The Bases of Periclean Power: The Orator
In the funeral oration that Pericles delivered in 431, to honor the citizens who had fallen during the first year of the Peloponnesian War, he praised the city, emphasizing the role that speech played in deliberations and decision-taking: “We Athenians decide public questions for ourselves or at least endeavor to arrive at a sound understanding of them in the belief that it is not debate that is a hindrance to action, but rather not to be instructed by debate before the time comes for action.”1 Unlike the laconic Spartans, the Athenians indeed never hesitated to enter upon long discussions prior to voting, in the meetings of the Assembly that took place on the Pnyx hill forty times a year.
Speak before doing anything and reflect before taking action: this characterization of Athens is to some extent valid for Pericles himself who, under cover of his celebration of the whole city, was implicitly praising himself. Thucydides often describes the stratēgos as an orator who enlightens the crowd and influences the decisions that it takes. The art of speaking—or not speaking—was clearly a second basis upon which Periclean power rested.
In this Athenian city rapidly moving toward democratization, persuasive oratory was now playing a key role. In this respect, Pericles remained the incarnation, par excellence, of an orator endowed with a power of rhetoric that combined both authority and pedagogy. The ancient sources never cease to dwell upon his quasi-divine oratorical power, employing a selection of metaphors the effects of which need to be assessed. When Pericles addressed the people from the tribune of the Assembly, he abided by extremely elaborate codes of oratory. The rhetoric and gestures that he adopted made him a measured orator whose imperturbability was nevertheless interpreted by his opponents as arrogance or even aristocratic disdain.
Pericles was a past master not only of public speaking but also of the art of remaining silent or, to be more precise, of getting his political allies to speak in his place: in order not to saturate the crowds with his own presence, often I he would remain in the background so as to make his own rare public appearances more solemn and striking. The combination of all these facets of his behavior rendered his hold over the people well nigh irresistible.
PERICLES AND RHETORIC: KNOWING HOW TO SPEAK
Rhetoric and Democracy
The Athenian democracy respected the principle of isēgoria: equal access to public speech for all citizens. At the start of every Assembly meeting, after the Pnyx had been purified by a sacrifice, the herald (kērux) stepped out before the Athenians, said a prayer and pronounced a curse on any orator who attempted to mislead the people, and then asked, “Who wishes to speak?”. Whoever came forward placed upon his head a myrtle crown that made him unassailable, and spoke directly to the people, proposing a decree to be voted upon. Any citizen could, in his turn, speak in answer to the preceding orator. The Assembly thus proceeded like a competition (agōn) in public speaking, with the city gods looking on.
In truth, these egalitarian principles masked powerful internal hierarchies. In the first place, according to the orator Aeschines, Athenian law ruled that turns for speaking be determined by the speakers’ respective ages: the oldest citizens had the right to speak first and this lent a particular force to their words.2 Second, not many Athenians dared to speak in public. Unless a man had mastered the art of oratory, he would soon expose himself to ridicule or even to thorubos, the kind of general tumult often mentioned in the speeches of the Attic orators.3 Furthermore, speaking in public involved a legal risk: the orator was responsible before the magistrates for the motions for which he requested the people’s assent. Even if his point of view triumphed in the Assembly, he might then be pursued by his opponents within the framework of a legal trial in which he was accused of illegality, a graphē paranomōn that may have been instituted by Ephialtes’ reforms of 462/1. If found guilty by the judges, the orator had to pay a heavy fine or was even condemned to atimia, total or partial privation of his civic rights. So nobody came forward to speak without carefully weighing up the pros and cons.
Stepping up to the tribune involved personal initiative, and the risk was all the greater given that the orator could not count on the support of any structured political formation. Although historians are often inclined to reduce Athenian political life to confrontation between two camps—the aristocrats and the democrats—we know of no official political party possessed of a clearly defined policy and stable organization in Athens.4 Although influential men were surrounded by factions that supported them, these were always precarious and informal. Coalitions would form and disintegrate depending on the circumstances and the questions debated.
