21 AUGUST 1971, Page 14

Hugh Lloyd-Jones on Bowra and Periclean Athens

Periclean Athens C. M. Bowra (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £2.50) Armada From Athens: The Failure of the Sicilian Expedition, 415-413 BC. Peter Green £3.15).

Sadly the English edition of Sir Maurice Bowra's study of the Periclean Age appears after the author's death on July 4. The excellent obituary notice which was printed in the next day's Times echoes a common opinion among Bowra's acquaintances when it says that his writings "lacked the scintillating, shimmering and sometimes thunderous wit of his conversation." That is true. Bowra talked marvellously, in a way very unlike any other don; it was more as one might imagine the conversation of an eminent but unconventional general who happened also to be a distinguished creative writer. Like all witty people, he was accused of malice, usually by those who hardly knew him; his friends will testify that he was, despite his extreme sensitivity to criticism, the most loyal and reliable of human beings. His power to discern ability was uncanny, and the encouragement he gave to other people unbelievable.

But though his writings do not give a proper notion of his tremendous personality, his achievement as a scholar and critic is very considerable indeed. He was a truly learned man, whose substantial achievements as a classical scholar did not prevent him from mastering all the chief modern European languages and writing illuminatingly about their literatures. He may have been excelled by others in criticial acumen; but in a period in which several of the most influencial literary critics have been distressingly parochial in their interests and narrow in their tastes, the vast range of Bowra's interests and sym pathies was especially valuable. Though he did not write as well as he talked, he wrote far better than most learned, and indeed than most unlearned, men; the book before me bears powerful witness to this fact. Far more than most scholars, he loved literature, and he resisted the temptation to turn every literary discussion into a discussion of morality. Instead of seeing the great period of Greece as a preparation for Plato, or as a preparation for Christianity, he was content to appreciate it for what it was, and to examine it with sympathy.

The Periclean age at Athens is an almost unique episode in world history; Florence under Lorenzo del Medici seems to offer the only real parallel. The city was an international centre of art and literature; many famous writers and artists from abroad were welcomed there, and several were friends of Pericles himself. The great dramatists were creating a new literature, hardly inferior even to the Homeric epic. Great orators, like Pericles himself, were speaking in the assembly; the great historian Thucydides had reached maturity before Pericles' death. The great buildings on the Acropolis and elsewhere, despite all the damage they have suffered, still allow the Periclean age to speak for itself; so do countless minor masterpieces of sculpture and vase-painting. Moreover, this extraordinary development in intellectual culture was the work of a civic community which not only carried out a revolutionary experiment in democratic government, but achieved for a time startling military and political success. Had the expediticin of 415 BC against Sicily been successful, the Athenian empire might conceivably have anticipated the adhievements of Alexander, or even those of Rome.

Not surprisingly, most of us have been brought up on accounts of Periclean Athens that are heavily soaked with unction. Their writers have been more interested in morality than in art or literature, or indeed — at any rate when the remote past is in question—political success. Eager as they have been to attribute the successes of the Greeks to the possession of various moral qualities, they have judged Athenian imperialism with all the censoriousness of jabbering savages at a session of the United Nations. The defeat of Athens, they have told us, was a punishment brought on her by her moral decadence; that decadence, in turn, was caused by a collapse of moral values, due to the fundamental inadequacy of early Greek religion and to the corrupting activities of the Sophists . . . Plato's unscrupulous slanders against his own culture have been accepted as gospel truth.

Bowra, is wholly free from this failing; he writes of the Athenian empire with sympathy and understanding. He was extremely well acquainted with the relevant material, and his clearly and elegantly written book makes easy and pleasant reading. Much of it consists of historical narrative, which is most skilfully handled, and this is agreeably varied with the description of Periclean art and literature.

