THE emperor Augustus once caught sight of some wealthy foreigners in Rome, who were carrying about young monkeys and puppies in their arms and caressing them with a great show of affection. We are told that he then asked whether the women in those countries did not bear children, thus rebuking in truly imperial fashion those who squander upon animals that capacity for love and affection which in the natural order of things should be reserved for our fellow men. In the same way, since nature has endowed us with a lively curiosity and love of knowledge, we ought equally to blame the people who abuse these gifts and divert them to objects which are unworthy of attention, while they neglect those which have the best claim to it. It is true, of course, that our outward sense cannot avoid apprehending the various objects it encounters, merely by virtue of their impact and regardless of whether they are useful or not: but a man’s conscious intellect is something which he may bring to bear or avert as he chooses, and he can very easily transfer it to another object if he sees fit. For this reason we ought to seek out virtue not merely to contemplate it, but to derive benefit from doing so. A colour, for example, is well suited to the eye if its bright and agreeable tones stimulate and refresh the vision, and in the same way we ought to apply our intellectual vision to those models which can inspire it to attain its own proper virtue through the sense of delight they arouse.
We find these examples in the actions of good men, which implant an eager rivalry and a keen desire to imitate them in the minds of those who have sought them out, whereas our admiration for other forms of action does not immediately prompt us to do the same ourselves. On the contrary, it is quite possible for us to take pleasure in the work and at the same time look down on the workman. In the case of perfumes or dyes, for example, we are delighted by the product, but regard perfumers and dyers as uncouth persons who follow a mean occupation. The same idea was well expressed by Antisthenes, when he was told that Ismenius was an excellent oboe-player, and retorted: ‘Then he must be good for nothing else, otherwise he would never play the oboe so well!’ We are told, too, that King Philip of Macedon, when his son was playing the harp delightfully and with great virtuosity at a drinking-party, asked him: ‘Are you not ashamed to play as well as that?’ For a king it is surely enough if he can find time to hear others play, and he pays great honour to the Muses if he does no more than attend such contests as a spectator.
2. On the other hand a man who occupies himself with servile tasks proves by the very pains which he devotes to them that he is indifferent to higher things. No young man of good breeding and high ideals feels that he must be a Pheidias or a Polycleitus after seeing the statue of Zeus at Olympia or Hera at Argos,1 nor does he aspire to be an Anacreon or a Philetas or an Archilochus, because of the pleasure he derives from their poems, for it does not necessarily follow that because a particular work succeeds in charming us its creator also deserves our admiration. We may say, then, that achievements of this kind, which do not arouse the spirit of emulation or create any passionate desire to imitate them, are of no great benefit to the spectator. On the other hand virtue in action immediately takes such hold of a man that he no sooner admires a deed than he sea out to follow in the steps of the doer. Fortune we prize for the good things we may possess and enjoy from her, but virtue for the good deeds we can perform: the former we are content to receive at the hands of others, but the latter we desire others to experience from ourselves. Moral good, in a word, has a power to attract towards itself. It is no sooner seen than it rouses the spectator to action, and yet it does not form his character by mere imitation, but by promoting the understanding of virtuous deeds it provides him with a dominating purpose.
These, then, are the reasons which have impelled me to persevere in my biographical writings, and I have therefore devoted this tenth book to the lives of Pericles and of Fabius Maximus, who waged such a long war with Hannibal. The two men possessed many virtues in common, but above all through their moderation, their uprightness, and their ability to endure the follies of their peoples and their colleagues in office, they rendered the very greatest service to their countries. Whether my judgement is accurate, the reader must decide from what is written here.
3. Pericles belonged to the tribe of Acamantis and the deme of Cholargus, and he was descended on both sides from the noblest lineage in Athens. His father was Xanthippus, who defeated the Persian generals at Mycale.1 His mother, Agariste, was the niece of that Cleisthenes who not only performed the noble exploit of driving out the Pisistratids and destroying their tyranny, but went on to establish laws and a constitution that was admirably balanced so as to promote harmony between the citizens and security for the whole state. Agariste once had a dream that she had given birth to a lion, and a few days later she was delivered of Pericles. His physical features were almost perfect, the only exception being his head, which was rather long and out of proportion. For this reason almost all his portraits show him wearing a helmet, since the artists apparently did not wish to taunt him with this deformity. However, the comic poets of Athens nicknamed him ‘schinocephalus’ or ‘squill-head’, and Cratinus,2 for example, in his play The Tutors says that ‘Old Cronos mated with the goddess of party-strife, and their offspring was the biggest tyrant of all: now the gods call him ‘The Head-Compeller’.’ And again in his Nemesis he refers to ‘Zeus, the protector of foreigners and heads’. Telecleides describes Pericles as sitting on the Acropolis at his wits’ end, ‘at one moment top-heavy with the load of the cares of state, and at another creating all the din of war by himself, from that brain-pan of his, which is big enough to hold eleven couches.’ And Eupolis in The Danes1 asks questions about each of the great popular leaders as they come up from Hades, and remarks, when Pericles’ name is called out last:
Now you have brought us up the very head
Of those in the world below.
4. His teacher in music,2 most writers agree, was Damon (whose name should be pronounced with the first syllable short), although according to Aristotle3 he had a thorough musical training at the hands of Pythocleides. This Damon appears to have been a sophist of the highest order, who used his musical teaching as a screen to conceal his real talents from the world in general; in fact it was he who trained Pericles for his political contests, much as a masseur or trainer prepares an athlete. However, Damon’s lyre did not succeed in imposing upon the Athenians, and he was banished by ostracism on the grounds of being a great intriguer and supporter of tyranny, and he also became a target for the comic poets. At any rate Plato, the comic dramatist, makes one of his characters speak these lines to him
First of all answer my question, I beg you,
For you are the Chiron,4 they say, who tutored Pericles.
Pericles also studied under Zeno the Eleatic at the period when, like Parmenides, he was lecturing on natural philosophy. Zeno5 had perfected a technique of cross-examination which enabled him to corner his opponent by the method of question and answer, and Timon of Phlius has described him as
Zeno, assailer of all things, whose tongue like a double-edged weapon Argued on either side with an irresistible fury.
But there was one man more closely associated with Pericles than any other, who did most to clothe him with a majestic bearing that was more potent than any demagogue’s appeal, and who helped to develop the natural dignity of his character to the highest degree. This was Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, whom the men of his time used to call Intelligence personified. They gave him this name either out of admiration for the extraordinary intellectual powers he displayed in the investigation of natural phenomena, or else because he was the first to dethrone Chance and Necessity and set up pure Intelligence in their place as the principle of law and order which informs the universe, and which distinguishes from an otherwise chaotic mass those substances which possess elements in common.
5. Pericles had an unbounded admiration for Anaxagoras, and his mind became steeped in the so-called higher philosophy and abstract speculation. From it he derived not only a dignity of spirit and a nobility of utterance which was entirely free from the vulgar and unscrupulous buffooneries of mob-oratory, but also a composure of countenance that never dissolved into laughter, a serenity in his movements and in the graceful arrangement of his dress which nothing could disturb while he was speaking, a firm and evenly modulated voice, and other characteristics of the same kind which deeply impressed his audience. It is a fact, at any rate, that once in the marketplace, where he had urgent business to transact, he allowed himself to be abused and reviled for an entire day by some idle hooligan without uttering a word in reply. Towards evening he returned home unperturbed, while the man followed close behind, still heaping every kind of insult upon him. When Pericles was about to go indoors, as it was now dark, he ordered one of his servants to take a torch and escort the man all the way to his own house.
The poet Ion,1 however, says that Pericles had a rather disdainful and arrogant manner of address, and that his pride had in it a good deal of superciliousness and contempt for others. By contrast, he praises the ease, good humour, and polished manner which Cimon showed in his dealings with the world. But we need not pay much attention to Ion, who apparently expects that virtue, like a complete dramatic tetralogy, must include an element of low comedy. Against this, Zeno used to urge all those who derided Pericles’ austere manner as nothing more than pride and a craving for popularity to go and affect something like it themselves; his idea was that the mere imitation of these noble qualities might, after a time, cause them to be adopted unconsciously as a habit and even admired.
6. These were not the only advantages that Pericles gained from his association with Anaxagoras. He seems also to have learned from his teaching to rise above that superstitious terror which springs from an ignorant wonder at the common phenomena of the heavens. It affects those who know nothing of the causes of such things, who fear the gods to the point of madness and are easily confused through their lack of experience. A knowledge of natural causes, on the other hand, banishes these fears and replaces morbid superstition with a piety which rests on a sure foundation supported by rational hopes.
There is a story that Pericles was once sent from his country estate the head of a one-horned ram. Thereupon Lampon,1 the soothsayer, when he saw how the horn grew strong and solid out of the middle of the creature’s forehead, declared that the mastery of the two dominant parties in the city-which at that time were led by Thucydides and Pericles respectively – would be concentrated in the hands of one man, and that he would be the one to whom this sign had been given. Anaxagoras, on the other hand, had the skull dissected and proceeded to demonstrate that the brain had not filled its natural space, but had contracted into a point like an egg at that place in the cavity from which the horn grew. On that occasion, so the story goes, it was Anaxagoras who won the admiration of the onlookers, but not long after Lampon came into his own, for Thucydides was overthrown and the entire control of affairs fell into Pericles’ hands.
