Pericles' Funeral Oration

Pericles' Funeral Oration is a famous speech from Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. The speech was delivered by Pericles, an eminent Athenian politician, at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC) as a part of the annual public funeral for the war dead.

It was an established Athenian practice by the late 5th century to hold a public funeral in honour of all those who had died in war. The remains of the dead were left in a tent for three days so that offerings could be made. Then a funeral procession was held, with ten cypress coffins carrying the remains, one for each of the Athenian tribes, and another for the remains that could not be identified. Finally they were buried at a public grave (at Kerameikos). The last part of the ceremony was a speech delivered by a prominent Athenian citizen.

Several funeral orations from classical Athens are still extant, which seem to corroborate Thucydides' assertion that this was a regular feature of Athenian funerary custom in wartime.

The Funeral Oration was recorded by Thucydides in book two of his famous History of the Peloponnesian War. Although Thucydides records the speech in the first person as if it were a word for word record of what Pericles said, there can be little doubt that he edited the speech at the very least. Thucydides says early in his History that the speeches presented are not verbatim records, but are intended to represent the main ideas of what was said and what was, according to Thucydides, "called for in the situation". We can be reasonably sure that Pericles delivered a speech at the end of the first year of the war, but there is no consensus as to what degree Thucydides' record resembles Pericles' actual speech. Another confusing factor is that Pericles is known to have delivered another funeral oration in 440 BC during the Samian War. It is possible that elements of both speeches are represented in Thucydides' version. Nevertheless Thucydides was extremely meticulous in his documentation, and records the varied certainty of his sources each time. Significantly he begins recounting the speech by saying: "Περικλῆς ὁ Ξανθίππου ... ἔλεγε τοιάδε", i.e. "Pericles, son of Xanthippos, spoke like this". Had he quoted the speech verbatim, he would have written "τάδε" ("this", or "these words") instead of "τοιάδε" ("like this" or "words like these").

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