The King Archon next turned to Pericles. “Is there aught you wish to say, Pericles, son of Xanthippus?”
Pericles sighed, and wiped away non-existent sweat from his forehead. It was as if he were very tired. Then he addressed the whole assemblage, and only the King Archon and Anaxagoras heard the irony in his resonant voice.
“I have always been proud, as Head of State, of the nobility and balanced judgment of the men of Athens. We are all but human, yet sometimes we rise to grandeur, as the acropolis is now rising. What stands there, what is being built there, is a poor if beautiful reflection of the Athenian soul, the glory of that soul. Let no man now or in the future denigrate Athens, her integrity, her holy passion and reverence for beauty, her arts, her scientists, her philosophers. But above all, let all admire, in every corner of this world, the spectacle of our matchless impartiality, our craving for the orderly processes of law which were given to us by Solon. Where else in the world do such processes exist? Who can be compared with us? Despotisms abound, tyrannies which will not let a man speak the truth or lift his head as a man and not a slave, and who exact the last coin of tribute from their helpless people.
“But in Athens a man is free. His opinions may not be honored or regarded highly, but he may speak them—as you have permitted Anaxagoras to speak. You have refuted slanders with that mighty sense of justice which only Athenians possess. There are some among us, I admit, who possess the tarnish of a despot’s evil urges, but only a few. Only a few. But from those few may the gods deliver us!”
Even his enemies felt their hearts swell with emotion at this subtle flattery of themselves, and they experienced a thrill of gratitude for Pericles who had so elevated them in their own estimations. For a brief moment or two they actually loved him and forgot their enmity. As for the men who had known terror, they sweated with relief and were grateful to Pericles for delivering them from open accusations. Some of them said to themselves: “That fool of a Daedalus nearly destroyed us. We must warn him to hold his tongue hereafter.”
The King Archon ordered the chains to be struck from the wrists and ankles of Anaxagoras, who stood there eying Pericles with a most peculiar smile. The King Archon then rose and all bowed to him, even the Head of State, Pericles himself. The King Archon retired from the chamber and a loud buzzing of voices rose as a storm of bees in the hall. No one noticed that Daedalus, staggering, was leaving like a gaunt shadow.
Pericles himself led Anaxagoras from the chamber. “Come with me to my offices, for a little refreshment,” said Pericles. “My throat is dry.”
“I do not doubt it,” said Anaxagoras. “My dear friend, you are worthy of the most prominent role on the stage.”
“Tut,” said Pericles. “Do I not always speak the truth?”
“No,” said Anaxagoras, smiling. Then his face changed. “But I am afraid I have not heard the last of this.”
That night the unfortunate Daedalus, consumed by his own rage and defeat, had a seizure and died before dawn. To the last he cursed Pericles.
Dejanira, his daughter, wrote to her son in Cyprus: “My dearest Callias, what calamity has fallen on this house! My beloved father, and your grandfather, has died in his bed, in our arms, weeping. Alas, it was his own fury against Pericles which killed him.” She then related what Daedalus had incoherently gasped before he succumbed.
On receiving her letter Callias lifted his hand in an oath and said, “We will be avenged! Of a certainty, we will be avenged!”
CHAPTER 10
Socrates said to Pericles, ‘This, of course, is not the end.”
“In the meantime,” replied Pericles, “let us not anticipate trouble before it arrives. Each day we live is a day gained.”
“We, your friends, are alarmed for you, Pericles.”
“So am I,” said Pericles, laughing.
“You are an orator,” said Zeno of Elea.
“Have I not had an excellent teacher—you?”
“Alas, what a world this is,” said Pheidias.
“When was it not? It was and ever will be a dangerous and precarious planet, full of evil and contention, of malice and envy, of death and fury, of murder and pillage, of lies and hatred. Human nature is, was, and always will be detestable and unchangeable. We are a monstrous species.”
He looked at his friends and added, “With rare exceptions. But you are in this world but not of it. There is a difference. Future ages will proclaim your names, forgetting that you were outlaws among your contemporaries, just as they will persecute their own contemporaries who are superior, leaving them for future generations to extol.”
