Pericles' Political Career

No student of the career of Pericles and of the extension of Athenian democracy that took shape under his direction can but be astonished by the paucity of evidence that has survived antiquity. It is a real paradox that the "Age of Pericles" presents to us a lacunose record disposing itself into a series of problems that resist solution because of our inadequate understanding of the chronology of Pericles' career and the intent and, sometimes, the dates, of his major legislation. Thus, although his first political action may more or less reliably be set in the year 463,^[51] we do not know his age at the time^[52] or even whether he acquired political importance immediately thereafter. That assumption has indeed been made, for it is often supposed that he participated with

Ephialtes in the great reform of 462/1, when the Areopagus was deprived of its power and the new era of radical democracy commenced.^[53]

In this connection it has even been argued (by H. T. Wade-Gery) that one of Pericles' major pieces of legislation, the introduction of jury pay for the Athenian citizen body, occurred before rather than after 462/1, developing out of his (alleged) conflict with Cimon son of Miltiades, the leading politician in Athens until his ostracism in 461.^[54] We shall have occasion to examine this measure more closely in chapter 2,^[55] where we give our reasons for placing the enactment well after the date of Ephialtes' reform, though it can be stated here that the main prop of Wade-Gery's thesis, Plutarch, Pericles 9.1–5, rests on misunderstanding or carelessness by Plutarch of his main source, Aristotle, Ath. Pol. 27. But the real sequence should not be a matter of doubt. Aristotle in Politics 1274a7–11 is decisive as to the order of events. Speaking of the danger implicit in Solon's distribution of jury powers to the people, Aristotle observes that these powers expanded and eventually brought democracy. He adds by way of explanation that, after Solon, "Ephialtes and Pericles curtailed the boule of the Areopagus and Pericles had the juries given pay; in this fashion, each of the demagogues brought onward the democracy by expansion of its current state."

Aristotle's formulation, which imparts historical perspective, implies the temporal separation of one reform from the other, first that of the Areopagus, then that providing for jury pay, and his evidence must take precedence over speculation about the complex topical arrangement that appears in Ath. Pol. 27. But not only is it premature to assign a major legislative act of Pericles' to the late sixties; as we shall see, the tradition associating him with Ephialtes in the attack on the Areopagus in 462/1 is sufficiently suspicious as to render it probable that Pericles' legislative activity actually began no sooner than in the early fifties.

To question the association of Ephialtes and Pericles in the attack on the Areopagus in 462/1 may well appear, at first sight, to be little more than an exercise in hypercriticism. Very little, it might be supposed, would be gained or lost by the assumption of their collaboration except the pleasant association of Pericles with an epochal measure suitable to

his political orientation. Yet the question deserves attention, for it affects our general estimation of the shape and character of Pericles' career in the fifties and, no less important, supplies an opportunity to test the quality of our tradition. Now modern scholars almost universally bring the date of significant Periclean measures, especially the decree about jury pay, into close temporal relation with the reform of 462/1, as if they were logically concomitant,^[56] and that presumption is greatly assisted by the vision of Pericles as a powerful political personality operative in the late sixties serving as the adjutant of Ephialtes. Our own belief is that Pericles' radical measures about misthos (public pay) belong late in the fifties, if not thereafter, for we suppose that this ideological departure, though it presumed the destruction of the Areopagus, was not a mere consequence of its fall but in fact represents a new orientation towards public expenditure presupposing, among other things, access to the allied treasury. Our reasons will be presented in due course (chapter 2); our object here is to demonstrate how very tenuous is the evidence usually accepted as sufficient to indicate the association of Pericles with Ephialtes. Grounds for skepticism arise from the fact that the tradition is weakly and selectively asserted when not implicitly contradicted by our sources; in a word, it appears to be nothing more than an unsupported inference.

The temptation will have been irresistible for fourth-century critics to associate the great leader of democratic Athens with the epochal political event of the first half of the fifth century. Certainly the available biographical/political data rendered the assumption tenable, for it was known that Pericles had come forward politically just before the year 462/1 in the prosecution of Cimon,^[57] while, on the other hand, his legislative career was indisputably in place in the 450s, shortly after the assault on the Areopagus had been successfully launched and Cimon had fallen to ostracism. But if Pericles had indeed been involved in this period of political convulsion, one would expect a firm tradition testifying to it. Instead we find something quite different and rather peculiar. To be sure, in the important passage already quoted, 1274a8, Pericles as well as Ephialtes is credited with the reform. But Pericles' name looks as if it has been added as an afterthought^[58] ( )