Within such a fluctuating framework, mastery of the art of oratory represented an essential trump card for anyone bold enough to ascend to the tribune. That is why the lessons of the sophists were so successful among the Athenian elite of the second half of the fifth century. The mission of these itinerant sages was, in return for considerable fees, to teach a person how to handle speech, whatever the circumstances. In the course of his long stay in Athens, the Sicilian sophist, Gorgias, from Leontini, is even said to have defined rhetoric as follows: “the ability to persuade with speeches either judges in the law courts or citizens in the Assembly or an audience at any other meeting that may be held on public affairs.”5 As can be imagined, in Athens the demand for such skills was particularly great. “To control the people with one’s tongue”6 was precisely the aim of Athenian orators schooled by the sophists.
Pericles mastered this art of persuasion (peithō) to the highest degree. The stratēgos dominated his opponents by his speech—and solely by his speech. In a city marked by its semi-literacy, Pericles was still fully a man of oral communication. Unlike the orators of the fourth century such as Demosthenes or Aeschines, he left to posterity no written texts, apart from his decrees. So it is only through the filter of other authors—in particular, Thucydides—that we can attempt to evaluate the nature of Pericles’ rhetoric and its amazing persuasive force.
Pericles the Demagogue
A reading of The Peloponnesian War enables one to appreciate the full measure of Pericles’ oratory. In this work, the historian records three long speeches delivered by the stratēgos. The first relates to the declaration of war; the second, dated 431, is the funerary oration in which Pericles celebrates an Athens still confident and domineering; the third, one year later, in 430, is the harangue that he addressed to a rowdy assembly at the time when the city, ravaged by the plague, had to endure the devastation of its territory.
Clearly, these extremely sophisticated if not sophistic speeches7 certainly do not bear authentic witness to Pericles’ eloquence. Thucydides may well have been present when these three rhetorical tours de force were delivered, but he reconstructed them many years later, leaving his own stamp upon them at a time when he had long since been living in exile. So these samples of Periclean eloquence are in all likelihood partly Thucydidean. Indeed, the historian himself half-admits to this at the beginning of his work: “The speeches are given in the language in which, as it seemed to me, the several speakers would express, on the subjects under consideration, the sentiments most befitting the occasion, though at the same time I have adhered as closely as possible to the general sense of what was actually said.”8
Despite this partial rewriting, The Peloponnesian War makes it possible to appreciate the two complementary facets of Pericles’ oratorical skill: authority and pedagogy. According to Thucydides, the stratēgos did not hesitate to counter the crowd’s anger and even chided it severely. This authoritarian dimension had a pedagogic aim. In his speeches to the Assembly, the stratēgos frequently addressed the people as he would a capricious child who would change its mind depending on the circumstances.9 This uncompromising speech-making won the historian’s admiration: “he restrained the multitude while respecting their liberties, and led them rather than was led by them, because he did not resort to flattery, with a view to pleasing them [pros hēdonēn], seeking power by dishonest means, but was able, in the strength of his high reputation, to oppose them and even provoke their wrath” (2.65.8). The fact is that Pericles stood out as being radically different from his successors who, according to Thucydides, sought in their speeches only to flatter the people, without any attempt to instruct it.10
Of course, this is an idealized description. Although contemporary sources are in agreement when they emphasize Pericles’ oratorical skills, they certainly do not all praise him for them. Pericles is often criticized for his ability to turn black into white—and, in particular, to persuade his listeners that he had won a fight when, in fact, he had lost it11—and he is often depicted as an orator who, though extraordinary, is alarming. The comic poets compare his eloquence now to a kind of bestial seduction, now to a divine enchantment, resorting to a double play of revealing metaphors.