Zeno of Elea said, somewhat sadly, “You grow more caustic and embittered with time, my dear Pericles. But then, you are not a philosopher.”
“Thank the gods! I, therefore, will not perish.”
His enemies in the government, however, declined to sanction the name of his illegitimate son, the infant Pericles, and refused that name on its records.
Aspasia was too wise a woman to attempt to soothe Pericles with the metaphorical substitute of a honeyed tit, as one soothes a fractious or frightened infant. She said, “Our son is Pericles, in our minds and our hearts, and so he will be called among us and in our houses. The malice of governments is always present, and its attempts to punish its adversaries or those who criticise it. It should not be pertinent to our own lives. We should remember who and what it is, and disdain it.”
“Unfortunately, it has the power to defame, exile, depose and even kill,” said Pericles, who was both humiliated and angered at the insult. He knew now why some men like himself desire to be dictators, when inflamed, mortified or impatient with lesser functionaries of government. He knew that his own government, and many of the rabble, were accusing him of plotting to become a monarch or at least a dictator. He told this to Aspasia. She touched his cheek gently with her soft hand. She smiled and dimpled.
“That, too, has its worth, for it is only when the lesser functionaries of government, and the rabble, fawn unanimously on a man that he can attain despotism.”
He laughed. “So I am kept in salutary check! I do, at times, have an imperative impulse to override the rules and regulations of the functionaries and the bureaucrats with one powerful gesture—which, I am certain—would cow them. Adversaries, I see, can not only be abrasive and irritating, but can make a man pause and take measure of himself, unpleasant though that is.”
Aspasia now lived almost always in his house, for he feared for her since the birth of his son. They resumed their dinners for their friends and the long and exciting conversations which ensued during them. Only Aspasia observed that Anaxagoras was unusually silent these nights, or started when someone addressed him. Since his trial and exoneration he had become melancholy, though he continued to have his academe and to speak in the colonnades. However, it was as if some vital virtue had either been wounded in him, or lost. Each time she saw him Aspasia became more anxious, for he was aging. Sometimes his hands trembled. There were rumors that he was mocked and threatened on the streets even more than usual, and that his little modest house was stoned. If this were true he did not speak of it.
Xanthippus, the enthusiastic soldier, and Paralus, an avid student, loved their infant brother and played with him at all opportunities, remarking how much he resembled their adored father. The child had a merry temperament, like Aspasia, and his father’s stateliness also. He was strong and vigorous. “What an athlete for the Olympian Games he will be,” said Xanthippus. “And what a soldier.”
The young men were now permitted to join the dinners and discussions in the house of their father. They saw that not only were gifted and beautiful hetairai present but the advanced wives of many of Pericles’ friends. The dinners, because of Aspasia who presided, were becoming more and more famous throughout Athens, and hundreds of wives became rebellious against their husbands who kept them in subservience, and hundreds of daughters demanded the education given their brothers. The young ladies, graduat
es of Aspasia’s school, often refused the husbands chosen for them and insisted on their right to choose their own. They did not encounter much opposition, however, for their parents had sent them to Aspasia. But the girls’ influence extended to their friends, who had not had their own opportunities, and this outraged more conservative parents.
In the meanwhile Pericles was being attacked covertly in the theatre, to the hilarity even of his adherents. Cratinus, the poet and playwright, had an actor declaim:
“Here’s Pericles, our own squill-headed Zeus.
Where did he buy that hat? What, what excuse?
It’s new head-cover in Odeum style,
Late storms of censure hardly left a tile.”
Not only then did he mockingly liken Pericles to Zeus, as did other poets and playwrights. In his Chiron he derided:
“Strife and old father Chronus went together to bed
And gave birth to the mightiest tyrant,
Whom the gods call Head-gatherer.”
(This, referring to Pericles’ towering brow and helmet.)
