Studies in Greek Scenery, Legend and History / Selected from His Commentary on Pausanias' 'Description of Greece,'

by James George Frazer

The rise of Pericles to power, though it cannot be followed step by step, has an obvious and sufficient explanation in his combined wisdom and eloquence. Plato traces his eloquence largely to the influence of Anaxagoras; intercourse with that philosopher, he says, filled the mind of Pericles with lofty speculations and a true conception of the nature of intelligence, and hence his oratory possessed the intellectual grandeur and artistic finish characteristic of the highest eloquence. The range and compass of his rhetoric were wonderful, extending from the most winning persuasion to the most overwhelming denunciation. The comic poets of the day, in general very unfriendly to him, speak with admiration of his oratory: “greatest of Grecian tongues,” says Cratinus; “persuasion sat on his lips, such was his charm,” and “he alone of the orators left his sting in his hearers,” says Eupolis; “he lightened, he thundered,” says Aristophanes. His speeches were prepared with conscientious care; before rising to speak he used to pray that no inappropriate word might fall from his lips. He left no written speeches, but the few sayings of his which have come down to us reveal a passionate imagination such as breathes in the fragments of Sappho. Thus, in speaking of those who had died in war, he said that the youth had perished from the city like the spring from the year. He called the hostile island of Aegina “the eyesore of the Piraeus,” and declared that he saw war “lowering from Peloponnese.” Three of his speeches have been reported by Thucydides, who may have heard them, but, though their substance may be correctly recorded, in passing through the medium of the historian’s dispassionate mind they have been shorn of the orator’s imaginative glow, and in their cold iron logic are hardly to be distinguished from the other speeches in Thucydides. An exception to this is the speech which Thucydides reports as having been delivered by Pericles over the slain in the first year of the Peloponnesian War. This speech stands quite apart from the others; and as well in particular touches (for example, in the saying that “the grave of great men is the world”) as in its whole tenor we catch the ring of a great orator, such as Thucydides with all his genius was not. It is probably a fairly close report of the speech actually delivered by Pericles.

The first public appearance of Pericles of which we have record probably fell about 463. When Cimon, on his return from the expedition to Thasos, was tried on the utterly improbable charge of having been bribed by the Macedonian king to betray the interests of Athens, Pericles was appointed by the people to assist in conducting the prosecution; but, more perhaps from a conviction of the innocence of the accused than, as was said, in compliance with the entreaties of Cimon’s sister Elpinice, he did not press the charge, and Cimon was acquitted. Not long afterwards Pericles struck a blow at the conservative party by attacking the Areopagus, a council composed of life-members who had worthily discharged the duties of archon. The nature of the functions of the Areopagus at this period is but little known; it seems to have had a general supervision over the magistrates, the popular assembly, and the citizens, and to have exercised this supervision in an eminently conservative spirit. It sat also as a court for the trial of certain crimes, especially murder. Pericles appears to have deprived it of nearly all its functions, except its jurisdiction in cases of murder. The poet Aeschylus composed his Eumenides in vindication of the ancient privileges of the Areopagus. Though Pericles was the real author of the attack on the Areopagus, the measure was nominally carried by Ephialtes. It was, indeed, part of Pericles’s policy to keep in the background, and to act as far as possible through agents, reserving himself for great occasions. Ephialtes, a friend of Pericles, and a patriot of inflexible integrity, paid dearly for the distinction; he fell by the hand of an assassin employed by the oligarchical party—an event the more striking from the rarity of political assassinations in Greek history. The popular party seems to have immediately followed up its victory over the Areopagus by procuring the ostracism of Cimon, which strengthened the hands of Pericles by removing his most influential opponent. Pericles took part in the battle of Tanagra and bore himself with desperate bravery. After the battle Cimon was recalled from banishment, and it was Pericles who proposed and carried the decree for his recall.

In 454 Pericles led an Athenian squadron from the port of Pegae on the Corinthian Gulf, landed at Sicyon, and defeated the inhabitants who ventured to oppose him; then, taking with him a body of Achaeans, he crossed to Acarnania, and besieged the town of Oeniadae, but had to return home without capturing it. Not long afterwards he conducted a successful expedition to the Thracian Chersonese, where he not only strengthened the Greek cities by the addition of a thousand Athenian colonists, but also protected them against the incursions of the barbarians by fortifying the isthmus from sea to sea. This was only one of Pericles’s many measures for extending and strengthening the naval empire of Athens. Colonies were established by him at various times in Naxos, Andros, Oreus in Euboea, Brea in Macedonia, and Aegina. They served the double purpose of establishing the Athenian power in distant parts and of relieving the pressure of population at home by providing the poorer citizens with lands. Somewhat different were the famous colonies established under Pericles’s influence at Thurii in Italy, on the site of the ancient Sybaris, and at Amphipolis on the Strymon, for, though planted under the conduct of Athens, they were not exclusively Athenian colonies, other Greeks being allowed, and even invited, to take part in them. This was especially true of Thurii, which was in a manner a national Greek colony, and never stood in a relation of subjection to Athens. On one occasion Pericles sailed at the head of a splendid armament to the Black Sea, where he helped and encouraged the Greek cities and overawed the barbarians. At Sinope he left a force of ships and men, under the gallant Lamachus, to co-operate with the inhabitants against the tyrant Timesileus, and on the expulsion of the tyrant and his party he carried a decree for the despatch of six hundred Athenian colonists to Sinope, to occupy the lands vacated by the exiles. But, with the sober wisdom which characterised him, Pericles never allowed his plans to exceed the bounds of the possible; he was no political dreamer like Alcibiades, to be dazzled with the vision of a universal Athenian empire in Greece, Italy, and Africa, such as floated before the minds of many in that and the following generations. The disastrous expedition which the Athenians sent to Egypt, to support the rebel Inarus against Persia, received no countenance from Pericles.

