Plutarch's Lives: Pericles

Pericles is one of the best known personalities from the ancient world. The glorious parts of his biography are well known to even casual students of Greek history. His was one of Athens' leading lights during its cultural heyday. He was a gifted orator, a skilled politician, and the possesor of a first class temperment. He expanded Athens' wealth and power through carefully planned conquest and trade initiatives. Most important, he organized and directed building of the great temples and public works of Athens - from the Parthenon on down - that defined the Golden Age of Greece. For the average politician down to modern times, Pericles has been an example of what can be accomplished in public life. But, history and Pericles' admirers have tended to gloss over how his career ended: with Pericles dying of the plague at the beginning of a war that would see Athens destroyed and its Golden Age ended almost as soon as it began.

Pericles was born into a family of nobles. His father was a much-honored general, and his mother was descended from the Clisthenes, who had ended the tyranny of the Pisastratus line, and helped establish Athens' government. Pericles was born to politics, and was given the best possible education. He was taught by, among others, Zeno (of Paradox fame). However, his greatest teacher was Anaxagoras who taught Pericles not just philosophy and reason, but also mental discipline, which allowed Pericles to remain serene even as he was buffeted by the whirl of Athenian political life.

Pericles entered politics earlier than he would have planned. At that time, the great divide was between those who favored a pure democracy and those who leaned more towards an oligarchy dominated by the elite. The worst thing one could be accused of would by the harboring of secret monarchial tendencies. In fact, at the beginning of his career, Pericles was believed to be a dangerous person with dictatorial tendencies. His own inclinations were to support "the few and the rich" as Plutarch puts it, but Pericles saw that the path to power lay in appealing to the Athenian masses. Pericles was nonetheless criticized in Athens and elsewhere as leading "an aristocratical government that went by the name of democracy."

Pericles originally came to power after several of his rivals in the Old Guard were banished for 10 years. The banishments arose because the elites who ruled Athens were reluctant to ascede to the common peoples' demands for foreign conquest and redistributions of public money. Pericles came to power promising to redistribute Athens' wealth and to expand its power through war. Having obtained power, Pericles never really gave it up. He won applause for leading a series of military conquests against other Greek city-states. He increased the fees that citizens could earn for performing public service work. He sent out expeditions to colonize the Aegean region. He set up a system for redistributing athens' wealth among the common people. And, he becanme adept at dsitracting the people with banquets, processions, shows, and the like.

Pericles lasting achievement was the construction of the architectural wonders that made Athens famous in his day and immortal in ours. For Pericles, the grand constructions were not just a way to show off Athens' power and wealth, it was also a vast public works project that allowed him to employ virtually the entire population of Athens' tradesmen. Plutarch spends considerable space describing the persons and materials who built Athens' temples. But, Plutarch also points out that, while these public works elicited the wonder and admiration of Pericles' contemporaries, by Plurarch's day they were the only evidence of the power that Athens still emptily boasted of having, and that its lost wealth was no romance.

Pericles' last political rival was Thucydides, who led the small faction that decried the massive expenditure of public funds, and the havoc this expenditure caused in the state revenues. Thucydides gathered enough support that he and Pericles finally faced off in a contest to see who would banish the other. While Thucydides may have had the better argument Pericles was the better orator and had the good will of the people behind him. Pericles prevailed and Thucydides was banished.

With this final challenge to his power gone, Pericles is said to have adopted a more regal political persona and approach. pericles still sought to persuade the people to follow his dictates, but increasingly Pericles' policy simply became Athenian policy. After experiencing a century of rough-and-tumble democracy, Athens was ruled by Pericles decade after decade. He would still stand for election every year, but these became formalities; Pericles had no rivals. In many ways, his rule was an admirable one. He did not grow wealthy (much to the annoyance of his children) and made a practice of annually divesting himself of his wealth. He was known to shop in the public markets shoulder to shoulder with his fellow citizens. He was as much an intelectual as he was a leader, taking on the slightly younger Socrates in debate. And, while he indulged the Athenians' love of spectacle, he tempered their repeated demands for foreign conquest, counseling that Athens would become wealthier through trade, rather than through empire building. To that end he negotiated favorable trade agreements around the Aegean and ensured that Athens military remained focused on affairs in Greece, rather than in Carthage or Tuscany, where some of the more militant Athenians wished to go for conquest.

The end of Pericles' career saw disasters as great as the glories he had accomplished at the height of his powers. Things seemed to take a turn for the worse when he called on Athens to attack the island of Samos. The initial attack was repulsed an the athenian army destroyed. Pericles led the siege against the samians, eventually taking the island and levying a heavy fine for their resistance. At the same time, Athens impeded an expedition by Corinth against another Greek city. Athens also found itself competing for power with the Spartans to the south. Athens attempt to establish its hegemony over the Greek world, as well as its arrogant attitudes of the athenians, gave rise to the enmities that would explode into the Pelopponesian War.

At first, Pericles seemed to be able to keep hostilities from spreading into a wider war. However, the Athenians found themselves drawn in nonetheless. Plutarch suggests that Pericles actually encouraged the drumbeat of war to distract from his own impending impeachment for misusing public funds. Regardless of the cause, Athens quickly found itself under seige with a plague ravaging the athenians from the inside, as the Spartans ravaged the coutryside on the outside. Pericles, a shadow of the man he had once been, died of the plague along with many of his friends and countrymen. The Athenians would quickly regret his loss, as Pericles' successors led the Athenians into defeat and destruction in war, and cultural and social decay at home.

Because Athens' Golden Age coincided with his rule, Pericles is one of history's immortals. However, his story is also important in the manner it demonstrates the promise and perils of democracy. Most politicians in representative government are (if you haven't noticed) calculating opportunists. The only thing that separates them from courtiers in a royal house is the fact that they have to stand for re-election at regular intervals. Pericles was that rare thing in a democracy: a visionary who could motivate the electorate to greater heights of economic. political, military, and cultural power. But, Periclean Athens fell afoul of the factor that has ruined democracies since then: the discovery by the voters that they could vote benefits for themselves from the public purse. Pericles, for all of his other virtues, was only happy to oblige them-turning his re-election campaigns into a succession of promised give-aways. Athens could not keep up, and when it turned to conquest and trade war to find new sources of funds, it found itself embroiled and eventually ruined by the Pelopponesian War. Worse, because Pericles had been in office so long, and so many of his rivals driven into exile, Athens had no one to take his place.

While the life of Pericles does not quite achieve the level of tragedy, it certainly leads one to melancholy reflection over the quick fading of glory that is a recurring theme in human events.