First, consider the animal metaphor: in Eupolis’s Demes, Pericles’ wit is compared to the sting of a wasp or a bee: “Pericles was the most eloquent man in the world. When he appeared he was like a good sprinter. His words set him ten feet ahead of the other orators. He spoke rapidly, but as well as this rapidity, a kind of Persuasion [Peithō] clung to his lips, for he was the only orator who left his prick [kentron] in the ears of those who heard him” (fr. 102 K.-A.). Here, the poet assimilates Periclean rhetoric to a sting striking the listener in order to blunt his perceptions (the metaphor also clearly plays on sexual connotations).12
Now for the divine metaphor: according to Plutarch, it was on account of his extraordinary eloquence that Pericles was nicknamed “the Olympian” by the comic poets: “they spoke of him as ‘thundering’ and ‘lightning’ when he harangued his audience, and as “wielding a dread thunderbolt [keraunon] in his tongue.’”13 This metaphor attributes a quasi-divine power to the speech of the stratēgos. A thunderbolt, the divine attribute par excellence, could strike a person down and could bind those whom it touched, constricting them in unbreakable bonds from which it was absolutely impossible to escape.14 The poet Cratinus possibly resorted to the same analogy in his play titled The Ploutoi (The Spirits of Wealth), composed in 430/429 B.C. for the Lenaean Festival, in which he assimilated Pericles to Zeus “binding the rebel Titans in unbreakable bonds [desmoi].”15
Periclean eloquence thus possesses a disquieting power that links it now to the beasts, now to the gods. In both cases, the stratēgos was set apart from common humanity, either for better or for worse. When the comic writers presented him in this way, they intended to arouse in the public admiration as well as suspicion.16
One reason why Periclean rhetoric was effective, even terrifying, is that it observed a number of oratorical and gestural codes that served to magnify its impact and renown even further.
PERICLES AT THE TRIBUNE: KNOWING HOW TO BEHAVE
Oratorical Codes and Political Innuendo
In the Assembly, as in the Agora, Pericles’ behavior was, according to Plutarch, marked by order and balance. “He not only had … a spirit that was solemn and a discourse that was lofty and free from popular and reckless effrontery, but also a composure of countenance that never relaxed into laughter, a gentleness of carriage and cast of attire that suffered no emotion to disturb it while he was speaking, a modulation of voice that was far from boisterous [athorubon], and many similar characteristics which struck all his hearers with wondering amazement [thaumastōs].”17 Plutarch, the moralist, presents Pericles as the very embodiment of a model orator, in sharp contrast to demagogues such as Cleon.
According to the author of the Constitution of the Athenians, the death of Pericles in fact ushered in new oratorical codes: “When Pericles died, Nicias, who died in Sicily, held the headship of the men of distinction and the head of the People was Cleon, son of Cleaenetus, who was thought to have done the most to corrupt the people by his impetuous outbursts and was the first person to use bawling and abuse on the platform, all other persons speaking in an orderly fashion.”18 Thucydides described Cleon as “the most violent of the citizens of his day,” and Aristophanes declared him to be a “thief, brawler, roaring as Cycloborus roars.”19 To the horror of members of the traditional elite but in keeping with democratic ideology, Cleon broke with the current conventions. Although the origin of his wealth and his way of addressing the public shocked some of the Athenian elite, they in no way offended the sensibilities of the people, as was proved by his brilliant career and his numerous reelections to the post of stratēgos.
Cleon initiated a new mode of communication between the leaders and the dēmos, and it was destined to enjoy a fine future. In the fourth century, the orator Aeschines reminisced about a time in the past when orators spoke in a more measured fashion, with one hand placed beneath a fold in their clothing—the himation—thereby conveying their moderation and distinction:
So decorous were those public men of old, Pericles, Themistocles and Aristides (who was called by a name most unlike that by which Timarchus here is called), that to speak with the arm outside the cloak, as we all do nowadays as a matter of course, was regarded then as an ill-mannered thing and they carefully refrained from doing it. … See now, fellow-citizens, how unlike to Timarchus were … those men of old whom I mentioned a moment ago. They were too modest to speak with the arm outside the cloak, but this man, not long ago, yes, only the other day, in an assembly of the people, threw off his cloak and leaped about like a gymnast, half-naked.20
Quite apart from its nostalgic tone, this passage shows how much oratorical gestures and techniques had changed since the age of Pericles. But even if he praises the eloquence of the past, the better to draw attention to the lack of dignity of Timarchus, his opponent, Aeschines in no way calls for a return to the conventions of the past that—in any case—would no longer have suited the fourth-century audience.
