The Parthenon Enigma (17 page)

We can only wonder how the trauma of the Persian attack affected the psyches of the Attic teenagers who grew up to forge what has been called the golden age of Periklean Athens. Theirs was a rarefied cohort, those young men of the highest privilege, but also united in their common experience of unimaginable shock suffered at a tender age. Did the ordeal of seeing the very existence of the young democracy threatened spur them on to special greatness as thinkers, artists, architects, playwrights, generals, and, yes, politicians, achieving things that endure superlative even today?

Perikles, for one, was certainly set on a road to success from the start; even his name (
peri
+
kleos
) promises he would be “surrounded
by glory.” The boy studied music with the theorist
Damon and went on to learn philosophy from
Anaxagoras, whom he would befriend.
¹
As an adult, and aspirant to power, Perikles would still enjoy discussing philosophy, especially with
Protagoras and
Zeno of Elea, and he was close to the geometer
Hippodamos of
Miletos, whom he would hire to lay out the harbor town of
Piraeus. But among his very dearest friends was
Pheidias, the master sculptor who would collaborate with him in planning the Parthenon and its sculptural program. That, however, would not be for some time, a quarter century later, when Athens was at its imperial zenith.

While he was still in his early twenties, in the spring of 472, Perikles’s very first public act was to finance a production of
Aeschylus’s
Persians
, a play that celebrated none other than the Athenian victory at Salamis. It was a canny gesture for the future statesman, presenting a drama that spoke hopefully to his generation, still scarred by the Persian War period and the sack of the Acropolis. Standing at the very center of this cohort, Perikles the aristocrat would rise as a champion of the people, the man as naturally cool and aloof as Olympian Zeus discovering a gift for charismatic oratory with which he could stir the masses.
²
By that time it was democracy not as the Athenians had first imagined it but an even purer strain, for good and ill.

Much of what we know of Perikles comes from the golden hindsight of those who wrote after his
death, Thucydides and
Plutarch chief among these admirers.
³
But a few facts speak for themselves, attesting to the magnitude of Perikles’s accomplishments. Every two years from 450 to 429, he was elected by popular vote (with the exception of only one term) to the council of ten generals, or
strategoi. The office of strategos was far more than a military responsibility, giving the ten who held it the authority to speak before all others at meetings of the assembly. One of the few elected positions, the strategos was as close as one could come to being a civic leader in a democracy that now distributed most jobs by lot, or sortition. (This seemed to the Athenians only fair, ensuring every man had an equal chance at most public positions—those requiring no special expertise anyway—and that none was unduly advantaged by reason of wealth.) That Perikles could hold on to his elected office for some twenty years, never successfully challenged or ostracized (as his father had been and so many of his friends and enemies would be), speaks to his exceptional skills.

IN TIME
, Perikles came to embody Athens of the fifth century in a way that
Peisistratos had done for the Athens of the sixth. But if the masses were readily swayed, his fellow aristocrats were not as easy to dispatch. Perikles was of the Alkmeonidai, rival clan of the Peisistratids, his mother’s brother being none other than
Kleisthenes, architect of the Athenian democracy. And through his father, the war hero and politician
Xanthippos, Perikles belonged to the Athenian tribe
Akamantis and the deme (or burg) of
Cholargos. In 461
B.C.
, when he was roughly thirty-five, he stepped into the political spotlight as a leading advocate for the
ostracism of Kimon, who was related through marriage to the
Philaidai. Enmity between the two families went back a generation, when Xanthippos had imposed exile and a hefty fine of fifty talents on Kimon’s father,
Miltiades, the general responsible for the victory at Marathon.
⁴
Unable to pay the fine, the heroic warrior died in jail, bequeathing the onerous penalty and the attendant resentment to his son.

