Achilles is racing the tortoise. He gives it a head start of one hundred yards. By the time he has run the one hundred yards, the tortoise has advanced (say) by one yard. It takes Achilles some more time to cover the additional yard, during which the tortoise has advanced a bit further still. So at each point that Achilles reaches, the tortoise has moved forward and, as there is an infinite number of points, he will never overtake the tortoise. (But in real life, of course, he does. The paradox, which has tested the finest philosophical minds for two millennia, reveals a mismatch between the way we think about the world and the way the world actually is.)
With teasers like this Pericles titillated his mind. But although he admired Zeno, he also became a close friend of Anaxagoras, a philosopher from Clazomenae, a polis in Asia Minor. He was credited with having introduced philosophy to Athens, where he settled in the mid- to late 460s. He was more interested in scientific inquiry than the pursuit of reason or metaphysical speculation. He believed that everything in nature was infinitely divisible and that mind was a substance that enters into the composition of living things and is the source both of all change and also of motion. He was the first to understand that moonlight is reflected from the sun.
Pericles enjoyed lengthy discussions with another of the age’s great thinkers, Protagoras, born in Abdera, an important Greek polis on the coast of Thrace. His ideas were controversial and deeply offended right-thinking, right-wing Athenians. He was skeptical about the supernatural and was a moral relativist. “About the gods,” he wrote, “I have no way of knowing whether they exist or not, nor what form they may have: the subject is very hard to understand and life is short.” He also made the bold claim that “man is the measure of all things: of those which are, that they are, and of those which are not, that they are not.” This left little room for the Olympians.
Sitting at the feet of men like Anaxagoras and Protagoras, Pericles learned to abandon magical explanations of natural events for rational ones. Once an eclipse of the sun took place when he was sailing in a ship. The helmsman panicked, as did everyone else on board, and did not know what to do. Once the eclipse had passed, Pericles held his cloak in front of the helmsman’s eyes and asked: “Is this a terrible omen?”
“No, it is not,” came the reply.
“Well then, what is the difference between this and the eclipse—except that the eclipse was caused by something larger than my cloak?”
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Pericles was in his early twenties when he first entered the political stage. In the spring of 472 he was chosen to be choregos, or theatrical investor and producer, for the tragic playwright Aeschylus. By then his father was dead and he was in charge of the family fortune.
Like other wealthy citizens Pericles was expected to undertake a liturgy (the Greek for “work for the people”). This entailed undertaking a costly task for the state at his own expense. There were two kinds of liturgy—responsibility for running a trireme in the navy for one year and funding some aspect or other of a festival (a banquet or an athletic team or, as in this case, a chorus for a musical or dramatic performance). This was a typically ingenious means of encouraging public-spirited expenditure in place of an unpopular tax.
Pericles was choregos at the Great Dionysia drama festival and he was the financier and producer of three plays by Aeschylus, one of which survives, The Persians. Most Greek dramas were set in the legendary past, but in this case Aeschylus chose as his subject the victory at Salamis, only eight years after the battle had been won and lost. The action takes place at the imperial court in Susa, one of the Persian Empire’s capital cities, and its centerpiece is a long description of the battle by an eyewitness (see this page to this page). It gave plenty of opportunity for splendid and barbaric spectacle. We may imagine that the young Alcmaeonid spared no expense.
It was in this year or thereabouts that Themistocles was ostracized, and it may well be that Pericles used the play to remind the demos of the great man’s achievement and restore his popularity. If so, it was a bold political move for a newcomer and, as we know, it failed. Themistocles was soon voted out of Athens and obliged to leave his native land.
—
As a young man Pericles was the coming hope of the nobility, but he took up the people’s cause from motives of self-preservation and ambition. He came to act as aide to the leading democratic personality of the day, a man called Ephialtes. Little is known of him, but (unusually) he was probably not of aristocratic stock. Unlike most public figures of the day he was incorruptible. He was the guiding spirit behind the trial of Cimon. Pericles was appointed one of the ten prosecutors, although his heart seems not to have been in the task. Cimon’s sister begged Pericles to be gentle with her brother. He replied with a smile: “Elpinice, you are too old, much too old, for this kind of business.” In front of the jury he did not press the accusations against Cimon very hard.
For the two democrats there were serious flaws in the way the constitution was working. The first concerned the role of the antique council of the Areopagus. Its members were former Archons, public officials appointed from the two richest social classes in the polis. It was not directly elected and the less well-off were excluded from participation. This was against the spirit of the age and action was called for. The council should be either abolished or reformed.
Ephialtes opened the campaign against the Areopagus by bringing individual members to court for corruption and fraud. Having weakened the council’s self-confidence, he moved in for the kill. He chose his moment with care. In 462, when his leading opponent, Cimon, was away in Messenia on his unsuccessful mission to help the Spartans, Ephialtes persuaded the ecclesia to pass a package of bills that stripped the Areopagus of all its powers that were of political significance. These included its right to punish elected officials if they broke any laws while in office, to supervise the administration of government, and to ensure that the laws were obeyed. Its power to inquire into the private lives of citizens was also abolished.
The functions of the Areopagus were transferred either to the ecclesia, the boulē, or the jury courts. The council itself was left in being, but its only real, remaining function was to try cases of homicide. To add insult to injury, it was charged with looking after the sacred olive trees of Athena and helping to safeguard the property of the goddesses Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis in western Attica, where annual Mysteries in their honor were held.
Victory was gratifying, but short-lived. In 461, not long after the reform of the Areopagus, Ephialtes was kidnapped one night and murdered. According to Diodorus, it was never clear “just how his death came about”—a mysterious phrase, implying either that his body was not found or that the cause of death was unclear. In any case, his killer or killers were never caught. Plutarch reported that a certain Aristodicus of Tanagra was to blame, but nothing is known about him. It is a fair guess that Ephialtes fell victim to embittered oligarchs who wanted to avenge the emasculation of the Areopagus.
But what if we apply the test cui bono? To whose advantage was the murder? The obvious answer was Pericles, who inherited the leadership of the democratic faction. Malicious rumor suggested that he had arranged the assassination. Plutarch dismissed it as a “poisonous accusation” and he was right to do so. Pericles was a law-abiding man, self-righteously so.