In Our Time - Pericles

Episode Date: September 17, 2020

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Pericles (495-429BC), the statesman who dominated the politics of Athens for thirty years, the so-called Age of Pericles, when the city’s cultural life flowered, its democracy strengthened as its empire grew, and the Acropolis was adorned with the Parthenon. In 431 BC he gave a funeral oration for those Athenians who had already died in the new war with Sparta which has been celebrated as one of the greatest speeches of all time, yet within two years he was dead from a plague made worse by Athenians crowding into their city to avoid attacks. Thucydides, the historian, knew him and was in awe of him, yet few shared that view until the nineteenth century, when they found much in Pericles to praise, an example for the Victorian age. With Edith Hall Professor of Classics at King's College London.Paul Cartledge AG Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of CambridgeAnd Peter Liddel Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of ManchesterProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, we're back with the new series. In 431 BC, Pericles gave a funeral oration to his fellow Athenians, which has been celebrated as one of the finest speeches ever delivered.

Within two years, he and myself was dead from the plague. He had dominated the politics of Athens for 30 years, the so-called age of Pericles, when the city's cultural life flowered magnificently. Its democracy strengthened, its empire grew, and the Acropolis was adorned with the Parthenon. Thucydides, the historian, knew him, and was in awe of him. Yet few shared that view until the 19th century, when they found much in Pericles to praise, an example for the Victorian age and his status has been revered and scrutinized ever since. Joining me from their homes to discuss Pericles are Paul Cartledge,

A.G. Levantis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge. Peter Little, Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Manchester, and Edith Hall, Professor of Classics at King's College, London. Edith Hall, Pericles was born around 495 BC. What was happening in Athens then? Pericles was born into probably the most exciting period of Athenian history that had ever happened. He was born about 12 years after the Kleisthenic revolution, which was when the Athenians had actually finally got rid of the tyrants

and set up something like the democracy for the first time. He was there at a time which became increasingly exciting because when he was only about four or five years old, Darius, the great king of Persia, invaded Greece and his father, Pericles' dad, Santhipas, almost said, He certainly fought him at Marathon. And when he was in his teens, the second Persian invasion happened. The incredibly terrifying March of Xerxes, enormous army down through Greece

and the invasion of Attica. And the Persian force is actually taking the acropolis and completely destroying all the ancient temples and the evacuation of Athens and the nail-biting, but ultimately triumphant sea battle of Salamis, just off the Athenian harbour area. So it must have been a bit like people who grew up, who were born in the 20s and 30s,

whose very early adulthood was spent during the Second World War. It would have informed his psyche, and I think his political position, indelibly. At that time, Edith, in what way was Athens a democracy? Well, Athens had, in 507, with the Kleisthenic Revolution, a couple of years after the expulsion of the tyrant family, the last tyrants of Athens, the sons of Pisestritus, had set up a completely new, in very radical constitution,

which very heftily transferred the executive power and the decision-making powers to the free, poor of Athens. It meant that they actually got to take the decisions in their assembly, the Ecclesia for on all issues of moment, And they started to be much more involved in the magistracies and the law courts. And there was a very, very buzzing atmosphere and a sense of the slogan was freedom, freedom to speak equally with each other. And this seemed to sort of somehow go with the fight against the tyrannical forces of Persia.

Freedom was expressed both on the international stage and locally in Athenian democratic politics. Was this, let's call a democracy, was this unique in the known world at that time? It wasn't completely unique. There were other areas of the Greek world, Megara and Sicily, that were experimenting with different kinds of mixed constitution. But the point about Athens was that she had been quite a backwater until the middle of the 6th century. And she was very conscious, everybody was very conscious

that she was about to emerge as a major player on the international stage. And I think Pericles, as a teenager, very much felt this. And he'd got, along with being in the right place at the right time for all these experiences, he'd got incredible role models in his father, Xanthippus, in his rival, who was 15 years older than him, Kimon. And, of course, in his maternal uncle, Kleisthenes. So he'd got a lot to live up to and a lot to imitate. Thank you. Paul Cartilage, in what way did Pericles' family background set him up for politics? Pericles was a blue-chip-cut-glass aristocrat. He was one of the Eupatriadai, which means descendants of well-born farmers.

