The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [57]
This was not Pericles’ style at all. Despite his reputation in Old Comedy for an engulfing sexual licence, the Olympian’s kicks, it seems, were satisfied not by personal wealth and domestic comfort, or by the obligingly varied knocking shops in the city, or even by the attentions of his courtesan-consort Aspasia (more of her later), but by the philosophical conversation of his protégés, by strategic military planning, by drama (as a young man he produced the playwright Aeschylus), and by the idea of what Athens could become.28
So we should imagine the modest home of Pericles – the man who is still a role-model for so many of our political leaders, the unofficial leader of Athens. Visitors striding in and out of his mud-brick and stone chambers. Slaves keeping the material world turning. Women everywhere in the house, apart from in the andron – the man’s room. Unpretentious dinner services on the table, but new ideas all around. The invisible web of interconnecting possibilities, woven by the men who came and sat at Pericles’ table, had sparkling ideas dropped into them like dew.
That Athenians employed ideas as a workhorse for civilisation was big news. This was an age when there were many gleaming examples of the wonders that man could achieve – Babylon’s Prussian-blue and ochre-glazed Processional Way protected by glazed dragons and lions (standing until 1902 in the sands of modern-day Iraq); the pyramids at Giza, already 2,000 years old; the Apadana – the ‘audience hall’ at Persepolis, where Darius and Xerxes intimidated their subjects while guarded by massive carved dogs and winged bulls.29 And although many other towns, particularly along the western coast of Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey), sponsored thinkers and scientists, Athens had something different: thoughts, ideas that were beginning to harmonise and to sound the timbre of an ideology, demos-kratia – the power of the people.
Listen to contemporary accounts of the excited reports of Athens’ egalitarian attitudes from a Persian nobleman, Otanes:
The rule of the majority has a most beautiful name: equality under the law [isonomia] … The holders of offices are selected by lot and are held accountable for their actions. All deliberations are in public. I predict – and suggest that we will give up monarchy and replace it with democracy. For in democracy all things are possible.30
Although Otanes’ predictions of democracy in Persia are still to be fully realised, his final comment proved prescient. ‘In a democracy all things are possible.’ Athens was focusing not just on making herself beautiful and fit for practice, her eyes were flicking elsewhere too. Pericles could not afford simply to indulge his time with humble-born, thinking men such as Socrates and Anaxagoras – scintillating as they might be – to play around with ground-breaking political experiments. Because he now had not only a citystate, but a burgeoning empire to run.
12
DELOS – AND THE BIRTH OF AN EMPIRE
The Cyclades,
the Mediterranean basin, 478/7–454 BC
CALLICLES: What do you mean?
SOCRATES: I mean that every man is his own ruler; or is there no need of one’s ruling oneself, but only of ruling others?
Plato, Gorgias, 491d1
THE ATHENIANS HAD SHOWN THEIR IMPERIAL hand early. Up until 477 BC, it had been the Spartans who bared their teeth at the Persians, controlling the loose alliance between like-minded Hellenic city-states that was formed to prevent another Thermopylae.
But then the Athenians became Hellenic protectors-in-chief. It was they who determined who should provide ships, who should offer up human muscle to serve