Five-minute digest
Pericles' Funeral Oration
Summary
Pericles' Funeral Oration is the speech that the Athenian statesman Pericles delivered in the winter of 431/430 BC at the public burial of the citizens who had died in the first year of the Peloponnesian War against Sparta. It survives only in the History of Thucydides, who heard Pericles speak and who says of the speeches in his work that he kept as close as he could to the general sense of what was actually said. Thucydides first describes the ancestral custom (II.34): the bones of the dead lie in a tent for three days, cypress coffins are carried for each of the ten tribes along with an empty bier for the missing, and the dead are buried in the public cemetery outside the city, after which a man chosen by the state speaks. Pericles opens (II.35) by doubting that words can match deeds and noting how hard it is to praise without provoking envy or disbelief. After brief honour to the ancestors and fathers who built the empire (II.36), he devotes most of the speech to praising Athens itself. Its constitution is called a democracy because it favours the many; offices go by merit, not class or wealth; citizens are tolerant in private and law-abiding in public (II.37). The city enjoys festivals and draws goods from the whole world (II.38), keeps its gates open to foreigners and trusts native courage over Spartan drill (II.39), and unites daring with deliberation, believing that discussion prepares for wise action (II.40). Athens, he says, is the school of Hellas (II.41). The fallen proved worthy of such a city, choosing to die resisting rather than live submitting (II.42). The living should gaze on Athens until they love her, for heroes have the whole earth for their tomb (II.43). He then offers comfort to bereaved parents, a hard charge to sons and brothers, and a brief word to widows (II.44-45), and ends with the promise that the city will raise the children of the dead (II.46). Thucydides immediately follows with the plague that devastated Athens the next summer.
Top Lessons
A city worth dying for
Pericles praises the dead chiefly by praising Athens, arguing that their sacrifice makes sense only if the city they defended is worthy of it. The structure of the speech teaches that civic courage depends on a clear understanding of what one's community is and why it deserves love.
Discussion as preparation for action
In II.40 Pericles claims that Athenians see debate not as an obstacle to action but as its necessary preliminary, and that they unite daring with deliberation. The claim is a lasting statement of what self-government asks of ordinary citizens.
Praise read in the light of what follows
Thucydides places this confident portrait of Athens immediately before his account of the plague, which killed many citizens and eventually Pericles himself. Readers learn to watch how a historian's arrangement of material can comment on a speech without a word of editorial judgment.
Verified Quotes
“Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighbouring states; we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves.”
Frequently cited
“Its administration favours the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy.”
“wealth we employ more for use than for show, and place the real disgrace of poverty not in owning to the fact but in declining the struggle against it.”
“instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all.”
Frequently cited
“In short, I say that as a city we are the school of Hellas”
Frequently cited
“For heroes have the whole earth for their tomb”
“judging happiness to be the fruit of freedom and freedom of valour, never decline the dangers of war.”
“For it is only the love of honour that never grows old; and honour it is, not gain, as some would have it, that rejoices the heart of age and helplessness.”
Medical Lens
The oration is a public consolation for the bereaved, and II.44 offers an ancient account of grief: loss is felt most for goods long enjoyed rather than goods never known, and Pericles advises younger parents to hope for other children and older ones to take comfort in the fame of the dead. Crawley's 1874 phrase that festivals help to banish the spleen (II.38) uses the older English humoral idiom for low spirits; the Greek speaks more generally of driving away distress. The speech's main importance for the history of medicine is its placement: Thucydides follows it directly with his account of the plague of 430 BC (II.47-54), one of the earliest detailed descriptions of an epidemic, in which Pericles himself later died. The identity of that disease is still debated.
- Book II.34
Thucydides describes the Athenian rites for the war dead: the laying out of the bones, tribal coffins, the empty bier for the missing, and the public burial.
- Book II.44
Pericles consoles the parents of the fallen and reflects on why grief is sharpest for blessings long possessed.