CHAPTER 12

Pericles Rediscovered: The Fabrication of the Periclean Myth (18th to 21st Centuries)

From the Renaissance right down until the beginning of the nineteenth century, Pericles was seldom raised to the rank of a model. For most of the time, he was arrogantly ignored and remained in the shadow of the great men of Sparta and Rome. When his memory was recalled, it was mainly to his disadvantage; depicted, as he was, now as a corrupting demagogue, now as a corrupt warmonger, for the elite groups of the modern era his role was that of a scarecrow. That critical approach, inspired by Plutarch, became even more entrenched in the eighteenth century and peaked at the time of the French Revolution.

Yet it was at the point when those attacks became most virulent that a more favorable view of the stratēgos was quietly taking shape. For not all the men of the Enlightenment were particularly keen on austere Sparta or the moderate democracy of Solon. Although Charles Perrault sought to compare “the age of Louis XIV” solely to that of Augustus, Voltaire insisted that “the age of Pericles” would not be at all shamed by such a comparison. The famous formula “the age of Pericles,” which was to enjoy a fine future, now made its appearance.

However, it was only in Germany that, as early as the eighteenth century, Pericles became an undisputed icon. In the relationship to Antiquity, the Germans were already following a Sonderweg, or path of their own, in that they preferred not only Greece to Rome, but also Athens to Sparta, and it was, moreover, Classical—not Archaic—Athens that won all their attention. As early as 1755, Winckelmann was presenting an enchanted view of the Athenian art of the mid-fifth century, a view with which Pericles was closely associated.

Elsewhere in Europe, it was not until the following century that there appeared a magnified image of Pericles in the guise of a great bourgeois parliamentarian. The monumental History of Greece written by the liberal historian George Grote and published in the mid-nineteenth century played a crucial role in this change of view. This work, which was rapidly translated into French, in its turn inspired the reflections of European historians such as Victor Duruy and Ernst Curtius. Within a few decades, Pericles became the very embodiment of the Greek miracle, to the point of being celebrated as the genius who had bequeathed to posterity two imperishable monuments: the marble creation of the Parthenon and the verbal creation of the funeral oration.

For the Periclean myth to become rooted, it was necessary for two parallel developments to come together. In the first place, a change in political practices and ideas: the progress made by parliamentary democracy in the nineteenth century did much to boost the new popularity of the stratēgos. Second, a new perception of historical time was needed: just as the model of a historia magistra vitae was receding, there emerged a mode of history that was, if not scientific, at the least attentive to the succession of different ages and civilizations—their births, their peaks, and their declines. In this new regime of historicity, Pericles found a place of importance, as an essential player in the constitution of this Classical age that presented Antiquity with its most beautiful monuments.

But the nineteenth century was also marked by the matter of nationalisms. This impassioned interest in identities affected relations with Antiquity in a lasting fashion. Through a strange kind of osmosis between interconnecting vessels, just as the French and the English were rediscovering Pericles, the Germans seemed to be turning away from him. Within the framework of Bismarck’s new State, the Athenian stratēgos was no longer surrounded by an aura of sanctity; the landowning and military elite groups of Prussia, the Junkers, were now identifying with the Spartans, while the Hohenzollern dynasty took its models from Alexander and the Hellenistic kings.

These divergent historiographical trajectories appeared in the full light of day in the twentieth century. In World War I, for example, the British invoked the memory of Pericles when faced with the Germans, who were converted to Spartans. But the allocation of roles was not always so clearcut. Even as the memory of the stratēgos was cherished by European democrats, Pericles also elicited a certain fascination among Nazi intellectuals, who were won over by his oratorical charisma, his great architectural works, and his intransigent imperialism.

After the end of World War II, attitudes toward Pericles changed again. Once he had been converted to an innocuous icon for school classrooms, within popular culture the stratēgos came to arouse nothing but indifference. Meanwhile, among historians, his image was deteriorating as decolonization speeded up and the ideology of the rights of man—and woman—was increasingly forcefully affirmed. Now, Pericles was sometimes presented as the promoter of an imperialist, slave-based, and macho system in a mirror held up to a Western world that was now assailed by doubt as to its founding values. Having for centuries been criticized for being too democratic, now he was attacked for not being democratic enough.

THE ROOTS OF THE PERICLEAN MYTH

The Genealogy of a Formula: “The Age of Pericles”

Even today, “the age of Pericles” formula is a cliché.1 That expression, along with the milder “Athens in Pericles’ day,” until recently appeared in school syllabuses for sixth-grade students in France to indicate the study of Athenian democracy as a whole. But, far from being neutral, it is a formula that implies a particular way of thinking about time and historical developments; it is, in itself, already an interpretation that suggests that one individual can model the face of a whole period to the point of coming to embody it entirely.

To trace the genealogy of the expression, we need to go back to the early centuries of the Christian era, when Eusebius, Jerome, and Augustine were proposing that historical development should be envisaged as an immutable sequence of four “ages” or “centuries”:² the Assyrians (or Babylonians); the Persians (or Medes/Persians); the Macedonians; and, finally, the Romans. The concept was based on an interpretation of the vision of Daniel, in the Old Testament (Daniel 7.2–8)—a vision that introduced four beasts that symbolized four future kings or kingdoms.

In the sixteenth century, Jean Bodin recalled that ancient image, the better to dismiss it. In chapter 7 of his Méthode de l’histoire (Historical Method), he tried to refute “the theory of the four monarchies and the four golden ages [aurea secula],”³ which, according to him, was based on a mistaken interpretation of the sacred texts. However, the notion of an “age” was not abandoned, even if, at this point, it was profoundly rearranged. Instead of serving to suggest a succession of empires leading up to the second coming of Christ, the formula came to characterize particular periods, regardless of any concern to insert them into some historical continuum. For instance, at the time of the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns (ca. 1680–1720), the royal historiographers constructed “the age of Louis XIV” as a mirror of “the age of Augustus,”⁴ as if those two high points in human history reflected one another timelessly across the intervening centuries.

The formula was applied to Pericles only quite late in the day, for it did not appear until the mid-eighteenth century, when it was used for the first time—to my knowledge—by the future Frederick II of Prussia. In 1739, the young prince had the idea of writing a refutation of Machiavelli, underlining the need for a monarch to serve the State, govern according to reason and reject all wars of conquest. Voltaire, won over by this enlightened concept of power, showered endless praises upon the manuscript and even found himself entrusted with the task of editing it. After many ups and downs, that task was completed in 1741,5 just as Frederick came to the throne. In his Anti-Machiavelli, the new sovereign tried to define an ambitious artistic policy, taking Athens as his model: “Nothing makes a Reign more illustrious than the Arts that flourish under its protection. The age of Pericles is as famous for the great men of genius who lived in Athens as for the Battles that the Athenians were then fighting.”⁶ In its first appearance, “the age of Pericles” thus found its unity in the flourishing of its arts, not in the birth of politics—for democracy was certainly by no means compatible with the ideals, however enlightened, of Frederick II. Several years before Winckelmann and shortly after the publication of the Ancient History composed by Rollin (1731–1738), the Anti-Machiavelli thus heralded the pro-Periclean turning point reached by the members of the German elite in the eighteenth century.⁷

