Pericles of Athens

"It’s very hard to tell what exactly Thucydides is a fan of, or who he is a fan of. That’s part of the work that Vincent Azoulay does, trying to unpick the myths around Pericles. He tries to read against the grain of Thucydides, even though Thucydides is one of our major sources. Thucydides really sees Pericles as the foremost citizen of the time. He even gives his name to this era: today we call it ‘the Periclean era.’ Azoulay gives a slightly different interpretation. He’s interested in the ways in which Pericles was constrained by the political circumstances, and was guided or constrained in his policies by the people. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In choosing these books, what I was interested in doing was setting up Azoulay’s Pericles of Athens in contrast with David Stuttard’s biography of Alcibiades . These are two recent, very readable biographies of some of the preeminent people of the era, people who figure very prominently in The History of the Peloponnesian War, but they’re done in very, very different ways. Azoulay takes a thematic approach, just because the actual sources we have are so thin and these figures are so shrouded in myth. He looks at Pericles as an orator, as a statesman, and also at his shifting reputation over time through history. Stuttard’s book is a more traditional, chronological, biographical approach. He’s facing the same problem, that we don’t really have that many sources for the life of Alcibiades. How do you spin a biography out of what little we have, especially when there’s so much accreted myth around these particular figures? Together, these two books form an interesting look at the different ways that you might deal with this kind of lack of information that we have, but still try to piece together some kind of narrative about these figures. We don’t really know anything other than what he tells us in passing in his work. He was old enough to have served as a general in the war; he also mentions that when the war broke out (in 431) he was old enough to understand what was going on. We tend to assume, then, that he was born in about 460. He came from a family of means—he had financial interests in mines in Thrace, north of Greece, which is why he was sent there as general in the 420s. He seems to have known the area, and had a connection to it. We don’t know much beyond that, but seeing as Thucydides was clearly very well educated it doesn’t seem too much to assume that at some point he ran into or even knew fairly well the other Athenian leading lights of his day: Socrates, Sophocles, and so on. There are two big takeaways. Firstly, that Pericles himself was much more beholden to the people of Athens than Thucydides sets him up to be. Thucydides paints him as the de facto leader of the Athenians. Azoulay reads the people of Athens, the ‘demos,’ as exerting a huge amount of power and shaping what Pericles could do. It might be because Thucydides very much has a ‘big man’ approach to history: he sees history as often (though not always) being driven, at least at its turning points, by big, charismatic personalities. The second is that the myth around Pericles never stopped forming. Azoulay is very interested in the reception of Pericles. So he covers Pericles through Rome, through the Middle Ages, and onward and onward. He shows us how each age interprets Pericles in a different way, to fit their own time or their own political agenda. The continuing dynamism of the myth of Pericles is a really interesting takeaway from the Azoulay book. The problem with Pericles—and this has been one of the criticisms of the Azoulay book—is that for every ancient source, there’s another saying, ‘that’s just a myth’ or ‘that source is biased.’ For every representation of Pericles—even the ones that we have from Antiquity—there is a completely opposite perspective on him. I think that’s why he’s proven to have had this extremely malleable reputation over time. Depending on the time period and who’s doing the interpreting, our view of Pericles can just radically shift and invert itself. Alcibiades, in contrast, has always been known as a playboy, this enchanting figure."