and, in any case, his position is secondary to Ephialtes. The implication of his secondary status would be negligible were it not for the remarkable treatment this subject receives in Ath. Pol. 25–27. Chapter 25 describes Ephialtes' attack on the Areopagus without mention of the name of Pericles (though in 25.3 Themistocles is introduced, impossibly, as a participant); chapter 26 descends in time from the destruction of the Areopagus to Pericles' citizenship law of 451/50 (26.4)—the first mention of his name. In chapter 27, devoted to Pericles' demagoguery in the 50s,^[59] it is also said that "he took away some powers of the Areopagites," and is by no means clear that this reference is intended to coincide with the material provided in chapter 25. Thus Pericles' alleged complicity in the attack on the Areopagus is ignored when the subject is the Areopagus, Ephialtes (and Themistocles) having been given the responsibility for the assault, while it is only when the subject turns to Pericles himself that we are offered halfhearted and vague expression of his alleged activity against this council.

Let us pass on to certain remarks made by Plutarch in the Pericles. In 7.8 we read that Pericles liked to have other people do his work for him, "of whom one, they say, was Ephialtes, who destroyed the power of the boule of the Areopagus" (cf. Moral. 812d). Again, in 9.5, where Plutarch speaks of Pericles' opposition to Cimon, his demagogic measures and his attack on the Areopagus (an inflation of Ath. Pol. 27.3f., where the Areopagus is not mentioned),^[60] the crucial phrase is Pericles' removal of the power of this boule "through Ephialtes." To this we must add the negative evidence of Ath. Pol. 35.2. The Thirty Tyrants are here said to have attempted to restore the "ancestral constitution" and to have "abrogated the laws of Ephialtes and Archestratus [otherwise unknown] concerning the Areopagites of the Areopagus." In this critical passage, Pericles is passed over in silence.

The picture, surely, is one in which Pericles' presence has been limned because it was inferred that he must have played a part in a movement that seemed so Periclean in its spirit and direction that his involvement followed of itself. Is it not equally apparent that the evidence would have been of a more substantial nature had Pericles actually been the associate of Ephialtes? And if he had been his associate, the emphasis certainly would have shifted, and the great politician

would have been known for the reform, Ephialtes going the way of Archestratus. Instead we have a reverse tendency, culminating in the assertion of Idomeneus of Lampsacus (FGrHist 338 F 8 = Plut. Per. 10.7) that Pericles killed "his friend and associate," Ephialtes, "out of jealousy and envy of his reputation." The transparent creation of a tradition specifically attaching Pericles to this reform, on the one hand, and the inability of the man of greater fame to crowd out the truly responsible agent, make the conclusion reasonable that Pericles was associated by ancient writers with the attack on the Areopagus in spite of the absence of any sign of his involvement in the affair simply because the idea was attractive and seemed appropriate. Hence the invention of the tradition that filled the gap by making Pericles operate from behind the scenes, a mere expedient, this, to "explain" why Pericles' name was not connected with Ephialtes' legislation.^[61] If this ancient theory will not be taken as the certain sign of inferential speculation—the desire to fill the historical record with plausible guesses—one can only wonder what more is required. In this connection, Plut. Per. 7.1, which implies that Pericles delayed his political debut beyond the normal date, becomes an important testimony. This tradition may also be based on inference. But, if so, it was intended to serve as an alternative explanation for the same curious lack of knowledge about Pericles' early days that generated the theory that he manipulated others and did not himself step to the forefront. The existence of this tradition thus confirms our argument that the other is a fabrication intended to fill a lacuna. The negative implications of our assessment of both traditions nevertheless yields a valuable result: it confirms that Pericles entered on his political career comparatively late—that is, after the Ephialtean reform.

Our sources tell us little of Pericles' rise to power in the fifties, though it was a period of great activity for him and importance to the Athenian community. This was the decade in which the principle of misthos, or state payment for public service, was proposed and carried, and the Athenians entered in consequence on the direct enjoyment of the benefits of empire. Yet our record is woefully meagre. The ancients convey the impression that Pericles' domination over the political scene, when Cimon was in ostracism,^[62] swung into balance again on Cimon's return in 452, and that a delicate equilibrium continued after Cimon's death and his replacement as a leader of the "better people" by

Thucydides son of Melesias (Plut. Per. 11.2).^[63] That view cannot be refuted, but it seems unlikely enough to deserve brief comment.

