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- [00:01]
Paul Cartledge
What can we learn from history's most powerful people? Join me Mike suiter, author of NextGen CEO, in History Extra's new podcast series, History's Greatest Leaders. To find out, listen wherever you get your podcasts.
- [00:18]
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- [01:21]
Emily Briffet
So.
- [01:21]
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- [01:39]
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- [02:13]
Emily Briffet
Ancient Athenian statesman Pericles was was a remarkable figure renowned for promoting democracy, championing the arts, and shaping the fate of the Athenian empire. But his legacy of military mistakes and eccentricity has landed him with a somewhat mixed reputation. In this History Extra podcast episode, historian Paul Cartledge shares the details of his latest book, Pericles, Statesman, Demagogue, Eccentric Speaking to me, Emily Briffet, he presents a more nuanced portrait of Pericles exploring his political career, cultural influence, personal life and enduring legacy from antiquity to the present day.
- [02:58]
Mike Suiter
We are going to be talking all
- [02:59]
Emily Briffet
about the life of Pericles today.
- [03:02]
Mike Suiter
Before we really get into the story, could you introduce us to Pericles? 60 second book biographical intro.
- [03:09]
Emily Briffet
Why should we know about him?
- [03:11]
Paul Cartledge
Ah, well that's a different question. What he was as opposed to why he was born Pericles, son of Xanthippos and Agariste. And he came from a particular ward, parish or village of Athens called Cholagos People. If you go on the train today to the airport from Athens, you'll pass Cholagos. But actually that's not where Pericles was born. He was born into the purple, that's to say a very distinguished aristocr aristocratic family, also very wealthy. And his great uncle was the founder, the reputed founder of the Athenian democracy into which he was born in 495 or thereabouts. We don't exactly know BC or BCE so we're in the 5th century BC. We're in the 400s BC. Pericles lived for about 65 years. He was born in about 495. He certainly died in 429.
- [04:11]
Mike Suiter
And what are the heads hits? Why is he significant in our history?
- [04:15]
Paul Cartledge
Okay, he's Pericles and some people write of Periclean Athens. Well that would imply that Athens during his lifetime in some sense was so influenced by him that it became a creature or some sort of reflection of him. I try to draw back a little from that. I think his influence and his authority and that's very different by the way from power. His influence and authority have been over exaggerated, they've been overestimated. He was super smart, he was an exceptionally skilful politician. But that doesn't mean he didn't make mistakes. Some people even go to the extent of calling the whole of Greece in his period Periclean Greece. Well now that's to extend that thing much too far I think. On the other hand, he was terrifically significant in two main ways. He was a democratic politician. He actually furthered the workings of democracy in Athens. He wasn't just an also ran. Secondly, what he did, including his mistakes, were extremely significant for the course of all ancient Greek history and therefore eventually our history, because we are the ultimate heirs of the ancient Greeks via mainly the Romans and then the Renaissance, the early modern period and so on. But the ancient Greeks are one of our cultural ancestors. And the word democracy is of course originally a Greek word, just to give you one example.
- [05:54]
Mike Suiter
So that gives us a Hint of what's to come as we talk about his life.
- [05:59]
Emily Briffet
Now, could you set the scene for us a little bit?
- [06:01]
Mike Suiter
What was Pericles early years like? Do we know much about that?