In my opinion, however, there was nothing to prevent both the scientist and the prophet from being right, since the one correctly diagnosed the cause and the other the meaning of the prodigy. It was the business of the first to observe why something happens and how it becomes what it is, and of the second to foretell the purpose of an event and its significance. Those who say that to discover the cause of a phenomenon disposes of its meaning fail to notice that the same reasoning which explains away divine portents would also dispense with the artificial symbols created by mankind. The beating of gongs, the blaze of beacons, and the shadows on sundials all have their particular causes, but have also been contrived to signify something else. However, this is perhaps a subject for a separate essay.
7. As a young man Pericles was inclined to shrink from facing the people. One reason for this was that he was considered to bear a distinct resemblance to the tyrant Pisistratus, and when men who were well on in years remarked on the charm of Pericles’ voice and the smoothness and fluency of his speech, they were astonished at the resemblance between the two. The fact that he was rich and that he came of a distinguished family and possessed exceedingly powerful friends made the fear of ostracism very real to him, and at the beginning of his career he took no part in politics but devoted himself to soldiering, in which he showed great daring and enterprise. However, the time came when Aristides was dead, Themistocles in exile, and Cimon frequently absent on distant campaigns. Then at last Pericles decided to attach himself to the people’s party and to take up the cause of the poor and the many instead of that of the rich and the few, in spite of the fact that this was quite contrary to his own temperament, which was thoroughly aristocratic. He was afraid, apparently, of being suspected of aiming at a dictatorship; so when he saw that Cimon’ sympathies were strongly with the nobles and that he was the idol of the aristocratic party, he began to ingratiate himself with the people, partly for self-preservation and partly by way of securing power against his rival.
He now entered upon a new mode of life. He was never to be seen walking in any street except the one which led to the market-place and the Council-chamber. He refused not only invitations to dinner but every kind of friendly or familiar intercourse, so that through all the years of his political career, he never visited one of his friends to dine. The only exception was an occasion when his great-uncle Euryptolemus gave a wedding-feast. Pericles sat at table until the libations1 were poured at the end of the meal, and then at once rose and took his leave. Convivial occasions have a way of breaking down the most majestic demeanour, and in familiar relationships it is hard to keep up an imposing exterior which is assumed for appearances’ sake, On the other hand, genuine virtue can only be more impressive the more it is seen, and the daily life of a really good man is never so much admired by the outside world as it is by his intimate friends.
Pericles, however, took care not to make himself too familiar a figure, even to the people, and he only addressed them at long intervals. He did not choose to speak on every question, but reserved himself, as Critolaus says, like the state galley, the Salamina, for great occasions, and allowed his friends and other public speakers to deal with less important matters. One of these, they say, was Ephialtes, who destroyed the power of the Council of the Areopagus and in this way, as Plato the philosopher puts it,1 poured out neat a full draught of freedom for the people and made them unmanageable, so that they ‘nibbled at Euboea and trampled on the islands, like a horse which can no longer bear to obey the rein.’
8. Pericles wished to equip himself with a style of speaking which, like a musical accomplishment, should harmonize perfectly with his mode of life and the grandeur of his ideals, and he often made use of the instrument which Anaxagoras had put into his hand and tinged his oratory, as it were, with natural philosophy. It was from this philosophy that he had acquired, in addition to his natural gifts, what the divine Plato calls ‘the loftiness of throught and the power to create an ideally perfect work’,2 and by applying this training to the art of oratory he far excelled all other speakers. This was the reason, some people say, for his being nicknamed the Olympian, though others believe that it was on account of the buildings with which he adorned Athens, and others again because of his prowess as a statesman and a general; but it may well have been the combination of many qualities which earned him the name. However, the comic poets of the time, who were constantly letting fly at him either in earnest or in fun, declare that the title originated mainly from his manner of speaking. They refer to him as thundering and lightning when he addressed his audience and as wielding a terrible thunderbolt in his tongue. A saying of Thucydides,3 the son of Melesias, has come down to us, which was uttered in jest, but which bears witness to Pericles’ powers of persuasion. Thucydides belonged to the aristocratic party and was a political opponent of Pericles for many years. When Archidamus, the king of Sparta, asked him whether he or Pericles was the better wrestler, Thucydides replied: ‘Whenever I throw him at wrestling, he beats me by arguing that he was never down, and he can even make the spectators believe it.’
The truth is, however, that even Pericles was extremely cautious in his use of words, so much so that whenever he rose to speak, he uttered a prayer that no word might escape his lips which was unsuited to the matter in hand. He left nothing behind him in writing except for the decrees he proposed, and only a very few of his sayings have been handed down. One of these was his appeal to the Athenians to remove ‘that eyesore of the Piraeus’, as he called Aegina, and another his remark that he could already see ‘war bearing down upon them from the Peloponnese’. On another occasion when Sophocles, who was serving with him on the expedition to Samos,1 began to praise the looks of a handsome boy, Pericles remarked that a general has to keep his eyes clean, too, and not merely his hands. Stesimbrotus also records that in his funeral oration for those who had fallen in the war against Samos, Pericles declared that these men had become immortal like the gods: ‘for we cannot see the gods’, he said, ‘but we believe them to be immortal from the honours we pay them and the blessings we receive from them, and so it is with those who have given their lives for their country.’
9. Thucydides2 characterizes Pericles’ administration as having been distinctly aristocratic – ‘democracy in name, but in practice government by the first citizen’. But many other writers maintain that it was he who first led on the people into passing such measures as the allotment3 to Athenians of lands belonging to subject peoples, or the granting of allowances4 for the public festivals and fees5 for various public services, and that because of his policy they fell into bad habits and became extravagant and undisciplined instead of frugal and self-sufficient as they had once been. Let us consider in the light of the facts what may account for this change in his policy.1
At the beginning of his career, as we have seen, Pericles had to measure himself against Cimon’s reputation, and he therefore set out to win the favour of the people. He could not compete with the wealth or the property by means of which Cimon captured the affections of the poor; for the latter supplied a free dinner every day to any Athenian who needed it, provided clothes for the old, and took down the fences on his estates so that anyone who wished could pick the fruit. So finding himself outmatched in this kind of popular appeal, Pericles turned his attention to the distribution of the public wealth. He did this on the advice of Damonides of the deme of Oa, as Aristotle tells us;2 and before long, what with the allowances for public festivals, fees for jury service, and other grants and gratuities, he succeeded in bribing the masses wholesale and enlisting their support in his attack on the Council of the Areopagus. Pericles was not himself a member of this body, since he had never been appointed by lot to the post either of chief archon or archon thesmothete or king archon or polemarch. These positions had traditionally been filled by lot, and it was only through them that men who had acquitted themselves well in office could rise to membership of the Areopagus. Because he had thus been excluded, Pericles, once he had gathered popular support, exerted himself all the more to lead his party in a campaign against the Areopagus, and he succeeded so well that not only was it deprived of most of its judicial powers through a bill brought forward by Ephialtes, but Cimon himself was ostracized3 on the charge of being a friend of Sparta and an enemy of the people’ interests. Yet this was a man who was second to none in Athens in birth or in wealth, who had won’the most brilliant victories over the Persians and filled the city with money and treasure, as has been recorded in his Life. Such was the strength of Pericles’ hold over the people.
10. Now ostracism was limited by law to a period often years. In the meantime,4 however, the Spartans invaded the district of Tanagra with a large army and the Athenians at once marched out to meet them. Accordingly Cimon returned from exile,1 took up arms and placed himself in the line of battle by the side of the men of his tribe, determined to clear himself of his supposed pro-Spartan sympathies by his actions and by sharing the dangers of his fellow countrymen. However, Pericles’ friends combined to drive Cimon away from the ranks on the ground that he was still an exile. For that reason it is believed that Pericles fought in this battle with greater courage than ever before and surpassed everyone in exposing himself to danger. In this action, too, Cimon’ friends, whom Pericles had accused along with him of pro-Spartan leanings, were all killed to a man. So the Athenians, now that they had lost a great battle on the frontiers of Attica and expected that the Spartans would press them hard in the coming summer, were plunged into remorse for their .treatment of Cimon and longed to bring him back. As soon as Pericles understood this, he did not hesitate to grant the people their wish and himself proposed the decree to recall his opponent Thereupon, Cimon returned from exile and negotiated a peace between the two cities, for the Spartans were as well disposed towards him as they were hostile to Pericles and the other democratic leaders.
Some writers maintain, however, that Pericles did not propose the decree for Cimon’ recall until a secret agreement had been reached between them with the help of Elpinice, Cimon’s sister. The terms of this, they say, were that Cimon should sail with an expedition of 200 ships to attempt to reduce the territory of the king of Persia and should take command abroad, while Pericles should have supreme authority at home. It is also believed that when, several years before this, Cimon was being tried for his life2 on a charge of treason, and Pericles had been chosen as one of the ten public prosecutors, Elpinice helped to soften his animosity towards her brother. The story goes that when she came and pleaded with him, Pericles told her with a smile, ‘Elpinice, you are too old, much too old, for this kind of business.’ However this may be, Pericles made no more than one speech, by way of formally discharging his commission, and in the end did Cimon less harm than any of his other accusers.