In France, this positive view was relayed ten years later by Voltaire in his Le siècle de Louis XIV (The Age of Louis XIV). Right at the beginning of this work, the philosophe resuscitated the theory of the four ages of humanity, although he subverted the original meaning: “Whosoever thinks, or what is still more rare, whosoever has taste, will find but four ages in the history of the world. These four happy ages are those in which the arts were carried to perfection and which, by serving as an era of the greatness of the human mind, are examples for posterity.”⁸ Voltaire allotted ancient Greece a place of honor, mixing together politicians, philosophers, and artists in exuberant chronological disorder: “The first of these ages to which true glory is annexed is that of Philip and Alexander or that of a Pericles, a Demosthenes, an Aristotle, a Plato, an Apelles, a Phidias, and a Praxiteles.”⁹ So the writer did not, strictly speaking, isolate an “age of Pericles,” since this list of names amalgamated not only different periods—the fifth and the fourth centuries B.C.—but also antagonistic political regimes—the monarchy of Macedon and the democracy of Athens. In truth, Voltaire had no sympathy for Periclean democracy, as such, as he explained to Frederick the Great at the end of 1772: “When I begged you to restore the fine arts of Greece, my request did not go so far as to ask you to reestablish Athenian democracy; I have no liking for government by the mob.”¹⁰ If the philosophe valued Athens so highly, it was not so much for its political liberty but for its trade and opulence, in which he detected fertile ground that favored a blossoming of the arts and letters.11

In France, the expression “the age of Pericles” did not become common currency until the eve of the revolution; and when it did, it was not in a positive sense. Condillac, influenced by his brother, Mably, used the formula negatively in his Histoire ancienne, composed in 1775 for Louis XV’s grandson, the prince of Parma. In opposition to Voltaire’s paean of praise, Condillac declared, “The excesses to which luxury leads are always harbingers of the fall of empires. The ages in which it holds sway are those that come to be called fine ages and the age of Pericles was the first of those prized centuries. They would be valued more accurately if the clamour of those celebrating them allowed the groans of the people to be heard.”¹²

In 1788, Abbé Barthélemy, in his turn, employed the expression in his Voyage du jeune Anacharsis, using it as the title of a section of the introduction that preceded the story. Before tackling the book’s actual subject, the author reflected upon “the age of Solon” (630–490); “the age of Themistocles and Aristides” (490–444); and, finally, “the age of Pericles” (444–404), indicating the dates of each period in a note. This chronological arrangement was by no means favorable to the stratēgos. The short “age of Pericles,” which lasted no more than forty years, did not include the glorious Persian Wars but only the shameful Peloponnesian War. Barthélemy thus chose to link together what Thucydides had deliberately set apart—the time before and the time after Pericles and the glorious reign of the stratēgos that was followed by the sordid domination of the demagogues, which led to Athens’s undoing.

So it was not until the following century that the expression acquired a definitely positive connotation, with the elaboration of a representation of a bourgeois and liberal Athens that was in step with the political developments of the period. All the same, in the eighteenth century, Voltaire was neither the only one nor the first to sketch in a more favorable portrait of the stratēgos. Influenced by Thucydides, a number of the Enlightenment historians did likewise, without, however, jettisoning a number of prejudices that had resulted from the reading of Plutarch.

A Two-Faced Pericles: The Ambivalence of Enlightenment Historians

Although the partisans of Athens were certainly less numerous than Sparta’s admirers, their voices did not go unheeded. Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Condorcet all contrasted the frugality of Sparta to an Athens whose power rested not on weapons but on trade and luxury.13 Nevertheless, this alternative tradition does not necessarily redound to the credit of Pericles himself. The article titled “Luxury” composed by Saint-Lambert for the Encyclopédie is altogether symptomatic in this respect: while he rejected Rousseau’s idea that Athens was corrupted by the theater, it was certainly not so as to rehabilitate the stratēgos, for he went on to explain, “It was by bringing down the Areopagus, not by constructing theatres, that Pericles destroyed Athens.”¹⁴ Even in the eyes of the philosophes who were fascinated by Athenian elegance, the reputation of Pericles remained lastingly tarnished.

However, the Enlightenment historians were kinder to the stratēgos. One of them was Charles Rollin (1661–1741). In his monumental Histoire ancienne in thirteen volumes,¹⁵ which was read throughout scholarly Europe and was immediately translated into English, Athens was presented as an enlightened city, open to both arts and letters.¹⁶ In particular, Rollin admired its well-balanced political regime in which popular government was harmoniously combined with the influence of great men. The reign of Pericles naturally occupied a major place in his account, even though blame was still mixed in with praise for Pericles.

In the section devoted to the “character of Pericles,” Rollin started off by considering all the clichés produced about Pericles’ supposed demagogy. He noted that, in order to discomfit his rival Cimon, the stratēgos had distributed plots of land, multiplied entertainments, and distributed pay to the people. His opinion, which was influenced by Plutarch, was by no means flattering to Pericles: “It is impossible to say how fatal these unhappy politics were to the republic and the many evils by which they were attended. For these new regulations, besides their draining the public treasury, gave the people a luxurious and dissolute turn of mind; whereas before they were sober and modest, and contented themselves with getting a livelihood by their sweat and labour.”¹⁷ More surprisingly, Rollin even cast doubt on the advisability of the great construction works launched by Pericles: “Was it just in him to expend in superfluous buildings and vain decorations the immense sums intended for carrying on the war?”¹⁸ Following the example of Plato, the historian even declared “that Pericles, with all his grand edifices and other works, had not improved the mind of one of the citizens in virtue, but rather corrupted the purity and simplicity of their ancient manners.”¹⁹

However, criticism then gave way to praise. We are told that, having rid himself of his last great rival in 443, Pericles began “to change his behavior. He now was not so mild and tractable as before, nor did he submit or abandon himself any longer to the whims and caprices of the people, as so many winds.”²⁰ In marking this change, Rollin was clearly following the account that Plutarch gives in his Life of Pericles;21 but he was also drawing upon other sources and, in particular, based his remarks upon a close reading of Thucydides: “It must nevertheless be confessed that the circumstance that gave Pericles this great authority was, not only the force of his eloquence but, as Thucydides observes, the reputation of his life and great probity.”²² Having exalted the incorruptibility of the stratēgos, Rollin again referred to the Athenian historian in order to exonerate Pericles from any responsibility in starting the Peloponnesian War: “But Thucydides, a contemporary author, and who was very well acquainted with all the transactions of Athens, … is much more worthy of belief than a poet who was a professed slanderer and satirist.”²³ And it was again Thucydides who inspired Rollin’s final eulogy after he had described Pericles’ death—at precisely the same point as in the Athenian author’s account:

In him were united almost all the qualities which constitute the great man; as those of admiral, by his great skill in naval affairs; of the great captain, by his conquests and victories; of the high-treasurer, by the excellent order in which he put the finances; of the great politician, by the extent and justness of his views, by his eloquence in public deliberations, and by the dexterity and address with which he transacted the affairs; of a minister of state, by the methods that he employed to increase trade and promote the arts in general; in fine, of father of his country, by the happiness that he procured to every individual and which he always had in view as the true scope and end of his administration. But I must not omit another characteristic which was peculiar to him. He acted with so much wisdom, moderation, disinterestedness and zeal for the public good; he discovered in all things, so great a superiority of talents, and gave so exalted an idea of his experience, capacity and integrity, that he acquired the confidence of all the Athenians; and fixed, in his own favour, during the forty years that he governed the Athenians, their natural fickleness and inconstancy.²⁴

It was one of the first times since the rediscovery of Greek writings that Pericles benefited from a panegyric so full and well argued. By paying unprecedented attention to Thucydides, Rollin’s Histoire ancienne paved the way for the rehabilitation of the stratēgos.

At the end of the eighteenth century, another historian succeeded in engineering a decisive rehabilitation of Thucydides and, along with him, Pericles. Pierre Charles Lévesque, who was a professor at the Collège de France and a member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, published a new translation of the Peloponnesian War in 1795—more than a century after the “faithless beauty” by Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt that had appeared in 1662; and it was in Lévesque’s version, in the following century, that Thucydides, “of all the ancient historians the one who deserves most to be trusted,”25 was read and reread. Even so, in his Etudes d’histoire ancienne Lévesque did not manifest unconditional admiration for the Athenian leader: “The Greece of Pierre-Charles Lévesque is a composite construction in which the heritage of Isocrates and Plutarch, that is to say Abbé Barthélemy, coexists, not without a number of glaring contradictions, alongside his readings of Thucydides. Thus, on the very same page in the Etudes, Lévesque describes Pericles both as the demagogue who changed the democracy of Theseus and Solon into a ‘violently conflict-ridden regime’ and also as an irreplaceable statesman, whose death delivered up the Athenians to ‘upstart wretches such as Cleon.’”²⁶ Despite his real admiration of Thucydides, the historian still remained partly dependent on the clichés produced by Plutarch. Scorched as he was by the Terror, Lévesque was doubtless wary of the excesses of direct democracy and rejected any servile imitation of Antiquity in the manner of his colleague Volney.