Pericles thus founded his oratorical successes upon a way of addressing the people that was somewhat out of date. All the same, the reason he fascinated his listeners so much was not just because he was the last representative of a form of eloquence that was on the way out. Far from invariably respecting well-trodden paths, as an orator he broke away from the customary codes of behavior, in that he never responded with violence to attacks launched against him. Throughout his career, Pericles manifested an unrivaled ability to suffer outrageous assaults without striking back. This set him apart from his contemporaries and lent a particular solemnity to his words.
Periclean Imperturbability: An Ambiguous Solemnity
At the Assembly’s tribune, Pericles was several times confronted by the people’s anger, but never betrayed the slightest annoyance. This imperturbability was highlighted in 430 B.C., when the Athenians accused him of being responsible for the many disasters that had struck them. As Plutarch, following Thucydides, points out: “Pericles was moved by no such things, but gently and silently underwent the ignominy and the hatred [tēn adoxian kai tēn epekhtheian].”21 Far from being dictated by the circumstances, this imperturbability was a deliberate strategy on the part of the Athenian leader, who observed this line of conduct not only in the Assembly but also when in the Agora, engaging in the exchanges of daily life. Plutarch records a particularly striking episode: “Once, at a time when he had been abused and insulted all day long by a certain lewd fellow of the baser sort, he endured it all quietly, though it was in the market place, where he had urgent business to transact, and towards evening went away homewards unruffled, the fellow following along and heaping all manner of contumely upon him. When he was about to go indoors, it being now dark, he ordered a servant to take a torch and escort the fellow in safety back to his own home.”22 Rather than react as any citizen normally would, Pericles remained unmoved and refused to lose his temper despite repeated insults. This was, to put it mildly, an unusual reaction. Faced with such a torrent of insults, the normal reaction would have been to respond to the affront by giving as good as he got—a form of negative reciprocity—or else to set the matter before the judges, for to insult serving magistrates was behavior liable to heavy punishment.23 Not only did the stratēgos refrain from replying but he chose to respond to the humiliation with a kindness—in accordance with a positive form of reciprocity: he had the offender escorted back to his home.
In Plutarch’s account, Pericles thus stands out by reason of his imperturbable behavior, at the risk of compromising his honor as a citizen and his dignity as a magistrate.24 It is tempting to link this phlegmatic attitude with his sculpted effigy, which represents him as impassive, parading a serenity untouched by emotion, as if whoever commissioned the sculpture (either himself or his relatives) wished to emphasize this particularly detached way of behaving and appearing.25
This representation of a Pericles of bronze, draped in all his dignity, was, however, not devoid of a measure of ambiguity. His opponents suggested that this carefully studied pose was simply a disguised form of arrogance. A refusal to respond to insults might well pass for a manifestation of an excessive distance, for it was a way of refusing to communicate with ordinary citizens, even in an aggressive mode. Such was the reproach expressed by Ion of Chios, who was always quick to criticize the stratēgos, to the advantage of Cimon: “The poet Ion, however, says that Pericles had a presumptuous [hupotuphon] and somewhat arrogant manner of address and that into his haughtiness [megalaukhiais] there entered a good deal of disdain and contempt for others; he praises, on the other hand, the tact, complaisance and elegant address which Cimon showed in his social intercourse.”26
When he displayed such emotional detachment, Pericles shocked his contemporaries as much as he fascinated them: when solemnity (semnotēs) was not tempered by a dose of affability, it always risked being taken badly and considered to reflect an anti-democratic stance.27 That is precisely the gist of a line by the comic poet Cratinus, who presents Pericles as “a man full of haughtiness and frowning brows [anelktais ophrusi semnon].”28 Weird though it might seem, in Athens, certain facial expressions conveyed well-established political meanings. Frowning eyebrows were considered as an external sign of oligarchical or even tyrannical aspirations. So when the orator Demosthenes wanted to discredit his opponent Aeschines, he reproached him not only for his sumptuous clothing and his imposing trailing train but also for his frowning brows: “But since he has perpetrated wrongs without number, he has become mighty supercilious [tas ophrus anespake]. … Behold him, pacing the market-place with the stately stride of Pythocles, his long robe reaching to his ankles, his cheeks puffed out, as one who should say ‘One of Philip’s most intimate friends, at your service!’ He has joined the clique that wants to get rid of democracy.”29 As a reflection of a misplaced solemnity, frowning brows—here rendered as “superciliousness”—could be interpreted as a manifestation of overweaning scorn. So when he dwelt on this seemingly anodyne facial detail, Cratinus was launching a particularly grave accusation against Pericles.30
When Pericles addressed the people with such imposing solemnity, he was bound to attract virulent criticism from all those bent on representing such behavior as tyrannical haughtiness. To counter that suspicion, the stratēgos devised a new stratagem to protect himself from similar accusations: he would take care to limit his public declarations and appearances so as not to have the people tire of him.
