Favor comes to a man because for a brief moment, in the great
space of human change and progress, some general human purpose
finds in him a satisfactory embodiment. -F. D. R.
There is some danger that our idea of Pericles may be of a rather
chilly and inhuman person. Even the Athenians of his own years
of fame found him 'Olympian' and from the super-human to the inhuman
is a short step in thought. In his own day he was respected and
trusted as none other, but really loved only by a few, who have
left no memorial. To this, his own character contributed. Self-effacing
he was not, but one might coin the expression "self-immersing."
Athens as he made her was not only his life-work but his most
abiding passion, loved to the detriment both of his property and
of his family life. It was perhaps his most tragic limitation
that Greece, apart from Athens, meant no more to him than Europe
to most patriots of the recent past. But few modern people can
throw stones at him' His business was Athens' business, his recreation
the devising of new means of expression for Athenian art, song,
athletics, and lyrical drama ' He had long conversations with
the pioneer thinkers of his time on the physical or social sciences
as they are called today' His intimate friends included Sophocles,
Phidias, Anaxagoras the scientist, Damon the musician, and many
others. The woman he loved was one whose intelligence was respected
by Socrates--and she, my friends, was a former lady of the evening.
As a young man he was a soldier of conspicuous gallantry' He had
also a dry' ironic' sense of humor. Olympian to the outside world
he may have been, but chilly he was not Even in Athens no man
lived more fully than Pericles. In the middle of the Plain of
Athens a miniature range of rocky hills breaks the surface of
the land. Highest of them is the spike of Lykabettos, from which
you can look over the whole Saronic Gulf to the coast and the
mountains of the Peloponnese.
On a clear day you can pick out the citadel of Corinth, some fifty
miles away. But of greater interest to early man was a lower rock,
with steep sides for defense, space on top for habitation, and
copious springs under the rocks, where water could be got without
far to venture or far to carry. In the early days the rock was
not yet so flat-topped or so precipitous as it became in later
days. Its present shape is due to works of building and revetment
performed when Pericles was still a youth' r But already it was
an almost ideal citadel when Neolithic men first settled there
and made of it the "High City''--the ACROPOLIS.
With such a refuge from which to till the good land round about,
and the sea at Phaleron far enough away to deter casual sea-raiders,
Athens prospered and gradually developed an exemplary democracy.
The wide area of the country helped to support an enormous population
for a Greek state. In Pericles' time probably over 250,000 Athenians,
in addition to many thousands of free non-citizens, and at least
100,000 slaves lived in Attica. It is significant that there was
little bitterness in the internal strife of Athens. Class-struggles
were not exacerbated by a congest as in the Dorian states. In
old and traditional Attica, even in the revolutionary period,
political struggles never led to serious difficulties as in Dorian
Megara or half-Asiatic Miletus.
The crowning success of continuity and moderation at Athens came
after the triumph of democracy, in the lifetime of Pericles. Most
of the old families accepted and worked the democratic constitution,
a fact of which Pericles himself is the most conspicuous example.
Athens in her prime then, had a population surpassing that of
any other Greek state, had an internal solidarity unmatched in
the history of that politically all to active people. Pericles
was born about 494 BC, probably in the country house of his father,
Xanthippos, at Cholarges, the plain near Athens. He must have
been over twenty in 473, when his name first appears in an extant
official document. He was still in full vigor--probably not over
sixty-five--almost up to his death in 429.
Pericles' family was distinguished. His father was a rising general
and politician and appears on the list of Archons or Regents elected
for life. If Xanthippos' family was distinguished, that of Pericles'
mother was famous throughout the Greek world. She came of 4 the
magnificent, brilliant, slightly sinister House of the Alkmeonidai,
whose family history constituted no small part of the political
history of Athens. They claimed descent from the family of the
old King Nestor of the Trojan War, which had migrated to Athens
when the wild Dorian conquerors overran the Peloponnese and founded
the great military power of Sparta. The Alkmeonidai played no
small part in the long history that led to Athens' greatness in
the fifth century' Pericles had a heritage to live up to and also
to live down. The Persian question dominated politics throughout
the childhood and youth of Pericles. He was fourteen years old
when Athens had to be evacuated because of the Persian threat.
