FOREWORD

Introducing Azoulay’s Pericles

Paul Cartledge

There is no shortage of would-be biographies of Pericles, son of Xanthippus of the deme Cholargos (to give him his full, ancient Athenian democratic-citizen nomenclature). But to be frank, not many of them are much good—and that includes the best surviving ancient one, compiled by Plutarch of Chaeronea in about A.D. 100. One hint that Plutarch was not perhaps on the very top of his form here is that the ancient Roman with whom he saw fit to compare or rather contrast the Athenian Greek was Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, later nicknamed Cunctator (“the Delayer”), the man tasked with rescuing Republican Rome’s fortunes after the disastrous defeat inflicted by Hannibal at Cannae in 216 B.C. The careers of Pericles and Fabius simply did not have enough points of significant similarity to make the comparison at all helpful or even interesting.

On the other hand, the fact that pastmaster Plutarch could do no better suggests that writing a good biography of Pericles would have been a pretty hopeless goal for any ancient author. And since Plutarch did at least have at his disposal a large amount of primary written source material not available to or used by any later author, the lot of the modern would-be biographer is even more desperate. Yet this has not deterred a seemingly endless succession of attempts at, if not strictly a Life of Pericles, then at any rate a Life and Times. This latter at least is understandable. The times Pericles lived in—from about 493 to 429 B.C.—and indeed helped to make and shape were deeply interesting, and the family and the city of his birth lay at their very epicenter.

Pericles belonged to the same aristocratic family, the Alcmeonids of Athens, from which had issued the man credited—by Herodotus, the father of Western historiography—with introducing Greece’s first democracy, in 508/7 B.C. He lived through the Greco-Persian Wars of 490 (Marathon) and 480–479 (Salamis and Plataea). He sponsored, at the tender age of twenty or so, the earliest surviving tragic drama by Athens’s and Greece’s first master of that evergreen theatrical genre: the Persians of Aeschylus first staged in the Theater of Dionysus at the foot of the Athenian Acropolis in early 472. He was intimately connected with the building program on top of the Acropolis that witnessed the construction preeminently of the Parthenon (447–432). He hobnobbed with leading intellectuals of the day, both Athenian and foreign. His private life—living with a foreign Greek woman to whom he could not legally be married, thanks to a law that he had himself sponsored in 451—was a scandal that writers of comic drama considered a gift. Above all, so far as posterity is concerned, Pericles made such a huge—and hugely favorable—impression on Herodotus’s principal successor as a writer of big Greek history, Thucydides of Athens (ca. 455–400?), that Thucydides came near to calling him the uncrowned monarch of Athens, and to writing his history of the Atheno-Peloponnesian War (431–404) in terms of the Athenians’ adherence to or failure to adhere to the policies and strategies advocated, so persuasively, by Pericles—as Thucydides understood and presented them.

It was thus Thucydides who posed Plutarch the biographer with his greatest problem, and Thucydides too who ultimately set up the problematic with which Dr. Azoulay grapples in this intriguing, innovative, and justly prizewinning book.1 For Plutarch found it very hard to reconcile the sober-sided statesmanlike Pericles of Thucydides with the scandalously self-indulgent and bohemian Pericles presented in other contemporary, fifth-century B.C. sources, including both comic drama and law court oratory. Dr. Azoulay, for his part, has several objectives in view, but not the least of them is to deconstruct the image of Pericles that is now standard both in scholarship and in more popular works—namely, that of a game-changer, the “grand homme” and very epitome of not just Athens but also his “age.”²

Let us therefore start this very brief introduction with that notion of Pericles as secular hero, the ancient Greek answer to Voltaire’s Louis XIV: was there, really, a “siècle de Périclès”? One of the many surprises that Dr. Azoulay can spring is to show how recent that notion is—no more ancient, that is, than the era of Voltaire himself. The phrase itself goes no further back than the future Frederick the Great’s Anti-Machiavel of 1739, published (anonymously) in Amsterdam in 1740 and vigorously distributed by Voltaire himself. But, as Dr. Azoulay ably shows, it is not until very much more recently that it has gained wide currency and been given, supposedly, material content. Not the least of the many valuable historiographical services our author performs is to show how shaky are the foundations of such an intellectual-ideological edifice.

