17 - The Funeral Oration as a Self-Portrait of Athenian Democracy

Summary

Nicole Loraux saw the genre of the funeral oration as ‘the spokesman of official ideology’ and even as ‘the only developed discourse that the Athenian city officially had on democracy’. Nevertheless, the funeral oration was not the only public treatment of democracy. Indeed, Athens was the only ancient Greek state in which citizens produced representations of their own regime and did so in a variety of literary genres. This chapter begins by considering the place that the funeral oration generally accorded democracy, as well as the specific democratic practices and principles that the surviving speeches mentioned. It then refutes what is, probably, the most famous argument in The Invention of Athens, namely that the funeral oration represented democracy only in aristocratic terms. Thirdly, the chapter clarifies the uniqueness of the epitaphic genre’s treatment of democracy by bringing in as comparison-points two tragedies and a famous legal speech. It concludes by drawing attention to the multiplicity of the self-portraits that Athenian democracy produced and to the ways in which the clear military function of the funeral oration constrained its portrait of the regime.