When Cimon died in 449 the aristocratical party sought to counterbalance the power of Pericles by putting forward Thucydides, son of Melesias, as the new head of the party. He seems to have been an honest patriot, but, as the event proved, he was no match for Pericles. The Sacred War in 448 showed once more that Pericles knew how to defend the interests of Athens. The Phocians, under the protection of Athens, had wrested the control of the Delphic oracle from their enemies the Delphians. The latter were friendly to Sparta, and accordingly the Spartans marched into Phocis and restored the oracle to the Delphians. When they had departed, Pericles, at the head of an Athenian force, placed the oracle once more in the hands of the Phocians. As the seat of the great oracle, Delphi was to ancient Greece much what Rome was to mediaeval Europe, and the friendship of the god, or of his priests, was no small political advantage.

When the Athenians despatched a small force under Tolmides to crush a rising in Boeotia, they did so in spite of the warnings of Pericles. These warnings were soon justified by the unfortunate battle of Coronea, which deprived Athens at a blow of the continental dominion she had acquired a few years before by the battle of Oenophyta. The island of Euboea now revolted from Athens, and hardly had Pericles crossed over with an army to reduce it when word came that the Megarians had massacred the Athenian garrison, and, in league with Corinth, Sicyon, and Epidaurus, were up in arms, while a Peloponnesian army under King Plistoanax was on the point of invading Attica. Pericles recrossed in haste to Attica. The Peloponnesians returned home, having advanced no farther than Eleusis and Thria. It was said that Pericles had bribed Cleandridas; certain it is that both Cleandridas and Plistoanax were charged at Sparta with having misconducted the expedition and were found guilty. Having saved Attica, Pericles returned to Euboea, reduced it to subjection, expelled the Histiaeans, and settled the Athenian colony of Oreus on their lands.

The thirty years’ peace, concluded soon afterwards with Sparta, was probably in large measure the work of Pericles. The Athenians had evacuated Boeotia immediately after the battle of Coronea, and by the terms of the peace they now renounced their other continental possessions—Achaia, Troezen, Nisaea, and Pegae. The peace left Pericles at liberty to develop his schemes for promoting the internal welfare of Athens, and for making it the centre of the intellectual and artistic life of Greece. But first he had to settle accounts with his political rival Thucydides; the struggle was soon decided by the ostracism of the latter in 444. Thenceforward to the end of his life Pericles guided the destinies of Athens alone; in the words of the historian Thucydides, the government was in name a democracy, but in fact it was the rule of the first citizen. The unparalleled ascendency which he wielded so long over the fickle people is one of the best proofs of his extraordinary genius. He owed it entirely to his personal character, and he used it for the wisest and purest purposes. He was neither a vulgar demagogue to truckle to the passions and caprices of the mob, nor a vulgar despot to cow it by a hireling soldiery; he was a citizen among citizens, who obeyed him because they trusted him, because they knew that in his hands the honour and interests of Athens were safe. The period during which he ruled Athens was the happiest and greatest in her history, as it was one of the greatest ages of the world. Other ages have had their bright particular stars; the age of Pericles is the Milky Way of great men. In his lifetime there lived and worked at Athens the poets Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Cratinus, Crates, the philosophers Anaxagoras, Zeno, Protagoras, Socrates, the astronomer Meton, the painter Polygnotus, and the sculptors Myron and Phidias. Contemporary with these, though not resident at Athens, were Herodotus, the father of history; Hippocrates, the father of medicine; Pindar, “the Theban eagle”; the sculptor Polyclitus; and the philosophers Empedocles and Democritus, the latter joint author with Leucippus of the atomic theory. When Pericles died, other stars were rising or soon to rise above the horizon—the historians Thucydides and Xenophon, the poets Eupolis and Aristophanes, the orators Lysias and Isocrates, and the gifted but unscrupulous Alcibiades. Plato was born shortly before or after the death of Pericles. Of this brilliant circle Pericles was the centre. His generous and richly-endowed nature responded to all that was beautiful and noble not only in literature and art but in life, and it is with justice that the age of Pericles has received its name from the man in whom, more than in any other, all the various lines of Greek culture met and were harmonised. In this perfect harmony and completeness of nature, and in the classic calm which was the fruit of it, Pericles is the type of the ideal spirit, not of his own age only, but of antiquity.