Ediths mentioned that Pericles was a direct descendant of the supposed founder of the Athenian democracy. He was actually the great nephew of Kleisthenes. So he was born into a political family, round about 495, as we say. He would have inherited, interestingly, a feud because, of course, aristocratic families, they didn't all get on brilliantly, and especially at the time of such change as Edith has described when Athens is becoming a very, very interesting new kind of democritia, the cratos of the demos, the masses, the ordinary people. And the feud that Pericles inherited specifically was through his father, Xanthippos, who was an enemy of the famous Miltaiades of Marathon. Well, Miltadis died shortly after. But his son, he was a son. He was a manorpeylus, he was

Kimon inherited his mantle, and so Pericles inheriting the mantle of his father, Xanthipos, was sort of destined to be a bit of a political enemy of Kimon. And in fact, he began his political career in a way by trying to undermine Kimon. This is in the four-60s. But we first hear of Pericles. He actually appears on the democratic scene in the theatre as a sponsor, because he was very rich. Rich people were obliged to sponsor.

religious festivals, including theatre festivals. The beginning of his reputation began when he was 20, he mixed with a lot of thinkers and doers, when he commissioned Iskoulos to do a play, the Persian War. That was a great success. Why was it so successful, and why did it influence his future career so much? The Athenian system of staging plays

was done by requiring extremely rich citizens to finance a whole slew of plays. So in Iskoulos' case four, three tragedies, one satir drama. Of those, the play that survives, it's our earliest Athenian surviving tragedy, is the Persians. And the Persians, the title of it tells you it's set in Persia, and it's about the result of the Battle of Salamis, which was, if you like, the battle that saved the early Athenian democracy, and not just the Athenians and their democracy, but in a way all grace from becoming a sub-sableness. area of Persia.

Praising the Athenians in this and giving them a great deal of credit for what had happened, the rowers and the people in it, and that was the beginning of the basis of his association with the people of Athens, which did him in good stead for the rest of his life, more or less. Completely right, except that we must remember being aristocratic and being extremely rich, he is not a man of the people. Now we know that. What is extraordinary about his case? career is how far he chose to identify his career with actually a system that did not privilege

his socio-economic class. There was a feud which he said to have held him back. It doesn't seem to have held him back much, does it? Well, he inherited through his father a feud with another family and the leading actually admiral of the Athenians in the four 70s. This is the period leading up to that play of the Persians that I mentioned was a man called Kimone and Pericles actually chose to take him on. He himself needed sponsors,

he needed supporters and he was taking a big risk in taking Kimon on. But nevertheless he did, brought him to court and Kimon never forgave him. And Simon was ostracized for 10 years which left the coast clear for Pericles. Peter Little, how did he gain power and what power did he gain?

Well, over the 450s BC, Pericles seemed to have advocated policies which favoured the interests of adult male citizens, such as payment for public service. But it wasn't until the early 440s that he became the most important player in political life. Between the years of 448 and 429 BC, the Athenians elected him 15 times to the College of 10 generals, who held that post for a year. And this was not only a military position, but it also gave him the right to attend meetings of the Athenian Council or Senate, which set the agenda of the Assembly, or Ecclesia, which we've already mentioned. While he doesn't seem to have been a particularly inspired leader on the battlefield,

he seems to have been good at making the best of the results that he had, and so he was chosen on at least two occasions to give the funeral speech, in honour of Athenians who died in battle. But he did have service in the field with the forces of Athens? Yes, absolutely. He had service in different locations, different parts of Greece. I mean, I think Thucydides... Thucydides is his biographer and someone who knew him at the time, yes.

