For Wallace Stevens, the romantic period extends from the late eighteenth century through the late nineteenth century, and it includes both English and American writers. The chief romantic influences on Stevens' poetry include Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Emerson, Whitman, and Tennyson. (There are lesser echoes of Blake and Coleridge; Byron seems to have had little impact.) Stevens was born in 1879, and both Whitman and Tennyson died in 1892. For Stevens, then, romanticism was not a remote historical episode. It overlapped with his own life, and it formed the immediate historical background to his life's work as a poet. Moreover, in Stevens' conception, romanticism is not just a single historical period. It is a recurrent mode of the poetic imagination, and for Stevens that mode constitutes the wellspring of all poetic vitality.

In a letter of 1940 - when he was sixty years old and writing the poems included in Parts of a World - Stevens succinctly sketched out a comprehensive theory of poetic history as a cycle. The cycle begins in romanticism, as a phase of imaginative vitality, moves in a degenerative direction leading to exhaustion, and then returns to romanticism. “I suppose that the way of all mind is from romanticism to realism, to fatalism and then to indifferentism, unless the cycle re-commences and the thing goes from indifferentism back to romanticism all over again” (L 350). The middle terms in this sequence take their inflection from the direction of the sequence. For Stevens, romanticism is the highest form of imaginative fulfillment. “Realism” might seem a neutral or even positive term, but “fatalism” has a sinister ring, and “indifferentism” is unmistakably negative in connotation. Indifferentism is a blank absence of interest and pleasure in the world. “Realism” and “fatalism” thus measure out stages in the descent from fulfillment to despair.

In the past half-century it has often seemed paradoxical, and to the politically correct embarrassing, that Athens in the second half of the fifth century was democratic, and indeed a champion of democracy in the Greek world, and therefore admirable, but was also the head of the greatest empire in which Greeks controlled other Greeks, and therefore deplorable. One advantage available to those who challenged the orthodox dating criteria for fifth-century Athenian inscriptions, and moved to the 420s texts which orthodoxy placed ca. 450, was that the more extreme manifestations of imperialism could be associated not with Pericles, of whom (following Thucydides) we ought to approve, but with Cleon, of whom (again following Thucydides) it was respectable to disapprove: “None of the inscriptional evidence for fully organized Athenian imperialism can be dated before 431 B.C. Even the very language of imperialism does not seem to have been current until the last years of Perikles' ascendancy.” G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, in an avowedly if idiosyncratically Marxist interpretation of ancient history, developed the idea first expressed by G. Grote (who in the nineteenth century did more than anybody else to make Athenian democracy an object of praise) that, despite the judgment of Thucydides that the Athenians exercised their power as far as they could, as was natural, and their subjects hated it, as also was natural, in fact the Athenian empire was unpopular only with upper-class oligarchs in the member cities and was popular with lower-class democrats: “It is unique among past empires known to us in that the ruling city relied very much on the support of the lower classes in the subject states.”

Sources

Our literary sources for the study of mid-fifth-century Athens consist of contemporary Greek historians (especially Herodotus and Thucydides), Athenian orators and intellectuals (especially Andocides, Antiphon, Plato, and the anonymous author known as Pseudo-Xenophon or “The Old Oligarch”), and Aristotle's works analyzing Athenian and Greek political life (the Politics and the Constitution of the Athenians, the latter probably but not certainly composed by Aristotle). Besides the references to older (but no longer extant) works found in such late authorities as Plutarch and the Hellenistic and Byzantine commentators, we also possess a significant number of fifth-century decrees (psephismata) passed by vote in the Athenian assembly. The Athenians often inscribed these measures on stone pillars (stelai), and fragments of many of these decrees (and other inscribed documents) have survived into the present age.

Plutarch composed his biography of Pericles (and those of his contemporaries Themistocles, Aristeides, Cimon, Nicias, and Alcibiades) between ca. A.D. 90 and 120. The biographer was therefore removed from his fifth-century B.C. subjects by more than five centuries. Plutarch's anecdotal style and purpose - to shed light on his subjects' characters rather than their political careers - make his work difficult for the historian to exploit confidently. Nevertheless, Plutarch had access to contemporary fifth-century sources lost to us, and any attempt to flesh out Athenian life or understand Athenian politics in the Age of Pericles must rely heavily (if often uneasily) on his biographical works.

