Pericles of Athens (45 page)

A similar quest inspired Werner Jaeger, then a professor at the University of Berlin,
in the first volume of his
Paideia
, which appeared in 1934. Calling for the birth of a “third humanism,” this Greek
scholar proposed a return to the Greeks, which he envisaged as a cure for the German
decline—for the parliamentary Republic with all its “vulgarity” failed to win his
approval. Faced with such a depressing present, he exalted “the genius of Athens,”
whose funeral oration seemed to him to encapsulate its quintessence.
¹⁰⁸
But that was not all: according to Jaeger, Pericles’ speech pleaded for the emergence
of a charismatic Führer. “In Athens, says he, every man is alike before the law, but
in politics the aristocracy of talent is supreme. Logically,
that implies the principle that if one man is supremely valuable and important he
will be recognized as the ruler of the State
.”
¹⁰⁹
Jaeger suggested that the
stratēgos
was just such an exceptional man who, by combining power (
Macht
) and spirit (
Geist
), Dorian discipline and Ionian creativity, turned Athens into an unsurpassable model.
Such was the political lesson provided by the case of Pericles: “History has shown
that this solution depends on the appearance of a genius to lead the state [
des genialen Führers
]—an accident as uncommon in a democracy as in other types of state.”
¹¹⁰
This proposal, advanced at the very moment when Hitler was democratically elected
to power, inevitably took on a particular resonance. Jaeger himself certainly had
no respect for the Nazis, whose popularism he detested. Nevertheless, he did share
their fascination with charismatic heroes and leaders; and the reason why this Greek
scholar eventually, in 1936, exiled himself to the United States was in order to protect
his Jewish wife from persecution, not for any ideological reasons.
¹¹¹

Pericles, a Mirror-Image of Hitler: The Builder-Leader

The advent of the Third Reich increased the glorification of Pericles. At first sight,
this may seem strange or even grotesque. Clearly, the Nazis both used and abused Antiquity:
the arts, costumes, architecture, and sport all now took on an antique veneer. However,
Athenian democracy was, for the most
part, eclipsed by imperial Rome and, above all, by Dorian Sparta. Whereas Humboldt,
Hegel, Nietzsche, and Burckhardt harbored nothing but scorn for Sparta, which they
considered to be a backward state, resistant to any refined culture, the Nazis rehabilitated
the Spartans, radicalizing the theses developed in the nineteenth century by Karl-Otfried
Müller. The Dorians were now assimilated to a superior race, set up as ancestor to
the Aryans. Their essentially Nordic vitality was represented as even regenerating
the Greek race, which had been bastardized as a result of the long contact with Asia.
¹¹²
For the Nazis, the exaltation of Sparta was doubly gratifying politically: the city
was “for them, the archetype of an elitist, racist, and eugenicist Nordic State, pretotalitarian
in its concept and practice of education, but at the same time the finest illustration
of the virtues of military obedience and self-denial.”
¹¹³
So it was in no way surprising that Hitler himself made Sparta the model for the
future Third Reich and even went so far as to regard it as “the first racist State
in history.”
¹¹⁴

All the same, Pericles was not neglected by Hitlerian propaganda, for the fact is
that it had no respect for the principle of noncontradiction: just as the Nazis celebrated
both Augustan imperial Rome and Arminius’s heroic resistance to the legions of Augustus
in the forest of Teutoburg,
¹¹⁵
they venerated the Spartan city even as they continued to sing the praises of the
Athenian
stratēgos
.

However, their admiration for Pericles was selective, focusing on two characteristic
features, to the exclusion of all others. First, in the wake of Pohlenz and Jaeger,
Nazi scholars celebrated the charismatic leader, drawing a direct parallel with Hitler.
As early as 1933, in a collective volume sponsored by the new National-Socialist State,
Fritz Schachermeyr maintained that the Athenian leader had arisen at a time of crisis
for the democracy, a crisis “exactly similar to that which we experienced before Adolf
Hitler came upon the scene.”
¹¹⁶
According to this Austrian historian, the reforming will manifested by Pericles had
nevertheless hit a snag in the form of the “Mediterranean substratum that was foreign
to the Nordic race,” represented by Pericles and the Indo-Germanic elite groups of
Athens. The implication was clear: if Athens had had the courage to rid itself of
its parasitic elements—as Germany was doing—it would never have lost the Peloponnesian
War.