It seems to have been shortly after the ostracism of Thucydides that Pericles conceived the plan of summoning a general congress of all the Greek states to be held at Athens. Its objects were the restoration of the temples which the Persians had destroyed, the fulfilment of the vows made during the war, and the establishment of a general peace and the security of the sea. Invitations were sent to the Greeks of Asia, the islands from Lesbos to Rhodes, the Hellespont, Thrace, Byzantium, Boeotia, Phocis, Peloponnese, Locris, Acarnania, Ambrada, and Thessaly. The aim of Pericles seems to have been to draw the bonds of union closer between the Greeks and to form a national federation. The beneficent project was defeated by the short-sighted opposition of the Spartans. But if in this scheme Pericles rose above the petty jealousies of Greek politics, another of his measures proves that he shared the Greek prejudices as to birth. At an early period of his career he enacted, or perhaps only revived, a law confining the rights of Athenian citizenship to persons both of whose parents were Athenian citizens. In the year 444, on the occasion of a scrutiny of the list of citizens, nearly five thousand persons claiming to be citizens were proved to be aliens under this law, and were ruthlessly sold into slavery.

The period of the thirty years’ peace was not one of uninterrupted tranquillity for Athens. In 440 a war broke out between the island of Samos (a leading member of the Athenian confederacy) and Miletus. Athens sided with Miletus; Pericles sailed to Samos with an Athenian squadron, and established a democracy in place of the previous oligarchy. After his departure, however, some of the exiled oligarchs, in league with Pissuthnes, satrap of Sardes, collected troops and, crossing over to Samos, overpowered the popular party and revolted from Athens. In this revolt they were joined by Byzantium. The situation was critical; the example set by Samos and Byzantium might be followed by the other confederates. Pericles discerned the danger and met it promptly. He led a squadron of sixty ships against Samos; and, after detaching some vessels to summon reinforcements from Chios and Lesbos, and others to look out for the Phoenician fleet which the Persians were expected to send to the help of Samos, he gave battle with forty-four ships to the Samian fleet of seventy sail and defeated it. Having received reinforcements of sixty-five ships, he landed in Samos and laid siege to the capital. But when he sailed with sixty ships to meet the Phoenician vessels which were reported to be near, the Samians sallied out with their vessels, defeated the besiegers, and remained masters of the sea for fourteen days. On his return, however, they were again blockaded and were compelled to surrender, nine months after the outbreak of the war.

Though Pericles enjoyed the confidence of the people as a whole, his policy and opinions could not fail to rouse the dislike and suspicions of many, and in the last years of his life his enemies combined to assail him. Two points in particular were singled out for attack, his administration of the public moneys and his religious opinions. With regard to the former, there must always be a certain number of persons who will not believe that others can resist and despise a temptation which to themselves would be irresistible; with regard to the latter, the suspicion that Pericles held heretical views on the national religion was doubtless well grounded. At first, however, his enemies did not venture to impeach himself, but struck at him in the persons of his friends. In 432 Phidias was accused of having appropriated some of the gold destined for the adornment of the statue of Athena in the Parthenon. But by the prudent advice of Pericles the golden ornaments had been so attached that they could be taken off and weighed, and when Pericles challenged the accusers to have recourse to this test the accusation fell to the ground. More dangerous, for more true, was the charge against Phidias of having introduced portraits of himself and Pericles into the battle of the Amazons, depicted on the shield of the goddess: the sculptor appeared as a bald old man lifting a stone, while Pericles was represented as fighting an Amazon, his face partly concealed by his raised spear. To the pious Athenians this seemed a desecration of the temple, and accordingly Phidias was clapped into gaol. Whether he died there or at Elis is uncertain.

Even more deeply was Pericles wounded by the accusation levelled at the woman he loved. This was the famous Aspasia, a native of Miletus, whose talents won for her general admiration at Athens. Pericles divorced his wife, a lady of good birth who had borne him two sons, Xanthippus and Paralus, but with whom he was unhappy, and attached himself to Aspasia. With her he lived on terms of devoted affection to the end of his life, though, as she was a foreigner, their union was not a legal marriage. She enjoyed a high reputation as a teacher of rhetoric, and seems to have been the centre of a brilliant intellectual society, which included Socrates and his friends. The comic poet, Hermippus, brought her to trial on the double charge of impiety and of corrupting Athenian women for the gratification of Pericles. A decree was further carried by a religious fanatic named Diopithes, whereby all who denied the existence of the gods or discussed the nature of the heavenly bodies were to be tried as criminals. This blow was aimed directly at the aged philosopher Anaxagoras, but indirectly at his pupil Pericles as well as at Aspasia. When this decree was passed, and apparently while the trial of Aspasia was still pending, Pericles himself was called upon by a decree of the people to render an account of the money which had passed through his hands. The result is not mentioned, but we cannot doubt that the matter either was dropped or ended in an acquittal. The perfect integrity of Pericles is proved by the unimpeachable evidence of his contemporary, the historian Thucydides. Aspasia was acquitted, but not before Pericles had exerted all his eloquence in her behalf. Anaxagoras, tried on the charge of impiety, was obliged to quit the city.