Kimon would become a war hero in his own right, distinguishing himself fighting the
Persians at Salamis and later in
Thrace,
Skyros, and at the battle on the
Eurymedon River in Pamphilia (southern Turkey). As a leading statesman throughout the 470s and 460s, he had a crucial part in building the
Athenian navy, which allowed the city to become an empire. Military victory was remunerative, and so, having paid off his father’s debt, Kimon lavished his personal fortune on civic projects. He is said to have been the first to adorn Athens with elegant spaces for public use.
⁵
He planted many
plane trees in the Agora. He transformed the Academy into a shady grove, well watered by an
aqueduct some 3 kilometers (nearly 2 miles) long, carrying runoff from the market. Spoils from his military conquests also enabled Kimon to finance the rebuilding of the south wall of the Acropolis, the laying out of the Long Walls connecting Athens to the
Piraeus, and the construction of the
Klepsydra fountain and the Painted Stoa (from which the philosophical school of
Stoicism takes its name). But when, in 462
B.C.
, Kimon led an unsuccessful mission in support of the Spartans (against the Helot uprisings), he opened himself to accusations of fraternizing with Athens’s enemy. This gave Perikles the perfect opportunity: he launched a case for ostracism against Kimon. Thus did Perikles use a tool of fifth-century democracy (the ancient version of today’s recall referendum) to
advance his personal political ambitions, forcing his main rival to leave Athens for ten long years.

There was another contender for leadership at Athens, Perikles’s own mentor
Ephialtes, the great reformer and champion of the masses. A tumultuous moment, 462 was also the year Ephialtes introduced reforms stripping the
Areopagus Council (the aristocratic body composed of former archons and other elite officeholders, a kind of senate) of nearly all its functions except that of murder tribunal. Henceforth, all other criminal and civil trials would be handled by the law courts, in which all Athenian citizens could serve. This decisive truncation of aristocratic influence and its typically moderating effect marks the beginning of what has been called Athens’s
radical democracy. To put it mildly, not everyone was pleased. The following year, Ephialtes was assassinated. This left Perikles’s path to power wide open.

By 457, Perikles was recognized for valor at the
Battle of Tanagra,
Plutarch reporting that among Athenian soldiers he was “the most conspicuous of all in taking no care for his safety.”
⁶
And so, before reaching the age of forty, this consummate patriot and thoughtful man of action managed to consolidate his position as the leading statesman
of Athens. Over the next thirty years he would preside over a radical democracy, a powerful empire, a savage war with
Sparta, and an extravagant building program on the Acropolis. Before considering the latter, which gave us the Parthenon, chief among its wonders, let us consider the political context, which was then, as ever, bound up with the Athenian self-understanding.

Even the greatest cynic must acknowledge that the central tenets of Athenian radical democracy were inspired: individual freedom, self-government, equal protection before the law (regardless of wealth), the right of any citizen to own land and houses in Athenian territory, and an affirmation of the individual’s commitment to the well-being of the community as a whole. All Athenian (male) citizens could participate in the deliberations and vote in the assembly, or
ekklesia (where some measures required a quorum of six thousand), and by serving as jurors in the law courts, the
heliaia, where a minimum panel of two hundred males over the age of thirty was required but up to six thousand were kept in service. With the authority to impose ostracism, this body, not the assembly, was where the real power lay. Then there was the
Council of 500 (boule), comprising fifty members chosen by lot from each of
the ten Kleisthenic tribes. In all, some eleven hundred citizens now held office each year at Athens, most chosen through sortition, only about a hundred elected, including the ten
strategoi. After 487
B.C.
,
archons were no longer elected by the people but chosen by lot;
⁷
and by 457 even
zeugitai
(those of minimal property, enough for subsistence) could serve as archons. Civic life grew to ensure a job for every citizen, with anyone who neglected his due involvement reviled as an
idiotes.
Thus power was never more dispersed in the polis and, as a consequence, its exercise never more fractious. Soon, the need for a monumental reminder of first things would seem ever more urgent.