The tradition that Pericles and Cimon carved Athens into separate and independent spheres—domestic and external—when Cimon returned to Athens, has the taint of wishful thinking by conservatives.^[64] Pericles' control over the voters can only have intensified in the fifties, when, in addition to the First Peloponnesian War, which yielded Megara, Aegina, and Boeotia to Athens, the Athenians began construction of the Long Walls and Pericles initiated his domestic legislation. Cimon's return to Athens after an absence of ten years does not constitute an argument favoring the assumption that the conservatives regained the power they had lost in 462.^[65] The ancients would naturally infer something of the kind, magnetized as they were by the spell of Cimon's name, while moderns are inclined to view the cessation of hostilities with Sparta and the renewal of open warfare with Persia as a mark of the resurgence of Cimon's influence and as the sign of a modification, if not a change, in the direction of Athenian foreign policy. But the peace with Sparta that Cimon helped to negotiate was to all appearance a nonpartisan objective, not a conservative triumph, and with regard to Persia, Pericles had excellent reasons for pressing the war; that policy was mandatory if Artaxerxes was to be brought to the peace table.^[66]

Nor did Thucydides son of Melesias pose any perceptible danger to Pericles' predominance after Cimon's death. We may infer from his opposition to the building program, which proved futile, that he attained symbolic importance, perhaps as the "conscience of the conservatives." To such a position, glory but not much power attaches. Both the glory and the lack of power are reflected in the tradition, which speaks in

general and inflated terms of this political figure.^[67] The exception is Satyrus, FHG III F. 14, who preserves the information that Thucydides was responsible for the trial of Anaxagoras for impiety. It is difficult to evaluate this unsupported testimony: if authentic, as is probable enough, the trial should be set before Thucydides' ostracism (conventionally set in 444), not after Thucydides' return.^[68] But this victory, if it occurred, is less a manifestation of Thucydides' political power than of the inherently conservative religious views of the Athenians, which he tapped successfully. Pericles and his friends were certainly not immune from attack at any time; predominance, even great predominance, is not equivalent to absolute rule. The important consideration is that Thucydides' successful prosecution does not in this instance represent a dazzling partisan victory. Indeed, Thucydides' incapacity to galvanize an effective opposition is implicit in the story (Plut. Per. 11.2) that he attempted to organize a clique of conservatives to act in unison against Pericles. The tradition seems credible, though it has been doubted,^[69] and the implication it carries is that special measures were necessary if Pericles were to be stopped. But it was Thucydides who failed in the great test of 448 and who suffered ostracism shortly thereafter. It appears, therefore, that Thucydides' appeal in the literature, from Stesimbrotus of Thasos, who included Thucydides' name in the title of his political pamphlet, to Aristotle, Plutarch, and beyond, was essentially as a symbol of the opposition to Pericles from the right, which was effectively overridden.

As stated, however, modern scholars take a different view,^[70] despite the endlessly victorious career of Pericles, the nature of which inevitably suggests that if he had reason to fear for his popularity, the threat lay to his left and not to his right (cf. Plut. Per. 33, 35, for the mention of Cleon). Evidence to support this view is very hard to find. Apart from the existence of the inefficacious Thucydides (schol. Wasps 947), we have only uncertain conjecture about the possible significance of Pericles' tenure of the strategia for fifteen years in a row—443/2–429/8 (Plut. Per. 16.3). That knowledge of this feat provided the ancients with a convenient means to divide Pericles' career into two halves, the first embodying his "demagogic" side, the second, his development into a "statesman," is beyond dispute; as we shall see shortly, it was incumbent on the ancients to posit a transformation of this type. But why moderns follow suit is harder to understand. Pericles was not elected to the strategia, in which ten positions were open, in direct competition with Thucydides. In all probability, election to the strategia was now open to all Athenians without regard to tribe and, in any case, Pericles' tribe was Akamantis, whereas Thucydides' was Antiochis, so that even if election partially remained a tribal competition (the exception, on that view, being the so-called strategos ex hapanton ),^[71] Pericles and Thucydides competed in separate spheres. In other words, the fifteen-year tenure of the strategia, whatever else it may imply, has nothing to tell us of Pericles' relative position in Athens vis-à-vis Thucydides in the prior period. Moreover, it can hardly be alleged that the apparent absence of Pericles' name in the strategic lists of 444 (and perhaps prior years) indicates that he had been turned away by the voters. We cannot infer the infliction of a grave political setback for Pericles when we do not even know whether he found it desirable, before 443, to hold the strategia continuously. The fact that the strategia was a high political-military office does not require that the leading politician of Athens, especially if he were not cast in the mold of Cimon (cf. Plut. Per. 11.1), serve as a member of the board at all times. Pericles' real power arose from his control of the ecclesia,^[72] and there is no reason to believe that he found it convenient in the fifties to detach himself from this arena.