- [06:05]
Paul Cartledge
We know almost nothing. But I'll set the scene in a broader sense. What was Athens like? What was the Greek world like? Well, beginning in the middle of the 6th century, so going back about half a century before Pericles born, an enormous phenomenon developed in what we call the Middle east in Iran, and it's what we call the Persian Empire. Suddenly, I won't go into all the hows and the whys and wherefores, but there arose the greatest empire in the Middle east, in fact, before China, the greatest Asiatic empire, which spread its tentacles east and west. And so it went as far east eventually as Pakistan, India today, Afghanistan, and in the west, as far as the Aegean Sea, the eastern bit of the Mediterranean. And so by 500 BC, which is roughly when Pericles was born in Athens, lots of Greeks living in Asia are in the Persian Empire and they don't like it. And round about 500 BC, a lot of them rebelled. And the Athenians who were by then just, I would say, the world's first. But any rate, an very early form of democracy where the ordinary people had a say and actually made decisions for themselves. They decided to support those rebels against the Persian Empire. And that set in train a whole series of events over the next 20 years. Persian invasion of Greece Greek victory 2nd Persian invasion of Greece Greek victory SO Pericles 1st 15 or so years are extremely turbulent, both externally and internally. Internally, his dad, Xanthippos was actually a major player in those Greek Persian relations, both for the good and for the bad. So on the one hand, he wasn't that keen on Athens resisting Persia. He didn't think that Athens should spend its money and its efforts in opposing the Persians at all costs. For that he got booted out when pericles was about 10. So imagine you're exiled with your father because your dad has made what the ordinary Athenians consider to be a major mistake in relation to foreign policy. As I say, the Persians are actually repelled. So Pericles, by the age of 15, he's back in Athens, his dad has come back, he's been rehabilitated, if you like. And so we then await the first major event in Pericles life. And I said earlier, the evidence for his early life is very poor. We have a biography of him, but it was written many, many years later. And so it's strong in some aspects, it's not so good in others. And of course it's dependent on what the sources told him. And the author is a guy called Plutarch, writing in about 100 AD, so hundreds of years later than Pericles, any rate, in 472 BC, Pericles about 23, he finances a series of plays at the Athenians annual play festival in honour of Dionysus, the God of wine, the God of metamorphosis, the God of theater. And the playwright that Pericles sponsors happens to be Aeschylus. Now Aeschylus was a tragic playwright, absolutely brilliant. And the four plays that Pericles funded were the ones that the audience. It's audience vote. It's not quite like Eurovision, but a certain number of the audience actually did vote on which plays should win. They voted that Aeschylus was the winner. So Pericles hits the ground running with a series of plays, one of which survives to this day. It's on that same theme, the Persians. The play is actually called the Persians and it's in a way a celebration of the Athenian democracy and its role in repelling the Persians, keeping the Greek world free and enabling democracy at Athens to flourish.
- [10:35]
Mike Suiter
It feels very much of the moment. So how and when did Pericles first enter the world of politics?
- [10:43]
Paul Cartledge
So in Athens, one becomes a man that is a fully fledged adult citizen, the age of 20. So for Pericles that'd be about 475 BC. And at that time Athens had just embarked on a foreign policy which was lead to its acquiring what we call an empire. I mean, you mustn't think of it like the Roman Empire or let alone the Persian empire or a Chinese empire, it's not that big, but in the eastern Mediterranean it was quite a big deal. And Pericles was, I think, pretty much in favor from the start of it existing and indeed expanding. And so we get Pericles after his first debut, if you like, in the theatre. The next thing we hear about him is it's in connection with the way in which empire is being developed. He takes on as a young man, he's about in his early 30s, an established politician, older and a very successful general, or we'd rather call him an admiral, and he takes him on. The guy's called Cimon. And Pericles and Cimon's family had been at loggerheads before, so this is partly personal as well as political. He accuses him of corruption, of misleading the people, of misusing, misappropriating public funds. He loses. So Pericles formal political career as a politician, so far as we know, is A failure. His very first effort, three years later. And this is something we should hold onto very much, a little bit anyway, because there is a major change domestically in the way in which democracy functions. Without going into the details, a politician called Ephialtes, we know almost nothing about him, proposes a series of measures which give more power to the masses, reduce the power of the elite, broadly speaking. Within every Greek city there are two sociologically divided groups. There are the, what we call the elite and the mass, or the few and the many. The few tend to want themselves alone to have, have differential power. So they go for oligarchy. The masses tend to think, no, no, we are equally qualified and actually there are more of us and so we should rule. And they want democracy. Well, the ascendancy in about 461 was in favour of the democrats. So Ephialtes proposes a package which is voted by the assembly. And Pericles is Ephialtes number two. He's still a young man in Athenian political terms. He's 35 or so, but he supports Ephialtes. So good, you know, he's on the way up. However, Ephialtes was very soon after assassinated. There were enough people in Athens who disliked the way in which Athenian politics were going that is much too democratic, too much in favour of the masses. They wanted to stop that trend. Ephialtes was murdered. Guessing we don't know that. Pericles also was in danger of being bumped off. Anyway, he survives. He keeps his head down for a bit, probably. And actually Athens is then involved, as it very often is, in a foreign war, this time not with Persia, but with other Greeks. So Pericles were in his mid-30s, late-30s. He's not yet made a terrific mark, but we're up to, in chronological terms, about 455, the middle of the 450s BC.
