Pericles of Athens Read Online Free Page B

poets such as Cratinus and Hermippus
     were quick to depict the stratēgos as a ridiculous figure. 16 The comic authors were writing about the contemporary scene, and their often violent
     and sometimes abusive plays were performed before the entire city, on the occasion
     of the great religious festivals in honor of Dionysus. Most of those comedies have
     come down to us only as fragments, but they nevertheless do allow us to sense the
     virulence of the accusations launched against Pericles. The poets reproached him for
     his tyrannical behavior and, above all, for connections of his that were harmful to
     the city. On the stage, Pericles was represented sometimes as an all-powerful leader,
     sometimes as a puppet manipulated by his friends (such as Damon) or his lovers (such
     as Aspasia). 17
    All the same, those theatrical works are tricky for a historian to handle: in the
     first place, for the very reason that they are fragmentary and this often makes it
     difficult to reconstruct their authors’ intentions; second, because they aim to shock
     and deliberately magnify certain characteristics in order to provoke laughter, in
     what seems to be a ritualized verbal ranting; and finally, because they inevitably
     make their criticism personal and always attack clearly identified figures—rather
     than political and social mechanisms. Attacks ad personam are one of the mainsprings of comedy, which defines itselfby naming names ( onomasti komoidein ). 18 So it is that Comedy invariably tends to concentrate exclusively on individuals whom
     it certainly denigrates but nevertheless positions very much centerstage.
    The extant fragments of Ion of Chios and Stesimbrotus of Thasos are equally difficult
     to interpret. Ion of Chios, who was contemporary with Pericles, excelled in a range
     of public genres, including tragedy and dithyrambs. When he visited Athens, he was
     a guest of Cimon, whom he describes in flattering terms, whereas he denigrates the
     behavior of Pericles, particularly at the time of the war against Samos. 19 As for Stesimbrotus of Thasos, he was equally ill-disposed toward the stratēgos . In his treatise on Themistocles, Thucydides, and Pericles , he launches into a classic attack on these three Athenian political leaders, criticizing
     both their upbringing and their characters. 20 It is not surprising that he criticized the seemingly high-handed behavior of Pericles;
     in the Greek world, lifestyles were an integral part of the definition of politics. 21
    These many attacks were the source of a tradition hostile to Pericles. Thucydides
     (the historian) was indisputably at the origin of an idealized representation of the stratēgos . 22 This historian, who was himself a stratēgos before he was exiled from Athens in 424, presents, in his History of the Peloponnesian War , an idealized account of the actions of Pericles, reconstructing several of his speeches,
     including the famous funeral oration delivered in 431 in honor of the Athenians killed
     in the first year of the war. Yet Thucydides gives a detailed account of only the
     last two years of Pericles’ life. In part 1 of his History , which contains an account of the pentēkontaetia , the fifty-year period between the end of the Persian Wars and the start of the Peloponnesian
     War, the stratēgos is mentioned, fleetingly, only three times: when he beat the Sicyonians and attacked
     Oiniadae in 454 (1.111.2), when he defeated Euboea in 446 (1.114), and when he crushed
     the revolt in Samos in 440/39 (1.116–117). In effect, Pericles takes on the foremost
     roles only at the end of book I and already disappears halfway through book II (2.65)
     in this work that runs to a total of eight books. Thucydides dwells upon the stratēgos only as an actor in the Peloponnesian War and is not concerned to present a detailed
     account of his life before the outbreak of those hostilities. The historian is, in
     any case, interested in power and its mechanisms