Thucydides, yes, the historian of the Peloponnesian War. And one of the important things that Thucydides said was that in what was nominally a democracy, power was in the hands of the first citizen, i.e. Pericles. And that's a correct analysis for those moments, and there seem to have been many of them, when the people appear to have found Pericles and his policies persuasive and supported them by vote in the Assembly. So maintaining the support of the power of the people at the Assembly was key to securing power in Athenian democracy,

It's quite possible that Thucydides, also Pericles, who wrote a, sorry, Plutarch who wrote a biography of him, exaggerated his political profile. And that's perhaps why Pericles' reputation seems to have eclipsed that of his contemporaries, many of whom were attested not so much in the literary sources, but rather in stone inscriptions of the time. Pericles, as we know from what's being said on the programme so far, but came from a very rich background, and surrounded by powerful people, and then he was elected 15 times. How did the individuality, how did that individual become so dominant in what we're calling a democracy? Well, a key aspect of that may have been his rhetorical style. He's known to have had a lot of contact with the cultural critics of the day,

Damone, the musical teacher, Zeno, Annexagoras, people like that, natural scientists, who are developing a science of oratory. So he may well have developed a mode of oratory that was elevated, persuasive, and at the same time quite appealing to the male citizens in the Assembly. Well, let's turn to the orator now with you, Edith Hall. In Thucydides, remarkably,

he gave three speeches to Pericles, but one of the high points is this funeral oration, which has been picked over and imitated in the last 200 years numerous times. Can you set the scene for that oration, Edith, and tell us why you think it had such impact then? Yes. Every year during the Peloponnesian War,

the Athenians used to gather at their cemetery in the Keramikos, one of the loveliest suburbs of the city by the Eridanos River, with beautiful plain trees and beautiful memorials to do a ritual funeral for everybody who died, all the men who died during the war.

So it's a little bit like what we do on November the 11th at the Senatar. And one of the main things here was that a speaker was chosen simply because he was highly respected and had a beautiful voice. He was chosen for the power of his oratory to give the speech to basically the bereaved. So that's the scene. He's talking to the bereaved. Can you give us the main points he made first of all? And then we talk about him. What were the main points he made?

Okay, it's fascinating because he moves the convention from celebrating the past glories of Athens and relating all the great victories of the past. He transfers the tense, as it were, to the present and the future. So he gives a description account of the institutions and the ideals of democratic Athens in order to paint a picture of what it's worth dying for. So it's a completely different idea of a speech. It's very, very little about the actual glory of the men who died. It's all about the ideals that they died for.

So the idea that everybody in Athens, who's a free citizen, can get a good chance to ascend the political ladder. Everybody in Athens gets a good education. Everybody in Athens has beautiful buildings to look at. Everybody in Athens has learned to deliberate so they understand the true value of what they're fighting and dying for. So it's about idealising the city to make people feel that what they've got is so precious that it's of course worth risking, not only their own lives for the brothers and sons of those

who died, but for the women of the city. And one of the reasons it's so important this annual speech, it's the only time that a senior politician of Athens got to address the women of Athens. they could not attend the Assembly. This was the one time of the year that they were given a chance to buy into the whole project and he'd really got to persuade them. A lot of them were probably demented with grief

and very, very angry indeed at losing their menfolk. So it was a really important ideological occasion for whole families under the Periclean democracy. And we know that it had a huge impact at the time he did. I believe that it did, yes. I think that it managed to get people to believe in continuing the war all the way through till the plague struck a couple of years later.

We don't have any evidence, any particular comments from people immediately after it, but Thucydides had either pretty much memorized every word of it or managed to get hold of a transcript. Paul Cardledge, what do you make of the speech? It's one of those speeches where, because we've no idea what Pericles actually said, we have to go on what Thucydides said he said.

Are we reading Thucydides, or are we reading Thucydides, are we reading Pericles? Well, one of the things that I think must have, I think it must have been Pericles and to this extent, he says that democracies, our system, is not one that we imitate from others. It's we've made it. We are the model. And he says it's a regime for the many, not the few. And there's a little bit of an irony there because Pericles was one of the few. He was one of the few, rich, well-born elite. The other thing that's, if I may pick up what Edith's just, about women, what he says to women is not to be inferior to your nature. In other words, don't cat a wall, don't wail and moan, but just man up, as it were. And imagine that you've got

to support Athens and support your menfolk. It's a little bit cruel, the last bit. Whether that was actually Pericles, one thing that anybody listening to it or reading about it would immediately think, what about your own women folk, Pericles? Was Pericles then so outstanding or so powerful that he had to make the great funeral oration, or did he do it as one of his steps to power and showing he had power? Well, as with everything in the democracy, Pericles was the servant of the system. He was not an uncrowned king, let alone a dictator. So he would have actually been chosen by a procedure which we're not very familiar with this.