To find an unalloyed paean of praise for Pericles in the eighteenth century, one must leave France and cross the Rhine. It was, in fact, in the German world that, for the first time, the stratēgos became an indisputable model in the writings of Winckelmann.

Pericles in the Germanic World: Selective Similarities

At the start of the eighteenth century, there were no visible signs of the philhellenic vogue that was about to seize Germany. What is the explanation for this fascination that took hold around 1750 and peaked at the turn of the century? It was a craze that cries out for an explanation all the more because it ran counter to all the uses to which Antiquity was currently being put.

First, why choose Greece rather than Rome? Precisely so as to be original and different: in the great European interplay of affiliations to Antiquity, Rome had already been taken over by Italy and, worse still, by the imperialistic and universalist France of Louis XIV, the revolution and, finally, the empire.²⁷ Greece, on the other hand, seemed a model that was available to Germans in quest of an identity. But a mere desire to be different cannot explain everything. More positively, Greece represented a model of non-state-based civilization that was united by its language and culture—in short, a plausible ancestor for a German nation that was divided into several hundred states that were virtually independent but shared a common linguistic and cultural horizon.²⁸

But why did German authors prefer Athens to Sparta? Here too, it was a matter of distancing themselves from the dominant cultural model, the better to affirm Germanic originality. But this preference for the city of Athens did not result solely from a choice by default. It was also based on a specific relationship to Antiquity that was founded, not on literature, but on the visual arts. German authors focused not on a purely literary Greece—that of Homer or of Plutarch—but on a tangible Greece, above all that of sculpture and architecture. In this particular respect, Sparta clearly could not compete with Athens.

If Frederick II of Prussia was the first to sing the praises of the fine “age of Pericles,” it nevertheless fell to a young librarian, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), to provide a historical and scientific basis for German philhellenism. In less than ten years, Winckelmann published two works that produced an immense effect throughout scholarly Europe: in 1755, the Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works of Painting and Sculpture, and, in 1764, the monumental History of Ancient Art in Antiquity, which was very promptly translated into French. In it, Winckelmann, inspired by “an obsessive quest for origins,”29 exalted Greek art to the point of turning it into a source [Quelle] and model [Urbild] for his German readership.³⁰

And in Winckelmann’s eyes, it was the Athens of Pericles that constituted the pinnacle of Greek art and, consequently, of the human spirit.

The happiest time for art in Greece, and especially in Athens, were the forty years in which Pericles ruled the republic—if I may so express myself—and during the obstinate war that preceded the Peloponnesian War, which had its beginning in the eighty-seventh Olympiad. … [Pericles] sought to introduce wealth and superfluity into Athens by giving employment to all sorts of men. He built temples, theatres, aqueducts, and harbours and was even extravagant in ornamenting them. The Parthenon, the Odeon and many other buildings are known to the whole world. At that time art began to receive life, as it were, and Pliny says that sculpture as well as painting now began.³¹

Winckelmann’s study closely associated “beauty (natural and artistic), well-being (individual and collective) and liberty (personal and political).”³² Athenian art was thus certainly not set apart from the fertile political terrain that had favored its blossoming.

A few decades later, this “politicization of aesthetics” peaked in the work of Johann Gottfried von Herder. In 1791, this German philosopher published his Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit), in which he proclaimed an equal dignity of all the civilizations that had appeared on Earth. This display of relativism did not, however, prevent him from paying emphatic homage to Greece “whose monuments speak to us with a philosophic spirit.”33 Referring explicitly to Winckelmann, Herder stressed the degree to which, in Athens, the artistic flowering and the democratic regime were linked: “But the republican constitutions, which in time were diffused throughout all Greece, gave a wider scope to the arts. In a commonwealth, edifices for the assembly of the people, for the public treasure, for general exercise and amusement were necessary …, as Winckelmann no doubt considered when he esteemed the liberty of the Grecian republics was the golden age of the arts.”³⁴

In support of his argument, following a remarkable change of attitude, Herder cited the precise case of Pericles. Instead of criticizing the stratēgos’s demagogy, he represented it as the very motor that produced the artistic climax of Athens: “Pericles flattered the people with these notions of fame, and did more for the arts, than ten kings of Athens would have done.”³⁵ It was in order to please his fellow-citizens that the stratēgos had launched his policy of great architectural works: without his frantic pursuit of popularity, there would have been no Parthenon, no Odeon, no Propylaea! Even the oppression of the allies met with Herder’s approval, given that “even these grievances were subservient to the public arts.”³⁶

Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the German fascination with Pericles’ city never flagged. Through the voices of writers such as Schiller and Hölderlin, the German bourgeoisie set about “speaking Greek,” since it was too weak to “speak German” (that is, to constitute its own national State).³⁷ Meanwhile, over and above philosophy and poetry, this enthusiasm also found expression in architecture. German builders adopted a neoclassical style of openly Greek inspiration, in particular in Berlin and Munich. The Brandenburg Gate, set up in 1788 and 1791, today still testifies to this, for its architect Carl Gotthard Langhans took the Propylaea as the model for his project (figure 13).

In Germany, the flattering reputation of Pericles lived on into the first decades of the nineteenth century. Hegel, for instance, praised the stratēgos unhesitatingly in his lectures on The Philosophy of History, which he delivered between 1822 and 1830. Won over by the Athenian spirit—which he admired more than Spartan rigidity—the philosopher sang the praises of the democratic leader, even straying into hyperbole: “Pericles is the Zeus of the human pantheon of Athens,” “the most profoundly accomplished, genuine, noble statesman.”³⁸ All the same, Hegel no longer regarded Periclean Athens as a model for Germany to follow. Unlike Winckelmann and Herder, this philosopher did not believe that such an imitation would be possible or even desirable. The Greek cities, which embodied the adolescence of Reason, could offer no political perspective for the future.³⁹ So Hegel’s praises had all the characteristics of an embalming; Pericles was certainly canonized but was turned into a relic from the past that was definitely now beyond reach. At this point, a distance developed between the Germans and the stratēgos, at the very point when English and French historians were rehabilitating him and turning him into the patron saint of parliamentary democracy.

FIGURE 13. Napoleon passing through the Brandenburg Gate after the battle of JenaAuersted (1806), by Charles Meynier. Oil on canvas. The Brandenburg Gate was inspired by the Propylae of Mnesicles. Versailles, chêteaux de Versailles et de Trianon. © RMN-Grand Palais (Chêteau de Versailles) / rights reserved.

THE PERICLEAN MYTH AT ITS PEAK

After the French Revolution, the status of Greek Antiquity changed in Europe. At this point, a different relationship to history developed, involving not so much imitation as distancing, an accurate assessment of which was provided by Benjamin Constant’s 1819 lecture on “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared to That of the Moderns.” From now on, Greece was approached as a period and a civilization within the history of the world rather than a reservoir of exempla from which one could take one’s pick. This distancing was accompanied by an increasing professionalization of historical writing, based on the development of philology and a critical study of sources. Within this new historiographical framework, Thucydides had his revenge on Plutarch to the point of becoming the archetype of a scientific historian, passionate about truth and rigor. Periclean Athens profited from these developments and was now recognized in Europe and the United States as the major model of an ancient city. Two liberal historians played a crucial role in this great transformation—George Grote in England and Victor Duruy, who introduced Grote’s theses into France.