The basic institutions of the Athenian republic, including the assembly, the council, election and sortition, and the courts, had been fashioned before Xerxes invaded Greece in 480. But the word demokratia, first attested in the work of Herodotos, was coined later, about the middle of the fifth century, and it soon came to be applied to Athens. Thereafter it figured prominently in discussions of political theory. Yet the average Athenian, admittedly an elusive person, did not concern himself much with theoretical discussion, if one may judge from the plays of Aristophanes, who offers the modern reader a closer approach to everyday life than any other writer of the fifth century. So it is advisable first to study the institutions of the Athenians in their historical development and then to ask what principles they imply. That is, one should proceed from practice to theory.

The Emergence of the Polis

Modern understanding of the way society developed in Greece early in the historical period has changed radically in the last two decades. Previously it was believed that, after the collapse of the civilization of the Bronze Age (ca. 1200), migrating bands of people wandered until they found land to settle. Supposedly, when they did so, in the typical community hereditary kingship arose from the former leader of the migratory host, commanders of groups within the host became a council advising the king, and from the parade of all the warriors there arose an assembly of adult male citizens to decide issues by vote. On this view the political history of the emergent cities was to be reconstructed as a series of struggles between monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy.

In 432, Sparta and its allies, fearing the growth of Athens's power and its aggressive policies, decided to go to war. In subsequent negotiations, the Spartans raised specific demands that, if accepted, might have avoided war. Urged by Pericles, the Athenians decided not to negotiate about ultimatums; any disagreements were to be resolved by arbitration, as envisaged by the Thirty Years' Peace of 446. A few months later, fighting began. After almost three decades of war, interrupted by a short period of ineffective peace, Sparta prevailed. In 404, starved and exhausted, the Athenians capitulated.

Pericles died in 429. Only the outbreak and first two years of this war were his responsibility. Thucydides explains its catastrophic outcome by the mistakes and rivalries of Pericles' successors. In his view, Pericles' plan, strategy, and calculations were sound; had the Athenians followed his advice, they could have won (2.65.8-10). He supports this judgment by a comprehensive assessment that he lets Pericles formulate in a speech before the war (1.140-44): Financial reserves and a centralized, unified process of deliberation and decision-making are crucial for success in war. Both are typical of Athens but not of the enemy. In a single land battle, the Peloponnesians can take on the rest of Greece, but they do not have the resources to fight the type of war that is required to defeat the Athenians. They are farmers, not sailors, used to engaging in short infantry wars with neighbors but unable to spend much time away from home and lacking experience in fighting long wars overseas.

Introduction

It was three days' walk from the borders of Attica to the crest of the vale of Laconia, from Athens, the city wreathed in violet, to Lacedaemon, clad in mountains and in bronze. The wayfarer from Athens left behind him the pandemonium of lucre, naval empire, and democracy, and entered the hushed streets of Sparta, where by an ancient law no coin might be found, where boys were schooled to silence and men to speak rarely and shortly, in the Laconic way. So close in miles but so contrary in manners, in the time of the Athenian statesman Pericles Athens and Sparta came to fight a great war together, the war we call the Peloponnesian War.

Two features of Sparta are especially important for understanding her relations with the Athens of Pericles. The first is the warlike quality of Spartan society. The toiling of Sparta's helots in the fields of Laconia and Messenia gave Spartans the leisure to devote themselves to hunting, athletics, and martial exercise. And the harsh Spartan upbringing, the whipping contests and starvation, and Spartan military training - no other state in fifth-century Greece trained all her citizen soldiers - left the Spartans supreme on the field of battle. This military dominance enabled the Spartans to forge an alliance of defeated, timid, or hopeful states, the Peloponnesian League (so we call it). Its members were wards against the rising of the helots, and allies against other enemies, especially against proud Argos, Sparta's old foe in the Peloponnese. But together Sparta’s league was as strong as its mistress: Sparta could bully one town or a few, but not all and not the greatest, such as Corinth.

