The Funeral Oration of Pericles

1948

Special Collections DF229 T55 BL94

London: Dropmore Press

The free-thinking culture of ancient Greece, with its centre in Athens, foregrounded civic duty. Each citizen was able to express himself freely in public, vote for whomever he chose, and was entitled to a fair trial. The most famous democratic Athenian leader, Pericles (495-429 BC), an army general and statesman, came to prominence in 461 BC. At the beginning of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC) he made a speech honouring those who had died in battle for Athens. Thucydides (460-395 BC), a Greek historian, ‘recorded’ this speech in which Pericles spoke of the struggles of the ancestors to achieve a free state, the democracy of that state, and the equal rights that ‘everyone’ enjoyed – this being his somewhat idealised vision of Athens as a democracy.