The Birth of a Great Bourgeois Parliamentarian: The Pericles of the English Nineteenth-Century Historians

The British Anti-Periclean Tradition

In the early nineteenth century, Periclean democracy still had a detestable reputation among British elite groups raised on readings of Plutarch. The work of Sir George Lyttleton is typical in this respect.

When he retired from political life, this former First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer wrote a collection of Dialogues of the Dead (1760), imitating Fontenelle and Fénelon, in which Pericles did not appear to advantage. In dialogue XXIII, Pericles conversed with Cosimo dei Medici and passed severe judgement on his own government:

We are now in the regions where Truth presides, and I dare not offend her by playing the orator in defence of my conduct. I must therefore acknowledge that, by weakening the power of the court of the Areopagus, I tore up that anchor which Solon had wisely fixed to keep his republic firm against the storms and fluctuations of popular factions. This alteration which fundamentally injured the whole State, I made with a view to serve my own ambition, the only passion in my nature which I could not contain within the limits of virtue. For I knew that my eloquence would subject the people to me, and make them the willing instruments of all my desires.40

In the Underworld imagined by Lord Lyttleton, Pericles was condemned to wander like a soul in pain, mocked by wise Athenians who accused him of having cast Athens into irremediable corruption.⁴¹

It is true that, in the same period, a few British scholars had tried to present a more flattering vision of Athenian democracy.42 But that rehabilitation did not extend to Pericles himself, as can be seen from the work of the Irish historian John Gast. The Rudiments of the Grecian History, published in Dublin in 1753, is presented as a series of thirteen dialogues between three people: a master, a scholar who has made some progress as an ancient historian, and, last, a novice. This unusual arrangement allows the author to present a critical evaluation of Greek history from which Pericles does not emerge at all enhanced. In dialogue XI, the government of the stratēgos is riddled with criticisms. The first remarks are laudatory: the Athenian is described as “an accomplished statesman and a powerful speaker, beyond all that ever were in Athens before him.”⁴³ But the praises soon dry up: the stratēgos, spurred on by his all-consuming ambition, is said to have used his formidable powers for the worse rather than for the better—in particular, manipulating the people in order to obtain the condemnation of the noble Cimon, even at the risk of endangering his own country. “He was a man, tho’ in arms as great as Cimon, and as to brightness of parts and fine improvements of mind far greater, yet in most other respects the reverse of him; sacrificing his country to his ambition, lavishing away the riches of the State to obtain the suffrages of the multitude, seeking to establish his power even on the ruins of the Public Wealth, and scheming destructive Wars.”⁴⁴ And his speech for the prosecution continues in the same vein. Although himself a man of frugal habits, Pericles is accused of giving the people corrupt habits, the better to dominate it: “He sought to govern Athens; for this purpose he opened the Exchequer to the craving multitude, he gratified their passions, he fed their voluptuousness, he multiplied their wants. … The very virtues which he had, undid his country.”⁴⁵

As for William Young (1749–1815), although he favored the Athenian democratic regime, his description of the stratēgos was no kinder. In his History of Athens, published in 1777,⁴⁶ Young accused Pericles of having unleashed the Peloponnesian War “to screen some past malversation or to make his abilities necessary for the future, or even for meaner motives.”⁴⁷ The stratēgos is said to have been a master of intrigue who introduced “licentiousness in the State.”⁴⁸ The only shaft of light in this somber picture is that Young does recognize Pericles’ genius in managing, through cunning and corruption, to hold together “the heterogeneous and uncemented mass” that the Athenian people then was.

Similar but even greater prejudice prevails in the two great syntheses that appeared at the end of the eighteenth century: John Gillies’s The History of Ancient Greece, which appeared in 1786, and William Mitford’s The History of Greece, a vast fresco in multiple volumes, published in various editions between 1784 and 1829. These two works shared the common hostility toward the city of Athens. Gillies, the official historiographer of the Royal House of Scotland, was appalled by the “democratical licentiousness and tyranny introduced by Pericles”49 and even accused the stratēgos of having initiated the decadence of the entire Hellenic world: “In one word, the vices and extravagances, which are supposed to characterise the declining ages of Greece and Rome, took root in Athens during the administration of Pericles, the most splendid and most prosperous in the Grecian annals.”⁵⁰ As for William Mitford, he professed a greater scorn for the democratic regime, criticizing “the inherent weakness and the indelible barbarism,” although he did also confess to a sneaking admiration for the Athenian leader.⁵¹

A Change of View: George Grote’s Moment

In his monumental publication, A History of Greece, which appeared between 1846 and 1856, George Grote (1794–1871) attacked those widespread attitudes. This work by an erudite ex-banker opens with a predictable attack on Mitford and goes on to defend a liberal and democratic view of the Greek city, following the example set by Connop Thirlwall.⁵² Grote, a former member of the English parliament, was close to utilitarian philosophers such as John Stuart Mill, and he admired Pericles without reserve. His eulogy was founded on close scrutiny of the ancient texts, and, as far as possible, he favored the judgments of Thucydides, “our best witness in every conceivable respect,”⁵³ above all other ancient sources. This led him not only to reject the generally accepted distinction, drawn originally by Plutarch, between the first and the second parts of the stratēgos’s political career, but also to exonerate Pericles of all responsibility for the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, sweeping aside all the accusations of the comic poets.⁵⁴ And while Grote did criticize the Athenians’ treatment of their allies, he considered that “it was beyond the power of Pericles seriously to amend,” even maintaining that “practically, the allies were not badly treated during his administration.”⁵⁵ In conclusion, the historian, in one lengthy sentence, gathered together the essence of the praises showered upon Pericles in the course of his book:

Taking him altogether, with his powers of thought, speech and action—his competence civil and military, in the council as well as in the field—his vigorous and cultivated intellect, and his comprehensive ideas of a community in pacific and many-sided development—his incorruptible public morality, caution, and firmness, in a country where all those qualities were rare, and the union of them in the same individual of course much rarer—we shall find him without parallel throughout the whole course of Grecian history.56

This enchanted view of Periclean Athens was supported by John Stuart Mill, who produced an enthusiastic review of the work, carrying in his wake the flower of the British intelligentsia.⁵⁷ The fact is that George Grote was by no means a scholar without influence. This British historian had been the leader of the “Philosophic Radicals” Party in the House of Commons, and, even though he wrote his work after his retirement from politics in 1841, he retained many supporters willing to spread his theories.

In any case, his success was such that the English of the second half of the nineteenth century sometimes saw themselves as Athenians dressed in frock coats and top hats. This trend to draw comparisons peaked in George Cox’s History of Greece, published in 1874, in which Periclean Athens was presented as a blueprint for Victorian England and its maritime empire. On the basis of the Thucydidean funeral oration, Cox declared, somewhat sanctimoniously,

All the special characteristics of English policy—its freedom of speech, the right of people to govern themselves … may be seen in equal development in the policy of Athens.⁵⁸

The Liberal and Republican Pericles of the French: From Duruy to Gambetta

In France, Grote’s work was a resounding success. As early as 1848, Prosper Mérimée was spreading the word and relating the book’s major message to the current political situation. “For us, who live under a government founded upon universal suffrage, the study of Greek history is of particular interest and the example of the little republic of Athens may well be profitable for the great republic of France.”⁵⁹ Mérimée found in the theses developed by Grote a means of breaking away from a deeply rooted French orthodoxy: “M. Rollin and many others have accustomed us to regard the Athenians as the most flighty people in the world, frivolous, cruel, careless and bent solely on pleasure. Yet this flighty and frivolous people elected Pericles as their stratēgos or president year after year. This great man laughed good-naturedly at the comedies that mocked him but, upon leaving the theatre, he still found his power respected.”⁶⁰ With Mérimée, the rehabilitation of democratic Athens—and its leader—took off.

