Pericles the Eccentric

It has been a decade since the last major biographical treatment of Pericles's life, career, and times appeared in English. (Others have appeared in German, Italian, and French, as befits a major ancient Greek political figure.) Each of the three predecessor works considered below has its special emphases and strengths. None, noticeably, is as hagiographic as some of its forerunners. Pericles has long since ceased to be a hero of his nation, as he was represented in late Victorian times.

The particular strength of Pericles of Athens, which was released in 2014 by Paris-based scholar Vincent Azoulay, lies in its scrupulous attention to the reception of Pericles, how he has been variously conceived and portrayed, for praise and blame alike, over the ages since Thucydides’ fifth-century B.C. portrayal of Pericles in the History of the Peloponnesian War. More traditional, because of its focus on politics, diplomacy, and war, is American Loren J. Samons II's 2015 Pericles and the Conquest of History. Also American-authored is Pericles: A Biography in Context by Thomas Martin, which appeared in 2016. Martin's biography is the most similar in approach and scope to my own new book Pericles: Statesman, Demagogue, Eccentric, especially as it correctly takes context in a plural sense to refer to family background, educational experience, and unorthodox domestic life, as well as the public institutions of democracy and empire and Pericles’ impact on those institutions and their impact on him.

As to what I hope readers might take away from reading about "my" Pericles, I would stress two negative points first: There was no such thing as "Periclean" Greece, Athens, or democracy. As important as he was to each of these, he was not the major (let alone the sole) decisive influence in shaping them. Second, his partner in life for his last twenty years, Aspasia of Miletus, was just that: his partner. She was emphatically not his mistress. Positively, I hope readers will come to appreciate that Pericles was a strikingly remarkable individual, one of the most remarkable in all of ancient Greek and indeed world history. He was always at the dead center of Athens' and humanity's most considerable achievements, not least an unparalleled degree of direct democratic self-governance and an unequalled stream of top-notch dramatic (Aeschylus, Sophocles), literary (Thucydides) and artistic (Parthenon) productions that still influence us to this day. Of course, there were also downsides, with which Pericles was at least complicit: the inferior status and treatment of even free Athenian Greek women, as well as the enslavement of many thousands of mainly non-Greek persons. But balance is all.

On the Life of Pericles

The February 12, 1973 issue of The New York Times carried an article headlined “Pericles Statue Stirs Up Ahem.” The occasion of the stirring was the unveiling in Athens of a full-length statue of Pericles, the ancient Athenian democratic statesman and orator who lived from circa 495 to 429 B.C. The cause of the kerfuffle was not that it was made of Carrara rather than Pentelic (Athenian) marble but instead that it was fashioned by a German sculptor, Hans Faltermeier, not a Greek, and by one who had committed several faults of proportion and detail both anatomical and sartorial.

Faltermeier’ Pericles, predictably, showed him in the first two of three guises listed as the subtitle of my book. Specifically, he is shown as if delivering the Funeral Speech of 431 B.C. immortalized in the history written by his Athenian contemporary Thucydides and very well known today through the 1852 painting by the Bavarian artist Philipp von Foltz.

In this brief essay, however, it is the third avatar, “Eccentric,” on which we shall concentrate our focus. Without great exaggeration, all great democratic politicians are eccentrics of one sort or another. But Pericles embodied one in several ways.

Consider first his birth. He was born into the Athenian democratic purple. Although he was one of those elite citizens who liked to style themselves Eupatrids or “Born of Good Fathers” (his was Xanthippus, who later commanded an entire allied Greek fleet to victory over the Persian empire), his mother was a close relative of Athens’ equivalent of a Founding Father, Cleisthenes. But his mother’s name was also a liability: She shared it with the daughter of a tyrant, who was not Athenian.

During his lifetime, native Athenianness would emerge as a central political issue. Moreover, as a member of the aristocratic Alcmeonid family by descent, Pericles had also inherited a family “curse,” the religious stain of homicide incurred by a far distant ancestor some 140 years before his birth. That too would come back to haunt him much later in his career.

As if that were not enough, his father Xanthippus was also not the easiest of parents to follow. In 489 B.C., just a year or so after Athens’ stunning victory over an invading Persian force at the Battle of Marathon, when Pericles was about six, Xanthippus chose to launch a prosecution of that battle’s chief hero, Miltiades, on grounds that in his subsequent, failed campaign against a Cycladic island community he had “deceived the People,” thus committing a form of high treason. The Athenians’ highest court found Miltiades guilty as charged.

His father was not motivated purely by altruistic concern for the People; at least as much, he was pursuing an inter-aristocratic family feud. And five years later, when the Persian issue was again at the top of the Athenian democratic agenda, a majority of the at least six thousand Athenians casting their potsherd ballots voted to ostracize Xanthippus. This was, presumably, because they believed that his commitment to the cause of all-out resistance to Persia was less than wholehearted.

The fate of an ostracized politician was to have to remove himself and his family—including therefore a ten- or eleven-year-old Pericles—into exile beyond the territorial borders of the Athenian state. The sentence was nominally for ten years, but such was the Persian emergency that just four years later Xanthippus was recalled and reinstated. The following year, he was elected to command not just the Athenian fleet but the entire allied Greek fleet. That proved a triumphant success, though his harsh treatment of enemy prisoners revealed a cruel streak.