Democracy had taken form for the first time in human history precisely because of the profound and all-pervading sense of a common Athenian ancestry, one that originated in the mists of the
Bronze Age, the sons of Erechtheus—of Athena herself—all belonging to the land.
Politeia
, that touchstone of Athenian life denoting the conditions and rights of the citizen, was a concept whose sense extended far beyond our notions of politics, positing a mythic “deep time” and a cosmic reality in which the citizen could not locate himself or understand his existence except through religious
awareness and devotions. All were pledged to the good of the polis, and by extension that of one another, and by that mutual understanding popular rule could be trusted. But radical democracy was inevitably an expansive vision of rule and, just as inevitably, a costly one, dependent on the revenues of empire. However much that vision may have included ever more lavish tributes to the divine order of things, its abundant benefits to the individual citizen distracted him, weakening the very solidarity and selflessness that had made democracy trustworthy.

It was
Perikles himself who introduced payment for jury service. Now men sitting on juries were compensated for their service just as soldiers and the oarsmen of the great triremes were.
Priesthoods, long an inherited privilege of the elite, were now opened to a wider cut of the citizenry through use of the lot. And while sacred offices had always brought emoluments, we now hear of cash salaries and payments in skins, hides, and meat portions from the animal victims. The benefits of
citizenship grew so great that in time it seemed better to limit those eligible rather than to restrain the benefits, lest too many outsiders share in the wealth
of Athens. Aristocratic Athenian men had long favored rich foreign brides, as Perikles’s own maternal grandfather had done, marrying well at Sikyon.
As typically happens, less eminent citizens began following suit, taking foreign wives, with every confidence of passing Athenian citizenship on to their sons. But in 451/450
B.C.
,
Perikles introduced legislation under which citizenship could be conferred only on those whose mother and father were both from Athenian families.
⁸
The
Periklean citizenship law, exclusionary as it was, had the effect of elevating the status of Athenian women by making them, more than ever, desirable for marriage. Apart from the ownership of property and its legal protection, women had few rights or benefits, being ineligible for military service or politics. It was required that male guardians speak for them in the law courts and handle all their financial and legal affairs, but women did enjoy the wealth of the city equally within their families, and those who held key priesthoods enjoyed not only the prestige but a salary and a share in the sacrifices.
⁹

Amid the demands of a populace expecting ever greater emoluments, the key to Perikles’s success, apart from his spending lavish sums, was certainly his unrivaled gift for oratory. Plato calls him, in the
Phaidros
, “the most perfect of all in rhetoric,”
¹⁰
though elsewhere the philosopher takes him to task for artifice in delivering orations that seem to have been written out in advance.
¹¹
In his comedy
The Demes
(performed in 412
B.C.
), the playwright Eupolis gives a rather breathless description of Perikles’s gifts:

Speaker 1: That man was the most powerful speaker of all.

Whenever he came forward, like a great sprinter

Coming from ten feet behind, he bested his rivals.

Speaker 2: You say he was fast … But, in addition to his speed,

Persuasion somehow or other sat on his lips,

So entrancing was he. He alone of the politicians customarily left his sting in his hearers.

Eupolis,
Demes
, PCG V 102
¹²

That sting would need to remain in effect if Perikles was to persuade his fellow Athenians to join his vision for a newly resplendent Acropolis. To judge by his stunning success, it did.

BY THE MIDDLE
of the fifth century, the Acropolis had stood in semi-ruins for thirty years. The platform on which the Older Parthenon was to have been built lay broken, its marble blocks still fractured from Persian fire. The roof of the Old Athena Temple had collapsed, but despite the utter destruction of the interior its battered façades and apparently a good bit of its westernmost room still stood (
this page
).
¹³
Cleanup on the Acropolis had already begun under
Themistokles in the 470s, when usable blocks were salvaged for hasty construction of the city’s new defensive walls. But much of the Sacred Rock remained a sad, wounded, and dark memorial to Persian atrocities. There could have been no more galvanizing reminder of this sacrilege.