By the way, it was not his first attempt. So he would have had a bit of experience of how his previous one went down. But nevertheless, it was a thoroughly democratic procedure, as Edith has very well said. Peter Little, Athens was particularly crowded at around that time. Why was that? Why did it matter? Well, the ancient city state of Athens consisted of a city centre with a rural hinterland with its own population. The city became extraordinarily crowded at the start of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC, owing to the Periclean strategy for surviving the early years and the Spartan invasions.

The policy of the Spartans and their Peloponnesian allies from the start of this war was to invade Attica twice yearly and to ravage their territory in the hope that the Athenians would yield. Pericles' response to this was to order the Athenians to retreat within the city walls of Athens and to avoid face-to-face combat with the invading forces. He advised the people to bring within the city walls their wives, their children, their household goods, they sent their sheep and their cattle across to the island of Evia. There were two reasons why the Athenians were able to do this. One was the security offered by their city walls, which had been rebuilt over the course of the 5th century,

both to encompass the city, but also to secure a connection with Athens' poor to the Pyraeus. These long walls were about four miles long and wide enough for two chariots to pass each other. And second, Athenian naval imperialism. Having bolstered her navy before the Persian wars, the Athenians had the biggest force of fighting ships in the Greek world, and they used that force to dominate the eastern Mediterranean and to transform their league of allies into an empire consisting of tribute-paying subjects. So physically, this meant that a large proportion of Athens' population

squeezed into the few kilometres of the walled areas. Cucydides says that many crowded into poorly ventilated huts, and he himself recognises that this situation exacerbated the plague that struck Athens in the first year. We have the plague, and this is one of the key decisions that Pericles made, bring them all into Athens, which you so well described as a tremendous fortress. It must have seemed right at the time, Edith Hall. Was he just unlucky that it turned out to work against him, to be a bad decision? Well, I think he was extremely unlucky.

I mean, we know that pandemics and plagues cannot be predicted and there was very little reason for him to suppose it was coming. Thucydides says he came from Africa, perhaps Ethiopia. And although the Athenians themselves spread rumours that the Spartans had deliberately polluted the wars supplies, there's no real proof of that. That's exactly the sort of paranoid suspicion that you would get. But it was absolutely dreadful.

It was either Typhus. dreadful. How many people are in the city and how many people died? Well, at least one in five died. Some estimates are between 10 and 30,000. Thucydides himself got it and has left us the most chilling description of the symptoms. And he died? No, Thucydides did not die. Oh, not Thucydides, sorry, I'll mix you up. Thucydides, Pericles died. So Thucydides got it, sorry, I was messing about that.

Yes. Yes, are the symptoms. We know what the symptoms were, and there have been many, many, many attempts, including analyzing the DNA of a fairly recently found a bunch of skeletons of people who almost certainly died in the plague has been discovered. But there's typhus or typhoid fever or some sort of hemorrhagic viral fever, possibly smallpox are the kinds of things that noisologists, that means studies of the history of disease, have considered.

But I do think he was really, really unlike. I think it was actually a very smart policy. Ever since the Persian War and Themistocles, the Athenian Navy was absolutely cracking and had almost complete supremacy. And because of the system of allied tribute and the ships coming into Pereus, being able to be defended by the Athenian Navy,

the food supply was really quite secure. The problem was that they were incredibly sick? Was that considered at the time? Was that considered to be a blunder? Or was it considered, as you've said, look, it was just one of those things? things. No, Pericles' popularity certainly declined drastically in the last year or so. Because he died two years out. He died in 429. The war was to continue for another 25 years.

Yeah, well, the plague came back in 427 as well. But it's actually surprising how little discussion in ancient sources there are of his culpability or not with that particular policy. I think that, you know, that kind of level of illness, I mean, it's like the Flavian plague that decimated the entire Roman army across many countries hundreds of years later. There's very little that can be done, like the Black Death. Paul, Paul Cardledge, can we look at what had changed, briskly, what had changed under Pericles in Athens. Yeah, when he first became in a position to influence anything,

he was the sidekick of a man called Effialti's, and there was a quite significant reform of the way in which the Athenians did their politics. took their decisions, conducted their litigation around about 460 BC. In the following decade, because his partner had been assassinated, very interesting, Pericles took the lead and he introduced pay for jurors, and they didn't in the ancient Greek system distinguish between political trials, criminal trials, everything was fair game. So doing politics involved taking your opponents to court.