When Pericles son of Xanthippos rose to speak in honor of the Athenian dead from the first year of the Peloponnesian War, coming “forward from the tomb and standing on a high platform, so that he might be heard by as many people as possible in the crowd” (Thucydides 2.34), he stood as a privileged and powerful representative of the strong side of three social polarities in ancient Athens: he was free not slave, citizen not foreign, and male not female. These “either/or” contrasts were part of the basic Athenian - and indeed Greek - political and social vocabulary, but they did not create a simple bipolar society of one united “us” versus one excluded “other.” Rather, the three sets of polarities combined to create a complex set of identities and a community in which male and female members of citizen households lived side by side with free and enslaved foreigners, male and female. Representatives of this complex community stood together in the Kerameikos to hear the words of Pericles on that day in 431 - just as they stood (willingly or unwillingly) behind the energetic and creative achievements of the Periclean era.

Plato’s Sophists

A series of figures whom Plato called “the sophists” were among the most prominent intellectuals working in Athens during the second half of the fifth century. By a traditional consensus based largely on his testimony, the sophists were traveling wisdom professors for hire, especially in the art of rhetoric. Plato's principal sophists include Protagoras of Abdera, Gorgias of Leontini, Prodikos of Keos, Hippias of Elis, and Thrasymachos of Chalcedon. Less prominent sophists include the Athenians Antiphon, Kallikles, Kritias, the Chian brothers Euthydemos and Dionysodoros, and Polos of Akragas. Most of these figures are featured in Plato's dialogues, and some seven dialogues bear sophists' names. The sophists were among Plato's constant preoccupations, for reasons we shall see.

Plato and his followers sharply distinguish the sophists from the philosophers who worked before and after them. “Never before had such teachers been seen, never such teaching.” “Philosophers” - our sense of this term is also Platonic - investigated metaphysical, political, and ethical questions in search of the truth. “Sophists” taught expository and argumentative techniques to those who sought success in public life (Pl. Prt. 316b, 319a). Rhetoric “brings freedom to men and to each man dominion over others,” Plato's Gorgias proclaims. “Possessed of such power you will make the doctor and the trainer your slaves; your businessman will prove to be making money not for himself but for another, for you who can speak and persuade multitudes” (Gorg. 452d–e).

In fifth-century Athens tragedy, satyr drama, and comedy, together with the largely choral dithyramb, achieved distinct generic forms and a level of artistic refinement and portability that ensured their continuing vitality and popularity throughout the Greco-Roman world to the end of antiquity and, in the case of tragedy and comedy, into our own world. While we admire the artistic qualities of Athenian drama, it is worthwhile also to ask in what ways its development and success can be related to the simultaneous development of democracy, particularly during the age of Pericles and the Athenian empire, for exploring the relationship between these principal artistic and political products of fifth-century Athens cannot but enhance our understanding of each.

In Attica, drama at the polis level was attached to two annual, state organized Athenian festivals for Dionysus: the spring City or Greater Dionysia as early as ca. 501 and from ca. 440 the winter Lenaea as well; drama was also performed locally in the deme-organized Lesser or Rural Dionysia. But drama was hardly confined to democratic Athens: each of its dramatic forms (tragedy and satyr drama, comedy, and the dithyramb) is attested before the democracy as well as in other Greek locales. Although a reliable record of drama at the Dionysia begins only ca. 501, at least tragedy seems to have become significant under the (comparatively populist) tyranny of Peisistratus in the sixth century; whether and in what ways the organization of the dramatic festival(s) figured among Cleisthenes' reforms cannot now be determined.

Sometime in the second half of the fifth century the Athenians ratified a decree, proposed by a citizen named Kleinias, setting out stricter regulations for the collection and delivery of tribute to Athens (IG i3 34). Although the decree cannot be dated precisely (suggested dates range from ca. 448 to ca. 424), its provisions provide important insights into Athenian imperial administration. They also testify to the official, administrative role that written texts played in fifth-century Athens. The decree requires subject cities to send to Athens, together with tribute payments, sealed tablets recording the amounts they are sending (lines 6-16). These tablets are to be opened at Athens and read out to the boule as payments are delivered (lines 16-18). Further texts are created at Athens itself. The hellenotamiai are instructed to report to the assembly which cities have paid their tribute in full, and which cities have not (lines 18-22). Then a commission of four men is to draw up a written list of the names of defaulting cities, copying that information from the earlier report (also presumably written) of the hellenotamiai (lines 22-8). This written list of cities in arrears will serve as the foundation of the commissioners' work: their principal task is to collect balances of unpaid tribute from delinquent cities.

The contents of later sections of the decree are less certain, because the stone on which its text is preserved is fragmentary. But they too allude to documents, some of which concern legal proceedings. Some clauses appear to outline procedures against individuals interfering with the efficient delivery of tribute; such persons are to be liable to graphai, written indictments, lodged with the prytaneis (lines 31–41).

