Funeral Oration of Pericles

About the Author

Pericles of Athens, born in about 495 BCE, served as a prominent strategos, or general, within the assembly of the city. He served with nine other generals, but with his popularity and reputation he quickly gained a significant influence in the affairs of the government. In 462 BCE he emerged into public prominence as an associate of Ephialtes, who had pioneered democratic reforms that gave more authority to the people. After his mentor's assassination, Pericles became the mouthpiece for more democratic reforms and efforts to strengthen the city, both militarily and culturally. This period is referred to as the Age of Periclean Athens because of the artists, writers, and philosophers who flourished under his patronage, creating a cultural heritage for Western civilization. Pericles’ efforts to broaden Athens's authority and power in the Aegean allowed the city to dominate the Delian League and emerge as a major rival to Sparta.

With the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, Pericles devised the defensive strategy that pulled the population of the region within the walls of the city. While Athenian naval forces raided the Peloponnesus, Spartan forces continued to ransack the countryside. An outbreak of a plague within the city stirred up the anger of the people, who punished Pericles with a large fine. He nevertheless won reelection as general in 429 BCE, only to succumb to disease later that year.

Pericles’ Funeral Oration, given during the first year of hostilities, is related within Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War, which details a year-by-year history of the conflict between Athens and Sparta through 411 BCE. Very little information about the historian's life has survived from antiquity despite some biographical efforts, which tend to contradict each other or to proffer unsubstantiated reports. What can be gleaned with a certain amount of certainty are glimpses into Thucydides' life based on references to himself within the history. His father, Olorus, lived as a citizen of Athens, and Thucydides survived the devastating plague that struck the city in 429 BCE. In 424 BCE he served as a general in the defense of Amphipolis, a city on the northern coast of Greece, but his failure resulted in his exile for twenty years. Other trustworthy reports infer his age at around forty at the outbreak of the war in 432 BCE, placing his birth around 472 BCE. The date of his death is uncertain, but given statements about the eruption of Etna in 425 BCE and his lack of knowledge of a subsequent volcanic event in 396 BCE, historians assume that he died before that date. A belief that he suffered assassination persisted in antiquity, explaining why his work abruptly breaks off and ends, but the details are not consistent; thus confirmation eludes modern historians.

Famous for his work The History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides stands along with the fifth-century BCE historian Herodotus as one of the fathers of history. Unlike his predecessor, whose work rambled and included a variety of traditions and legends, Thucydides is distinguished as being more technical. With an insistence on recording only those events that came from eyewitnesses, Thucydides established himself as a reliable source in antiquity. Despite some biases, a tendency to omit details unrelated to politics and military, and a few errors, the text survived as a trustworthy account of the events of Greece in the fifth century BCE.

Among the critiques about Thucydides is his treatment of speeches, which is germane to the contents of the Funeral Oration. Although he claimed to have begun compiling information from the beginning of the conflict, he acknowledged that he did not hear all of the speeches firsthand but received some from other sources. Indeed, he admitted that

it was in all cases difficult to carry them word for word in one's memory, so my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course, adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said. (i.xxii.1)

Thus the style does belong to the author, but the essence of the oration seems to have been captured. Thucydides was probably an eyewitness of Pericles’ delivery of the Funeral Oration, and given the speech’s prominence within Athens, the community at large would not likely have accepted a fabrication of its contents.