And therefore, if it's the masses that are sitting in judgment, it's an increase in their power. One of the problematic, rather interesting measures that he is specifically associated with is the change in the rules for citizenship. Who was now, from 451 BC on, entitled to be a full Athenian citizen? From that moment on, you had to have an Athenian mum as well as an Athenian dad. You've always had to have had an Athenian father, but you now have to have an Athenian mother. Why? Well, it rules out any non-Athenian women, all Athenian women,

and now are going to become absolutely crucial for reproducing the population. One explanation is the need to reduce the population, so fewer potential mothers, fewer potential offspring, but it is still slightly a puzzle and a problem. Yes, Peter Little, we've been talking about Pericles and this superb orator and a good enough general and a wonderful politician inside Athens and pro-democracy. But there were scandals that surrounded him at the time.

Can you give us some idea of those and why they didn't rock him? I mean, I'm talking about Aspezier. If you could talk about her after his divorce, he's separating from his wife, he lived with Aspecia. Can we talk about that, please? Yes, I mean, apart from his, apart from Aspasia, I suppose he was accused of spending Athens' allies' money on public buildings. But yes, Aspasia, and Pericles was accused of lechery. He was accused, or at least his...

Was that proved? I don't think he was proved. At least he was accused of it. His associate Fideas, who was a sculptor, was accused of leading women to him on the pretext, on the claim that they would be shown works of art. And then after they had spent some time with Pericles, they were paid off with gifts of peacocks.

Pericles was also accused probably by his rivals of sleeping with his own son's wife, committing second-degree incest. But yes, Aspasia, his second wife, for whom he divorced his first, was one of the most controversial figures in ancient Athens. What made him controversial? Well, there were things said that she ran brothels, and in fact that Pericles began the Peloponnesian war. It was joked that Pericles began the Peloponnesian war after the to the rivals of the Athenians, the Magyrians had kidnapped two of, of the women that she employed.

Does this brothel accusation hold up? Did she? Was there any evidence? I don't think so. I think this was a joke. But I think what was controversial about Aspasia is that she wasn't an Athenian. She was from the city of Miletus

on the west coast of Asia Minor. And Pericles married her, had a son with her. And that was something very controversial in 5th century Athens, especially given that Pericles had introduced some years earlier a law which excluded males who were born not of two citizen parents from citizen rights. Hard to say whether these scandals affected his popularity.

Probably not. His popularity was hit in the first years of the Peloponnesian War, but that was probably more to do with his policy for avoiding face-to-face combat than the scandals that surrounded him. Edith, Edith Hall, his life, apparently his life coincided with the golden age for Athens between the Persian War, let's say, and the Peloponnesian War. How much was he responsible for that prosperity and that magnificence? He did two very important things. One was that he was completely single-minded about ensuring that tribute came in from the subject states to supply money and ruthlessly put down revolts when they happened, whether in Ubeir or Egyna or Samos,

I mean, any idea that he wasn't perfectly prepared to be ruthless in the pursuit of financing his democracy at Athens would be most misleading. But he spent it on very interesting things. So part from the fact that he, one of the things that made people suspicious of him was that he deliberately invited or encouraged intellectuals from all other parts of Greece,

the brightest and best, whether it's Protagoras and Anaxagoras amongst the philosophers and scientists, or it's Gorgias from Sicily, the great rhetoricians, all these people who were brought to the city and the great artists like Fidesas, who he commissioned the Periclean building program from. And he certainly altered the visual impact made by Athens immeasurably. I mean, whatever you think about the Parthenon, and in some ways the Acropolis was a great monument to Athenian superiority

and the right of Athens to govern the rule. They started using a word RK, which means, you know, we actually dominate you rather than hegemony for the allies. They were now very much subject state. But when you look up at the Parthenon in Athens, not just the Parthenon, but the propylia, and although the Eric Thaon was built a bit later, this was his great dream was to leave visual monuments

