Pericles: A Sourcebook and Reader

Pericles’ Writings

Pericles’ Writings No written work by Pericles has come down to us and, except for some speeches that he may have committed to writing and measures that he sponsored in the Council and the Assembly, we have no sure knowledge that Pericles himself wrote anything .1 This loss of his direct words is a great pity, for contemporary and near-contemporary sources—namely, Thucydides, the comic poets, and Plato—describe him as the greatest orator of his time.2 Eupolis in his comedy the Demes, which survives 27 1. At least some decrees attributed to Pericles survived in Plutarch’s day (Pericles 8.7); in the 50s b.c. the Roman politician Cicero had seen purported speeches of Pericles (De oratore 2.93, Brutus 27). They were probably not genuine and are dismissed as composed by others by the Roman authority on rhetoric, Quintilian, about 75 a.d. (3.1.12, 12.2.22, 12.10.49). 2. Thucydides describes him as “first among the Athenians at that time and the man most effective in speech” (1.139.4; see below, p. 52); Plato styles him “the most perfect of all in rhetorical skill” (Phaedrus 269e). only in fragments, includes the following exchange about Pericles , a high compliment indeed (PCG V 102): A) 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. B) You say he was fast . . . A) 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. Thucydides, who was perhaps in his midtwenties or older at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, had the opportunity to hear Pericles speak, one would assume, on a number of occasions. Whether he actually did or not, we have no way of knowing. He does not volunteer such information. In any case, Thucydides puts three speeches in Pericles’ mouth in the first two books of his History.3 Magnificent though they are, these are compositions by Thucydides, not the precise words of Pericles. Indeed, Thucydides admits in his History that it was difficult for him and his informers to remember the exact words spoken in the speeches on each occasion (1.22.1); but he adds that he composed them “adhering as closely as possible to the overall spirit of what was actually said.” He also says in this same passage that he has recounted “what he thought each speaker needed to say in a given situation.” Apart from these speeches of Pericles recorded in Thucydides , we possess nearly a dozen turns of phrase that appear to 28 / Pericles’ Writings 3. 1.140–144, 2.35–46 and 60–64. These speeches are translated and discussed below. be either actual quotes or close paraphrases of Pericles. These are isolated passages for which we do not in most cases have an adequate context. When questioned about a politically sensitive expenditure during an annual audit of his official accounts in 446, Pericles replied with firm brevity that he had spent it “for what was necessary.”4 The temerity of this response sufficiently captured the imagination of his fellow Athenians that Aristophanes , more than twenty years later, could have old Strepsiades quote it in an absurd context in the Clouds (858–859). When questioned by his son about his slippers, the old man retorts , “Like Pericles, I lost them ‘for what was necessary.’”5 Aristotle in his Rhetoric cites Pericles for his use of two striking similes and two arresting metaphors. In the funeral speech he gave probably in 439 over the dead in the Samian War, Pericles said that “the youth who had perished in the war had vanished from the city just as if someone had removed the spring from the year” (1411a2–4; cf. also 1365a31–33). Near the beginning of the Peloponnesian War he exhorted his fellow citizens “to remove Aegina, the sty in the eye of Piraeus” (1411a15–16). He likened the Samians “to kids who get bread but go on crying” and the Boeotians, “since they continuously fight with each other, to prickly holm oaks that inflict cuts on themselves” (1407a2–6). Aristotle also recounts a famous case where Pericles tricked the seer Lampon in cross-examination by asking him about the mysteries at...