PERICLES OFFSTAGE: KNOWING HOW TO KEEP QUIET
The Art of Delegation
Whoever intervened on every point on the political stage, was bound, eventually, to aggravate his fellow-citizens. In his Precepts of Statecraft (811E), Plutarch enjoys reminding his readers of this fact: “Those who strip for every political activity … soon cause themselves to be criticized by the multitude; they become unpopular and arouse envy when they are successful, but joy when they meet with failure.” Pericles seems to have been deeply aware of this danger. In the course of his career, he limited the number of his public interventions by getting his friends to speak in his place. It was often those close to him who, in the Assembly, stepped up to the tribune to propose the decrees that Pericles wished to submit for public approval. In this way, his authority was protected from envy yet without being any the less effective. As Plutarch, again, remarks: “Pericles made use of Menippus for the position of general, humbled the Council of the Areopagus by means of Ephialtes, passed the decree against the Megarians by means of Charinus, and sent Lampon out as founder of Thurii. For, when power seems to be distributed among many, not only does the weight of hatreds and enmities become less troublesome, but there is also greater efficiency in the conduct of affairs.”31
So Pericles resorted to a practice that was well-attested in the fourth century. At that time, certain citizens had no compunction whatever about selling their names and proposing decrees of which they were not the true authors: “[Stephanos] was not yet a public speaker, but thus far merely a pettifogger, one of those who stand beside the platform and shout, who prefer indictments and informations for hire, and who let their names be inscribed on motions made up by others.”32 Seen in this light, it is perhaps not simply by chance that no decree proposed by Pericles is attested epigraphically among the dozens that cover the period in which he is said to have wielded such decisive influence.
Cleverly delegating power in order to strengthen his own authority, Pericles made use of a number of “straw men,” who functioned as so many lightning conductors that distracted the people’s hatred. In this way, Metiochus (or Metichus), totally unknown in any other respect,33 is described by Plutarch as the clumsy victim of his own activism. This understudy of Pericles seems to have become the target of the comic authors, who mocked him mercilessly: “Metiochus, you see, is general, Metiochus inspects the roads, Metiochus inspects the bread and Metiochus inspects the flour, Metiochus takes care of all things and Metiochus will come to grief.”34 As Plutarch correctly points out, “He was one of Pericles’ followers and seems to have used the power gained through him in such a way as to arouse odium and envy [epiphthonōs]” (Precepts of Statecraft, 811F).
The same applies to the seer Lampon, another of the stratēgos’s trusted followers.35 The scene unfolds in 444/3 B.C., when the Greek world was finally enjoying some respite from warfare. After trying in vain to convene a pan-Hellenic congress (Pericles, 17.1), Pericles made the most of the “Thirty Years’ Peace” signed with Sparta and its allies and launched an ambitious project: the founding of a new colony at Thurii, in Magna Graecia, on the site of the ancient Sybaris. Even though the Dorian cities of the Peloponnese did not take part, the expedition was a propagandist success, involving numerous Greeks such as the architect Hippodamus of Miletus, the historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus, and the sophist Protagoras of Abdera. Rather than take any leading role, Pericles sheltered behind Lampon in carrying out this operation: the seer, placed at the head of the colonists, even acted as one of the founders (oikistēs) of the colony (Diodorus, 12.10.3–4). However, this sudden notoriety of his made him the butt of attacks from the comic poets, as can be seen from several fragments of Cratinus.36 Concealed behind Lampon, Pericles was sheltered from attack at the very moment when he had to confront the increasingly virulent opposition of Thucydides of Alopeke; less than one year later, his opponent was ostracized, having failed to come to grips with the stratēgos lying low in the shadows, carefully concealed behind his political allies.