In the light of this, how are we to believe Idomeneus’s charge that Plutarch’ version of the affair. Pericles arranged the assassination of the democratic leader Ephialtes, who was his friend, as well as his partner in his political programme, out of sheer jealousy of his reputation? This is surely a poisonous accusation, which he has concocted from some unknown source, to hurl at a man who may not have been in every respect above reproach, but who possessed a noble disposition and a spirit so dedicated to the pursuit of honour that there was no room in it for such brutal or savage passions. As for Ephialtes, the truth is that the aristocrats had good reason to fear him, since he was relentless in calling to account and prosecuting those who had in any way harmed the people, and so his enemies conspired against him and secretly arranged for him to be murdered by Aristodicus of Tanagra, according to Aristotle.1 Cimon’s death took place later during his campaign in Cyprus.2
11. The aristocratic party had already recognized for some time that Pericles was now the most important man in Athens and that he wielded far more power than any other citizen. But they were anxious that there should be someone in the city capable of standing up to him so as to blunt the edge of his authority and prevent it from becoming an outright monarchy. They therefore put forward Thucydides, of Alopece, a man of good sense and a relative of Cimon, to lead the opposition. He was less of a soldier than Cimon, but better versed in forensic business and an abler politician, and by watching his opportunities at home and engaging Pericles in debate, he soon succeeded in creating a balance of power in Athenian affairs. He did not allow the aristocrats, the so-called party of the good and true, to become dispersed among the mass of the people in the Assembly, as they had done in the past, with the result that their influence had been swamped by sheer numbers. Instead, by separating and grouping them in a single body, he was able to concentrate their strength and make it an effective counterweight in the scale. Below the surface of affairs in Athens, there had existed from the very beginning a kind of flaw or seam, such as one finds in a piece of iron, which gave a hint of the rift that divided the aims of the popular and the aristocratic parties’ but now these two men’ rival ambitions and their struggle for power sharply widened this cleavage and caused the one side to be named the party of the many and the other of the few. Pericles therefore chose this moment to hand over the reins of power to the people to a greater extent than ever before and deliberately shaped his policy to please them. He constantly provided public pageants, banquets, and processions in the city, entertaining the people like children with elegant pleasures; and he sent out sixty triremes to cruise every year, in which many of the citizens served with pay for eight months and learned and practised seamanship at the same time. Besides this, he dispatched 1,000 settlers to the Chersonese,1 500 to Naxos, 250 to Andros, 1,000 to Thrace to make their homes with the Hisaltae, and others to the new colony named Thurii, which was founded in Italy near the site of Sybaris. In this way he relieved the city of a large number of idlers and agitators, raised the standards of the poorest classes, and, by installing garrisons among the allies, implanted at the same time a healthy fear of rebellion.
12. But there was one measure above all which at once gave the greatest pleasure to the Athenians, adorned their city and created amazement among the rest of mankind, and which is today the sole testimony that the tales of the ancient power and glory of Greece are no mere fables. By this I mean his construction of temples and public buildings; and yet it was this, more than any other action of his, which his enemies slandered and misrepresented. They cried out in the Assembly that Athens had lost her good name and disgraced herself by transferring from Delos into her own keeping the funds that had been contributed by the rest of Greece, and that now the most plausible excuse for this action, namely, that the money had been removed for fear of the barbarians and was being guarded in a safe place, had been demolished by Pericles himself. ‘The Greeks must be outraged,’ they cried. ‘They must consider this an act of bare-faced tyranny, when they see mat with their own contributions, extorted from them by force for the war against the Persians, we are gilding and beautifying our city, as if it were some vain woman decking her self out with costly stones and statues and temples worm millions of money.’
Pericles’ answer1 to the people was that the Athenians were not obliged to give the allies any account of how their money was spent, provided that they carried on the war for them and kept the Persians away. ‘They do not give us a single horse, nor a soldier, nor a ship. All they supply is money,’ he told the Athenians, ‘and this belongs not to the people who give it, but to those who receive it, so long as they provide the services they are paid for. It is no more than fair that after Adieus has been equipped with all she needs to carry on the war, she should apply the surplus to public works, which, once completed, will bring her glory for all time, and while they are being built will convert that surplus to immediate use. In this way all kinds of enterprises and demands will be created which will provide inspiration for every art, find employment for every hand, and transform the whole people into wage-earners, so that the city will decorate and maintain herself at the same time from her own resources.’
Certainly it was true that those who were of military age and physically in their prime could always earn their pay from the public funds by serving on Pericles’ various campaigns. But he was also anxious that the unskilled masses, who had no military training, should not be debarred from benefiting from the national income, and yet should not be paid for sitting about and doing nothing. So he boldly laid before the people proposals for immense public works and plans for buildings, which would involve many different arts and industries and require long periods to complete, his object being that those who stayed at home, no less than those serving in the fleet or the army or on garrison duty, should be enabled to enjoy a share of the national wealth. The materials to be used were stone, bronze, ivory, gold, ebony, and cypress-wood, while the arts or trades which wrought or fashioned them were those of carpenter, modeller, copper-smith, stone-mason, dyer, worker in gold and ivory, painter, embroiderer, and engraver, and besides these the carriers and suppliers of the materials, such as merchants, sailors, and pilots for the sea-borne traffic, and waggon-makers, trainers of draught animals, and drivers for everything that came by land. There were also rope-makers, weavers, leatherworkers, roadbuilders and miners. Each individual craft, like a general with an army under his separate command, had its own corps of unskilled labourers at its disposal, and these worked in a subordinate capacity, as an instrument obeys the hand, or the body the soul, and so through these various demands the city’s prosperity was extended far and wide and shared among every age and condition in Athens.
13. So the buildings arose, as imposing in their sheer size as they were inimitable in the grace of their outlines, since the artists strove to excel themselves in the beauty of their workmanship. And yet the most wonderful thing about them was the speed with which they were completed. Each of them, men supposed, would take many generations to build’, but in fact the entire project was carried through in the high summer of one man’s administration. On the other hand we are told that when Zeuxis the painter once heard Agatharchus boasting about how swiftly and easily he painted his figures, his retort was, ‘Mine take, and last, a long time.’ Certainly mere dexterity and speed of execution seldom give a lasting value to a work of art or bestow a delicate beauty upon it. It is the time laid out in laborious creation which repays us later through the enduring strength it confers. It is this, above all, which makes Pericles’ works an object of wonder to us – the fact that they were created in so short a span, and yet for all time. Each one possessed a beauty which seemed venerable the moment it was born, and at the same time a youthful vigour which makes them appear to this day as if they were newly built. A bloom of eternal freshness hovers over these works of his and preserves them from the touch of time, as if some unfading spirit of youth, some ageless vitality had been breathed into them.
The director and supervisor of the whole enterprise was Pheidias, although there were various great architects and artists employed on the individual buildings. For example, Callicrates and Ictinus were the architects of the Parthenon with its cella 100 feet long; it was Coroebus who started to build the temple of initiation at Eleusis, but he only lived to see the columns erected on the lower story and the architraves placed on the capitals. After his death, Metagenes of Xypete added the frieze and the upper colonnade, and Xenocles of the deme of Cholargus crowned it with the lantern over the shrine. Callicrates was the contractor for the third Long Wall,1 which ran between the original two, and for which Socrates says2 that he himself heard Pericles propose the decree to the people. Cratinus makes fun of the slow progress of the work, saying
Pericles had built this wall long ago, if words could do it;
In fact, not one inch has been added to it
The Odeon, with its interior arranged to accommodate many rows of seats and supporting columns, and its circular roof sloping down from its apex, was said to be an exact reproduction of the king of Persia’ pavilion, and this was also built under Pericles’ direction. For this reason Cratinus has another joke at his expense in The Thracian Women:
As Zeus an onion on his head he wears,
As Pericles a whole orchestra bears;
Afraid of broils and banishment no more,
He tunes the shell he trembled at before.
At the same time, still in pursuit of distinction, Pericles had a decree passed to establish a musical contest as part of the Panathenaic festival. He himself was elected one of the stewards and laid down rules as to how the competitors should sing or play the flute or the lyre. At that time and from thenceforward the audience came to the Odeon to hear these musical contests.
The Propylaea, or portals of the Acropolis, of which Mnesicles was the architect, were finished in the space of five years. While they were being built, a miraculous incident took place, which suggested that the goddess Athena herself, so far from standing aloof, was taking a hand and helping to complete the work. One of the workmen, the most active and energetic among them, slipped and fell from a great height. He lay for some time severely injured, and the doctors could hold out no hope that he would recover. Pericles was greatly distressed at this, but the goddess appeared to him in a dream and ordered a course of treatment, which he applied, with the result that the man was easily and quickly healed. It was to commemorate this that Pericles set up the bronze statue of Athena the Healer near the altar dedicated to that goddess, which they say was there before.