This turn of events is the more remarkable given that, up until 1850, the French had shown scant interest in Pericles, as can be seen from their pictorial art. Although Aspasia was the object of a certain vogue in the early nineteenth century, painters never showed her in the company of the stratēgos, but always at the side of the handsome Alcibiades or the wise Socrates.61

It is true that Pericles did appear in the famous Apotheosis of Homer that Ingres painted in 1827, to decorate one of the ceilings of the Charles X Museum in the Louvre (figure 14). But his portrait was only roughly sketched in and was lost among the crowd of figures to the left of the poets, where he was almost entirely blocked out by Phidias. It was not until 1851 that François Nicolas Chifflart did him the honor of placing him in the foreground of his painting titled Pericles at the Deathbed of His Son,” exhibited at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts (figure 15).⁶² The fact that this oil painting won the Grand Prix de Rome for a historical painting seems symbolic, for in that same year, Hachette published the first edition of the Histoire grecque by Victor Duruy (1811–1894), which devoted particular attention to Pericles.

FIGURE 14. The Apotheosis of Homer (1827), by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Oil on canvas. Pericles is hardly visible, a sign that he is less important than Homer and Phidias, who almost entirely hide him. The tableau is imagined at the same moment as George Grote was preparing to put the stratēgos back center-stage in the West. Paris, Musée du Louvre. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Thierry Le Mage.

Declaring his disdain for Sparta, which was reduced to “a mere war-machine,” this French historian celebrated bourgeois Athens and its incomparable leader, with unprecedented enthusiasm: “Never before, in Athens, had any man held such power … and never was power acquired and preserved by such pure means. Pericles, with no particular title and no special post of command and through the sole authority of his genius and virtues, became the master of Athens, a post that he filled with more nobility than Augustus in Rome.”63 The idealization of Pericles now reached its peak, for Duruy even went so far as to justify the city’s imperialistic policy: “Of all the regimes that were destroyed, only one was to be regretted, that of Athens and Pericles. As long as it existed, there were fewer instances of cruelty and injustice and greater glory and prosperity than Greece had ever known.”⁶⁴

FIGURE 15. Périclès au lit de mort de son fils (1851), by François Nicolas Chifflart (1825–1901), Saint-Omer, Musée de l’Hôtel Sandelin, inv. 975.001. © Musées de Saint-Omer, D. Adams.

However, this eulogy did not go so far as to celebrate the democratic system as such, as, for the author, those Athenians all belonged to an elite group, “an aristocracy raised by its taste, its elegance, its intellectual culture and its habit of command, far above the ordinary condition of other peoples.”⁶⁵ So it was not the “ignoble populace” that governed the city, but an aristocracy of 15,000 citizens. From this point of view, Duruy’s argument was perfectly compatible with the authoritarian regime that, in the very same year as that of the first edition of his work, had been established by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte.

This idealized representation of Periclean Athens did not triumph without encountering a degree of resistance in French intellectual circles. The philologist Charles Nisard, a devoted supporter of Sparta, produced an acerbic review of Duruy’s work, accusing its author of devoting a “juvenile admiration” to Athens.⁶⁶ However, the situation evolved rapidly in the years that followed, when Duruy obtained uncontested power in the educational world.⁶⁷ Having risen through every level of the educational system, he was in a position to spread his ideas in textbooks such as his Abrégé d’histoire grecque pour la classe de cinquième (Abridged history of Greece for fifth-year pupils), which appeared in 1858 and ran into many further editions. Having become the general inspector of secondary education (1862–1863) and subsequently the Minister for Public Instruction (1863–1869), under the Second Empire, he found himself in an unchallengeable position to impose his view of Greece throughout the colleges and secondary schools of France.

The advent of the Third Republic put the finishing touches to this slow conversion of attitudes. While Napoleon III remained fascinated by Julius Caesar—to whom he devoted a biography in 1865—Gambetta regarded Periclean Athens as a model for the new Republican regime. He explicitly referred to the analogy in the funeral speech he delivered on 24 May 1874, in the Montparnasse cemetery, at the tomb of Alton Shée: “If it has the intelligence to rally to the new France, the France of work and science, [the nobility], through proud patriotism and noble delicacy, will contribute to providing the French republic with the flower of elegance and distinction that will make it, in the modern world, into what the Athenian republic was in Antiquity.”⁶⁸ Modeling his speech on Pericles’ funeral oration, Gambetta looked forward to the establishment of a moderate Republic that brought together the work of the populace, the knowledge of scholars, and the elegance of aristocrats.

Pericles in the Altertumswissenschaft: The History of a Disenchantment

Beyond the Rhine, Pericles benefited from the popularity of Thucydides that was then sweeping through Europe. The founders of Altertumswissenschaft, the “science of Antiquity,” shared a boundless admiration for the author of The Peloponnesian War. They included Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Leopold von Ranke, and Wilhelm Roscher—whom Marx even went so far as to call Wilhelm Thucydides Roscher.69 The author of The Peloponnesian War underwent a veritable historiographical apotheosis.⁷⁰ His history was regarded as an “extraordinary work”;⁷¹ and Niebuhr even considered Thucydides to be “the most perfect historian among all those that have ever written,”⁷² while Ranke, for his part, confessed that Thucydides was the writer “before whom he fell to his knees.”⁷³

This admiration was reflected in opinions of Pericles, as is clear from the Griechische Geschichte by Ernst Curtius (1814–1896), which appeared between 1857 and 1867.⁷⁴ Following in the neohumanist steps of Winckelmann, Curtius extolled Athenian prosperity and launched into a “defence and illustration” of Pericles. Like Grote, he based his eulogy on the rehabilitation of Thucydides, “the only man who makes it possible for us to rediscover the original features of this image [that of Pericles] that has been so disfigured.”⁷⁵ He claimed that the stratēgos, who was a statesman as well as a philosopher, exerted upon the people a “consistent and firm government,” thereby creating a perfect “combination of democracy and monocracy.”⁷⁶ No major fault could be attributed to him, including where the members of the Delian League were concerned: “as to the treatment of allies, the sagacity as well as the sense of justice of Pericles led him to object to the imposition of any undue burdens upon them, and to any measure tending to irritate their feelings.”⁷⁷ Even his private life was praiseworthy: Curtius found no fault with his love of Aspasia, a woman who possessed “a lofty and richly endowed nature, with a perfect sense of all that is beautiful.” According to Curtius, “the possession of this woman was in many respects invaluable for Pericles. Not only were her accomplishments the delight of the leisure hours which he allowed himself, and the recreation of his mind from its cares, but she also kept him in intercourse with the daily life around him.” Better still, he declared, she initiated him into Sicilian eloquence and “was of use to him through her various connexions at home and abroad, as well as by the keen glance of her sagacity and by her knowledge of men.”78

All the same, Curtius had no admiration for Athenian democracy as such—which is hardly surprising in the man who was the tutor of Frederick III, the heir to the throne of Prussia. The reason he so admired Pericles was precisely because the Athenian leader had removed all substance from the power of the people; under his leadership, “all the principles of democracy were virtually abolished, viz the constant change and the distribution of official power, and even the responsibility attaching to it and forming the strongest guarantee of the sovereignty of the people. … Pericles, alone invested with a continuous official authority which commanded all the various branches of public life, stood in solitary grandeur firm and calm above the surging State.”⁷⁹ Curtius, who was both a liberal and a monarchist, thus constructed the image of an Athens without democracy, the popular institutions of which were tempered or even neutralized by an aristocracy of the virtue that was embodied by Pericles.