In the forties, moreover, he held other offices, closely supervising the building program.^[73] Quite probably he preferred to remain at home. The report of his continuous tenure of the strategia may, therefore, be misleading, carrying the unintended implication that Pericles' prior experience with strategic elections was checkered. That should follow only if the ancients reported that at one time or another Pericles had been rejected by the voters. The absence of any such tradition renders the usual interpretation of this datum unnecessary and capricious.

What, then, of the prevalent ancient belief that the ostracism of Thucydides resulted in an alteration in the character of Pericles' political psychology? This view, which we find in its embryonic state in Ath. Pol. 28.2, is best expressed by Plutarch in the Pericles 14.3–15.1 (cf. 6.3, 16.3):

At length, coming to a final contest with Thucydides which of the two should ostracise the other out of the country, and having gone through this peril, he threw his antagonist out, and broke up the confederacy that had been organised against him. So that now all schism and division being at an end, and the city brought to evenness and unity, he got all Athens and all affairs that pertained to the Athenians into his own hand, their tributes, their armies, and their galleys, the islands, the sea, and their wide-extended power, partly over other Greeks and partly over barbarians, and all that empire, which they possessed, founded and fortified upon subject nations and royal friendships and alliances.

After this he was no longer the same man he had been before, nor as tame and gentle and familiar as formerly with the populace, so as readily to yield to their pleasures and to comply with the desires of the multitude, as a steersman shifts with the winds. Quitting that loose, remiss, and, in some cases, licentious court of the popular will, he turned those soft and flowery modulations to the austerity of aristocratical and regal rule; and employing this uprightly and undeviatingly for the country's best interests, he was able generally to lead the people along, with their own wills and consents, by persuading and showing them what was to be done; and sometimes, too, urging and pressing them forward extremely against their will, he made them, whether they would or no, yield submission to what was for their advantage. (trans. Dryden)

In estimating the value of this passage, two considerations must be kept in mind. History, as the ancients viewed it, was propelled by famous names. It was inconceivable to Aristotle, for instance (see Ath. Pol. 28.2) and other writers of the fourth century (e.g., Ephorus) that the return of Cimon in 452 or the inheritance of his place by Thucydides would not of itself have resulted in a divided city, or that the

politics of a city divided could in fact remain majoritarian. We can understand the predispositions standing behind this ancient notion but can find nothing in the historical record to suggest its propriety to the period 452–c. 444. Aristotle's list of the opposing leaders of the demos, on the one side, and of the "well born and rich and respectable," on the other, is purely schematic; the ostracism of a famous name served paradoxically as a guarantee of the power of the victim, though he had lost the most critical of elections, just as modern scholars often (and, apparently, erroneously) suppose that the return of the victim somehow establishes, tout court and without evidence, his accession to real power and influence. Dynastic politics of the type tacitly assumed, however, seem to have lost their effectiveness in 462/1; the Athenian demos, in the ecclesia and, later, in the dikasteria, implemented its will without the traditional regard for representatives of the great families. If a scion of an illustrious house wished for power in Athens after 462, however much his birth might recommend him, he needed to be a "leader of the people."^[74]

Secondly, the nature of the tradition about Pericles and the alleged alteration of his regime into one of "aristocratic" character makes clear that it was contrived not from the evidence but from a desire to reconcile two competing views of the statesman. Pericles' career presented a problem to the historical and philosophical critics of the fourth century. His dominance prior to the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, the ease with which he could be distinguished from the demagogues who succeeded him on his death, and his association with Athens at the apex of its development, something regarded with nostalgia and awe by his fourth-century epigoni, required that he be treated with respect. For later writers like Plutarch, Thucydides' famous words in 2.65.5–8 became dogma;^[75] in the fourth century it was enough that Pericles guided

Athens without a serious rival, was celebrated as the "Olympian" in comic literature, and was well remembered, probably exalted, in the oral tradition. Yet it was also clear to the critics that Pericles had been a demagogue responsible for the radicalization of the city-state. It therefore became desirable to resolve what in essence was an intellectual and literary problem centering on the apparent metamorphosis of the great politician, and the dividing line could plausibly be drawn at the year of the ostracism of Thucydides son of Melesias. The elimination of Pericles' "powerful" rival left him, as it appeared, without opposition, permitting him to rise above faction and, in the words of Thucydides, "to lead the people rather than to be led by them." In this way, the great statesman could be viewed not as a divisive figure but as a leader of the city as a whole. The conservative intellectual establishment of the fourth century could allege that he too had become an elitist, an aristocrat in control over the popular element, and not its creature. The development of the schema should not delude us; we need not suppose, on the basis of the rhetoric, that Pericles underwent a change in the forties. His domestic, imperial, and Spartan policy continued as before.