All of this, I suggest, materially contributed to producing the sort of rabidly pro-democratic politician that Pericles revealed himself to be as early as age twenty-three.

For us, the theater is mainly a place of entertainment, not instruction, let alone religious worship and national solidarity-building. For the democratic Athenians who invented our idea of theater, it was all those and more. The elites were required by law to fund it, and so it was that in 472 B.C. at the city’s chief religious play-festival Pericles sponsored four plays by the great Aeschylus. They included the still extant Persians, which, whatever else it was, was a great celebration of the Athenians’ version of democracy. Not entirely surprisingly, Aeschylus—and Pericles—won, by democratic vote.

A decade or so later Pericles emerged onto the main stage of Athenian politics as a leading figure and eventually a statesman, a position he occupied until his death over thirty years later. That prominence he owed in large part to his exceptional oratorical skill, a necessity in a face-to-face, mass-meeting style of the political system. It enabled him to become the “demagogue”—literally, leader of the People—of my subtitle. As one contemporary comic playwright put it, “persuasion sat on his lips.” Mostly—but not always—whatever Pericles promoted politically was found persuasive. The Great War between Athens and Sparta that broke out in 431 B.C., however, did not go at all well to begin with, and Pericles died in 429 B.C. of the Great Plague that first struck Athens in 430 B.C.

However, it is for neither of those two public-life roles—statesman, demagogue—that my book and this essay foreground the extraordinary life and career of Pericles. It is rather for the totally unpredictable turn that his private life took around 450 B.C. that he has fully earned the moniker of "eccentric." Upper-class Athenians typically married in their late twenties, entering a union arranged for them by their elders. Conforming to tradition, he fathered two sons. But the name of his wife—his only legal wife—remains an unknown mystery, and the name he gave one of his two sons, Paralus (the other was named, as normal, after his paternal grandfather), was distinctively political. The original Paralus was a distant minor Athenian hero, but his was the name given to one of the city’s two flagship state warships. That was because it recalled one of the three geopolitical regions into which the city’s home territory was divided, the coastal region of Paralia within which the port and dockyard of Piraeus were located. Democracy and the navy were symbiotically linked at Athens.

Having secured his family line and inheritance, Pericles then did something quite conventional, which was to divorce his wife. And he is said to have also found her an amicable new match. That would have been in the late 450s B.C., when Pericles was in his early forties. However, what he did a couple of years later was the very reverse of conventional, traditional, or normal: He fell passionately in love with a foreign Greek woman, set up household with her, had a further son with her and lived with her for some two decades until his death. How so? Why so? The human heart is ever a deep mystery, and the evidence is such that we can only speculate how Pericles was first introduced to the probably twenty-year-old Aspasia from Miletus (a Greek city allied to Athens on what is now the Aegean seaboard of western Turkey). The result was simply scandalous.

This was for several reasons. One of them was that Aspasia (her name can be translated roughly as "Joy") and Pericles could not be legally married and have legitimate offspring. That was thanks, ironically, to a "nativist" law that Pericles himself had promulgated and which the Athenian People had voted for in 451 B.C. Another reason for her scandalous notoriety was the way she and Pericles—allegedly—behaved together in public. Both on leaving their home in the morning and on returning in the evening Pericles would embrace Aspasia vigorously and visibly. That went against Athenian moral code, according to which respectable married women should not even be talked about let alone seen behaving unconventionally in public.

Another reason for Aspasia’s notoriety was that she was super-intelligent. So much so that she was credited with running a sort of salon in the home she shared with Pericles—for his male associates mainly, somewhat anticipating the eighteenth-century French salon of Madame du Deffand attended by, for instance, Voltaire. Indeed one source (none other than Plato) credited Aspasia with being the real original author of the famous Funeral Speech. In itself that was not the worst insult that could have been hurled at Pericles given the universally high opinion of the Speech as delivered. Far worse potentially was the accusation that, politically, Aspasia was the power behind the throne, the true originator of some of the more controversial policies that Pericles publicly advocated.

That scurrilous accusation applied particularly to Pericles' unshakable demand in 432/1 B.C. that the Athenians absolutely must resist the Spartans’ spurious diplomatic claims and take up arms against them both by land and by sea. For really—so it was alleged—it was chiefly because of his love not of Athens but of Aspasia that he took that view. As it happened, a few young men from the neighboring enemy city of Megara, an ally of Sparta, had sneaked into Athens and stolen two prostitutes from Aspasia’s brothel, whereupon Pericles had inveigled Athens into declaring war on Sparta in order to be able to retrieve them.

Of course, that line of argument and attack was—literally—comic: delivered after Pericles' death in a comedy of Aristophanes. But its point remains: Pericles' relationship with Aspasia was the height of eccentricity. Did it do him—or Athens—damage? Athens—none at all. Him—a little. But not enough to damn his memory or prevent his immortalization in stone, however controversial, in the bustling Athens of today.

An Emeritus Cambridge Professor of Greek Culture, Paul Cartledge is a Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge University. He is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of some thirty books, the latest being Pericles: Statesman, Demagogue, Eccentric.