The vision defended by Curtius soon entered general circulation. His work was rapidly translated into English and French and was certainly the Greek history that was most widely read in the nineteenth century and that, in its turn, influenced a number of great German historians. One was Wilhelm Adolf Schmidt, who described Pericles as “the zenith of the entire ancient and classical world” and the cultural peak of human history.⁸⁰

However, this idealized image soon faded away in the Germanic world. Two developments combined to marginalize or even discredit Pericles in Germany. In the first place, Athens was no longer alone in attracting the attention of historians, many of whom now turned to Rome or to the history of the Hellenistic kingdoms; and second, the progress made by the new “science of Antiquity” led to disenchantment with Pericles’ city, revealing hitherto unrecognized shortcomings.⁸¹

Following the Napoleonic occupation, one of the priorities of the Prussian government was to organize Altertumswissenschaft around subjects previously left aside in the Germanic world. Rome, for a long time the preserve of the French, now attracted the attention of German scholars. After Barthold Georg Niebuhr’s seminal study, published between 1811 and 1832, Theodor Mommsen flung himself into composing his Roman History in eight volumes, publication of which was spread over more than thirty years, from 1854 to 1886. Now that Germany assumed as its objective the constitution of a national state or even a unified empire, there could no longer be any question of ignoring Roman history.

That same quest for unity steered Germanic historians toward the study of Alexander the Great’s empire and the states that emerged from it. As early as the 1830s, Johann Gustav Droysen paved the way for this new “Hellenistic” history. In his Hellenistic History (Geschichte des Hellenismus), written between 1836 and 1843, this historian, who had sat in on the lectures given by Hegel, exalted the political work of Philip II, praising him for having unified all Macedonia into a homogeneous “nation” while, on the contrary, he had nothing but scorn for the Kleinstaaterei, the political fragmentation of the Greek world.82 In his Alexander, which appeared in 1833, he cast Pericles in a villainous role. Although he recognized that his reign had marked the peak of Athens’s glory, he accused him of having handed over all decisions to the people, “the people among which Pericles constantly encouraged a taste for democratic ideologies.”⁸³ According to Droysen, that excessive liberty led to the establishment of a veritable tyranny over the allies, which eventually rebounded against itself, propelling the city into ruination.⁸⁴ Seen from this teleological point of view, in which a unified State constituted the vanishing point, the figure of Pericles symbolized the Greek cities’ inability to achieve political unity and put an end to their internal quarrels.

This rejection of Athens was further emphasized by the evolution of Altertumswissenschaft scholarship. As early as the start of the nineteenth century, Pericles had been a target of criticism, breaking with Winckelmann’s kind of admiration. In 1817, Augustus Böckh, in his scholarly treatise on The Public Economy of Athens (Die Staatshaushaltung der Athener), was declaring that “depravity and moral corruption were rife throughout the Athenian community.”⁸⁵ And Pericles was certainly not excepted from this bitter observation. On the one hand, Böckh recalled the various accusations of corruption leveled at him, reassessing their credibility but not wholly rejecting them;⁸⁶ on the other, he criticized the stratēgos for his sumptuary expenditure on the people, even though, backed up by his sources, he did recognize that Pericles never offered pay for attending the Assembly.⁸⁷

From 1870 onward, criticism increased, as knowledge about Athens became more detailed thanks to the acquisition of a large epigraphic corpus and, above all, the discovery of the Constitution of the Athenians in 1891. As early as 1884, Karl Julius Beloch was distancing himself from “the unilateral views of Grote’s school” and “the cult of radical democracy” that had become fashionable.⁸⁸ Moreover, in Beloch’s Greek History, which appeared in 1893, Pericles was even subjected to an all-out attack. The German historian, who was skeptical about the real power possessed by “great men,” considered that the son of Xanthippus was even inferior to his predecessors, Themistocles and Cimon. He was no more than “a great parliamentarian” (ein großer Parlamentarier),⁸⁹ lacking any military talent. In the new Germany of Wilhelm II, disdain for representative democracy was now expressed openly. But Beloch did not limit his attack to this, for he went on to accuse Pericles of plunging Greece into a fatal internal war; even if sentencing the stratēgos to pay a hefty fine in 430 was legally unjust, it was nevertheless basically justified in that it was aimed at the politician “who had unleashed the fratricidal Hellenic conflict for personal reasons and had thereby been guilty of the greatest crime ever known in the whole of Greek history.”90 Pericles was the destroyer of the unity of the Hellenic world; in the recently unified Germany, this was the gravest of accusations.

In 1898, the Swiss German Jacob Burckhardt, for his part, returned to a more traditional vein, accusing the Athenians of having used their power in an unjust manner both inside the city and beyond it. He claimed that slavery and various handouts of pay gave rise to laziness, depravity, and excessive luxury: “The most demoralizing tax was the theorikon, doled out to the poorer citizens for theatre tickets, for celebrating festivals and games, and for sacrifices and public meals. The waste caused by this tax was relatively as great as that at the most sumptuous courts, and later wars were lost for lack of money because this sacrosanct tradition could not be abolished.”⁹¹ Pericles, “responsible for most of the taxes just mentioned,” was powerless to oppose such deadly tendencies. Far from being an educator of the people, “he was also forced to humour their greed with pleasures of all sorts—not to satisfy it would have been impossible.”⁹² The outbreak of the Peloponnesian War may even have seemed to him desirable, for it offered him an opportunity to avoid the anger that the people felt against him.

At the turn of the century, the elective similarities formerly detected between Pericles and the Germans had had their day. Now transformed purely into a parliamentarian and reviled for having stirred up ill-feeling in the Greek world, his image was repudiated and other models more in tune with the ideology of the Second Reich took its place. By the time of the outbreak of World War I, the divorce was complete: clearly rejected by the Germans, the stratēgos was now enrolled in the service of British propaganda. This prompted a renewed use of the figure of Pericles that sometimes took unexpected turns, not only in England, but once again in Germany when that conflict came to an end.

THE DETERIORATION OF THE PERICLEAN MYTH

The Exploitation of the Periclean Myth: Pericles amid the Turmoil of the Two World Wars

During World War I, the Germans showed scant interest in Pericles. If ever they did evoke the democratic city, it was, rather, in order to denigrate fourth-century Athens and its loquacious orators. In 1916, Engelbert Drerup published a book that attacked Demosthenes and the ancient “Republic of lawyers” (Advokaten-republik) in which the most inflammatory of modern issues rose to the surface. By means of an analogy, Drerup explicitly targeted the Entente leaders, first and foremost “the lawyer, Lloyd George,” who was then Minister for War in Great Britain.93 It was also a way of countering Clemenceau, who was devoting a veritable cult to Demosthenes, whom he presented as championing the resistance to Philip II of Macedon.⁹⁴

Pericles remained mostly uninvolved in this battle between great men. Significantly enough, it was not until the day after the armistice, on 12 November 1918, that the stratēgos made a timid appearance on the Parisian stage, in an operetta by Henri Christiné titled Phi-Phi. Although it was an instant success, Pericles did not emerge favorably from this lighthearted comedy that enjoyed a three-year run in the “Bouffes parisiens” theater. His role was no more than that of a foil, which was eclipsed by that of Phidias (alias Phi-Phi), the play’s real hero. The latter mocked the stratēgos, who was prepared to dye his hair in order to marry the “charming young” Aspasia. And this new “arch-countess” of Athens then proceeded to cheat on her husband with the sculptor, who teased her, saying, “You need so many men that our statesman does not satisfy you!”⁹⁵ Pericles was thus mobilized, not as a figure of resistance and heroism, but as one that represented loose moral behavior. This play founded the genre of musical comedies and started off the “Flapper Years.”

