favour, during the forty years that he governed the Athenians,
their natural fickleness and inconstancy.
²⁴

It was one of the first times since the rediscovery of Greek writings that Pericles
benefited from a panegyric so full and well argued. By paying unprecedented attention
to Thucydides, Rollin’s
Histoire ancienne
paved the way for the rehabilitation of the
stratēgos
.

At the end of the eighteenth century, another historian succeeded in engineering a
decisive rehabilitation of Thucydides and, along with him, Pericles. Pierre Charles
Lévesque, who was a professor at the Collège de France and a member of the Académie
des inscriptions et belles-lettres, published a new
translation of the
Peloponnesian War
in 1795—more than a century after the “faithless beauty” by Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt
that had appeared in 1662; and it was in Lévesque’s version, in the following century,
that Thucydides, “of all the ancient historians the one who deserves most to be trusted,”
²⁵
was read and reread. Even so, in his
Etudes d’histoire ancienne
Lévesque did not manifest unconditional admiration for the Athenian leader: “The
Greece of Pierre-Charles Lévesque is a composite construction in which the heritage
of Isocrates and Plutarch, that is to say Abbé Barthélemy, coexists, not without a
number of glaring contradictions, alongside his readings of Thucydides. Thus, on the
very same page in the
Etudes
, Lévesque describes Pericles both as the demagogue who changed the democracy of Theseus
and Solon into a ‘violently conflict-ridden regime’ and also as an irreplaceable statesman,
whose death delivered up the Athenians to ‘upstart wretches such as Cleon.’”
²⁶
Despite his real admiration of Thucydides, the historian still remained partly dependent
on the clichés produced by Plutarch. Scorched as he was by the Terror, Lévesque was
doubtless wary of the excesses of direct democracy and rejected any servile imitation
of Antiquity in the manner of his colleague Volney.

To find an unalloyed paean of praise for Pericles in the eighteenth century, one must
leave France and cross the Rhine. It was, in fact, in the German world that, for the
first time, the
stratēgos
became an indisputable model in the writings of Winckelmann.

Pericles in the Germanic World: Selective Similarities

At the start of the eighteenth century, there were no visible signs of the philhellenic
vogue that was about to seize Germany. What is the explanation for this fascination
that took hold around 1750 and peaked at the turn of the century? It was a craze that
cries out for an explanation all the more because it ran counter to all the uses to
which Antiquity was currently being put.

First, why choose Greece rather than Rome? Precisely so as to be original and different:
in the great European interplay of affiliations to Antiquity, Rome had already been
taken over by Italy and, worse still, by the imperialistic and universalist France
of Louis XIV, the revolution and, finally, the empire.
²⁷
Greece, on the other hand, seemed a model that was available to Germans in quest
of an identity. But a mere desire to be different cannot explain everything. More
positively, Greece represented a model of non-state-based civilization that was united
by its language and culture—in short, a plausible ancestor for a German nation that
was divided into several hundred states that were virtually independent but shared
a common linguistic and cultural horizon.
²⁸

But why did German authors prefer Athens to Sparta? Here too, it was a matter of distancing
themselves from the dominant cultural model, the better to affirm Germanic originality.
But this preference for the city of Athens did not result solely from a choice by
default. It was also based on a specific relationship to Antiquity that was founded,
not on literature, but on the visual arts. German authors focused not on a purely
literary Greece—that of Homer or of Plutarch—but on a tangible Greece, above all that
of sculpture and architecture. In this particular respect, Sparta clearly could not
compete with Athens.

If Frederick II of Prussia was the first to sing the praises of the fine “age of Pericles,”
it nevertheless fell to a young librarian, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768),
to provide a historical and scientific basis for German philhellenism. In less than
ten years, Winckelmann published two works that produced an immense effect throughout
scholarly Europe: in 1755, the
Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works of Painting and Sculpture
, and, in 1764, the monumental
History of Ancient Art in Antiquity
, which was very promptly translated into French. In it, Winckelmann, inspired by
“an obsessive quest for origins,”
²⁹
exalted Greek art to the point of turning it into a source [
Quelle
] and model [
Urbild
] for his German readership.
³⁰

And in Winckelmann’s eyes, it was the Athens of Pericles that constituted the pinnacle
of Greek art and, consequently, of the human spirit.