Pericles, however much he despised his fellow aristocrats and the market rabble (who appeared to have too many things in common), had no desire to be a tyrant, not even over his mockers and foes. He might, in his secret anger, wish to bang their heads together and to order them to refrain from their iniquities, and command them, but his emotions were never translated into action. He only watched them assiduously. If others found it strange that the aristocratic nobles of Athens, fastidious and discriminatory, and the odoriferous rabble had a deep accord, Pericles did not. The aristocrats (though they figuratively and sometimes literally held their noses) consorted in private with the rabble. They pretended to deplore the “tyranny” of Pericles, who opposed all laws giving the rabble free bread and meat and cheese and housing and demanded that they work for a living. “He has no compassion on the unfortunate,” the aristocrats would say to leaders of the rabble. “He has no mercy on the deprived and the humble. He despises those in want, and would have them starve. What is the treasury and gold of a people compared with a single human life? Should not taxes be used to alleviate distress and illness and starvation among our people? Are we not equal in our humanity? What pains Pericles in his flesh and belly pains the people of Athens also. He has physicians and medicine and fine food and shelter. You, our poor friends, have none of these. He builds grandiloquent temples and wastes your substance. While a gold and ivory statue is being raised in the Parthenon your children cry for bread, and you desire the barest amenities of living and have them not. Who can compare the house of Pericles with your huts? Our hearts bleed for you.”
None of the rabble appeared to notice that their friends, the aristocrats, parted not with a single drachma to relieve their alleged miserable state. When Hippocrates’ influence persuaded physicians that infirmias for the destitute should be built, the very “friends of the humble” opposed them, for such infirmias would cost them money in increased taxes. When Pericles insisted that the noisome hovels of the poor should be destroyed and more agreeable housing be built, his fellow aristocrats raised an outcry over his “extravagance, and his hypocritical desire to be known, unrighteously, as a humanitarian.”
Pericles, bitterly, understood the motives of the wealthy aristocrats. They were using the rabble against him, to impeach him. If, he would say, these gilded traitors attained their object and became omnipotent, they would at once enslave and subjugate the poor whom they pretended to respect and pity. They, the lovers of the poor, the champions of the afflicted, lusted for power above all things. They, in their souls, hated the populace, and despised them.
Daily the rage of the rabble increased and became more vociferous and audible against Pericles. The aristocrats smiled happily under their noses. The middle class was alarmed at the growing hostility against the man they so deeply admired and trusted. They knew that he stood between them and exploitation by the lazy and worthless, and between them and their natural enemies—the rich patricians. They sent him delegates to extend their love to him, their trust, their faith. Though these were not scholars their deep instincts warned them that their destruction was being plotted by the aristocrats through their minions, the rabble. If they did not know that the aristocrats called them “upstarts, who are inimical to the glory of Greece and would subdue her to the rule of dull merchants and shopkeepers,” they dimly suspected the truth. But they sensed, in their strong spirits, that if they disappeared and the aristocrats were solely in authority and the rabble were slaves, Greece would become a despotism.
Sometimes Pericles pondered: “Who had said that a despotism meant wolves on the top and jackals on the bottom?” Aspasia said, “I think you did, beloved,” to which he responded with gloom, “It does sound like me.”
His endless troubles with Sparta and other city-states were increasing, but he was now so obsessed with the saving of Athens and the buildings on the acropolis and the dilemma of his intellectual friends that he had little time to think of them. His government seemed to be apathetic and offered no suggestions and no assistance—and this made him suspicious. Sparta, believing he had become weak, daily became more aggressive, and incited other sister cities against him. Aspasia, who was not tormented daily as was her lover by the hostile government and the aristocrats, heard of Sparta and her determination to take over trade and commerce from Athens, and subjugate her. Because Pericles came to her and their son with smiles and embraces and jests, she tried to believe that he had complete control over all things. Thargelia would have smiled at this, saying, “Women attribute prescience to the men they love, which can be a mortal error.”
