Pericles of Athens Read Free Page A

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     adapt his own behavior in response to them. It is precisely that complex interaction
     between the crowd and its leaders that deserves to be placed at the heart of the inquiry.
    A project centered on Pericles has to walk a tightrope. We should take care not to
     idealize Athens but, at the same time, not to deny the rupture introduced by the invention
     of democracy; if possible, we should also avoid misleading parallels without, however,
     renouncing certain carefully controlled anachronisms, given that history, even when
     positivist, always feeds on present-day debates; and finally, we should succumb neither
     to the illusion of the power of one great man nor to that of the all-powerful masses.
     Rather, we should inquire into the productive tension that developed between the stratēgos and the Athenian community. If we accept those three conditions, we have some hope
     of plumbing the true historical depths of both Pericles and the city, at the same
     time emphasizing the profound differences as well as the few resemblances that it
     has with our own contemporary democratic life.
    Instead of launching into a new biography of Pericles, we must instead seek to set
     this great figure in context, reinserting it into the democratic political culture
     of the fifth century B.C. Pericles, the man, is surrounded by numerous and sometimes
     contradictory accounts where, reading between the lines, we find embedded 7 a picture of the social and historical world of classical Athens. Pericles thus seems
     to operate as a good reagent—to borrow a chemical metaphor—that reveals the multiple
     aspects of the workings of Athenian democracy.
    In order to evaluate the extent and scope of these interactions, we must begin by
     reconstructing the background against which Pericles’ life unfolded. These salient
     chronological points are necessary in order to seize upon both the disagreements that
     crystallized around his actions and also the degree to which he left his mark on the
     destiny of Athens.
    C HRONOLOGY: A B RIEF H ISTORY OF P ERICLES
    The city ( polis ), which appeared around the eighth century, constituted a new form of political and
     territorial organization that rapidly spread throughout the Mediterranean region,
     from the Black Sea right across to the shores of Andalusia. In the early fifth century,
     the Greek world was composed of a mosaic of communities that were independent of one
     another but were linked by their language and their cults. Among them was the city
     of Athens, whichat that time appears to have been a community undergoing serious changes. At the time
     of Pericles’ birth in 494/3 B.C., 8 the city had recently freed itself from the domination of tyrants who, for the past
     half-century, had held the reins of power. This was an important change. Once the
     tyranny had collapsed, in 510 B.C., all forms of personal domination remained for
     many years discredited—a factor that Pericles had to take into account throughout
     his career. In 508/7 B.C., this upheaval acquired an institutional form: a series
     of reforms, inspired by Cleisthenes, introduced profound changes into the political
     organization of the city, laying down the bases of the democracy that then developed
     in the course of the fifth century.
    Pericles was related to Cleisthenes the reformer and so belonged to an extremely prestigious
     family. However, very little is known of his youth except that he probably spent a
     few years in exile, as his father Xanthippus was banished by the Athenian people when
     he was ostracized. This was a procedure that made it possible temporarily to get rid
     of any member of the elite considered to be too powerful and so prevent any return
     to tyranny. That sanction of ostracism lapsed in 485, halfway between the two Persian
     Wars, in which a fraction of the Greek cities stood against the Persian Empire.
    Pericles grew up against the background of this struggle, which was, right from the