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Reviewed by:
  • Pericles of Athens by Vincent Azoulay
  • Frances Pownall
Vincent Azoulay. Pericles of Athens. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Foreword by Paul Cartledge. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014. Pp. xv + 291. US $35.00. ISBN 9780691154596.

Once again, we owe Janet Lloyd, the grande dame of translation of important works of French scholarship, a huge debt of gratitude for making available to an anglophone readership Vincent Azoulay’s prize-winning book on Pericles, first published in 2010.1 Despite the slightly deceptive implication of the book’s title (the subtitle of the French edition, not retained in this translation, is more representative of its contents), Azoulay offers far more than a simple biography of Pericles. Instead, he provides an erudite, kaleidoscopic, and sensitive reconsideration of the historical and historiographical importance of the figure of Pericles (right down to the present day), which boils down to the essential question: To what extent should Pericles be considered responsible for fifth-century Athenian democratic political culture, given that as a public official he himself was subject to the collective will of the dēmos ? In other words, far from being a narrowly focused biography, the present volume is a major work tracing the complex process of negotiation between the dēmos and the elite that culminated in the fourth century. Although Azoulay’s thesis is that the famous Thucydidean “obituary” (Thuc. 2.66) is misleading, in that Pericles’ death did not represent an abrupt break (“although a major player in it, he did not initiate the process nor did he [End Page 320] bestow upon it its final form,” 136), nevertheless, this comprehensive reevaluation of the figure of Pericles ultimately does reveal him to have been a liminal figure in the definitive formulation of the Athenian democracy.

Azoulay begins “this odyssey strewn with pitfalls” (3) with an examination of the genealogical, economic, and cultural “trump cards” that allowed the young Pericles to make his mark on Athenian political life (Chapter One). He then proceeds to the twin bases of Pericles’ authority that allowed him to dominate the political scene in Athens for so long: his abilities as military leader (Chapter Two) and orator (Chapter Three). Pericles’ expertise in both speech and action allowed him to influence the trajectory of Athenian fifth-century imperialism (Chapter Four), a dynamic enjoying a wide consensus in contemporary Athens that was continued by Pericles rather than initiated by him. His personal contributions therefore lie particularly in the theoretical realm (although perhaps Azoulay should exercise caution in adopting as evidence for Pericles’ policy the words put into his mouth by Thucydides, whose portrayal, as he himself observes, needs qualification) and the construction of grand monuments symbolizing the city’s imperial status (Chapter Four). Similarly, Pericles’ role in the Athenian imperial and democratic economy was largely theoretical as well, consisting of a redistribution of wealth (including, but not limited to, the introduction of civic pay and the construction of monumental works) to a newly redefined civic body (Chapter Five).

Following this assessment of Pericles’ contributions to Athenian fifth-century democratic and imperial culture, Azoulay proceeds to the broader question of how he successfully negotiated the fraught tension between the Athenian dēmos, whose consent was a prerequisite for political success of any kind in Classical Athens, and the elite, for the support of powerful friends and family was indispensable for aspiring statesmen to acquire and maintain power. Pericles had to strike a delicate balance between taking advantage of his personal and familial connections to further his political career and distancing himself from these very connections (Chapter Six), including his romantic partners (Chapter Seven), to avoid any potential taint of anti-democratic behaviour or (worse) tyranny. In spite of his great efforts to marginalize his family and associates, Pericles was unable to avoid accusations of impiety directed at both himself and his friends, although these attacks were likely motivated less by real or perceived religious deviations than by the suspicion with which the Athenian dēmos tended to view those who distinguished themselves individually (Chapter Eight).

In the third section of his book (my division, not his), Azoulay turns to the long historiographical tradition through which the “Periclean...

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