The happiest time for art in Greece, and especially in Athens, were the forty years
in which Pericles ruled the republic—if I may so express myself—and during the obstinate
war that preceded the Peloponnesian War, which had its beginning in the eighty-seventh
Olympiad. … [Pericles] sought to introduce wealth and superfluity into Athens by giving
employment to all sorts of men. He built temples, theatres, aqueducts, and harbours
and was even extravagant in ornamenting them. The Parthenon, the Odeon and many other
buildings are known to the whole world. At that time art began to receive life, as
it were, and Pliny says that sculpture as well as painting now began.
³¹

Winckelmann’s study closely associated “beauty (natural and artistic), well-being
(individual and collective) and liberty (personal and political).”
³²
Athenian art was thus certainly not set apart from the fertile political terrain
that had favored its blossoming.

A few decades later, this “politicization of aesthetics” peaked in the work of Johann
Gottfried von Herder. In 1791, this German philosopher published his
Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man
(
Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit
), in which he proclaimed an equal dignity of
all the civilizations that had appeared on Earth. This display of relativism did not,
however, prevent him from paying emphatic homage to Greece “whose monuments speak
to us with a philosophic spirit.”
³³
Referring explicitly to Winckelmann, Herder stressed the degree to which, in Athens,
the artistic flowering and the democratic regime were linked: “But the republican
constitutions, which in time were diffused throughout all Greece, gave a wider scope
to the arts. In a commonwealth, edifices for the assembly of the people, for the public
treasure, for general exercise and amusement were necessary …, as Winckelmann no doubt
considered when he esteemed the liberty of the Grecian republics was the golden age
of the arts.”
³⁴

In support of his argument, following a remarkable change of attitude, Herder cited
the precise case of Pericles. Instead of criticizing the
stratēgos
’s demagogy, he represented it as the very motor that produced the artistic climax
of Athens: “Pericles flattered the people with these notions of fame, and did more
for the arts, than ten kings of Athens would have done.”
³⁵
It was in order to please his fellow-citizens that the
stratēgos
had launched his policy of great architectural works: without his frantic pursuit
of popularity, there would have been no Parthenon, no Odeon, no Propylaea! Even the
oppression of the allies met with Herder’s approval, given that “even these grievances
were subservient to the public arts.”
³⁶

Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the German fascination
with Pericles’ city never flagged. Through the voices of writers such as Schiller
and Hölderlin, the German bourgeoisie set about “speaking Greek,” since it was too
weak to “speak German” (that is, to constitute its own national State).
³⁷
Meanwhile, over and above philosophy and poetry, this enthusiasm also found expression
in architecture. German builders adopted a neoclassical style of openly Greek inspiration,
in particular in Berlin and Munich. The Brandenburg Gate, set up in 1788 and 1791,
today still testifies to this, for its architect Carl Gotthard Langhans took the Propylaea
as the model for his project (
figure 13
).

In Germany, the flattering reputation of Pericles lived on into the first decades
of the nineteenth century. Hegel, for instance, praised the
stratēgos
unhesitatingly in his lectures on
The Philosophy of History
, which he delivered between 1822 and 1830. Won over by the Athenian spirit—which
he admired more than Spartan rigidity—the philosopher sang the praises of the democratic
leader, even straying into hyperbole: “Pericles is the Zeus of the human pantheon
of Athens,” “the most profoundly accomplished, genuine, noble statesman.”
³⁸
All the same, Hegel no longer regarded Periclean Athens as a model for Germany to
follow. Unlike Winckelmann and Herder, this philosopher did not believe that such
an imitation would be possible or even desirable. The Greek cities, which embodied
the adolescence of Reason, could offer no political perspective for the future.
³⁹
So Hegel’s praises had all the characteristics of an embalming; Pericles was certainly
canonized but was turned into a relic from the past that was definitely now beyond
reach. At this point, a distance developed between the Germans and the
stratēgos
, at the very point when English and French historians were rehabilitating him and
turning him into the patron saint of parliamentary democracy.