Another Nazi Hellenist, Hermannhans Brauer, developed a similar line of argument in
1943. But the wind had changed and now it was a matter of exonerating Hitler from
any responsibility for the defeat at Stalingrad. With such apologetic aims, this historian
claimed that if Athens had been defeated, it was no fault of Pericles but, rather,
in spite of him: for “he had embodied the ‘Nordic values: courage, honour, fidelity
and patriotism’ that the
Athenians had not managed to honour when the moment of truth came.”
¹¹⁷
Slipping from enthusiasm into open resentment, the Athenian people, it was claimed,
was guilty of a great mistake: “In a life-and-death struggle, it rejected its support
of its leader and denied him its loyalty because it placed too much value on temporal
things and neglected the eternal values to which the country subscribed.”
¹¹⁸
The analogy was clumsy but effective. In this way, it suggested that the Stalingrad
defeat could be imputed to the weakness of the troops and betrayal on the part of
the German General Staff, which was incapable of rising to the level of its genius
of a Führer.

Quite apart from the charismatic leader, the Nazis above all admired Pericles, the
man of great architectural works. In his
Memoirs
, Albert Speer recalled that Hitler himself liked to be seen as a latter-day Pericles:
the Athenians had erected the Parthenon and the Long Walls, just as he had constructed
the
Autobahnen
.
¹¹⁹
The fact was that architecture was an essential element in Hitlerian policy and,
in
Mein Kampf
, the Nazi leader was already declaring that “a strong state should leave its imprint
upon space and not allow private edifices to proliferate.”
¹²⁰
In this respect, Antiquity provided a model to imitate or even to surpass. Although
Hitler was, above all, intent on outdoing the monumental policy of the Roman Empire—the
great Berlin Stadium was designed to outdo the Colosseum—he was nevertheless impressed
by the classical Greek style and, in particular, the Doric order, for Hitler “believed
that in the Dorian people he had discovered a number of points in common with the
Germanic world.”
¹²¹
He was full of admiration for the Parthenon, which he regretted never having visited;
the monument was even reproduced on the tableware used for meals in his Austrian retreat,
the
Berghof
.
¹²²
It was therefore perfectly logical that certain historians of art, as good courtiers,
should bring the two monument-builders together so as to have two artistic moments
of unequaled artistic flourishing mirror one another.
¹²³

In his inaugural lecture as rector of the University of Leipzig, in February 1940,
Helmut Berve pushed the parallel between Pericles and Hitler even further.
¹²⁴
This historian, the author of a work on Thucydides, held an eminent position in the
Nazi hierarchy. He had been a member of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) ever since 1933 and,
in 1940, was appointed “war minister of the German science of Antiquity [
Kriegsbeauftrager der deutschen Altertumswissenschaft
].”
¹²⁵
In his speech devoted to Pericles, Berve began by justifying the subject, taking
care to represent the
stratēgos
as a good Aryan: his government, he claimed, constituted “the unique
acme
of Indo-Germanic humanity.” There then followed a dense interplay of implicit analogies
between the Nazi Führer and the Athenian
stratēgos
. First, Pericles’ democratic policy was said to be to get every Athenian to participate
in the life of the
city, the aim being to provide work and subsistence for one and all. Between the lines,
everyone recognized this as an allusion to Hitler’s
Arbeit und Brot
. This policy of economic revival depended on the great architectural works into which
Pericles flung himself, body and soul. As Johann Chapoutot has rightly stressed, “the
parallel between the Pericles-Phidias relationship and the Hitler-Speer duo is very
striking, as is the assimilation of the new Athens project and that of Germania.”
¹²⁶

According to Berve, this ambitious monumental policy depended on a pitiless exercise
of violence: “So it was the brutal force of Athens and the iron will of its
Führer
that made it possible to erect these marvels, the Parthenon and the Propylaea on
the Acropolis, which, still today, and even in their ruined state, represent the most
sublime evidence of the creative force of man.”
¹²⁷
For Pericles was not only a captivating orator but also a warrior who fought until
his last breath: “He had hardened himself throughout fifteen years spent in a bath
of steel, so that he possessed a strength of resistance that was hard to overcome
despite internal oppositions and external difficulties.”
¹²⁸
Like all Nordic leaders, Pericles had experienced all the trials of warfare, even
“looking into the eyes of death in the course of battles.” Those lines were written
during the Phoney War and they were intended to be prophetic: which, indeed, they
were, although not in the way that Berve had hoped. Like Periclean Athens, Hitlerian
Germany was eventually completely vanquished.