But it was Pheidias who directed the making of the great golden statue of Athena, and his name is duly inscribed upon the marble tablet on the Acropolis as its creator. Almost the whole enterprise was in his hands, and because of his friendship with Pericles all the artists and craftsmen, as I have said, came under his orders. The result was that he himself became the victim of envy and his patron of slander, for the rumour was put about that Pheidias arranged intrigues for Pericles with free-born Athenian women, when they came on the pretext of looking at the works of art. The comic poets took up this story and showered Pericles with all the innuendoes they could invent, coupling his name with the wife of Menippus, a man who was his friend and had served as his second ir command in the army. Even Pyrilampus’ fondness for keeping birds was dragged in, and because he was a friend of Pericles, he was accused of using his peacocks as presents for the women who granted Pericles their favours. The fact is that men who know nothing of decency in their own lives are only too ready to launch foul slanders against their betters and to offer them up as victims to the evil deity of popular envy. And, indeed, we can hardly be surprised at this, when we find that even Stesimbrotus of Thasos has dared to give currency to the shocking and completely unfounded charge that Pericles seduced his son’ wife. This only goes to show how thickly the truth is hedged around with obstacles and how hard it is to track down by historical research. Writers who live after the events they describe find that their view of them is obscured by the lapse of time, while those who investigate the deeds and lives of their contemporaries are equally apt to corrupt and distort the truth, in some cases because of envy or private hatred, in others through the desire to flatter or show favour.
14. Thucydides and the other members of his party were constantly denouncing Pericles for squandering public money and letting the national revenue run to waste, and so Pericles appealed to the people in the Assembly to declare whether in their opinion he had spent too much. ‘Far too much,’ was their reply, whereupon Pericles retorted, ‘Very well then, do not let it be charged to the public account but to my own, and I will dedicate all the public buildings in my name.’ It may have been that the people admired such a gesture in the grand manner, or else that they were just as ambitious as Pericles to have a share in the glory of his works. At any rate they raised an uproar and told him to draw freely on the public funds and spare no expense in his outlay. Finally, Pericles ventured to put matters to the test of an ostracism, and the result was that he secured his rival’s banishment1 and the dissolution of the party which had been organized against him.
15. From this point political opposition was at an end, the parties had merged themselves into one, and the city presented a single and unbroken front. Pericles now proceeded to bring under his own control not only home affairs, but all issues in which the authority of Athens was involved: these included matters of tribute, the army, the navy, the islands, maritime affairs, the great resources which Athens derived both from the Greek states and from the barbarians, and the leadership she exercised which was buttressed by subject states, friendships with kings and alliances with dynasties. But at the same time Pericles’ own conduct took on quite a different character. He was no longer so docile towards the people, nor so ready to give way to their caprices, which were as shifting and changeable as the winds. He abandoned the somewhat nerveless and indulgent leadership he had shown on occasion, which might be compared to a soft and flowery melody, and struck instead the firm, high note of an aristocratic, even regal statesmanship. And since he used his authority honestly and unswervingly in the interests of the city, he was usually able to carry the people with him by rational argument and persuasion. Still there were times when they bitterly resented his policy, and then he tightened the reins and forced them to do what was to their advantage, much as a wise physician treats a prolonged and complicated disease, allowing the patient at some moments pleasures which can do him no harm, and at others giving him caustics and bitter drugs which cure him. There were, as might be expected, all kinds of disorders to be found among a mass of citizens who possessed an empire as great as that of Athens, and Pericles was the only man capable of keeping each of these under control. He achieved this most often by using the people’ hopes and fears as if they were rudders, curbing them when they were arrogant and raising their hopes or comforting them when they were disheartened. In this way he proved that rhetoric, in Plato’s phrase,2 is the art of working upon the souls of men by means of words, and that its chief business is the knowledge of men’ characters and passions which are, so to speak, the strings and stops of the soul and require a most skilful and delicate touch. The secret of Pericles’ power depended, so Thucydides tells us,1 not merely upon his oratory, but upon the reputation which his whole course of life had earned him and upon the confidence he enjoyed as a man who had proved himself completely indifferent to bribes. Great as Athens had been when he became her leader, he made her the greatest and richest of all cities, and he came to hold more power in his hands than many a king and tyrant. And in the end he did not increase the fortune his father left him by so much as a single drachma from the public funds, a source of wealth which some men even managed to pass on to their children
16. But despite his unselfishness, there can be no doubt as to his power, which Thucydides describes to us clearly, while even the comic poets testify to it unwittingly in some of their malicious jokes. For example, they nickname him and his associates ‘the new Pisistratids’, and call upon him to take the oath that he will never set himself up as tyrant, as if his supremacy were too oppressive and out of all proportion in a democracy. Telecleides says that the Athenians had handed over to him
The cities’ tribute, even the cities themselves
To hold or to set free as he thinks fit,
And the cities’ walls to build or to pull down,
Their treaties and their armies, their power, their peace,
Their wealth, and all the gifts good fortune brings.
And all this was by no means a sudden harvest, the climax of popularity of an administration which flourished only for a brief season. The fact is that for forty years Pericles held the first place among men such as Ephialtes,2 Myronides, Cimon, Tolmides, and Thucydides, and after the fall of Thucydides and his ostracism, he exercised for no less than fifteen years a continuous, unbroken authority through his annual tenure of the office of general. During the whole of this period he proved himself completely incorruptible by bribery, although he was not altogether averse to making money. As for the wealth he had legally inherited, he adopted what seemed to him the simplest and most exact method of dealing with it, to ensure that his fortune should not be dissipated by neglect nor yet cause him much trouble or loss of time when his mind was occupied with higher things. His practice was to dispose of each year’s produce in a single sale, and then to buy in the market each item as it was needed for his daily life and his household. This arrangement did not endear Pericles to his sons when they grew up, nor did their wives find him at all a generous provider. They blamed his precise day-to-day regulation of expenses, since it allowed no margin for the superfluities which are usual in a great house in prosperous circumstances, but instead obliged his income and his purchases to balance one another exactly. He had one servant, Evangelus, who kept up all this meticulous accounting, and who was either exceptionally gifted by nature or else was trained by Pericles, so that he excelled everyone else in the science of domestic economy.
This course of conduct owed nothing to the wisdom of Anaxagoras, for the philosopher went so far as to abandon his house and let his land lie fallow and be grazed by sheep, while he pursued his lofty thoughts and his passion for speculation. However, the life of a contemplative philosopher is a very different thing, I take it, from the life of a statesman. The former brings his intellect to bear upon great and noble ends, but without the aid of instruments and independently of external factors; whereas the latter, in so far as he applies his gifts to the common needs of mankind, must sometimes regard wealth not merely as one of the necessities of life, but even as one of its nobler elements, as in fact was the case with Pericles, who gave help to many of the poorer citizens. It is said, too, that at a time when Pericles was absorbed in public affairs, Anaxagoras, who was by then an old man with no one to care for him, took to his bed and covered his face with his robe, determined to starve himself to death. When Pericles heard the news he was horrified, and at once ran to the poor man and begged him to live. He used every argument and entreaty and lamented not so much Anaxagoras’ fate as his own, if he were now to lose such a trusted counsellor in matters of government. At this Anaxagoras, so the story goes, unmuffled his head and said, ‘Pericles, even a lamp has oil put into it by those who need it.’
17. When the Spartans began to be vexed by the growing power of Athens, Pericles, by way of encouraging the people to cherish even higher ambitions and making them believe themselves capable of great achievements, introduced a proposal that all Greeks, whether living in Europe or in Asia, in small or in large cities alike, should be invited to send delegates to a congress1 at Athens. The subjects to be discussed were the Greek sanctuaries which had been burned down by the Persians; the sacrifices owed to the gods on behalf of Hellas to fulfil the vows made when they were fighting the Persians; and the security of the seas, so that all ships could sail them without fear and keep the peace. Twenty men were chosen from the citizens above fifty years of age to convey this invitation. Five of these invited the Ionian and Dorian Greeks in Asia and the islands, as far as Lesbos and Rhodes; five visited the regions on the Hellespont and those of Thrace as far as Byzantium; five others proceeded to Boeotia, Phocis, and the Peloponnese, passing from there by way of the Ozolian Locrians to the neighbouring mainland, as far as Acarnania and Ambracia, while the rest travelled through Euboea to the Oetaeans and the Maliac gulf, and to the Achaeans of Phthia and the Thessalians, urging them all to attend and join in the deliberations for the peace and well-being of Greece. However, nothing was achieved, and the delegates never assembled because of the covert opposition of the Spartans; at least this is the reason generally given, since the Athenian overtures were first rejected in the Peloponnese. I have mentioned this episode, however, as an illustration of Pericles’ lofty spirit and of the grandeur of his conceptions.