This passage, from Aristophanes' Wasps (655-60, trans. Henderson), performed in 422 before thousands of citizens, encapsulates a fascinating feature of fifth-century Athens: the place of money, economic activity, and numeracy in the life of citizens from rich to poor, urban to rural. It suggests an audience with a fondness for calculating and counting, one attuned to economic advantages - in short, an Athenian economic mentality. Aristophanes' verses also encompass many central facets of the fifth-century economy that will be surveyed in this chapter and illuminate the relationship among individual, polis, and empire in the pursuit of financial and economic benefit. Bdelycleon, the speaker, aims to deflate his father Philocleon's conviction that he has great wealth and power as a result of his position as a juror, for which he receives state pay (the ultimate justification, in Philocleon's view, for performing that service). Bdelycleon produces as argument the city’s staggering national wealth in order to show how little Philocleon gets out of it. “So the pay we’ve been getting,” Philocleon exclaims, “doesn’t even amount to a tenth of the revenue!” (664). The underlying assumption is that individual citizens have a right to benefit materially from the city’s power.

Aristophanes' hero Strepsiades brings the Clouds to a boisterous finale by burning down the Thinkery, whose leader Socrates has been subverting the minds and morals of young Athenians. Strepsiades himself was a short-term convert to the comic philosopher's slick sophistry and outlandish new gods - which include Cosmic Spin (Dinos), Aether, and especially the Clouds - but events in the play cause him to recognize his error and repent. With his parting words, he berates the Socratic crew for their other worldly speculations:

This chapter will focus on the right ways to treat the gods, by outlining the major beliefs and practices of Athenian religion(s) in the time of Pericles.

First, a disclaimer: no ancient Greek word corresponds to our term “religion.” Acts performed in recognition of unseen powers intermingled constantly with other aspects of daily life, rather than defining a discrete area of human activity. There were no widely accepted dogmatic texts, no priestly class, no creed. Nevertheless, activities and objects set apart for the gods had a particular status (hieron). The unseen entities that Strepsiades knows as theoi or daimones had a special claim on one’s attention, as Clouds makes clear, and nomizein tous theous, “doing the customary things for the gods,” was considered essential to the city’s well-being.

Pericles casts a long shadow. Undoubtedly the most important figure in the history of Athenian democracy, he nonetheless suffers from a kind of mythologization. Like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, Pericles has become larger (and smaller) than life. To moderns, he often seems a kind of disembodied spokesman for democratic values, transmitted to us through less than careful readings, summaries, or decontextualized quotations from Thucydides' account of Pericles' Funeral Oration. Many people know that Pericles in that address called Athens the “school of Hellas,” and that he praised Athenian government and society in contrast to the Spartans' regime. Yet few authorities have emphasized the primary thrust of the speech, which is thoroughly militaristic, collectivist, and unstintingly nationalistic. Beside Pericles' image in the popular mind, and at times clouding the very picture of him, are the famous buildings on the Acropolis of Athens, built as part of the “Periclean” program of construction. In fact, the Parthenon and (a very small part of) Pericles' speech stand together as the most concrete modern images of ancient democracy and classical Athens.

This is a strange situation. For, like Pericles' career, the Parthenon is not a testament to Athenian democracy, humanism, or liberalism, although some scholars still hold versions of this view. A temple to Athens's patron deity, Athena, the building was financed in part by money the Athenians had exacted from other Greek states. Its frieze seemingly depicted (at least in part) the Athenian festival known as the Panathenaea (i.e., sacred rites that were “All Athena” or “All Athenian”).

The monuments of fifth-century Athens, and its Acropolis (Figure 1) in particular, have come to embody the “Glory of Ancient Greece” to such a degree that Thucydides might be faulted for underestimation. While the knee-high remains of Sparta are today unimpressive, the Acropolis, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, averages over a million visitors annually. It appears constantly on travel brochures, postage stamps, restaurant menus, and olive oil containers, and even in less relevant contexts, such as Las Vegas casino chips and Japanese telephone cards. What accounts for the pervasiveness and continuing power of this imagery? Why are the art and architecture of fifth-century Athens so renowned?