The Myth Destroyed? Pericles and the End of the Greek Miracle

By the end of World War II, the reference to Sparta as a model, having been overmanipulated
by the Nazis, was definitively disqualified. In contrast, Athenian democracy emerged
enhanced from the conflict; the association between Hitler and Pericles had not been
established firmly enough to blemish the reputation of the
stratēgos
, particularly given that the allies—led by Churchill—had likewise enrolled Pericles
in their struggle against the Axis forces.
¹²⁹
In France, for example, Pericles continued to benefit from the persistent influence
of the
Histoire grecque
published by Gustave Glotz (1862–1935) in 1931. For this historian, who was close
to Durkheim and had long been a professor at the Sorbonne, Pericles’ governance was
laudable in all its aspects. Not only did Glotz praise Pericles’ “pacific imperialism”—a
most revealing combination of words—but he also celebrated the “State Socialism” set
in place by the Athenian leader and ended by concluding that Pericles “was the soul
of the city at a time when that city was the very soul of Greece.”
¹³⁰

In Italy, the work of Gaetano De Sanctis (1870–1957) took a similar idealizing line.
¹³¹
Abandoning Roman history, which had become the preserve of Mussolinian historians,
De Sanctis—one of the rare university professors who had refused to swear allegiance
to the Fascist regime—devoted a flattering biography to Pericles, which appeared in
1944. In it, the
stratēgos
was described as a man devoted to the interests of his city, a friend of the philosophers
and possessed of “great spiritual audacity,” who had led Athens into a veritable Golden
Age.
¹³²
On many points, his analysis agreed with that of Gustave Glotz, particularly on the
great works that, according to De Sanctis, were designed not only to render the city
more beautiful, but also “to wipe out unemployment among the working classes”
¹³³
and to “establish greater social justice.”
¹³⁴
That closeness to Glotz is also evident in his celebration of Pericles’ “pacific
imperialism”—an expression that De Sanctis took over.
¹³⁵
This irenic view of Athenian domination is not surprising, for, although antiFascist,
De Santis adhered to the myth of a “civilizing” Italian colonialism, and it is by
this yardstick that we should judge his praise of Periclean policy toward the allies.
¹³⁶

Such idealization persisted in the postwar years, particularly in the
Pericles
written by Léon Homo (1872–1957) in his twilight years.
¹³⁷
Abandoning the domain in which he had specialized—Roman history—this French historian
now represented the Athenian
stratēgos
as a hero possessed of every virtue: as a great general, a great admiral, an intelligent
economist, and an honest man through and through, Pericles was “one of the most luminous
spirits ever produced by the Greek race.”
¹³⁸
According to Homo’s analyses, Pericles was the leader of a “directed democracy” in
which the citizens enjoyed an “illusion of liberty” even as they were subjected to
a “legal dictatorship.”
¹³⁹
For this politically conservative historian, admiration for Pericles was thus accompanied
by a devaluation of the democratic regime. And, like his predecessors, Homo was careful
to justify Periclean imperialism, for which he found ‘serious excuses.”
¹⁴⁰

In 1960, François Chêtelet (1925–1985) adopted a similar line in the biography that
he devoted to the
stratēgos
. In this youthful work of his, this French philosopher portrayed Pericles as a Hegelian
hero, shining in the firmament of human history as did the “blazing light of Greece.”
¹⁴¹
Even a Marxist historian such as Pierre Lévêque confessed to huge admiration for
the Athenian leader, as is testified by the vast fresco that he devoted to
L’Aventure grecque
, published in 1964. Although he deplored Athenian imperialism and the exploitation
of slaves, he nevertheless praised the
stratēgos
for his great architectural works, saying, “after all, should we not salute this
first experiment in ‘State Socialism’ (G. Glotz)?”
¹⁴²
For this generation of
leftist intellectuals, “State Socialism” in the Periclean mode exercised an irresistible
attraction, for it testified to “the great hope that for the first time illuminated
Greece.”
¹⁴³