18. In his military operations he was renowned above all for his wariness. He never willingly engaged in a battle which involved much danger or uncertainty, nor did he envy or follow the example of those commanders who have gained a reputation as great generals by running risks or trusting to exceptional luck; indeed, he often used to say to his fellow-citizens that, so far as it depended on him, they could count themselves immortals and go on living for ever. There was an occasion when Pericles found that Tolmides, a soldier who had previously enjoyed particularly good fortune and had had exceptional honours bestowed upon him for his campaigns, was preparing to invade Boeotia. Tolmides had given no thought to the right moment for launching the attack, but he had persuaded 1,000 – without counting the rest of his force – of the bravest and most adventurous men of military age to volunteer. Pericles did his utmost in the Assembly to restrain Tolmides and dissuade him from going, and he remarked in a famous phrase that if he would not listen to Pericles, he would do well to be guided by Time, the most experienced counsellor of all. This saying did not bring him much credit at that moment. But a few days afterwards the news came that Tolmides had been defeated and killed in battle near Coronea1 and that many of the bravest Athenians had fallen with him, and this greatly increased the admiration and good-will the people felt towards Pericles, since he now seemed to them a man of foresight as well as a patriot.
19. Of all his campaigns it was the expedition to the Chersonese2 which was the most gratefully remembered, since it proved the salvation of the Greeks who lived there. Pericles not only brought with him a thousand Athenian colonists and so provided the cities there with fresh strength and vigour, but he also secured the neck of the isthmus with a fortified line stretching from sea to sea. By this means he barred the way to the Thracians, who had swarmed all over the Chersonese, and put an end to the constant and harassing border warfare to which the settlers had been exposed, since their territory marched with that of the neighbouring barbarian tribes and had been overrun by marauding bands, whose haunts were inside the frontier or close to it. But the venture which earned him most fame and admiration among foreigners was his voyage round the Peloponnese,3 when he put to sea from Pegae4 in the Megarid with a fleet of 100 triremes. He not only laid waste a long stretch of the coast as Tolmides had done before him, but he also led the heavy infantry from the ships, advanced far inland and inspired such fear in the enemy that they took refuge behind their walls at his approach. The only exceptions were the men of Sicyon, who made a stand against him in Nemea and engaged him in a pitched battle, but he routed them by main force and set up a trophy for his victory. After this he took on board troops from Achaea, which was friendly to him, and moved on with the fleet to the northern shore of the Corinthian Gulf. There he sailed past the mouth of the Acheloüs, overran Acarnania, shut up the people of Oeniadae1 behind their walls, and after devastating their territory returned home. Throughout this expedition he had proved himself a terror to the enemy, and at the same time a prudent yet vigorous leader of his fellow citizens, for nothing went wrong, even by accident, from beginning to end of the operations for the men who took part in them.
20. Pericles also sailed into the Black Sea2 with a large and splendidly equipped fleet, and there he treated the Greek cities considerately and secured by negotiation the various local arrangements which they desired. At the same time he demonstrated to the neighbouring barbarian states and their kings and princelings not only the strength of the Athenian forces, but also their confidence and their freedom to sail wherever they chose and to dominate these waters. He also left thirteen warships and a land force under the command of Lamachus with a group of exiles from Sinope to help them against Timesilaus. Later, when the tyrant and his supporters had been driven out of the city, Pericles had a decree passed that 600 Athenian volunteers should sail to Sinope and settle there with the inhabitants, dividing among themselves the houses and lands which had previously belonged to the tyrant and his followers.
But there were other instances when he would not give way to the Athenians’ more reckless impulses. He refused to be swept along with them, when they became intoxicated with their power and good fortune, and talked of recovering Egypt and attacking the sea-board of the Persian Empire. Many people, too, even as early as this, were obsessed with that extravagant and ill-starred ambition to conquer Sicily, which was afterwards fanned into flame by Alcibiades and other orators. There were even some who dreamed of attacking Carthage and Etruria, and, indeed, their hopes were not altogether ill-founded, when one thinks of the extent of the Athenian dominion at that time and the full tide of success which seemed to attend all their undertakings.
21. Pericles, however, constantly strove to curb this extravagant spirit of conquest, to restrain the desire to meddle with foreign states and to devote Athens’ main strength to guarding and consolidating what she had already won. He considered that to hold the Spartans in check was one of the prime objectives of Athenian policy, and he set himself to oppose them in every way; he showed this in many of his decisions and particularly by the action which he took in the Sacred War.1 The Spartans sent an expedition to Delphi and forced the Phocians, who were then in possession of the sanctuary, to give it up to the people of Delphi. But no sooner had the Spartans left than Pericles dispatched a counter-expedition and reinstated the Phocians. The Spartans had been given by the people of Delphi the right of precedence in consulting the oracle and had had the record of this carved on the forehead of the bronze wolf in the sanctuary. Now Pericles secured the same privilege for Athens and had it engraved along the right-hand side of the same wolf.
22. Events proved that Pericles was right in seeking to confine the power of Athens to Greece proper. First of all Euboea revolted2 and he was obliged to lead an army against the island. Immediately afterwards the news arrived that Megara had gone over to the enemy and that an invading army under Pleistoanax, the Spartan king, was threatening the frontiers of Attica. Pericles now hurriedly brought back his army from Euboea3 for the war in Attica. He did not risk an engagement with a force of hoplites, who were at once so numerous, so brave, and so eager for battle. But he took note of the fact that Pleistoanax was a very young man and that among his advisers he relied mainly on Cleandridas, whom the ephors had sent out with him on account of the king’s youth to act as his tutor and adviser. Pericles opened secret negotiations with Cleandridas and soon succeeded in corrupting him with bribes and prevailing on him to withdraw the Peloponnesian army from Attica.
When the expedition returned and dispersed to its various cities, the Spartans were so angry that they inflicted a heavy fine on their king. Pleistoanax could not pay this in full and so left the country, while Cleandridas who had retired into voluntary exile was condemned to death. He was the father of that Gylippus who later brought about the destruction of the Athenian expedition to Sicily. Nature seems to have bred avarice in the son as if it were a congenital disease, for Gylippus himself, after his brilliant exploits, was also convicted of taking bribes and banished from Sparta in disgrace. This story, however, is more fully told in my Life of Lysander.1
23. When Pericles made up his accounts for the campaign and included in them an item of ten talents for ‘necessary expenses’, the people gave their approval without asking inquisitive questions or probing the mystery further. Some writers, Theophrastus the philosopher among them, have asserted that every year on Pericles’ initiative ten talents found their way to Sparta, and that with this money he conciliated all the leading men in office and so staved off a war; what Pericles was buying, however, they say, was not peace so much as time2 in which to make preparations at his leisure and finally wage war all the more effectively. However this may be, he soon turned his attention back to the revolt in Euboea, crossed over with fifty warships and 5,000 hoplites and reduced the cities there to submission. He banished from the city of Chalcis the class known as knights, which consisted of the men of outstanding wealth and reputation, and he transported the whole population of Hestiaea from their territory and replaced them with Athenian colonists. He made an example of this one people and punished them relentlessly because they had captured an Athenian ship and put the whole crew to death.
24. Some four years later, after the Athenians and the Spartans had concluded their thirty years’ peace, Pericles had a decree passed to authorize his expedition to Samos,3 on the ground that the islanders had not obeyed the order given them by Athens to break off their war against Miletus.
Now it is commonly supposed that Pericles took these measures against Samos for the sake of Aspasia; so this is perhaps a suitable place to consider the extraordinary art or power this woman exercised, which enabled her to captivate the leading statesmen of the day and even provided the philosophers with a theme for prolonged and elevated discussions. It is generally agreed that she was Milesian by birth and that her father was Axiochus, and she is said to have set out to rival the career of Thargelia, an Ionian woman of earlier times, in marking down for her conquests only men of great power. Thargelia came to be a great beauty and possessed at the same time exceptional charm and intelligence. She had many lovers among the Greeks, all of whom she won over to the Persian interest, and in this way, since they were all men of high position and influence, the seeds of sympathy for the Persians were sown throughout the Greek cities. In the same fashion Pericles, too, according to some writers, was attracted to Aspasia mainly because of her rare political wisdom. Socrates visited her from time to time with his disciples and some of his close friends brought their wives to listen to her conversation, even though she carried on a trade that was anything but honourable or even respectable, since it consisted of keeping a house of young courtesans. Aeschines says that Lysicles1 the sheep-dealer, a man of low birth and character, came to be the leading figure in Athens because of his marriage to Aspasia after Pericles’ death. And in Plato’s dialogue, theMenexanus – even though the first section is written partly as a parody of the rhetoricians – there is certainly this element of truth, namely, that the woman had the reputation of being associated with a whole succession of Athenians, who came to her to learn rhetoric. However, Pericles’ attachment to Aspasia seems to have been a more passionate affair. His own wife was closely related to him: she had been married first of all to Hipponicus, to whom she bore Callias, who was nicknamed ‘the rich’, and her children by Pericles were Xanthippus and Paralus. Afterwards, when they found each other incompatible, Pericles legally handed her over to another man with her own consent and himself lived with Aspasia, whom he loved dearly. The story goes that every day, when he went out to the market-place and returned, he greeted her with a kiss.
Aspasia is referred to in the comedies of the time as the new Om-phale, or Deianeira, or even Hera. Cratinus bluntly called her a prostitute in these lines:
To find our Zeus a Hera, the goddess of Vice
Produced that shameless bitch Aspasia.