There is no single answer, of course, but any explanation must take into account the extraordinary aesthetic quality of the monuments. Over half a millennium after their construction Plutarch wrote

Shake-speares Sonnets have over time proved a remarkably attractive yet profoundly intractable document. Concealing as much as they reveal, and sharing intimacies only in the most detached manner, the Sonnets have frequently functioned as a mirror in which cultures reveal their own critical presuppositions about the nature of poetic creation and the comparative instabilities of gender, race, and class. Entering the world in a publication that may or may not be authorized, the Sonnets are surrounded by veils of inscrutability that have stirred the curiosity of readers since their initial publication. Although the Sonnets have proven particularly amenable to some of the central developments of late twentieth-century modes of criticism - particularly feminism and gender and gay studies - they continue to be richer and more complex than anything that can be said about them. As they approach their 400th birthday, the Sonnets have in fact aged quite well.

Perhaps this chronic inscrutability is why editing has proven to be such a rich area of enquiry for recent scholarly engagement with the Sonnets. Since Stephen Booth's marvellous and prize-winning edition of 1977, the Sonnets have been edited by John Kerrigan (1986), G. B. Evans (1996), Katherine Duncan-Jones (1997), Helen Vendler (1997), and most recently, Colin Burrow (2002). Each of these editions has been a work of criticism and scholarship at least as much as of editing, since the textual problems are for the most part rather straightforward (there is only one early edition, possibly authorized, but no manuscripts, no competing early editions, and relatively few typographical conundrums). The issue in each of these editions has been: how do we read the Sonnets? What is the most significant unit of meaning – the sequence, the individual poem, the quatrain, the sentence, or the word? Do we annotate the poems in order to record all possible meanings and inferences, or do we point to constellations of meaning and coherence?

Eli Peck, Philip Roth's characteristically neurotic protagonist in the short story “Eli, the Fanatic,” ardently maintains of the Jewish refugees who, emerging from the devastation of the Holocaust, settle in the suburban town of Woodenton, “I am me. They are them.” In this way, he defiantly dissociates himself from the defining and, to him, static markers of Jewish identity and history, both past and immediate. Eli Peck, a product of the secularization of American Jewry in the mid-twentieth century, believes himself freed from the restricting weight of a legacy linked to him only by an imposed inheritance, the remnants of history and blood. For Eli, the weight of such identification is as heavy as the stone tablets and a liability in America. In his insistent separation from his identity as a Jew, represented by his uneasy fear of the Jewish refugees, whose yeshiva is a constant reminder to Eli and the other Jews of Woodenton of the dangers of seeming “too Jewish,” Roth's apprehensively charged protagonist unconsciously exposes his fears of marginalization, shared by the other “assimilated” Jews of suburban Woodenton, of forever being considered outsiders and interlopers among the rightful inheritors of American culture.

Eli Peck's disavowal of the European refugees, the displaced men and “the little kids with little yamalkahs chanting their Hebrew lessons,” who have come to infiltrate the suburban haven of Woodenton, is motivated by the sure conviction that their very presence will threaten the “good healthy relationship in this town [among] modern Jews and Protestants” (“Eli, the Fanatic,” 277-78).

Judging from the fiction alone, Philip Roth experienced a spiritual meltdown during the second half of the 1990s. We'll leave it to the biographers to tell us why. And yet, paradoxically, he responded with a creative burst. From 1995 to 2001 he published five novels, each one more depressive than the last, and the first, Sabbath's Theater (1995), was an extended suicide note by its central character, Mickey Sabbath. It was followed in quick succession by American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), The Human Stain (2000), and The Dying Animal (2001). If we need an analogy to this collaboration of low spirits and high energy, this clamorous bleakness, we could turn to the blues, a music of great vitality whose lyrics commonly bemoan everything that is despairing in human existence. The only Roth novel of the past ten years (I write this in late 2005) to feel as if it came from something like personal equilibrium was The Plot Against America (2004), and that was about a Nazi takeover of America. This essay takes up the three central novels of this period, American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain, those acid dissertations on the heart of American darkness that are commonly called the “American problem” novels and have been much celebrated for Roth's turn toward social issues with what appears to be a conservative agenda. Maybe so, though I tend to see these books as “Roth Problem Novels,” telling us more about the man than they do about the nation. This essay could well be titled “Blues in the Night,” but the title of a well-known Sigmund Freud essay seems to be more apposite: “Mourning and Melancholia.”