There was a religious service of thanksgiving for the great deliverance
after the battle of Salamis ' The soloist was a very handsome
boy from Kolonos, near Pericles home, about the same age as Pericles,
and for most of his life one of his closest friends. His name
was Sophocles. Both were well-born, well-to do, and in mind brilliant,
serious, and idealistic. Sophocles' no doubt' was more interested
in poetry' Pericles in war and politics. Sophocles was religious,
Pericles a rationalist ' interested in Ionian science; Sophocles
was passionate and amorous, Pericles, for a Greek of his age,
almost austere. But there was no division yet in Athens between
men of action and aesthetes. Civilization was still integrated.
Pericles, like every intelligent man, was interested as a matter
of course in the art and poetry which expressed the spirit of
Athens: and Sophocles the poet, like every good citizen' was a
man of action too' Long afterwards, in the year in which he produced
his ---' he and Pericles were generals together.
We cannot deal in this brief time with the whole political life
and career of Pericles. Let me just make a few remarks about the
character of his politics. He was a democrat and a liberal, probably
the first liberal in history. I am using liberal to mean a person
who understands that liberty includes not only his own liberty
to do what he likes' but other people's liberty to do what he
does not like. (Read the excerpt of the Funeral Oration to get
the fuller meaning of this notion' ) It was always clear to Pericles
that Athens led the world in all the arts of civilization, that
Athens, in his own words, was an education to Greece. He never
doubted, therefore, that Athens must be the leader politically
too.
In the early days of the Athenian Empire, most of the inhabitants
of the ''cities'', as the speakers in the Assembly usually called
the Empire, followed Athens willingly' Athens was the deliverer
both from the Great King of Persia without and from the little
tyrants and oligarchs within. If a little coercion was temporarily
necessary to break down parochial prejudices in favor of local
money, or to see that reactionary elements did not gain political
power, then coercion must be applied' until all men' or enough
of them should see reason'
The cleruchies or colonies of the 5th century were said to have
been his idea' or that of his mentor Damonides. Apart from their
strategic importance, they were part of his 6 social policy, a
measure to plant out any poor Athenian who was able and willing,
on a farm of his own. The years of Pericles' supremacy saw the
construction of the great buildings, among which the new Temple
of Athena was only one, though the greatest. Released from war,
Athenian energies flowed swiftly into the new channel.
Plutarch gives us a vivid picture of Athens under what might be
called the ''full employment policy''. For Pericles wished the
common people, too, to have their share in the profits of empire,
but not to be paid for doing nothing; and so he brought before
them the great projects for buildings, and plans that would employ
many handicrafts, so that those at home, no less than those who
served in the fleet and army and garrisoned the empire, might
have their share in support from the public funds. For every kind
of material was used--stone and bronze, ivory and gold, ebony
and cypress wood and there was work for every craft: carpenters
and molders and smiths and masons, dyers, goldsmiths, ivory-workers,
embroiderers, turners; as well as the transport services, the
merchants and sailors and navigators at sea, and by land the wainwrights
and the breeders of oxen, the drivers, the rope makers, the workers
in flax and leather, the road makers and miners; and every art
had, as it were, an army under its command, of the unskilled laborers,
as the instrument and body of its work. Thus the need for workers
disseminated prosperity through the ranks of men of every age
and character.
And as the buildings rose, imposing in size and matchless in their
beauty and grace, while the workers vied with one another in the
skill of their craftsmanship, the most surprising thing was the
speed of their building; for works that one would have thought
could hardly be accomplished in several successive generations
were all accomplished in the prime of one man's political life.
An early item among these public works was the Middle Long Wall
directed by Pallikrates. It looks as though he was regularly retained
by the state. For the great temple of Athena in the City his name
is joined with that of another architect, Iktinos.