Pericles is believed to have had an illegitimate son by her, who is mentioned by Eupolis in his play The Demes, where Pericles is introduced as asking
Is my son alive?
and Myronides answers
Yes, he would have been a citizen long before
But for the shame of his mother, who is a whore.
Aspasia, they say, became so celebrated, that even Cyrus, the prince who fought his brother, the king, for the sovereignty of the Persian Empire, gave the name of Aspasia to his favourite concubine, who had previously been called Milto. She was a Phocaean by birth, the daughter of a man named Hermotimus, and when Cyrus was killed in battle, she was captured and brought to the king1 and later gained great influence with him at court. These details concerning Aspasia come into my mind as I write, and it would have been unnatural to omit them.
25. However, to return to the war with Samos. Pericles is accused of getting the decree against the islanders passed at Aspasia’s request for the benefit of the Milesians. The two states were at war over the possession of Priene, and the Samians had gained the advantage when the Athenians ordered them to break off the fighting and submit their differences to arbitration at Athens. The Samians refused and Pericles then set sail, dissolved the oligarchical government there, took fifty of their leading men and the same number of children as hostages and sent them to Lemnos. It is said, indeed, that each of these hostages was ready to give Pericles a talent on his own account and that he was offered even more by those who wished to prevent a democracy from being established in the city. Besides all this, Pissuthnes, the Persian satrap, who was particularly well disposed to the Samians, sent Pericles 10,000 gold staters and made a special plea for the city. However, Pericles accepted none of these offers, but dealt with the Samians just as he had already decided to do, set up a democracy there and sailed back to Athens. Thereupon the Samians immediately revolted, after Pissuthnes had contrived to steal away their hostages from Lemnos and had provided them in other ways with the means to carry on the war, and so once again Pericles came out against them with the fleet. He found that they were by no means passive or dismayed at his arrival, but were defiantly resolved to fight the Athenians for the mastery of the seas. There was a fierce naval battle near an island called Tragia, in which Pericles won a decisive victory, and with forty-four of his ships defeated a fleet of seventy, twenty of which were infantry transports.
26. After his victory and the enemy’s flight, he lost no time in capturing the harbour and he then laid siege to the city of Samos. The Samians, in spite of their defeat, still ventured in one way or another to sally out and fight under the city walls. But soon a second and larger fleet arrived from Athens and the islanders were then completely blockaded. At this point Pericles took sixty triremes and sailed out into the open sea: most authorities agree that his object was to intercept a fleet of Phoenician ships on their way to help the Samians, and to engage them as far away from the island as possible. According to Stesimbrotus, however, his intention was to attack Cyprus, but this seems extremely unlikely.
In any case, whichever his plan was, he seems to have blundered. As soon as he had sailed away, Melissus, the son of Ithagenes, a philosopher who was then in command of the Samian forces, concluded that there was nothing more to be feared from the Athenians, either because of the reduced size of the fleet which was left, or perhaps because of the inexperience of the Athenian commanders, and so he prevailed on his fellow-citizens to attack them. In the battle which followed, the Samians scored a victory, took a large number of Athenian prisoners and destroyed many of their ships, so that they now gained command of the sea and were enabled to lay in warlike supplies, which they did not possess before: indeed, Aristotle goes so far as to say that Pericles himself was defeated by Melissus in an earlier sea-battle.
The Samians, by way of retaliation, branded their Athenian prisoners on the forehead with an owl, as the Athenians had once branded them with a samaena. The samaena is a warship with a turned-up beak, like a boar’s snout, but it is broader than a trireme and has a paunch-like hull, and this makes it a swift sailer which can also weather a high sea. It got its name because the first ship of this kind made its appearance at Samos, where it was built by the orders of Polycrates the tyrant. This episode of the branding is supposed to be hinted at in Aristophanes’ verse when he says:
The Samians are a deeply lettered people.
27. However this may be, as soon as Pericles heard of the disaster which had overtaken his fleet, he hurried back to the rescue. He defeated Melissus, who came out to meet him, routed the enemy and at once built a wall around the city, for he preferred to get the upper hand and capture it at the expense of time and money rather than of the wounds and the lives of his fellow-citizens. But as time went on, the Athenians grew impatient at the delay and were more and more eager to fight and it became difficult to restrain their ardour. Pericles therefore split up his force into eight divisions and made them all draw lots. He allowed the division which drew the white bean to eat well and rest, while the others did the fighting. This is the reason, so the story goes, why people who have had a day of celebration call it a white day, from the white bean.
Ephorus tells us that Pericles also used various siege engines, as their novelty particularly appealed to him, and that Artemon the engineer was present at these operations. He was nicknamed Periphoretus because he was lame and had to be carried in a litter to any works that needed his immediate attention. Heracleides of Pontus, however, refutes this story on the evidence of Anacreon’s poems, which refer to Artemon Periphoretus as living many generations before the Samian war and these events. He says that Artemon was a man of luxurious habits and a weak character, liable to panic, who spent most of his time sitting at home with two slaves holding a bronze shield over his head, for fear that something might fall on it. If ever he was obliged to go out, he had himself carried about in a little hammock, which was slung so low that it almost touched the ground and this was the reason for his nickname, Periphoretus.
28. In the ninth month of the siege the Samians surrendered. Pericles demolished their walls, confiscated their fleet, and imposed a heavy fine on them, part of which they paid at once and the rest they agreed to pay at fixed intervals, and they also gave hostages as security. Duris the Samian magnifies these events into a tragedy and accuses Pericles and the Athenians of great brutality, although there is no word of this in Thucydides, nor Ephorus, nor Aristotle. He certainly does not appear to be telling the truth when he says that Pericles had the Samian captains and marines from each ship brought into the marketplace in Miletus and crucified there, and that when they had already suffered this torture for ten days he gave orders for their heads to be beaten in with clubs and their bodies thrown on the ground unburied. In any case, Duris is apt to overstep the limits of the truth, even when there are no personal interests of his at stake, and so it seems all the more likely that in this instance he has drawn a horrifying picture of his country’s sufferings simply to blacken the name of Athens.
When Pericles returned home after subduing Samos, he had funeral honours paid to all the Athenians who had lost their lives in the campaign, and he won especial admiration for the speech1 he delivered over their tombs, according to the usual custom. As he stepped down from the rostrum, many of the women of Athens clasped his hand and crowned him with garlands and fillets like a victorious athlete. Elpinice, however, came up to him and said: ‘This was a noble action, Pericles, and you deserve all these garlands for it. You have thrown away the lives of these brave citizens of ours, not in a war against the Persians or the Phoenicians, such as my brother Cimon fought, but in destroying a Greek city which is one of our allies.’ Pericles listened to her words unmoved, so it is said, and only smiled and quoted to her Archilochus’s verse:
Why lavish perfumes on a head that’s grey?
Ion says that his victory over the Samians gave Pericles a prodigiously high opinion of himself. He reflected that it had taken Agamemnon ten years to capture a barbarian city, whereas he within nine months had made himself master of the most important and powerful city in Ionia. In fact, his claim is not so unreasonable, for in this war the issue really was uncertain and the hazards very great, assuming that it is true, as Thucydides tells us,1 that the Samians came very near to wresting from Athens her control of the seas.
29. A few years later, when the clouds were already gathering for the Peloponnesian war, Pericles persuaded the Athenians to send help to Corcyra in her war with Corinth2 and so bring over to their side an island with a powerful navy at a time when the Peloponnesians had all but declared war on them. And yet when the people had agreed to this measure, Pericles sent a squadron of no more than ten ships under Lacedaemonius, the son of Cimon, as if his object were to humiliate him because Cimon’s family was on especially good terms with the Spartans. Pericles intended to make sure that if no particular success were achieved under Lacedaemonius’s command, then the latter would be discredited for his pro-Spartan sympathies, and so he allowed him only a few ships and sent him out against his will. In general he made a point of thwarting all Cimon’s sons, on the pretext that they were not true Athenians, but had something alien about them even in their names, since one of them was named Lacedaemonius, another Thessalus, and a third Eleius, and their mother was believed to be a woman of Arcadia.
In consequence, Pericles was sharply criticized for the paltry size of the force he had sent. It was felt that it was too small to help the Corcyraeans in their hour of need, but that at the same time it provided those enemies of Athens who were accusing her of interference with an invaluable pretext, and he therefore reinforced it later with a larger squadron which arrived after the battle.3
This action enraged the Corinthians and they denounced the Athenians at Sparta. The Megarians also joined them to complain that they were being shut out and driven away from every market and every harbour which the Athenians controlled, contrary to the common rights of the Greeks and the articles of peace entered into upon oath. The people of Aegina also considered themselves oppressed and outraged and secretly bemoaned their grievances to the Spartans, as they did not dare to accuse the Athenians openly. At this point, too, Potidaea revolted, a city which, although a colony of Corinth, was subject to Athens, and the siege on which the Athenians then embarked further hastened the outbreak of the war.