Pericles in an England at War: A Call to Arms

Only in England was Pericles truly honored during World War I. One year after the start of the conflict, in the autumn of 1915, all the London buses carried an advertisement bearing an extract from the funeral oration in which the stratēgos called upon his fellow-citizens to imitate the bravery of the soldiers who had fallen in defense of their city (figure 16): “For you now it remains to rival what they have done and, knowing the secret of happiness to be freedom, and the secret of freedom a brave heart, not idly to stand aside from the enemy’s onset.”⁹⁶

Cited in the fine translation by the British historian Alfred Zimmern,⁹⁷ this passage rested on a set of implicit references that suggested that the English were identified with the Athenians, the Germans with the Spartans. The analogy was the more apposite given that a number of Germanic historians had rehabilitated the Spartans in the course of the nineteenth century, even going so far as to represent those harsh warriors as “the Prussians of Antiquity,” as Karl Otfried Müller put it.⁹⁸

What can be the explanation for the remarkable interplay of roles between the French, fascinated by Demosthenes, and the English, committed to Pericles? Or, to put that another way, why did Clemenceau, after retiring from political life, write a life of Demosthenes rather than a biography of Pericles? The explanation is easy enough to find when one reflects upon the identities of Athens’s enemies. For the French, the struggle against the Macedonian kings provided a more attractive parallel than the struggle against the Spartan oligarchy. As a reflection of French resistance to Kaiser Wilhelm II, the war against Macedonia could be likened to a republican crusade against the despotism of Philip II. The English, however, had nothing against royalty as such; the Peloponnesian War offered them a chance to play upon a different register—not the opposition between a republic and a monarchy, but the confrontation between a liberal sea-power and an aggressive continental power.⁹⁹

FIGURE 16. “Pericles on the Athenians” (1915), by unknown artist. Published by Underground Electric Railway Company Ltd, 1915. Printed by the Dangerfield Printing Company Ltd, 1915. Panel poster. Reference number: 1983/4/8159. © TfL from the London Transport Museum collection.

Periclean Athens remained a model for English politicians right up to 1945. In his Memoirs, Winston Churchill showered praise upon Lord Beaverbrook (then minister for food supplies), who, in one of his letters, had quoted the last sentence from Pericles’ last speech: “Open no more negotiations with Sparta. Show them plainly that you are not crushed by your present afflictions. They who face calamity without wincing and who offer the most energetic resistance, these, be they States or individuals, are the truest heroes.”100 Impossible not catch an echo of the famous “We shall never surrender” pronounced by the English prime minister in June 1940. In that same speech, Churchill too promised to continue the battle, whatever the cost, with the help of “our Empire beyond the seas,” in the same way as Pericles did in the Peloponnesian War.¹⁰¹ English historians were quick to set the two situations in parallel. At the end of World War II, the Greek scholar Gilbert Murray wrote of the outbreak of hostilities between Sparta and Athens as follows: “Just as in 1914 or 1939, a rich democratic sea-power with a naval empire, full of interest in all forms of social, artistic and intellectual life, was pitted against a reactionary militarist land power, which had sacrificed most of its earlier culture to stark efficiency in war.”102

Yet we should not exaggerate the relevance of such comparisons. In the first place, those “Anglo-Periclean” affinities were by no means exclusive, for Gilbert Murray also quoted Demosthenes in support of his thesis.¹⁰³ Furthermore, not all British leaders felt the same admiration for the stratēgos. In 1940, the future director of the Intelligence Service cited the funeral oration in an official report, with a view to stigmatizing the dangers of open democracy in times of war: “Athens lost the war,” he reminded his correspondent, so Pericles’ city could surely not constitute a model to be followed.¹⁰⁴ Finally, the English were not alone in referring to the Athenian leader. Ever since the second half of the nineteenth century, the Americans too had claimed the figure of the stratēgos, with a view to turning him into one of the guardianheroes of American democracy. President Abraham Lincoln has been shown to have been inspired by the funeral oration when composing the famous “Gettysburg Address” in honor of the dead who fell in battle in July 1863.¹⁰⁵

Paradoxically, however, it was in Germany that the exploitation of the Periclean myth was carried furthest, in particular after Hitler’s accession to power. The upshot of a strange alliance between Altertumswissenschaft and Nazi propaganda was that the stratēgos became the archetype of the charismatic Führer, stamping his imprint upon both time and space with his monumental constructions.

Pericles in Defeated Germany: The Quest for a Führer

In the immediate postwar years, a humiliated Germany again turned to Athens in order to think through its own present situation. As Anthony Andurand has shown, Germanic historians identified the situation of their vanquished country with the fate of the Athenian city in 404: in both cases, the military defeat was accompanied by a change of political regime.¹⁰⁶ In September 1919, in a lecture titled “Thucydides and Ourselves,” the historian Max Pohlenz drew a contrast between the glorious Athens of 430 and the broken city of 404, in a bid to find lessons for the Germany of his own day. He was a supporter of the conservative Right, who regarded Periclean democracy as the archetype of a Volkstadt, a state in which the sovereignty of the dēmos was limited by all the citizens’ blind obedience to the law. According to Pohlenz, this “democracy of duty” implied a Führer in whom the people could believe. Whereas Pericles had ideally filled that role, his successors had turned out to be incapable of carrying on his work: “There was no longer any statesman who possessed the qualities necessary to be the people’s leader [Führer des Volkes]. Now there were only Party leaders [Parteiführer],” “purely professional politicians [reine Berufsparlamentarier],”107 all fighting one another with no thought for the interests of the community as a whole (des ganzen). As Pohlenz presented Pericles, the latter was the embodiment of a glorious but bygone period. However, the evocation of his memory indicated a path to follow, even a political solution: reading between the lines, the historian’s compatriots were invited to elect a new Führer, one capable of breaking with the Weimar Republic and all its useless partisan squabbles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the field of historical studies, enthusiasm for Pericles was nevertheless tempered by a double fundamental movement. In the first place, the intellectual hegemony of the Annales school tended to marginalize or even discredit the study of great men. Instead of taking an interest in the lives of State leaders, it was now a matter of assessing long-term developments, those of the longue durée, without being distracted by the froth produced by individual actions. Revealingly enough, in France no specialist in Greek history saw fit to devote a biography to Pericles in the second half of the twentieth century; the only writers to undertake such a task were a historian of Rome (Léon Homo) and a philosopher (François Chêtelet).¹⁴⁴ From the 1960s onward, the development of historical anthropology further accentuated the lack of interest in the stratēgos. Turning its back on political and institutional history, this new way of tackling the Greek world focused on rituals rather than individual events, and on mental representations rather than the history of battles. And even when it did turn to politicians, it was in order to rehabilitate figures that had been forgotten—such as the enigmatic Cleisthenes, of Athens, or the obscure Ephialtes—and, taking them as its starting point, to reflect on the mental structures of classical Athens: space and time, in the case of Cleisthenes; memory and forgetting, in that of Ephialtes.¹⁴⁵ The Greece of great men was done for. Besides, historical anthropology rejected idealization of Athens in any form and set out to study “the Greeks without miracles” (to use Gernet’s expression), denying them any ontological privileges over other peoples.

Pericles’ democracy was now regarded as a mirage rather than a miracle. From the 1970s onward, attacks multiplied on a democracy that, like a magnifying mirror, reflected all the shortcomings of an imperialist and male-chauvinist West. Quite apart from slavery, which had already for some time been arousing indignation,¹⁴⁶ the treatment of women now attracted criticism. And Pericles was accused of having encouraged the enslavement of half of humanity given that, in his funeral oration, he had invited women to be neither seen nor heard, “thereby reducing them to a state of non-being.”¹⁴⁷

However, it was on the score of imperialism that the Athenian leader was chiefly taken to task. The Belgian historian Marie Delcourt (1891–1979) had, as an enlightened pioneer, already sharply criticized Periclean imperialistic policy in the biography that she devoted to the stratēgos in 1939.¹⁴⁸ This great Greek scholar, a professor at the University of Liège, attacked in particular the cleruchies, which were condemned simply as a means of seizing land with no regard for its existing occupants, just like “the Europeans in Africa and the New World”: “It is strange that Pericles never noticed that the spread of cleruchies was both dangerous and ineffective. It generated hatred for Athens and gave it the reputation of treating the States of the Delian League like conquered countries.”149 In Marie Delcourt’s works, the criticism of Western colonialism (Belgium itself was a colonial power) spread to affect Periclean foreign policy as a whole.