of the greatness of the city that he'd led. And this is completely undeniable to this day. He was actually brilliant, I think. What his great brilliance was was theorising the democracy and its values. He actually put his very considerable intellect into why it was necessary, how it operated and what its benefits were. And he was able to translate that, not only into brilliant oratory and policy, but into the material environment and the festivals and the drama that Paul has talked about. He seems to have been extremely close, for example,

to Sophocles, the greatest some people think of all of the three Greek tragedians. They seemed to have been in quite a set together. So the intellectual glory that was certainly Athens had something to do with Pericles' openness to bringing in the brilliant ideas from across the Greek world. Thank you very much. Paul, Paul Cartlidge, we've heard a lot about democracy. Was Pericles a good Democrat?

I mean, at its best as I understand it, the democracy was, the votes were given, or the influence was given to 30,000 people out of a popular, of 300,000. So that's just one thing to throw into the fire. Was he a good Democrat? Well, according to his enemies, and they would be of two kinds,

rival politicians and people who hated democracy. He was far too good a Democrat. And this is quite striking because of his background. For people of his class, most of them, he was a class traitor. He went over to the bad side, to the masses. And I'll give just one illustration of how he, despite the impression one gets, that he was somehow above the fray, when he was very unpopular, as both Edith and Peter have said,

right at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, things were going badly, the plague hit Athens. What do you do? Well, this is great for his rivals. You prosecute him, and I suspect he was prosecuted for something like deceiving the people. In other words, you got. You got. You. You got, you the strategy all wrong. And now look what the gods have sent us, this plague. So he was actually prosecuted. He was found guilty and fined and sacked. Well, you can't be more democratic than being in the fray failing and then rising again. Now, Thucydides, who was not a Democrat, so as typical of the masses. They re-elected him. But that, I think, is a huge tribute to Pericles, the good Democrat.

The idea of democracy was heavily challenged in the next century by Plato, thought that democracy would lead to mob rule, too much populism. Anyway, democracy was not a good thing. And one way in another, it went out of vogue for about 2,000 years, and so did Pericles. Peter, when and how did his reputation re-emerged so positively? Well, it wasn't really until the middle of the 19th century. that Pericles' reputation began to recover, although maybe it's worth saying that in the 17th century,

Thomas Hobbes, who translated Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War, had a proving things to say about Pericles. He thought Pericles was a sort of serene leader who guided the people, who shepherded the people at a time when there was a danger of mob rule. And of course, this fits in very well with Hobb's rather negative view of human nature. But it wasn't until, as I said, until the middle of the 19th century that Pericles' reputation began to recover. At the same time as, well, democracy, the political term democracy, began to become more fashionable and stopped being a dirty word.

So in his mid-19th century history of Greece, George Grote, who was a philosophical radical, praised Pericles, his style of leadership and his democratic-mindedness. And that was probably the turning point and opened the way for other admirers of Pericles and other admirers of liberal democracy in Athens, such as George. John Stuart Mill to really take a new view of Athenian democracy. Could I just disagree? I have a rather different view. Pericles's real rehabilitation, in my view, was a matter of the mid-18th century when the future Frederick II of Prussia, no Democrat, adopted him as an exemplar of somebody who encouraged the arts and intellectual activities and refined recreations. and he actually wrote a treatise called the anti-Machiavelli,

which he elaborated this, and Voltaire took this up. But politically, it is traditional to say George Grote, and it's kind of conventional to say the mid-19th century. You actually find Tom Payne praising him as early as 1776 in a dialogue with the ghost of General Montgomery. And in the 1790s, the British radical Democrats, the London Corresponding Society, admittedly still a minority,

but they were absolutely giving lectures on the Athenian democracy, mainly Samistat lectures that would be put down by the harsh censorship laws at the time. But he was a secret ideal all the way through the Peterloo riots and adopted by the early chartists long before Grode ever published that history. That's registered, and you've said it very well. But it's still quite curious that for 1800 years, you're talking about the last 200 years or so, 1800 years, he was virtually ignored.

Do you have you on that, Paul Cartledge? Well, simply, the democracy was a dirty word. After all, the Romans hated any sort of democracy, especially the Greek direct style. Their success as the Byzantines lived under a theocracy, an autocracy. And then, well, the so-called Middle Ages in Europe, there is not a trace of popular government except, you know, sporadically. in, for example, the city-states of Italy.