In spite of all this a succession of embassies was sent to Athens, and Archidamus, the Spartan king, strove to placate his allies and bring about a peaceful settlement of most of their grievances. In fact, it seems likely that the Athenians might have avoided war on any of the other issues, if only they could have been persuaded to lift their embargo against the Megarians and come to terms with them. And since it was Pericles who opposed this solution more strongly than anyone else and urged the people to persist in their hostility towards the Megarians, it was he alone who was held responsible for the war.
30. It is said that a Spartan mission arrived in Athens to discuss this very subject and that Pericles took refuge in the pretext that there was a law which forbade the tablet on which the Megarian decree was inscribed to be taken down. ‘Very well, then,’ one of the envoys named Polyalces suggested, ‘there is no need to take it down. Just turn its face to the wall! Surely there is no law forbidding that!’ This was neatly put, but it had no effect on Pericles, who seems to have harboured some private grudge against the Megarians. However, the charge which he brought against them in public was that they had appropriated for their own profane use the territory of Eleusis, which was consecrated to Demeter and Persephone, and he proposed that a herald should be sent first to them and should then proceed to Sparta to complain of their conduct. Pericles was certainly responsible for this decree, which sets out to justify his action in humane and reasonable terms. But then the herald who was sent, Anthemocritus, met his death at the hands of the Megarians, so it was believed, and thereupon Charinus proposed a decree against them. This laid it down that henceforth Athens should be the irreconcilable and implacable enemy of Megara, that any Megarian setting foot in Attica should be put to death, and that the generals, whenever they took the traditional oath of office, should swear besides this that they would invade the Megarid twice in each year, and that Anthemocritus should be buried with honours beside the Thriasian gates, which are now known as the Dipylon.
On their side the Megarians denied that they had murdered Anthemocritus, and threw the blame for the Athenians’ actions upon Pericles and Aspasia, quoting those famous and hackneyed verses from Aristophanes’ Acharnians:
Some young Athenians in a drunken frolic
Kidnapped Simaetha, the courtesan, from Megara.
The Megarians were furious, primed themselves with garlic
Just like their fighting-cocks, then came and stole
Two of Aspasia’s girls to get their own back.1
31. The real reasons which caused the decree to be passed are extremely hard to discover, but all writers agree in blaming Pericles for the fact that it was not revoked. Some of them, however, say that his firm stand on this point was based on the highest motives combined with a shrewd appreciation of where Athens’ best interests lay, since he believed that the demand had been made to test his resistance, and that to have complied with it would have been regarded simply as an admission of weakness. But there are others who consider that he defied the Spartans out of an aggressive arrogance and a desire to demonstrate his own strength.
However, the most damning charge of all,2 and yet the one which finds most support, runs somewhat like this. Pheidias the sculptor had been entrusted, as I have mentioned, with the contract for producing the great statue of Athena. His friendship with Pericles, with whom he had great influence, earned him a number of enemies through sheer jealousy, while others made use of him to test the mood of the people and see what their temper would be in a case in which Pericles was involved. They therefore persuaded Menon, one of the artists working under Pheidias, to seat himself in the market-place as a suppliant and ask for the protection of the state in return for laying information against Pheidias. The people granted the man’s plea and a motion for Pheidias’s prosecution was laid before the Assembly. The charge of embezzlement was not proved, because from the very beginning, on Pericles’ own advice, the gold used for the statue had been superimposed and laid around it in such a way that it could all be taken off and weighed,1 and this was what Pericles now ordered the prosecutors to do.
However, the fame of Pheidias’s works still served to arouse jealousy against him, especially because in the relief of the battle of the Amazons, which is represented on the shield of the goddess, he carved a figure representing himself as a bald old man lifting up a stone with both hands, and also because he introduced a particularly fine likeness of Pericles fighting an Amazon. The position of the hand, which holds a spear in front of Pericles’ face, seems to have been ingeniously contrived to conceal the resemblance, but it can still be seen quite plainly from either side.
So Pheidias was cast into prison and there he fell sick and died. According to some accounts he was poisoned by his enemies in an attempt to blacken Pericles’ name still further. As for the informer, Menon, a proposal was passed, on Glycon’s motion, to make him exempt from all taxes and public burdens and the generals were ordered to provide for his safety.
32. About the same time Aspasia was put on trial for impiety. She was prosecuted by Hermippus the comic poet, who also accused her of procuring free-born Athenian women for Pericles and receiving them into her house. A decree was also introduced by Diopeithes, the diviner, to the effect that anybody who did not believe in the gods or taught theories about celestial phenomena should be liable to prosecution, and this was aimed to cast suspicion on Pericles through Anaxagoras. The people took up these slanders only too readily, and while they were in this mood a bill was passed on Dracontides’ initiative directing that the accounts of the public funds that Pericles had spent should be deposited with the prytanes, and that the jurors should pronounce their verdict on his case with ballots which had lain on the altar of the goddess on the Acropolis. However, this clause of the decree was amended by Hagnon, who moved that the case should be tried in the usual way, but before a body of 1,500 jurors, no matter whether it was to be termed a prosecution for embezzlement or bribery or malversation.
Pericles contrived to beg off Aspasia by bursting into floods of tears during her trial, so Aeschines tells us, and making a personal appeal to the jurors, but he was so alarmed for Anaxagoras’s safety that he smuggled him out of the city. Pericles had already fallen foul of the people on the occasion of Pheidias’s trial and he dreaded the jury’s verdict on his own case, and so now that the war was threatening and smouldering, we are told that he deliberately fanned it into flame. He hoped in this way to dispel the charges against him and make the people forget their jealousy, since he knew that as soon as any great enterprise or danger was in prospect, the city would put herself in his hands alone because of his great authority and prestige. These are the motives which are alleged for his refusal to allow the people to give way to the demands of Sparta, but the true history of these events is hidden from us.
33. The Spartans, for their part, recognized that if Pericles could be removed from power, they would find the Athenians much easier to deal with, and so they demanded that Athens should rid herself of the blood-guilt of Cylon,1 in which Pericles’s family on his mother’ side had been involved, as Thucydides explains. But this manoeuvre produced exactly the opposite effect to what was intended; instead of being slandered and treated with suspicion, Pericles now found himself more trusted and honoured by the Athenians than ever before, because they saw that the enemy feared and hated him more than any other single man. For this reason, before king Archidamus led the Peloponnesians into Attica, Pericles announced in public to the Athenians that if the king should ravage other estates but spare his own, either on account of the personal friendship between them or else to give his enemies cause to slander him, he would present all his lands and the buildings on them to the state.
The Spartans and their allies then proceeded to invade Attica with an immense army commanded by Archidamus. They advanced, devastating the land as they went, as far as Acharnae, which is very close to Athens, and there they pitched camp, for they imagined that the Athenians would never tolerate this, but would march out and fight them from sheer pride and anger. Pericles, however, judged that it would be a terrible risk to engage 60,000 Peloponnesian and Boeotian hoplites, (for the first invading army was at least as strong as this) and stake Athens’ very existence on the issue, so he tried to pacify those who were longing to fight and were becoming restive at the damage the enemy were doing. He pointed out that trees, even if they are lopped or cut down, can quickly grow again, but that you cannot easily replace the men who fall in battle. He would not summon the Assembly for fear that he might be forced to act against his better judgement. Instead, he behaved like the helmsman of a ship who, when a storm sweeps down upon it in the open sea, makes everything fast, takes in sail and relies on his own skill and takes no notice of the tears and entreaties of the sea-sick and terrified passengers. In the same way Pericles closed the gates of Athens, posted guards at all the necessary points for security and trusted to his own judgement, shutting his ears to the complaints and outcries of the discontented. At the same time many of his friends continually pressed him to take the offensive, while his enemies threatened and denounced his policy, and the comic poets in their choruses taunted him with mocking songs and abused his leadership for its cowardice and for abandoning everything to the enemy. Cleon, too, was already attacking him, and exploiting the general resentment against Pericles to advance his own prospects as a popular leader, as we see from this poem in anapaests by Hermippus:
Come now, king of the satyrs, stop waging the war
With your speeches, and try a real weapon!
Though I do not believe, under all your fine talk
You have even the guts of a Teles.
For if somebody gets out a whetstone and tries
Just to sharpen so much as a pen-knife,
You start grinding your teeth and fly into a rage
As if Cleon had come up and stung you.
34. Pericles, however, remained immovable and calmly endured all the ignominy and the hatred which were heaped upon him without making any reply. He sent a fleet of 100 ships to the Peloponnese, but did not accompany it himself. Instead, he remained behind to watch affairs at home and keep the city under his control until the Peloponnesians withdrew. Then he set himself to placate the people, who were suffering severely from the war even after the departure of the Peloponnesians, and he won back some of his popularity by giving them various subsidies and proposing grants of conquered territories: he expelled, for example, the whole population of Aegina and divided up the island among the Athenians by lot. The people could find some consolation, too, in the damage which was being inflicted on the enemy. The fleet, as it sailed round the Peloponnese, ravaged a very large area and sacked a number of villages and small towns, while Pericles himself led an expedition into the Megarid and devastated the whole territory. It was clear from this that although the enemy did the Athenians a great deal of harm by land, they themselves were also suffering severely from the sea. In fact, they would never have carried on the war so long, but would soon have called off hostilities had not an act of heaven intervened to upset human calculations.