Tormented by the memory of Nazism, German historians too cast doubt upon Pericles’ supposed moderation in his management of the Delian League.¹⁵⁰ And elsewhere attacks increased as decolonization proceeded and the Cold War conflicts developed. At this point, some Anglo-Saxon historians questioned the opposition that Thucydides identified between, on the one hand, the moderate imperialism of Pericles and, on the other, the radical imperialism of his successors. At the end of the 1960s, Victor Ehrenberg—who had left Nazi Germany via Prague and settled in England—argued that the central element in the Periclean legacy had been, quite simply, imperialism.¹⁵¹ One year after the end of the Vietnam War, the American historian Chester Starr expressed the following disenchanted opinion that was not unaffected by the political failures of Nixon’s policies: “In view of Pericles’ promotion of arrogant imperialism and his serious mistakes in foreign policy, which in the end ruined Athenian power, his reputation may well be overrated.”¹⁵² The same conclusion, albeit expressed less polemically, was reached by Simon Hornblower in the work that he devoted to Thucydides in the late 1980s: “The real mistakes [that led to the defeat of Athens] were after all mistakes of the 430s and earlier. That means that they were Periclean mistakes.”¹⁵³ Hornblower suggests that Thucydides, so fascinated by the stratēgos, misjudged the real moment when Athens lurched into the delirium of omnipotence and the pleonexia that caused its downfall.

This critical tradition has lost none of its rigor. Indeed, Loren Samons has recently carried it to a climax, echoing an anti-Periclean tone unheard since the late eighteenth century. In his indictment, titled What’s Wrong with Democracy?, this American historian targets the two major pillars upon which admiration for Pericles rests: the Parthenon and the funeral oration. The Parthenon, which was partly financed by the allies, serves simply as an ode to the imperial excesses of Athens. The colossal statue of Athena sums this up in striking fashion: the winged Victory (nikē) placed in her right hand, symbolizes the city’s imperialism, while the representation of Pandora, engraved on the soles of her sandals, recalls the despised nature of women, the better to justify their political relegation. As for the funeral oration, it is nothing but a militant or even militarist propagandist speech expressing “a fervent nationalism designed to underpin Athenian power.”154 Samons’s verdict allows for no appeal: Pericles, responsible as he was, through his intransigence, for the unleashing of the war, is “one of the most charismatic—and dangerous—leaders in Western history.”¹⁵⁵

This vein of anti-Periclean literature, still very much alive, is often accompanied by virulent attacks against Thucydides, who is accused of misrepresenting historical truth the better to praise the stratēgos. For instance, in a book published in 2011, Robert Luginbill declares that the main purpose of The History of the Peloponnesian War was to exonerate Pericles of any responsibility for Athens’s defeat. Following up this theme, the American historian defends an extremely dark picture of the stratēgos, whom he accuses not only of having unleashed the Peloponnesian War for ill-founded reasons, but above all for having pursued it, committing Athens to a path leading to ineluctable defeat: “in fact, Pericles doomed Athens.”¹⁵⁶

The Myth Sterilized: A Pericles for the Classroom

Despite the preceding citations, it would be mistaken to conclude that Pericles is now somewhat discredited in the Western world, for, on the contrary, the idealization of the stratēgos still continues today, sometimes quite openly—as in the case of the biography by Donald Kagan, for example¹⁵⁷—sometimes in a covert manner, if one thinks of Harold Mattingly’s attempt to redate Athenian decrees, which tends to exonerate Pericles from all responsibility for the extreme development of Athens’s imperialism.¹⁵⁸ Today still, very few historians fail to bend a knee before the icon of Pericles, following the example of Hermann Bengtson: “Without the initiative of Pericles, Athens would have remained as it had been: a typical provincial town which, under Pericles, became not only the wealthiest but also the most beautiful town in the whole of Greece.”¹⁵⁹ And in French school textbooks, Pericles still occupies a prime place, eclipsing all the other Athenian political leaders of the classical period. A bust of the stratēgos, an image of the Parthenon, and a passage from the funeral speech: few textbooks sidestep that stereotypical triptych.¹⁶⁰

The stratēgos thus continues to enjoy a brilliant career in occidental schools and universities, while regularly being mobilized in arguments about the European identity and its supposed Greek origins.¹⁶¹ But there is another side to this gleaming medallion; this “official” Pericles now arouses only indifference in popular culture worldwide. As a result of being used as a mouthpiece for democratic values, the stratēgos has become a mere symbolic sketch, a silhouette possessing neither substance nor charm, a symbol that, although, to be sure, admirable, is insipid. One might apply to him Marguerite Yourcenar’s remark about Greek studies in general: “We have no use for this all too perfect statue sculpted from marble that is all too white.”162

Transformed into a didactic implement, Pericles is, in effect, conspicuous by his absence from contemporary imaginary representations: no costume drama, no video game, virtually no comic strip is devoted to him. In the cinema, it is the Romans, the Spartans, and mythical heroes who are favored by the public.¹⁶³ A list of recent Hollywood productions speaks for itself: Gladiator, Troy, Alexander, The Three Hundred; nothing that deals, even remotely, with Pericles or even Athens.¹⁶⁴ The fact is that what seems to be fascinating about Antiquity is above all its violence and its urge to acquire power: by this yardstick, the stratēgos seems rather a dim subject. How can one get excited about an orator who died in his bed and was famous for his prudence rather than as a heroic warrior? And although we find a character named Pericles in a recent film made by Tim Burton, it is no more than a derisory name given to a primate trained to be an astronaut, in The Planet of the Apes (2001)!

Nor are the creators of video games any more charitable to the stratēgos. In this cultural industry, the budget of which now exceeds that of the cinema and music, there is no trace of Pericles; in the 157 titles that relate either closely or distantly to Antiquity, Alexander and ancient Rome take the lion’s share, leaving no more than a few crumbs to the rest.¹⁶⁵ The same disappointing tally relates to comic strips, with but one exception: the Orion series launched by Jacques Martin, the creator of Alix. However, Pericles is no more than a secondary character in the plot and is, moreover, not a sympathetic figure, for he betrays the confidence of the young hero, in the name of national interests; he is left out of the latest volume.¹⁶⁶

Although embalmed or even canonized by official culture, Pericles elicits boredom rather than fantasy. Indeed, it is only in bureaucratic imaginary representations that the stratēgos still arouses some interest, albeit in an unexpected manner. His name has become one of the favorite acronyms used by national and European administrations. In Wallonia, there is a Partenariat Economique pour le Redéploiement Industriel et les Clusters par l’Economie Sociale (PERICLES); the European Union has launched a Programme Européen de Renforcement des Institutions des Collectivités Locales et de leurs Services (likewise PERICLES); and as for UNESCO, it has set up a Programme Expérimental pour Relancer l’Intérêt de la jeunesse en faveur des Cultures et des Langues limitrophes à partir de l’Environnement naturel et des Sites patrimoniaux (PERICLES again)! More disturbing is the fact that the name of the Athenian leader has also been given to a number of repressive projects, such as the programme de lutte contre le faux monnayage ou le futur fichier informatisé (the European program to counteract counterfeit coinage and the future computerized database envisaged by the law of “internal security”) adopted in January 2010. Transformed into a name devoid of content, Pericles has become the symbol of an Antiquity that hardly makes any sense today beyond a close circle of specialists—except as a jokey wink or a decontextualized citation.

Faced with such a diagnosis, what room for maneuver remains for a historian? Should one launch into an apology for Pericles or, on the contrary, expose him to public contempt in the hope of provoking some debate? To limit oneself to such an alternative would be intellectually questionable and, in any case, be doomed to failure. Rather than attempt by any means to reconnect Pericles to the present world and establish him as our great ancestor, perhaps it would be better first to accept his radical strangeness so as to restore to his “all too white statue” the vivid colors that it has lost and, above all, accept that he has no useful lessons for our times. Only if we recognize all these differences will Pericles be able to return to the present day, liberated from the problems surrounding the whole question of the Greek origins of Western democracies.