But it's not surprising, therefore, that ancient Greece is at a discount. It's not so much Athens, democracy and Pericles. They hadn't got Thucydides and Plutarch. I mean, these were not available until the 15th century. We didn't have these Greek authors. So it was impossible for everybody even to find out who Pericles was, except for the occasional damning words in Roman sources, which are basically inheritances of Plato.

But they wouldn't have known what to make if they had had, you said it would. You know what I mean? And when he was printed for the first time, Aldous Manutius around about 1,500, then people can then start to take the view that, e.g., the American founding fathers, my God, he's a terrible A class traitor, and B, he fosters mob rule. Because what is ancient Athenian democracy, but mob rule? We don't want that. We want republicanism. Ah, there's a Roman word. So it does take Peter's right that it's not till the 19th century when democracy the word plus representative democracy, Edith's right there, Tom Payne, come into fashion. It's not ancient Greek democracy.

Pericles comes back on the back of a refashioning of democracy. So it's, if you like, a coincidence. Peter Little, what, fine, we're getting to the end now. What would you say is the legacy of Pericles? for the modern age? Well, there are different legacies. Pericles appears in different moulds in Thucydides, compare that to the violent leader embroiled in scandals

that we have in Plutarch's life of Pericles. That was 500 years later, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah. Five hundred years after his death? Although, what Plutarch has to say is often based upon the comic parody of Pericles. I think it's interesting that the Pericles of Thucydides, the serene and sensible leader, often makes him an attractive source of admiration for people whose political profile or stance

makes him a convenient ideal or model. So it's often said that the current occupant of 10 Downing Street has Pericles as a hero. But it's probably quite easy for somebody with an elite education who shares some of the politically liberal values of Pericles to hold up Pericles as a hero. Pericles appears in popular media. In the video game Assassin's Creed Odyssey, there's a very fictionalized version of a Pericles who is poisoned by Aspasia. But it's probably the case that, well, the reputation of Pericles depends upon the accessibility of at higher education in secondary education of the history and literature of 5th century Athens. If it's only the elite who get to learn about Pericles, then it's only the elite who will use his legacy. But if the history of 5th century Athens is thrown open to a broader audience, then who knows what legacies of Pericles could crop up.

Paul, how would you evaluate Pericles then? And what difference do you think he made to Athens and therefore, as time went by, nearly 2,000 years, to the rest of the world? Or to much of the rest of the world. I mean, let me take that under two aspects. One, demagoguery, in our vocabulary thoroughly about, thing. That goes back to the ancients. Why? Because people who had a policy to put forward in a democracy, such as Athens, had to lead the demos. So they were demagogues. The other aspect is this. Should we speak of Pericles in Athens or even more Periclesian Greece, as is sometimes done?

Well, I've thought of and written a bit about this. And my own view is that the one sense in which Pericles made a terrific difference was the building. building programme, and that's what Edith alluded to, that that building program on the Acropolis and down below in the Agararar Pericles had his fingers all over it. He was very keen on making sure that the money was not misappropriated. He actually had a very strong sort of bean counter mentality as well as everything. So Pericles in Athens, for me, is the Acropolis and the Agararar building programmes. And finally, Edith. Well, for me, it was his, I think he was intellectually incredibly brave. I think that he was standing on the cusp of very traditional,

you know, archaic society and midst. And he was so brave about considering what could a society look like, what could an ideal Athens be like in terms of all that intellectual input from an artistic input. And I think very, very few people sitting on, you know, the money bags of the theme of the tribute would have had that kind of response. So many would have sequestered the money for themselves or being corrupt. I don't think he was corrupt. I think he had a vision and it was a very revolutionary vision in an aesthetic and intellectual way. And that sets an example for all time that we don't have to be stuck in the past. We can try to imagine a better world. Well, thank you all very much indeed. Thank you. Edith Hall, Peter Little and Paul Cartilage.

Next week is cave paintings, the prehistoric people who created these extraordinary images around the world, why they did it, and what they have in common. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I'd managed to find three funny things that happened in Pericles' life, and I didn't manage to try and leaven the atmosphere, and I didn't manage to get any of them in, which was a shame, but there you go.