For now the plague fell upon the Athenians1 and devoured the flower of their manhood and their strength. It afflicted them not only in body but also in spirit, so that they raved against Pericles and tried to ruin him, just as a man in a fit of delirium will attack his physician or his father. They were urged on by his personal enemies, who convinced them that the plague was caused by the herding together of the country folk into the city. Here, in the summer months, many of them lived huddled in shacks and stifling tents and were forced to lead an inactive indoor life, instead of being in the pure open air of the country, as they were accustomed. The man responsible for all this, they said, was Pericles: because of the war he had compelled the country people to crowd inside the walls, and he had then given them no employment, but left them penned up like cattle to infect each other, without providing them with any relief or change of quarters.
35. In the hope of relieving these troubles and at the same time doing some damage to the enemy, Pericles manned 150 warships, embarked a large number of the best hoplites and horsemen, and was all ready to put to sea. The Athenians had high hopes of what such a powerful expedition might achieve and the enemy were equally alarmed by it. But at the very moment when the ships were fully manned and Pericles had gone on board his own trireme, an eclipse of the sun took place, darkness descended and everyone was seized with panic, since they regarded this as a tremendous portent. When Pericles saw that his helmsman was frightened and quite at a loss what to do, he held up his cloak in front of the man’s eyes and asked him whether he found this alarming or thought it a terrible omen. When he replied that he did not, Pericles asked, ‘What is the difference, then, between this and the eclipse, except that the eclipse has been caused by something bigger than my cloak?’ This is the story, at any rate, which is told in the schools of philosophy.
After this Pericles put to sea, but he seems to have achieved nothing worthy of such an important expedition. He besieged the sacred town of Epidaurus and raised hopes of capturing it, but he was frustrated by the plague which attacked and destroyed not only his own men but all who came into contact with them. He tried to console and encourage the Athenians, who had now turned against him because of this reverse. But he could not appease their anger or win them over quickly enough, before they had snatched up their ballots and made themselves masters of his fate, and they proceeded to strip him of his command and punish him with a fine. This amounted to fifteen talents according to the lowest account, while the highest places it at fifty. Idomeneus says that the public prosecutor referred to in the records of the case was Cleon, although according to Theophrastus it was Simmias, and Heracleides of Pontus mentions Lacratides.
36. After this the troubles of Pericles’ public life were soon to be at an end, once the people had stung him and, as it were, left behind their fury in their sting. But his private affairs now caused him great distress. He had lost some of his closest friends in the plague and his affections had for some time past been torn by a family feud. Xanthippus, the eldest of his legitimate sons, was a spendthrift by nature, who had married a young and extravagant wife, the daughter of Tisander, Epilycus’s son. Xanthippus resented his father’s passion for economy and the meagre allowance he was given, and still more the fact that he only received it in small amounts. He therefore approached one of Pericles’ friends and borrowed money from him, pretending that this was on Pericles’ instructions. When the friend later asked for repayment, Pericles, so far from settling the debt, brought an action against him. Young Xanthippus was furious and began openly to abuse his father, telling stories to raise a laugh against him about his management of affairs at home and his conversations with sophists. For example, there was an athlete who had accidentally hit Epitimus the Pharsalian with a javelin and killed him, and Pericles wasted an entire day, according to Xanthippus, arguing with Protagoras as to whether, ‘in the strictest sense’, it was the javelin, or the man who threw it, or the judges of the games, who should be held responsible for the accident. According to Stesimbrotus it was also Xanthippus who put about the scandalous story concerning his own wife’s association with Pericles, and he says that to the very end of Xanthippus’ life the quarrel between him and his father was never made up, for the young man fell sick and died during the plague. At the same time Pericles lost his sister and most of his relatives and friends, as well as those who had been his most trusted assistants during his administration. Yet not even these afflictions could make him despair, nor weaken his courage and nobility of purpose; he was not seen to weep even at the funeral rites or at the grave of any of his nearest kin, until at last he lost Paralus, his only remaining legitimate son. Even though he was crushed by this blow, he strove to persist steadfastly in his normal conduct and to sustain his greatness of spirit; but as he laid a wreath on the dead body, the sight overwhelmed him and he broke into a passion of tears and sobs, a thing he had never done before in his life.
37. The people tried other generals and politicians in turn to carry on the war, but they found that none of these possessed a stature or an authority that was equal to the task of leadership. So the city came to long for Pericles and summoned him back to the Assembly and the War Department.1 Because of his grief he was lying at home in dejected spirits, but he was persuaded by Alcibiades and his other friends to appear again in public. After the people had made amends for their ungrateful treatment of him and he had once more taken over the direction of affairs and been elected general, he pleaded that the law concerning children born out of wedlock, which he himself had originally introduced, might be suspended for once in his favour. He asked this so that the name and lineage of his house should not die out for want of an heir.
The circumstances of this law were as follows. Many years before,2 when Pericles was at the height of his power, and, as I have mentioned, had legitimate children born to him, he proposed a law that only those who could claim Athenian parentage on both sides should be counted as Athenian citizens. So when the king of Egypt presented Athens with 40,000 measures of grain and this gift had to be distributed among the citizens, a long succession of lawsuits began to be brought against those whose birth was illegitimate according to Pericles’ law, but who until that moment had escaped notice and never been questioned, and many of them suffered at the hands of informers. As a result nearly five thousand people were convicted and sold into slavery, while those who retained their citizenship and were acknowledged to be true Athenians were found after this scrutiny to number 14,040. It was therefore a very serious matter that this law, which had been enforced so harshly against so many people, should now be suspended in favour of the very man who had introduced it. However, the Athenians felt that the misfortunes which had overtaken Pericles in his family life represented a kind of penalty which he had paid for his pride and presumption in the past, and their hearts were touched. It seemed to them that retribution had fallen upon him, and that his plea was one which it was only human for him to make and for them to grant, and so they allowed him to enrol his illegitimate son in the family phratry lists and to give him his own name. This was the son who, many years later, defeated the Peloponnesians in the naval battle at the Arginusae Islands1 and was put to death by popular decree along with his fellow generals.
38. Soon after this it appears that Pericles himself caught the plague. In his case it was not a violent or acute attack such as others had suffered, but a kind of dull, lingering fever, which persisted through a number of different symptoms and gradually wasted his bodily strength and undermined his noble spirit. At any rate Theophrastus in his Ethics discusses the problem of whether men’s characters change according to their circumstances and whether they may be so deranged by physical suffering as to lose their former virtues. As an example he quotes a story that Pericles, as he lay sick, showed one of the friends who had come to visit him a charm which the women had hung round his neck, so much as to say that he was very far gone to allow such a piece of folly.
As he was now on his death-bed,2 some of the leading men of Athens and the survivors among his friends were sitting around him, praising his virtues and the extent of his power and recounting his famous exploits and the number of trophies he had set up, for he had won no less than nine victories as Athens’ commander-in-chief. They were talking to each other in this way in his presence, supposing that he had lost consciousness and could no longer understand them. But Pericles had been following everything they said and he suddenly spoke out aloud. He was astonished, he told them, that they should praise and remember him for exploits which owed at least as much to good fortune as to his own efforts, and which many other generals had performed quite as well as himself, while they said nothing of his greatest and most glorious title to fame. ‘I mean by this,’ he went on, ‘that no Athenian ever put on mourning because of me.’
39. Pericles deserves our admiration, then, not only for the sense of justice and the serene temper that he preserved amid the many crises and intense personal hatreds which surrounded him, but also for his greatness of spirit. He considered it the highest of all his claims to honour that, despite the immense power he wielded, he had never given way to feelings of envy or hatred and had treated no man as so irreconcilable an enemy that he could never become his friend. This fact by itself, it seems to me, removes any objection to his otherwise pretentious and childish nickname, and, indeed, gives it a certain aptness: a character so gracious and a life so pure and uncorrupt in the exercise of sovereign power might well be called Olympian, according to our conception of the race of gods who rule over the universe as the authors of all good things and as beings who are by nature incapable of evil. In this we part company from the poets, who confuse us with their ignorant fantasies and contradict themselves with their own fables. They tell us that the abode of the gods is a calm, untroubled place, which knows neither wind nor cloud, but shines for all time with a soft radiance and a clear light, and this, they suggest, is the mode of being that befits a blessed and immortal nature; but at the same time they represent the gods themselves as being filled with discontent, malice, anger, and other passions, which would disgrace even mortal men who possessed any sense. But these reflections belong to another place.
After his death, the course of events soon brought home Pericles’ worth to the Athenians and made them sharply conscious of his loss. Those who in his lifetime had resented his power and felt that it overshadowed them turned to other orators and popular leaders as soon as he was out of the way, only to find themselves compelled to admit that no man for all his majesty was ever more moderate, or,when clemency was called for, better able to maintain his dignity. Henceforth the public life of Athens was to be polluted by a rank growth of corruption and wrongdoing, which Pericles had always checked and kept out of sight, thereby preventing it from taking an irresistible hold. Then it was that that power of his, which had aroused such envy and had been denounced as a monarchy and a tyranny, stood revealed in its true character as the saving bulwark of the state.