In the midst of all his worries the young city-state of Italy, Rome, sent a commission to him, through her Senate, of three earnest Romans, “in order that you, lord, can instruct them in the creation of a perfect and just Republic, as established by your great lawgiver, Solon, and which has made Greece the wonder of the world.” Pericles, on receiving the message announcing the imminent arrival of the Romans, laughed with mirthless and cynical hilarity. But Aspasia said, “Why disillusion these honest men with the truth? Let them establish their republic, according to Solon, and perhaps they will realize the dream which Athens never attained, a dream which other nations may make into a glorious reality.”
“But these barbarian Romans are also men, and inevitably, despite their labors, they will become corrupt and establish a democracy and hence a despotism.” Yet secretly he felt a deep pity for the Romans and a sadness for their hopes. He prepared to receive them with solemn respect, and ceremony. This made the aristocrats restive and contemptuous. “He will honor barbarians,” they said, “barbarians without an aristocratic tradition, and entertain them lavishly at governmental expense, which will come out of the pockets of the working poor.”
Pericles addressed the Assembly: “We have been laughing at this small and virtuously ambitious city-state in Italy, but who knows what the future will bring? They may be only farmers and little winemakers and shopkeepers; it is possible that tomorrow, if they remain industrious and pious and honor God and humanity and patriotism and justice, they may become, too, of a grand stature.” This highly amused many of the Assembly and the Archons and the Eleven and the Ecclesia. “He is growing senile,” they said among themselves. “The values he extols are the petty follies of the middle class. He apparently does not know that the world is now sophisticated and that most of us have discarded those so-called virtues as the prejudices of our humble fathers who had no advantages and no wide learning.” With superb tolerance they consented to give the Roman barbarians some deference, for were they, themselves, not educated and indulgent gentlemen? As cultivated men they would not insult even foreign savages, who yearned to imitate them.
“We have heard they are a village of grocers,” one man said to Pericles, who replied, “Grocers are estimable. Let us not despise men who work.” He added, “We of Athens have come to belittle labor as fit only for slaves, but I tell
you that white hands never built a nation or maintained it. Labor is the cornerstone of grandeur, and he who denies that is not worthy of his bread.”
He personally met and greeted the Romans at the port, clad in ceremonial attire, with an honor guard headed by his trusted lieutenant, Iphis. When the three Romans left the ship drums were sounded, trumpets flared and colors were dipped. Pericles advanced, bowing, then extended his hand solemnly to each Roman in turn. His perceptive eye swept them, and he felt a warm impulse of approval. They were short but bulky men, not fat though muscular, and about forty years old. They had strong and serious faces with large noses, dark eyes and firm full lips, and their hands were calloused and familiar with work. Their hair was severely cropped, their dress sober, and they wore no jewelry. They looked like farmers, for their faces were browned by sun, and their shoulders were massive. They wore plain leather shoes, crudely but sturdily made. Pericles saw clear intelligence in their eyes, though he detected from their sincere expressions that they lacked the urbane humor of Athenians. Each carried one small chest, and none had attendants. They walked weightily as men walk who have trudged the earth and have sweated, and have guided plows and have builded houses. They were men with a purpose, and Pericles trusted them immediately. It was obvious they were peasants.
He took them to his house in his large awninged car, which was drawn by four magnificent white Arabian horses bright with silver harness. They watched everything with grave and alert eyes, and did not pretend that they were not impressed as the car passed grand houses and elaborate government buildings. When they glimpsed the acropolis and the now-completed Parthenon—shining like silver gilt in the morning sun—they audibly drew deep breaths of awe and admiration. Their knowledge of Greek was poor, and their voices were hoarse and loud, as are the voices who call to cattle and swine. They had the genuine dignity of simple men who esteem themselves without vanity, and who honor themselves and their country. Pericles loved them more and more. He pointed out spots of historic interest. They had, at first, been somewhat taciturn with him, as a superior man, but his manners, his kindness, his obvious respect for them as the men they were, reassured them and they spoke to him in the spirit of equality as members of government. They were not ignorant. In slow sentences they mentioned the history of Athens; they were conversant with the civilizations of Egypt also, and other eastern nations.