The Funeral Speech, A Study of Values

Abstract

Since no one doubts the pre-eminence of Socrates as a teacher, there is much, presumably, to be said in favour of his method of instruction. The picture of Socrates to be gained from the earlier dialogues of Plato is one of a man who consistently challenged orthodox opinions. In the same way, but, of course, with nothing like the Athenian's skill, I propose in what follows to react against a commonly accepted view; to be precise, I wish to scrutinize the opinion that the Funeral Speech, delivered by Pericles at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War and known to us from Thucydides, presents the reader with a splendid portrait of fifth-century Athens, and that, in stressing the spirit rather than the forms of Athenian democracy, it qualifies as the ancient equivalent of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. We all idealize the ancient Greeks; we ignore the harsh realities and prefer to concentrate our attention on what we see as the grandeur of Aeschylus, the splendour of the Parthenon, and the vision of Pericles; and it is the Funeral Speech, beyond everything else in Greek literature, which allows us to indulge in this type of escapism. That the Funeral Speech does have a ‘glorious’ reputation is a fact. Does it deserve so uncritical a fame ? If this question is posed, I ask it not from any perverted desire to debunk its reputation, but simply in order to gain a deeper understanding not only of the speech but also of the Greeks to whom it was addressed and of the particular statesman who delivered it.