What about you, Paul? Like Edith, I had one thing that I was going to bring in, which is a cup, recently found it's a drinking cup in Kifisya, northern Athens, near the modern Olympic stadium. And it has on it the name Pericles scratched in. It has on it the name Arifrone, and that's presumably Perigles' older brother. And there are three other names, and people have thought this is a cup out of which they'd all drunk and possibly drunk too much. How the hell did it find its way into a grave, not a very rich grave, in Northern Athens? But if I were to be a novelist, I would say that was the cup. They celebrated Pericles' victory as impresario for Iskulis in 472 BC, BC.

Edith, what would you like to have said that you didn't say? You've mentioned something about jokes, Edith, or light moments or whatever. Where are we? Yeah, I had three possibilities. is one is the wonderful story that the family dog, Pericles family dog, when he's, you know, in his early teens, his father had this faithful dog. His father went over to Salamis from Athens to either witness or join in the fighting. And the dog followed him all the way there and managed to get onto a boat and get over there. And I love this idea that this was the teenage Pericles dog. And it's the idea of fidelity in that family. Then the other thing is the wonderful masks that the comic writers, the precursors and colleagues and rivals of Aristophanes used. Pericles, one of his buildings we didn't talk about was the Odion, which means the great song hall.

He built this massive, enormous, roofed theatre so they could actually enjoy entertainments even when it rain. And it was almost certainly designed on the shape of the tent of Xerxes, which had been put up to watch the Battle of Salamis, a sort of great oriental circular tent shape. The comic poets put that on the top of his head, helmet on his mask. So he had a comic face mask with a helmet crowned with his own Odean. Isn't that brilliant? I think that's just

really fantastic. And the other tradition is that when a rival of his spoke, was talking to the king of Sparta and in fact Paraclius had got ancestral guest friendship ties with prominent people in Sparta said who was, there was discussion about who was you know the best ruler and the Spartan king said, well, to be honest, it has to be Pericles, because if he wins, he wins. And if he doesn't win, he still talks in his speeches to make people believe that he had. And that, I think, is a very telling story for spin doctors today. Paul, what about you?

Well, apart from my cup, I like the nickname that one of the comic poets applied to him. In Homer, Zeus is the cloudgabera, the Nepali Geretad Zeus. Because Pericles had a funny-shaped head like an onion, a comic poet called him the head-gatherer, the Kefali Geritae, and Zeus, Olympius, that's not a polite term. It means you're a kind of tyrant. If you've ever watched Ischalus is Prometheus bound, Zeus orders another god Prometheus to be bound on a mountainside. Zeus is a tyrant, and he's got an enforcer called Kratos. Kratos, Kratos means power, strength, might, force.

So Pericles got it in the neck from the comic poets for being a little bit too lordly and powerful. Peter? We could have said more about Athenian imperialism and where the Athenians got their money from and the violence at the times. The great cruelty imposed upon the Samians, the confiscation of lands

from Athenian allies who'd revolted. Pericle in Athens is built upon a great deal of exploitation. And I wonder

whether that's one of the reasons that his legacy appealed to well, not just mid-19th century British imperialists but other colonialists

before them. I think that he had a lot in common although not in terms of aristocratic background, but with Lloyd George, who was absolutely adamant in terms of his commitment to imperialism, especially in India, but who then wanted to redistribute the wealth garnered from the British Raj to the British predatoryat.

I think there's a lot in common there. Did you miss out, did I miss out, anything massive that would have changed the whole? run of the conversation. Well, we didn't talk about slavery and so we didn't talk about how the coined silver, which was an absolutely

crucial, both medium of exchange but also bullion. That was key for buying in all the stuff that the Athenians needed that they couldn't produce. Well, it was slaves and there were perhaps as many as 20, 30,000 at any one time. In the

silver mines, they're actually lead with silver in it, in South Statica. Well, that's in a way part of the economic basis of Athens' democracy, which we didn't really get a chance to talk about. Okay, well, you don't have far to go this time,

do you? You don't have to rush for a train. You just have to sort of say few and put your headphones down and think. But I thought you got through it very, very well. Thank you all very, very much indeed. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Have you ever wondered what

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