Indeed, the prime virtue of this outstanding book is that it is resolutely historiographical and problematizing. So far from attempting merely to set out “how it actually was” in Pericles’ life and lifetime, Dr. Azoulay frames his “biographical odyssey” in terms of a series of—roughly chronologically ordered—problems. He begins (chapter 1) with the problem of how the young Pericles accommodated himself to the illustrious but also notorious families into which he was born: on his mother’s side he was an Alcmaeonid, and thus under an ancestral curse going back almost a century and a half, on his father’s he was heir to a mega-feud with the no less aristocratic family of Miltiades of Marathon. His second problem (chapters 2 and 3) is that of the twin military and rhetorical bases of his political power—and what “power” meant or could mean in a democracy such as Athens was and, thanks not least to Pericles’ own efforts, became. A third problem concerns the power and wealth of Athens as that was expressed both externally and internally: how far was Pericles himself responsible for the imperialism of Athens (chapter 4)? In what way and to what extent did the by Greek standards massive internal revenues of Athens grease the wheels of democracy (chapter 5)? The fourth problem addressed by Dr. Azoulay is that of the relationship not so much between the public and the private as between the personal and the communitarian: in chapter 6 are considered with great finesse Pericles’ interactions with relatives and friends; in chapter 7 the unconventional “erotics” of his scandal-ridden career; and in chapter 8 his relations with the gods of the polis (“citizen-state”) of democratic Athens.³

The final chapters are the most explicitly historiographical in content and flavor: As the author states at the start of chapter 11, “One of the primary virtues of a historiographical inquiry is certainly its ability to dispel automatic assumptions and show that traditions do themselves have a history.” Chapter 9 explores the vision peddled particularly by Plato and inherited by Plutarch of Pericles as not at all the Thucydidean statesman, but the ultimate demagogue, the vilest mis-leader and immoral corruptor of the ordinary people of Athens. This is a vision that is shown to owe more to snobbery and antidemocratic sentiment than to objective historical evaluation and rational judgment. But it was also a vision that made it hard for Pericles to ascend to the status and stature of “great man,” as he did in a complicated process that Dr. Azoulay most skilfully untangles in chapter 11 (fifteenth to eighteenth centuries) and chapter 12 (eighteenth to twenty-first centuries). For Machiavelli and Bodin, Pericles was the very incarnation of democratic instability, for Montaigne a model of trumpery rhetoric, and indeed until after the French Revolution Pericles was deemed and doomed to remain firmly in the historiographical-ideological shadows. No gloriously conquering Alexander, no bravely fighting Cimon, no sagely legislating Solon he. And yet, as noted earlier, it was in the 1730s that the “Age of Pericles” tag first saw the light or, as Dr. Azoulay puts it, that the Periclean “myth” was born.

J.-J. Winckelmann’s pioneering art history of “Antiquity” of 1764, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, privileged the classical “Periclean” moment of fifth-century Greece and Athens, where and when as he saw it political, social, and intellectual conditions conduced most favorably to fostering eternally valuable aesthetic creativity. But it was the English private scholar and historian George Grote, ex-MP, who did most to establish the story of Athens and Athenian (quasi-parliamentary) democracy as the master-narrative of Western enlightenment in his originally twelve-volume History of Greece (1846–1856; esp. vol. VI, ch. XLVII), in the process permanently displacing from that role the rival city of Sparta—whose cause was not helped by its being so fervently embraced by reactionaries and nationalists from William Mitford in the late eighteenth century, through the pedagogues of the Royal Prussian Cadet-Corps of the later nineteenth, to those of the National Socialist elite schools sponsored in Hitler’s name by his academic lapdogs in the twentieth.4

A central chapter (chapter 10) addresses explicitly the problematic of the “great man” or event-making hero. It would be wrong for me to spoil the party by revealing Dr. Azoulay’s own take on that, although I can safely disclose that his Pericles is not that of Evelyn Abbott, author in the “Heroes of the Nations” series of Pericles and the Golden Age of Athens (New York/London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1891), nor indeed that of Thucydides. I can also add that here, as indeed throughout this book, he writes with great clarity, and with an impressive depth of interpretative sophistication, both qualities that have been expertly captured in this excellent translation by the doyenne of nontraducers, Janet Lloyd.