The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [53]
Pericles comes into focus when Socrates is just six years old, in 463 BC. He lobbies on behalf of the Athenian people. He is instrumental in the reforms and purging of the Areopagus Council. By the time Socrates has come of age in the Athenian sense – after 451 – Pericles is campaigning in the Gulf of Corinth and has won enormous political respect. Chosen as Athens’ General one season after another, he makes military achievements the basis of his power. This is the kind of man the democracy needs to give it backbone. And Pericles is not shy of reminding hoi polloi of the fact. His tongue was as sharp as his sword: he was an accomplished rhetor – a speaker.4 For fifteen consecutive years from 443 BC (and twenty-two in all) he was re-elected as Athens’ premier democrat.5 Although he was not officially Athens’ leader, think of him as the city’s ‘first citizen’. He had effective power because his lead was, almost always, followed in the Assembly. As Strategos, he could propose which motions were debated by the demos. He set the agenda for Athens’ ‘Golden Age’. His name, once again, seems prophetic. He is peri-kles – ‘surrounded or rimmed with glory’.
Pericles, because of his position, his intelligence, and his known integrity, could respect the liberty of the people and at the same time hold them in check. It was he who led them, rather than they who led him, and, since he never sought power from any wrong motive, he was under no necessity of flattering them: in fact he was so highly respected that he was able to speak angrily to them and to contradict them. Certainly when he saw that they were going too far in a mood of over-confidence, he would bring back to them a sense of their dangers; and when they were discouraged for no good reason he would restore their confidence. So, in what was nominally a democracy, power was really in the hands of the first citizen.6
It could be easy to imagine Pericles doing what so many of his peers did, drinking a great deal, gossiping in the symposia. But he was not typical; head down, we are told, he made a beeline from his home to the Assembly, not allowing for any distractions, making democracy his business. He was both an intellectual, a theorist, and a man who did. His mind buzzed with political reform; he attacked the privileges of the Areopagus Council; in the late 450s he introduced payment for juries – now every man, even the very poorest, could afford to be a judge; in 451 he limited entry to the democracy by allowing only the children of parents who were both fully fledged citizens to become citizens themselves; throughout the 440s he encouraged and supported radical thinkers and made their ideas flesh in the stones of the city.7
Pericles was evidently a man who watched and listened to the world around him. He recognised that you cannot exercise your right as a democrat without being reimbursed for your trouble. And so by the end of his life soldiers, sailors, jurymen, councillors were padding their way, the majority by foot, a few of the rich on horseback, into the city-centre or down to Piraeus to ensure that their democratic power mattered. Thucydides credits Pericles with an acute understanding of what it takes to be a politician: ‘to know what must be done and to be able to explain it; to love one’s country and to be incorruptible.’8
Athens, stage-set for democracy
When Socrates was in his early twenties, Pericles was the man who persuaded the demos to pour public money into the reconstruction of Athens’ cult centre, the Acropolis; he oversaw the