A Strategy of Light and Darkness
To preserve his authority, Pericles felt it necessary to secure a shadowy zone for himself: “Pericles, seeking to avoid the satiety which springs from continual intercourse, made his approaches to the people by intervals, as it were, not speaking on every question, nor addressing the people on every occasion, but offering himself like the Salaminian trireme, as Critolaus says, for great emergencies” (Pericles, 7.5). Skilfully handled, this measure of obscurity was not solely designed to disarm the envy of the people; it also had the advantage of imparting a particular dignity to Pericles’ rare appearances.
In a very attenuated way, such behavior was reminiscent of a “hidden king,” who reigned in his palace, sheltered from the eyes of the masses. Being shut away and kept secret indeed constituted means whereby royal authority was strengthened—this voluntary seclusion being the essential element in the “imperial mysteries” that the Greeks could observe from their contact with the palaces of eastern potentates. In his account of the Persian Wars, Herodotus had, precisely, described how the Median king, Deiokes, had adapted an imposing ceremonial that cut him off from his subjects in such a way that he remained surrounded by a quasi-divine aura. Many decades later, Xenophon likewise emphasized the role played by ceremony in the construction of the authority of Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire: the great king chose to live partly cloistered away, so as to appear only at particularly ritualized and majestic moments. To some extent, Pericles appropriated certain elements of that Eastern tradition, adapting it to the democratic context—just as he seems to have been inspired by the architecture of the Persian Empire when he built the Odeon on the slopes of the Acropolis.37
In truth, the fourth-century Athenians were not fooled by such stratagems and were wary of men who calculated their public appearances too carefully. When accused of speaking in the Ekklēsia in too parsimonious a fashion, Aeschines, for example, found himself obliged to justify his behavior to his fellow-citizens: “You blame me if I come before the people not constantly but only at intervals … [yet] the fact that a man speaks only at intervals marks him as a man who takes part in politics because of the call of the hour and for the common good; whereas to leave no day without its speech is the mark of a man who is making a trade of it and talking for pay.”38 So, to convince his audience that he was behaving as a perfect democrat, Aeschines presented himself as an ordinary citizen—not a professional orator—who spoke in the Assembly only from time to time, as circumstances demanded. He hoped in this way to disarm critics who regarded his fleeting appearances as a sign of his unconfessed and unconfessable oligarchic aspirations.
Even if such calculated reticence sometimes aroused suspicions, it clearly benefited Pericles. His measured appearances impressed the masses all the more because they evoked not just an imperial ceremony, but possibly even a form of religious epiphany. That is the implication of the comparison that Plutarch draws between, on the one hand, Pericles and, on the other, the Salaminian and Paralian triremes—two sacred vessels used only for exceptional events. Plutarch makes his meaning clear in his Precepts of Statecraft when, without actually naming Pericles, he declares: “Just as the Salaminia and the Paralus ships at Athens were not sent out to sea for every service, but only for necessary and important missions, so the statesman should employ himself for the most momentous and important matters, as does the King of the Universe.”39 Political leaders and deities in the same boat! It is in this context of a quasi-divine apparition that the nickname given to Pericles—he was called “the Olympian”—deserves to be analyzed.40
In this interplay of shadow and light, there were inevitably both winners and losers. Metiochus, about whom nothing is known, or even Ephialtes, reduced to a mere silhouette, are the forgotten ones in this story of light and darkness. Having been exposed to the full glare of publicity, they were condemned to remain in the glorious shadow of Pericles, the past master of both speech and silence.