Eros

This first experimental political passion in our account can be said to inaugurate the preoccupation with the passions among classical political theorists. We cannot know for certain the extent to which eros {in Greek, eros) made its way out of political rhetoric and theory into the realm of political practice; we do know that Thucydides was intensely interested in it, and that he had a stake in making his account credible to his audience. Non-erotic love had long provided solutions to Pericles’ problem of attracting citizens into civic duty rather than forcing them. Patriotic love, like the passions discussed above, formed part of the archaic legacy which classical thought inherited and revised. In addition, homoerotic attraction between pairs of comrades was believed to have political relevance.11 But as we shall see, the lens of the Funeral Oration will transform these traditional loves dramatically.

Pericles exhorts Athenian citizens to become erotic lovers (erastai) of Athens.12 Not only is a new, unusual object (the city) supposed to arouse eros, but citizens are also required to play the social role of lover in relation to the city, imitating the gallantry which homoerotic lovers were thought to show toward their beloveds. Rivalry with other suitors is a key aspect of this social role. Pericles’ citizens are to serve Athens chivalrously, sacrifice for her, perhaps die on her behalf, and, in this game of courtship, compete for her favors to show who is most worthy. People in love, then as now, were routinely seen to neglect their own interests for the sake of the beloved. Examples from homoerotic courtship included camping out on the beloved’s doorstep, disregarding one’s business affairs, going without food, all in the service of eros. Eros makes people willingly enter bonds that would otherwise look like slavery. In seeking to motivate free, democratic citizens toward civic sacrifice and duty, Pericles here discovers a passion that is at once perfectly free and perfectly committed.

Pericles’ reconception of the city into an erotic object flies in the face of a more traditional conception, in which the city - or at least the land - was the object of a very different kind of love. Myths and metaphors in which the native land was one’s mother (e. g. Aesch. Sept. 17), together with the common paternal or ancestral designation of the ‘‘fatherland’’ (patris, patroiagl) bespeak an attitude more properly called filial love. In place of the love a child owes to a parent, Pericles substitutes the more energetic passion of the lover. Such eros is dangerous because it overrides the awe or reverence (aidos) traditionally felt for the motherland or fatherland.13 A sacred object cannot be embraced without losing its sacredness. Pericles does not seem to anticipate that one suitor might actually win the competition for Athens, giving him rights of possession over the city - the way a beloved gives a lover erotic rights.

Fear of such a takeover eventually undermines Athens’ most erotic moment, in Thucydides’ narrative. Thucydides shows Pericles’ audience fulfilling his expectations of citizenship-as-courtship, but only after his death and in a manner he did not intend. The intense erotic rivalry to serve Athens best comes to a head in the citizens’ peacock behavior during the preparations for their disastrous expedition to conquer Sicily (6.30-2). Eros was the passion at the heart of this imperial overstretch, according to Thucydides (6.24.3; cf. 6.13.1).

But the Athenians lose their nerve in the face of all that erotic citizenship entails, Thucydides implies. The erotic longing to win Sicily is largely the work of Pericles’ young, flamboyant, and tyrannically ambitious nephew Alcibiades, who nevertheless manages the public’s affairs ably (6.15.4). He is put in joint command of the expedition to Sicily. Alcibiades’ rivals for the hand of Athens (6.28.2, 6.29.3) move the Assembly to recall him, leaving lesser talents in charge of the fleet. His rivals cannot bear the possibility that Athens might wish to be tyrannized by Alcibiades if he should prove successful in the monumental enterprise. Eros used as a political passion unexpectedly entails a benign tyranny under the greatest citizen. The Athenians could have had this, Thucydides implies, and with it possibly victory in the Peloponnesian War, but only at the cost of their democracy. In wanting Athens so much that they feel eros for her, Alcibiades and his rivals are prepared to harm her interests (6.92.2-4). The upshot of Thucydides’ explorations is that eros is an indispensable model for describing certain aspects of imperialism, of regime transformation, and of political psychology, but erotic courtship is no normative model for citizenship, nor is a political psychology based on erotic passion the most desirable psychology for citizens.