- [14:37]
Mike Suiter
He's about 40, so obviously we're talking about him today. We know he's going to go on to become more prominent and influential political operator. How do we get to that point?
- [14:47]
Paul Cartledge
Right. His very first major political office to which he was elected was that of General. Now, in Athens being a democracy, everything is corporate, so you don't have one General, you have 10. So any one general will not by that very fact be able to run any major policy campaign. So he is deputed by the Athenian people to serve as its general in a campaign, as I've mentioned, actually, it's already against Sparta. Now, I hadn't introduced Sparta before because I wanted to delay mentioning the polarity of 5th century BC politics in Greece, that is internationally, not domestically, was between those cities which were within Sparta's orbit and those cities which were within Athens orbit. Broadly speaking, southern Greece, the Peloponnese, as against Athens and the Aegean navy versus land army, very crudely, those are the big divisions. So Pericles finds himself in 454 as a general embroiled, I mean inevitably in the big issue of the day, which is Athens v Sparta and the allies on both sides. But Athens being Athens, very confident. It's done extremely well in building up a large naval alliance on an anti Persian basis. So the claim is we will keep you free from the Persian empire. And that alliance in the early 450s makes a terrible mistake. It decides that it will aid one of Persia's subjects in Egypt in order to free the Egyptians from Persian rule. Big mistake. They're caught up for something like six years. They lose huge numbers of men and ships and to such an extent that the alliance treasury which had been from the 470s on the island of Delos, was transferred in 454 same year as Pericles first generalship from the island of Delos to the Acropolis of Athens. So in a way this is a defensive measure, it's retrenchment. On the other hand, it sort of solidifies Athens control of the alliance because the allies now know whatever they contribute not going to go to the island of Delos, where indeed the treasurers were mainly Athenians, but it will go to the city of Athens. They will have to go to Athens to take their tribute and have to see how it's spent.
- [17:38]
Mike Suiter
And so where does Pericles sit in all this?
- [17:41]
Paul Cartledge
So he's moderately successful as a general, comes back to Athens and finds this Athens in this sort of post shock in Egypt's state. But he is one of those who put their minds to thinking, well, maybe we should come to some sort of accommodation with Persia that will be lasting. In other words, you could call it a truce, you could call it a peace. And there is one very particular reason for wanting to stop formally fighting, which is the aim of the alliance they founded in the 470 to stop that aggressive element in the alliance. And it is, they need to redirect money and attention to rebuilding buildings that had been destroyed on the top of the Acropolis and had been left as ruins ever since 479 B.C. when Pericles was, well, he was a teenager then. Now why had they left them there? Because they'd taken an oath that they wouldn't rebuild these are religious buildings for Athena and for other gods and goddesses until they had dealt with the Persian question. Well, there are various ways of dealing with it. One of them is you first of all set up a great alliance to attack the Persian Empire, then you come to an accommodation. So sometime around 450 BC, the Athenians and their allies made a decision not to carry on an aggressive campaign. Instead, the Athenians, and of course, this is an issue which might well have been controversial, decide to spend a lot of money, both their own and to some extent allied tribute money, on rebuilding the Acropolis and buildings around and buildings elsewhere in their territory. And this is sometimes called the building program. It goes on for 20 years or so, starts in the 440, about 448, 447. And this is another of those things. I mentioned Periclean Athens, I mentioned Periclean Greece. Well, it's often said this is the Periclean building program. There's something to be said for that. In other words, I'm sure he wholeheartedly supported it, but whether its details were always his, whether, that's to say, he worked out, whether he was on the committee deciding how and where and when the new building should go up. Any rate, one reason this is famous, you asked me about his legacy, is that the. The central building, the centrepiece of the entire building program is the Parthenon. Well, Pericles, as I say, had something to do with it, but the one thing we know he definitely was associated with was the cult statue of Athena, Athena, the virgin Athena, Parthenos, which was made by a friend of his called Pheidias, or in modern Greek, Phidia. Yes. Extraordinarily elaborate, very expensive. Definitely. Pericles was directly associated with that.
- [21:03]
Mike Suiter
I think that helps contextualise us with. As you said, we are perhaps altering the idea of Pericles here.