So we can assume that Iktinos was the artist and designer and
Pallikrates the organizer and engineer. Many other works were
started at the same time. In two of them Greek architects had
to tackle the problem of roofing a space to accommodate a considerable
audience, without use of the arch or dome, a problem which involved
the difficulty of setting the necessary pillars so as not to obstruct
the view. One of these was the Hall of the Mysteries at Eleusis,
where the devotees witnessed those secret rites of the Corri Goddess.
These secret rites gave hope of a glorified resurrection, like
that of the ''corn of wheat'' that falls into the ground and give
birth to something new. The other hall was the Concert Hall, the
Odeion, by an unnamed architect, with a high, vault like, conical
roof, said to have been inspired by Xerxes' great pavilion captured
during the Persian Wars.
This building was particularly near to Pericles' heart. In it
were held the musical contests in lyre-playing and flute playing
and singing, which on Pericles' proposal were at this time added
to the athletic contests and processions to the Akropolis, at
the four yearly festivals known as the Great Panathenaia. Pericles
himself was elected a Marshal of the Games at the next Panathenaia
(probably 442), and personally drew up the regulations for the
musical contests.
Kratinos has a typical crack at him, his skull, his Odeion, his
escape from ostracism and his liking for appearing in a helmet,
all in three lines: "And here, behold, our onion-headed Zeus
approaches, with the Odeion on his crown, now that the ostrakon
has passed him by." In the early forties another temple was
begun on the Market Hill, the little rising ground overlooking
the Agora, behind the Council Chamber and the Round House where
the Prytaneis on duty lived. This temple was smaller and plainer
than the Parthenon, yet dignified enough when seen, as it was
meant to be and can now be seen again, at the top of its bank
above the heart of the city.
This was the temple of Hephaistos, god of metal-workers, long
known to travelers as the Theseum. Its true dedication has been
proved by the American discovery of the sites of many little forges
in the area around it. Its building took longer than that of the
Parthenon, and its unknown architects in the later stages borrowed
some ideas from the great work of Iktinos. Perhaps one can infer
that it was paid for not by state funds but chiefly by the craftsmen
who lived and worked around it, in the same quarter of the old
town--the Athens inhabited from that time to this where the street
of the smiths still rings with the beating of iron and copper
at the present day.
But all other buildings were outshone, then no less than now,
by the great house of Athena of the City, which shortly came to
be called the Parthenon. On the foundations laid long since on
the highest part of the Citadel, the workmen under Pallikrates,
Iktinos, and the sculptor Phidias erected that most perfect of
European buildings. There it stood with all its sculptures, as
temple or as church of another Virgin or as mosque, until in a
modern siege, in 1687, a German gunner in the service of an Italian
general blew up a Turkish powder magazine inside the building,
demolishing the roof and both side walls with their pillars. This
episode is only too typical of the history of modern Greece between
the Great Powers of East and West.
After that it only remained for a British Ambassador to Turkey
(Lord Elgin) to remove the sculptures. There is little point for
us to engage in lyrical generalities about the great buildings.
The way to study them is to see them under their own sky, bright
in the sun or ethereal under the moon, an experience, I am told,
which will make a believer out of any one. The second best thing
to do is to look at pictures and use our imagination, something
we all can do.
The facts about the new temple are clear enough. It was to be
a large one, as befitted the dignity of Athens, nearly 230 feet
by just over 100 (70x31 meters) along the top step of its foundations,
and in that Doric style which was still the only style for Greek
temples west of the Aegean, a style exceedingly simple. It was
the translation into stone of a Bronze Age chieftain's log hall,
with porch and veranda, but enriched through generations of experience
with all manner of subtleties designed to lead, rest, and delight
the eye with the deliberate repetition of vertical and horizontal
lines, with the contrast between restrained but elaborate ornament
above and the plain colonnade below, and with the play on delicately
proportioned masses of the dry Mediterranean light.
Source: A. R. Burn, Pericles and Athens
(New York: Collier Books, 1966).