8 - Gorgias’ Funeral Oration

Summary

Within the group of classical Greek texts that we call funeral speeches, two have been passed down to us only in fragmentary form. We have just one single sentence from Archinus’ Epitaphios, and we know only a small number of relatively short quotations and paraphrases from Gorgias’ Epitaphios. Not surprisingly, these two texts are the least studied and the least well understood within the group of known funeral speeches. This chapter show shows that Gorgias’ Epitaphios played a vitally important role in the early formation of the literary genre. It begins with an overview of the text and the tradition of Gorgias’ literary version of a funeral oration before exploring its content, date, audience and purpose as well as its impact on the later funeral speeches. This chapter concludes that Gorgias’ Epitaphios was most likely composed and disseminated at some point in the last quarter of the fifth century, that the text was intended to be received primarily by an elite literary audience, and that Gorgias’ Epitaphios conveyed direct criticism of Athenian power politics at the time.