- [21:11]
Paul Cartledge
My book Pericles has a subtitle and it's three parts. First part is statesman, second is demagogue, third is eccentric. But the point about statesman is most politicians are unpopular most of the time. We hate them, we have them, we choose them, but we very rarely are very totally satisfied with them. And the Athenians were no exception to that. So the reason I put statesman in the subtitle is that in the pages of one of our main sources of evidence, it's a history of Thucydides. Thucydides presents Pericles as above. The usual rather gutter sniping type of politics between individuals who are in it for themselves and not for the good of the Athenians or Greece. And he makes one point about Pericles, that he was incorruptible, that is he didn't take bribes. And the assumption is that if you're a politician and you want something to go on the agenda, well, you want somebody who's going to come and bribe you to put it on, you don't just do it. And in Athens, every decision, every major decision, for example, the building program has to go through a process such that it eventually reaches the mass assembly that meets in the open air once a month, except in emergency. And at least 6,000 or so pitch up and they vote and they raise their right hand. Majority voting, that is direct democracy. So Pericles has to ride that system. He has to understand how it works and to function brilliantly within it. He does. He is enormously successful. Whether or not Thucydides is completely right is another question. Because I think Thucydides not being a democrat, Thucydides did not think democracy was a good way of doing politics. I think he exaggerated Pericles statesmanlike quality to make the other politicians look even worse. Well, second word in our vocabulary, demagogue, is negative. But in ancient Greek it originally meant, this is neutral and descriptive, leader of the deimos. Deimos means people, the mass, the majority, all the people of the athenos. So if you're a politician in Athens and you want your views to be accepted, you have to be a leader of the people. But demagogue. Very quickly the ancient Greek word acquired its modern sense of misleader of the people, rabble rouser, populist. In a bad sense. Thucydides uses the distinction between Pericles and all the rest to say Pericles was a statesman. The rest were demagogues. No, I say that is prejudice. Actually they're all demagogues, including Pericles. But Pericles was, if you like, a more successful, a more rational, in whatever way one likes to think of policymaking, he was the business. But there was one particular aspect of being a demagogue in a, a type of state, I mean topographically type of state, where you're speaking in the open air to 6,000 people trying to get them to hear you and then vote the way you want them to vote. You have to be a quite extraordinary orator. And Pericles, partly because he was so oratorically gifted, was able to get, get his views across rather better than attenuate some others of his rivals. So I brought you up to about 450.
- [25:17]
Mike Suiter
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- [25:22]
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- [26:48]
Emily Briffet
Quince.comHistoryExtra what do the 440s have in store for Pericles?
- [26:55]
Paul Cartledge
The war I mentioned between Athens and Sparta and its allies. That drags on for a bit. And the key thing to me is that hostilities between Athens and its allies and Persia cease. And so the building program begins. There are, however, and this is normal Athenian politics, people who don't think that the way in which Athens money was being spent was the best. And one obvious thing to sort of pin on a politician that you don't like is the building program. Because it's so visible, the whole of Athens. Athens was a building site, basically the center of Athens. I mean, and so an opponent of Pericles, a bit confusingly, he's called Thucydides. He's not the historian. This is another Athenian called Thucydides. Takes him on. And there's a kind of two way split between Pericles, who's all for the building program, all for everything that goes with that, and against him is this man called Thucydides. And what happens is an ostracism. Now I mentioned that in 484 Pericles father was ostracized. What was the issue? Persia. Attitudes to Persia. So what's the issue in 443? It seems to focus on the building program anyway. Pericles is therefore under the threat of being exiled if more than anybody else is voted against. What you have is 6,000 at least have to turn up with a bit of pottery. Broken pottery has a name on it and that's the name of the person you want to see exiled for 10 years and to get out, you know, to just have no further part of the political process. So it is existential for Pericles career. Pericles so wins that ostracism. In other words, he is not ostracized. His rival Thucydides is that he then is in a position for the next 14 years. He is elected to the top executive post of general. No one else does that. No