None of this should be taken to imply that Pericles maintained "absolute dominance" at any time. Though he was called so, he was not the tyrant of Athens, and the demos could be fickle. His opponents attacked his friends successfully, and the restrictions in comedy applied 440–438/7 (schol. Ar. Ach. 67) suggest pressure and criticism owing to the unpopularity of the Samian War. Since Pheidias went into exile in 438/7 and the comic poets were assailing Pericles for his bondage to "Omphale" at that time,^[76] it is likely enough that Pericles faced, and surmounted, a crisis in this period. But, in general, it is hard to believe that the man who survived a catastrophe of the dimensions of the Egyptian Expedition in 454, who dominated the domestic political scene from the 450s to 431, and who had the influence to bring about a war in 431 that posited the destruction of Attica as a matter of course had much to fear from any political opponent from the time he fol-

lowed Damon's advice and distributed "its own property" to the people.

Group-Outsource

The career of Pericles, viewed, as it were, from the outside, naturally manifests little sign of the effects on him of his peculiar family tradition. If, after our review, we were to attempt to set down, in anticipation of what is to follow, some of the family traditions Pericles inherited on the Alcmeonid side, what features are most likely to have impressed themselves upon him?

If the existence of the curse affected him personally, probably it reinforced his naturally rationalistic turn of mind. The man whose circle included Anaxagoras and Damon, and who evinced qualities that inspired Thucydides, will have greeted traditional ideas skeptically and have discounted supernatural agency as a matter of course. But the inheritance of a curse cuts deep; the experiences of his maternal ancestors cannot but have sharpened his impatience with contemporary representatives of the older ways of thought, making him naturally inclined to disparage their ideas and ethos. Cimon and Thucydides son of Melesias inhabited a different world from his; Herodotus and Pericles will have found each other congenial company only if they met very briefly and then but once.

If Pericles scoffed at the agos, his contempt for the aristocracy that, in the sixth century at least, isolated his family, would not have been the less real because the superstition was rooted in the conventional religious life of the times, and his sympathies with the class to which he belonged by birth must have been exiguous. We do not believe, today, in the efficacy of curses, but if ever a case history existed of the isolation of a family of wealth and prestige that had incurred a dreadful curse, it is that of the Alcmeonids. A common thread unites the manifestations of their political virtuosity: the absence of fixed and reliable associations with the Athenian nobility. In this respect, one element of his family tradition fused with another, for the absence of common understanding with the nobility was reinforced by the record of the family in championing the demos. We have no desire to romanticize Megacles II, and every reason to suppose that his actions were self-serving. The fact remains that by choosing Peisistratus over the local dynasts, the Athenian citizenry profited greatly. The association of

Cleisthenes with the Peisistratids tells the same tale, as does, later, Cleisthenes' establishment of the democracy. Whatever flirting with tyranny there may have been in 490, Pericles' heritage placed him squarely on the side of the demos .

There is also the question of Sparta. We should allow for some pre-determination of his sympathies in this direction. Cleisthenes had been expelled from Athens by the Lacedaemonians as one polluted by a curse and unfit for Athenian society; the Lacedaemonians had not only been the friends of Cleisthenes' enemies (Isagoras and the emigrés), but were the proudest and most powerful representatives of a form of government to which Athens, in Pericles' younger days, was becoming the antithesis. Here too it is possible to detect a fusion of attitudes resulting in a powerful controlling idea. Ancestral tradition and fervent patriotism united in an intractable and defiant hostility to Sparta, leading to the wars of the 450s and 431.

The impression conveyed of Pericles in the pages of Plutarch and our other sources is of a man detached from society, indifferent to conventional opinions and devoted, at all cost, to what he conceived to be the role and destiny of his city. It seems indisputable that such a man was the product of his family tradition no less than of the times he shaped so signally.