Aristide 'Le Juste'. L'art et la manière de fabriquer un héros dans la cité démocratique.

The Athenian Aristides (c. 530–c. 467 BC), son of Lysimachos, was acknowledged by Plutarch in the early second century AD to be one of the great figures of the Greek past as it was imagined under the Early Empire. He shares with Themistocles, Cimon, Pericles, Alcibiades and Nicias the honor of being one of the Lives of fifth-century Athens. According to the Athenian manuscript tradition of the Classical, Hellenistic and Roman periods, he was increasingly admired for his immense moral qualities more than for his feats of arms or his political actions. Despite the laudatory literary evidence, he remains something of an unknown: no copy of any statue of him has been found, nor is he mentioned by ancient authors, and no inscription mentioning him has survived, unlike his contemporary Themistocles. Although he came from a wealthy if not aristocratic family, he is said to have lived in the direst poverty, at a remove from all material considerations in keeping with a philosophical model originating in the life of Socrates and thereby dragging all his descendants into poverty. All these contradictions make it difficult to gauge Aristides’ actual political impact on the tragic events (the Persian Wars) that befell Athens and one invariably wavers between a prominent political figure in the history of early fifth-century Athens and Greece and a character fabricated from scratch by Athenian collective memory and above all by a wide range of later texts idealizing an unassailable figure of moral virtue. This book attempts to explain all of these contradictions.