one else has that length of record. And in a way it's slightly awkward because it meant that because of the way in which the eligibility rules work, no one else from the same, well, we use the word tribe, but any rate, political grouping within Athens as Pericles could stand to become general. So they actually broke their rules in order to enable somebody else from the same grouping as Pericles to be elected. So that another of the groupings, there are 10 groupings, didn't get a representative that year. Anyway, that just shows you how influential Pericles was. Now, what's going on in this period? What's brewing? Athens and Sparta are technically at peace since 445. That, that war, which dragged on for a very long period, was finally ended in the middle of the 440s. A peace was sworn for 30 years. Actually, it lasted only 14. All sorts of problems. Thucydides is our main source among the literary evidence. And the question is, who is responsible? This is now coming down into the 430s for either keeping or breaking the peace. Is it Sparta or Athens which is breaking the peace? The Spartans say, oh, you Athenians have broken it. And they point to various episodes which they claim to be breaches. The Athenians respond, now, now, who is persuading them that they must resist every single claim of the parts? Who is it? Who is putting the case for how the Athenians should resist? Should they go to war, for example? Well, it's Pericles. And that's actually the ultimate source of this notion of Periclean Athens. Because you read Thucydides, this is a major turning point that the war that does in fact break out is the biggest thing of the 5th century BC. It lasts nearly 30 years. Can you imagine? Well we had a 30 years war in Europe in the 17th century, but they're not common. So Pericles therefore is seen to be at the very centre of this huge policy decision. And he takes, takes the Athenian masses, the ordinary citizens with him all the way to the outbreak of war. And how the Athenians agree to conduct the war, a war of in their view, resistance to Spartan aggression.
- [31:55]
Mike Suiter
So the blame is laid at Pericles front door then it is by those
- [32:00]
Paul Cartledge
who dislike him anyway. And this is what his problem is actually. After the war breaks out, when it doesn't go brilliantly for Athens, the Spartans invade with their allies. It's a long distance from Athens to Sparta, it's about 150 miles and it's a big thing to organize an expedition. But they do it year on year for several years. The Athenian strategy, which is Pericles is not to resist the Spartan army by land, to conduct the odd raid by sea on, on Spartan territory, but that's not actually going to really damage the Spartans. Then the real problem, I suppose the major problem happens in 430 BC. So second year of the war and Athens suffers an enormous plague. And as a result up to a third of the entire adult Athenian citizen population, men and women, died. Pericles himself contracts the plague and he dies of it in 429 BC. So that's not great. And actually it's sometimes said all politicians careers end in failure and in a way Pericles did because at the time of his death, 429, late 429, Athens is not doing brilliantly in this war that he had set the Athenians would do very well in. And partly it was because of the unpredictable, which is the plague. I mean nobody could have predicted the plague in itself which was probably a form of typhoid and nobody could have predicted its damaging effect.
- [33:48]
Mike Suiter
Obviously as you've mentioned in this outbreak that Pericles dies, what did the aftermath of the plague look like for Athens? What did the Athens Pericles left behind look like?
- [33:59]
Paul Cartledge
So it lasted in its first burst for four whole years. Thucydides also caught the plague, but survived and survived to write a really gruesome description of it. Athens as I say, about a third of the active adult population is gone. And so they're in a defensive mode. But for various reasons Sparta doesn't actually capitalize well on Athens weakness. And after 10 years of back and forth, Sparta and Athens make a peace treaty and then a personal alliance in 421. Now Thucydides who survived, he looks back. He looks back from the very end of the war as he sees the war because it renews and it goes on until 404, 404 and Thucydides looks back and he writes an obituary notice of Pericles, which is actually looking forward to Athens defeat. He blames the defeat on the poor quality of Athens leaders in the aftermath of Pericles death. Now I personally think that's a little bit extreme and I think it's Thucydides wanting to blame democracy, not just Pericles successors as democratic leaders, but nevertheless, in the longer run Pericles legacy in terms of international relations, in terms of diplomacy, in terms of warfare is not absolutely brilliant.
- [35:40]
Mike Suiter
I think it would be fair to say that there have been lots of assessments and reassessments of Pericles.
- [35:47]
Emily Briffet
Where do you stand on him?
