Pericles - A Life
The New Anglo-Hellenic Review
by Paul Cartledge, Emeritus A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture in the Faculty of Classics, Clare College, Cambridge
Not another book on Pericles – some readers might exclaim. Some, but I hope very few, as there’s always room for a new and original take on one of the most interesting, controversial and influential characters of all history, not just all ancient Greek history. One sign of that universal significance is that ‘Periclean’ has become a derivative adjective – as in Churchillian or … Thatcherite. Hence even the best scholars are willing to speak of ‘Periclean’ Athens, ‘Periclean’ democracy, even ‘Periclean’ Greece. But should that really be so?
That’s one of the main questions I set myself to answer as I embarked on a new sort-of biography of Pericles for the ‘Great Lives of the Ancient World’ series that I edit for Reaktion Books of London. Why (only) ‘sort-of’? Because actually there is just a handful – if that – of individuals from the worlds of ancient Greece or Rome of whom one can even think about writing a biography of the accepted modern sort – a biography of one’s subject’s inner life as well as their external achievements. And the kinds of sources that we have preserved for the life of Pericles – even including the Life by Plutarch, composed around 100 CE – simply do not allow that. The most and best one can realistically hope to achieve is a life-and-times biography, exploiting to the full the opportunity to weigh the impact of the times on the life as well as that of the life on the times.
Let me tackle ‘Periclean’ right away. In 1751 Voltaire published a work entitled Le siècle de Louis XIV. French ‘siècle’ can mean either ‘age’ or ‘century’ – and ‘century’ wouldn’t entirely come amiss for the life a man such as Pericles who was born c. 495 (we don’t know the exact date) and cast his shadow as far as 404 BCE, when Athens lost a generation-long war to Sparta – prompting Pericles’ greatest ancient historian Thucydides to reflect how things might and should have gone differently for his fellow Athenians if only they had followed Pericles’ sage and sound (as Thucydides emphatically saw it) advice and guidance. Yet for all Pericles’ great influence he was not, unlike Louis, an absolute monarch. The Athenian state was not Pericles: living in a democracy that he himself had fostered, he was bound to be subject to the Athenian people’s whims and fancies as much as becoming the beneficiary of its rational support.
So much for the book’s essential background: now for its meat, whose contents I adumbrate in my three-word subtitle – statesman, demagogue, eccentric. Statesman and Demagogue are both varieties of Politician, for which there was a perfectly good ancient Greek word politikos. But there is also a not so subtle difference between them, today as in antiquity. Whereas statesman is conventionally a term of approbation, demagogue (like politician…) usually is the opposite. A demagogue is a populist rabble-rouser, a misleader of the people, but a statesman has the best interests of the people (and not his or her own) at heart and consistently and honestly provides wise, disinterested leadership.
Oddly – and this is a key part of the fascination of studying a political world very alien to our own, despite their both being called ‘democracies’ – Pericles was both. It all depended on one’s point of view. To Thucydides he was a statesman pure and simple; indeed, he if anything rather exaggerated Pericles’ foresightedness and disinterestedness, since he didn’t always get it right. Far from it – and the people told Pericles so in no uncertain terms, once even deselecting him from his elected post of general and fining him into the bargain. To his opponents and enemies (often one and the same), on the other hand, Pericles was an out-and-out demagogue who abused his extraordinary oratorical powers to promote both a system of self-governance and particular policies that they found abhorrent. The truth, as it often does, lay somewhere between those two extremes. Even his enemies might have conceded that he put his abnormal rhetorical skills to good effect when delivering the public, communal Funeral Oration for which he is perhaps best remembered.
What of the third subtitular term: in what ways and to what degree was Pericles an eccentric? This facet has two very different, contrasting aspects – the public and the private. Publicly regarded, Pericles was from his very birth quite extraordinary and exceptional, one of the 5-10 percent, as opposed to the other 90-95 (‘hoi polloi’). He was one of what the Athenians called the Eupatrids, those of ‘good paternal ancestry’, i.e. an aristocrat, and not just any ordinary aristocrat, either. Through his mother he was the grand-nephew of the man generally accredited as the democracy’s Founding Father, Cleisthenes. Herodotus, the great pioneering historian of Greece’s Persian Wars, wouldn’t have bothered to mention a dream experienced by almost any other Athenian mother, but he did mention that Agariste when pregnant dreamed she would give birth to a lion – an ambiguous portent. As an aristocrat from a conspicuous and very wealthy family, Pericles started out as socially eccentric, and from the earliest possible age his actions showed how he intended to proceed – as a leading, left-of-centre, ideologically democratic politician. As such, his achievements were, as indicated, second to none.
It is however Pericles’ eccentricity in his private life that marks him out as a genuine Eccentric with a capital ‘E’. Not that this was apparent at first. In his later twenties he married a fellow aristocrat (name unknown to posterity) and with her had two sons, the older named conventionally after his paternal grandfather, the younger less conventionally after a local hero associated with the coast of Attica and Athens’ maritime power. By 450 BCE, when he was about 45, Pericles had divorced that wife, amicably, and seen to her remarriage, again amicably, to a fellow aristocrat. What followed was as unpredictable as could be. He fell, hook, line and sinker, in love with a non-Athenian woman, named Aspasia, who came from Miletus, a distinguished city allied to Athens. The problem was – or so it would surely have been seen by almost anyone else – Pericles could not form a legal liaison with Aspasia due to a law that he had himself promoted in 451 regulating the legal qualifications for acquiring Athenian citizenship.
The best and most Pericles could do legally would be to form a union of concubinage with Aspasia such that any male offspring of theirs would be free (not enslaved) but also a bastard, illegitimate, denied certain privileges available to Athenian citizen boys. And that is what Pericles did, unabashedly, even at the certain cost of some public derision and ridicule. Their son Pericles junior – we note the choice of name – was born not long after, a gift to the comic playwrights who liked to satirise the current crop of political leaders even to the extent of making jokes about the shape of their head (as they did with Pericles). For the next two decades until his death in 429 Pericles and Aspasia lived together, as if man and wife, and embraced a social freedom and equality that less enlightened Athenians found puzzling if not disreputable.
Our chief evidence for this private side of Pericles’s biography, his lifestyle, is the Life already mentioned and written by Plutarch, who was interested far more in the personal than the political but was at the mercy of his obviously seriously biased eyewitness sources. Even after Pericles’s death, the playwright Aristophanes (born about 445) thought there was comic mileage to be gained from making out Count Binface-style that Aspasia had run a bordello… Later still, the philosopher Plato (born after Pericles’s death), a dedicated antidemocrat, joined in the fun, suggesting that really it was Aspasia who was the brains of the operation, not Pericles, even to the extent of writing drafts of the speeches that Pericles delivered publicly.
Against all this background noise, and faced with such contradictory contemporary and later testimonies, it’s often hard to make up one’s mind as to how Pericles should best be understood and presented both as a person and as a political figure for a twenty-first-century Anglo-Hellenic audience. Thucydides (along with Herodotus one of my two chief mentors) claimed that his work should be regarded as ‘a possession for all time’, it being of universal value since humanity dealt in constants across both time and space. But actually the past, as someone once wrote, is a foreign country – they do things very differently there. Pericles and Pericles’s Athens, I have suggested, exemplify that axiom to the max.
Paul Cartledge is A.G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow of Clare College Cambridge and former Deputy Editor of the (old) Anglo-Hellenic Review. Pericles is his 18th solo-authored book.