The book has some deficiencies. Sir jI. Maurice scarcely attempts to sketch the social and economic background; if he had, he would have made it clearer how inadequate our written sources for the period really are. Thucydides covers only part of the period here treated, and omits many things which a modern historian would think essential. For much of our information we must rely on Plutarch's life of Pericles, a work written six hundred years later and by a moralist, not by an historian. Despite all the valuable work done upon inscriptions, our knowledge is lamentably deficient. But some important things we do know; for example, that the Greek communities depended largely on agriculture; that trade and industry, even in Athens, were insignificant by modern standards; that the population and resources even of the chief cities were astonishingly small. I miss also a chapter on the religious outlook of the Greeks at this time, a factor which helps more than any other to explain their extraordinary success in art, philosophy and science.

Athens in Pericles' time was a direct democracy, in which many citizens got some experience of public office and the popular assembly determined important questions by its vote. That fact was to have vast importance for future history. But Athenian democracy was not like modern democracy, and indeed was less different from the so-called ' oligarchy ' which was its main rival than many historians imply. We know of very few important democratic politicians in the great age of Athens who were not rich; many were members of great families, which had good reasons, not all ideological, for preferring democratic rule. The Periclean age, it is essential to remember, was only a segment of the great period of Greece which lasted roughly from 600 to 300 BC. Pericles' political achievement would have been inconceivable without his sixth-century predecessor, the great tyrant Pisistratus; his son Hipparchus played the same role as patron of art and culture which Pericles was to play later. Democracy was introduced by a great nobleman, Clisthenes, then a rival of other nobles in the struggle for power; his niece was Peni cles's mother.

The differences between democrats and oligarchs were not negligible. One difference, as Sir Maurice notes, was that oligarchs were more internationally minded; democratic politics often went with aggressive nationalism as well as with imperialism. Under democracy, far more of the citizens had a say in political decisions. But that did not mean that everybody had a say; resident aliens had very restricted rights, and slaves no rights at all. Sir Maurice shared the prevalent view that slavery impeded technological advance; although there is much truth in this, technological progress by no means to be despised was made and continued to be made during the Hellenistic age. That slavery was an unmixed evil and technological advance an unmixed good may of course be taken for granted by all rightminded believers in our current orthodoxy. To an educated citizen of the fifth century, even to a Periclean democrat, these truths might have seemed less certain.

If her expedition against Sicily in 414 BC had succeeded, as it nearly did, Athens might have defeated Sparta and her other enemies, and so brought all mainland Greece under her control. That might have led to further conquests; ambitious Athenians talked of attacking Persia and even Carthage. That tantalising possibility lends the Sicilian campaign a special interest; and Mr Green's full and lively account of it is welcome. Mr Green is not a professional scholar, but a man of letters. He has written several novels set in the ancient world, and one might guess from a certain exuberance in his descriptions that he had written fiction; he tells us, for example, that when the Athenian armada was about to sail, "the whores in the Piraeus did a roaring trade." But Mr Green is well acquainted with both the primary and secondary sources, as well as with the places where the war was fought, and his clear and vigorous way of writing ensures that he is never dull. Even professionls will find his views worth considering, and any reader will enjoy his book, which seems to me his best since his understanding and entertaining biography of Kenneth Grahame.

Mr Green boldly guesses at the economic objectives of the Athenian campaign. At some points he runs ahead of our defective information, and is decidedly less cautious than Andrewes and Dover, the two distinguished scholars who have lately published a commentary that contains the relevant part of Thucydides' history. Still, his guesses are intelligent, and may well be right. He resists the temptation to speculate about what might have happened if the expedition had succeeded. Thucydides thought it might have done, if it had had proper support from those at home; and if the general Lamachus had been able to persuade his two colleagues to strike at once for Syracause, it is difficult to see what could have prevented their success.

If Athens had triumphed, it is hard to believe that the democracy could have gone on much longer: Alcibiades or another would surely have made a bid for tyranny, or at least for veiled monarchy. The empire could hardly have remained long undivided; one can imagine it splitting up into sections, as Alexander's empire did. Those sections would have been ruled, doubtless, by military despots; thus the political conditions of the Hellenistic age would have come into being about a century sooner.