- [35:49]
Paul Cartledge
Right, if I may, I'm going to delay that because I've not yet dealt with the third member of my subtitle, which is eccentric. And this is something that I think both fascinates and in a way amazes because it's a part of Pericles that if you didn't know it, you'd never guess it from what you read. In Thucydides, who doesn't talk about women hardly at all, he makes Pericles in a famous speech. It's called the funeral speech. Speech. It was delivered in 431. It was speech over the dead, actually ashes of the Athenians who'd died in the first year of the great war against Sparta. And he says there right at the end, well, if I must say something in regard to the feelings now of the female relatives of the dead in front, please don't give into your emotion. Control yourselves. In effect, I almost said man up because Athens was a very gender polarized society, as indeed we're all Greek communities. And if you like, the ancient Athenian male was not exactly a feminist. And in law Athenian women were inferior to their husbands, their brothers, their sons and so on. So that's not altogether surprising as a sentiment, that is to say, a man telling women to, as it were, be above their normal low nature, that is, don't be too emotional. Because why is that odd? Well, Pericles own private life since the early 440s had been quite extraordinary. He then met a woman called Aspasia, modern Greek Aspasia. And that means something like joy. And she wasn't Athenian, she was Greek. She came from a city on the other side of the Aegean, what's now Western Turkey. A place called Miletus. Now, that happened to be a city that was allied to Athens. And actually Athens and Miletus had a kind of sentimental relationship, as one might say, say a special relationship. Any rate, however they met, we don't know, he fell for her. She was about 20, he was about, what should we say, 495 to 450, in his mid-40s. And it was hook, line and sinker. He was absolutely just gone. Oh, I should say, by the way, he had been married. Pericles had two legitimate sons, divorced that wife, whose name we don't know perfectly, apparently amicably, this had all happened before 4:50. Anyway, he meets Aspasia, falls for her, they set up house together. She's super smart and his equal in intelligence. And she seems to have run something like a salon, you know, an intellectual salon, talking about philosophy, politics, rather like Madame du deffand in the 18th century France, leading up to the revolution. They have a child together. They call him Pericles. I think that's because he was technically illegitimate, because in order to be legitimate in Athens, you have to have an Athenian mother as well as an Athenian father. Interestingly, that was due to a measure, a law which Pericles himself had promoted. And the idea being, I think, to make athletic Athens feel we're all in it together, we're all very Athenians, we're ethnically terrifically solid, so we don't want to mingle too much with foreigners. Anyway, he contradicted, if you like, his own law. And they lived together for 20 years. And the ordinary people of Athens, we imagine, found this very strange, because not only was he, as it were, contradicting his own law, but allegedly every morning as he was leaving the house, openly, visibly, he would embrace Aspasia. And then when he came back home in the evening or whenever, from working or being a politician in the centre of Athens, he came home, he embraced her again publicly. That was pretty odd. But that's not, in a way, the half of it so far as Pericles reputation was concerned. Now, there's one kind of evidence which is unique to Athens and it's comic plays. So I mentioned the tragedies of Aeschylus, but alongside the tragedies in the same competition. Actually, from the middle of the 480s, the Athenians would watch five comic plays, separate playwrights. Five playwrights, five, one actor. Short plays, an hour or so each. Well, we happen to have bits and pieces, snippets of some of these. And then after Pericles death, we start to get whole plays among the Snippets, we learn that comic poets made fun of the shape of Pericles head, which apparently resembled a form of onion, rather bulbous. And the joke was, you can imagine how common comic poet would play this. You know why he wears a helmet? It's to hide this ridiculous looking head. And that image of Pericles is one that carries on through antiquity and in fact right down to today. If you make a statue of Pericles today, you have him with a helmet on. Well, of course he didn't wear a helmet except in warfare. It's a joke.
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But.
- [41:49]
Paul Cartledge
But there was one image of him made in his lifetime by a bronze sculptor, a man called Krisilas. And it depicts him as a general. So of course it has a helmet. But you know, you can see where I'm getting at. But much more seriously, in a way, though Serio, comically, if you like, Aspasia was represented as if it really she was, was the power behind the throne of Pericles. That is Pericles the public politician really was not as smart as the lady back home who was actually winding him up and then sending him out. That was one type of joke much nastier, but in a way funnier. And this is after Pericles death, one comic playwright called Aristophanes wrote a play, it's called the Acharnians. And he says, do you know what? He has the character, who's the lead character talk to the audience as something they didn't know. Did you know the real reason why the war, which they were in the middle of the great war with Sparta. Do you know really why it broke out? I'll tell you. Two guys from next door city, which is an enemy city, Megara, came into Athens, snuck in and they found their way to the bordello that Aspasia ran. They stole two of the prostitutes from her bordello, took them back to Megara across the border. Well, Pericles wasn't going to have that, so he declared war, which means he persuaded the Athenians to declare war on. On Sparta and therefore on Megara, in order that the Athenians could militarily go and recover these two prostitutes. I mean, total nonsense. But the nasty implication that Aspasia was not Pericles real equal, that she could be abused as being somebody who ran a brothel, that that's the sort of sexism that presumably Pericles was up against throughout that 20 year liaison. Not a marriage because he couldn't legally marry her, but liaison which was a partnership. So I get very irritated. Many people call Aspasia Pericles mistress And I've talked about this elsewhere, but she wasn't in what we call a mistress. A mistress. She was his partner, his living partner, partner in life.
- [44:33]
Mike Suiter
It's lovely to get an insight into his personal life as well as his political and public life. I suppose it also gives us a hint, a little bit into his contemporary reputation. Is there anything more that we should say on his reputation in the period he lived or perhaps in the years following?
- [44:52]
Paul Cartledge
Well, what I've tried to do is be balanced about in his lifetime, let's say, play down the exaggerated praise, but also play down the exaggerated hostility. So I've tried to produce a balanced view of Pericles, who was enormously influential, was super smart. Most interesting, there are all sorts of details of individual occurrences that play into the notion of him as being rational, which I think is in these days rather important. I evidently, and remember in the ancient Greek world, loads and loads of gods and goddesses, heroes, heroines, it was quite tough to be secular, to take the view that things happen because of human natural forces and not because of divine intervention. Any rate, I think Pericles was more on the side of rationality, even though it cost him, because some of the. His friends were extremely, if you like, secular. I mean, one of them, a foreigner actually called Anaxagoras, he said that the sun, it wasn't a God, it was a red hot stone, rather larger than the Peloponnese. I mean, it's almost comical that he reduced a God, the sun, to a purely natural phenomenon. And, and for that Pericles was attacked because people said, why are you friends with somebody who is so impious, who is sacrilegious like that? Any rate, Pericles stuck to his guns throughout his life. As to his subsequent reputation, it's really gone up and down and it depends on the type of society that's commenting on him. Well, now we are in a democracy, but our democracy is of a very different kind. And the risk is that we mistake Pericles for today's party politician. Any rate, the Athenians were desperately hostile to tyranny and they were rabidly pro democratic, but their form of democracy was very different. Pericles had no party, no party structure, no party support, if you can imagine, he's just him and his immediate circle of supporters and the Athenian people. There were no mass media, no media by distance, no digital media. Everything's face to face, in your face. And so to sustain a career as he did over 20 to 30 years, mostly successful, not ultimately successful, was, I think, pretty amazing. But today we have to Just be careful not to think of him as if he were the equivalent of a Prime minister or a president.
- [47:48]
Mike Suiter
And I suppose as I final ask to you Paul, is there anything else that we should add about Pericles? Is there anything else we should talk about?
- [47:56]
Paul Cartledge
I suppose I would add, and I will end on this, because it's supposedly Pericles last words, famous last words. And he is supposed to have said on his deathbed, nobody has ever had to put on mourning garb because of me. Now, given that he advocated for the war against Sparta in which thousands of Athenians died and their relatives put on morning garb, I don't know quite. I still put as to what exactly he was getting at. Was he saying that it was you guys who voted? I mean I merely suggested and that in war people die. And so if the war was right, then it's not in some sense my fault or my blame or my guilt that you and your relatives have had to maul. But I'm afraid that still leaves me a little bit puzzled. Maybe that's good. Maybe we shouldn't be able to answer absolutely everything. And there are a number of other loose threads in Pericles life that someone else will after me no doubt weave together in a very different way.
- [49:17]
Emily Briffet
That was Paul Cartledge speaking to me. Emily Briffet Paul in the Emeritus AG Leventis professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge and Senior Research Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. His book is Statesman, Demagogue, Eccentric. You can find out more from Paul on the history of Sparta, Athens, Troy and other ancient Greek history on the History Extra app or tune in wherever you get your podcasts.
- [49:51]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [50:13]
Paul Cartledge
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- [50:21]
Emily Briffet
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