Ancient historians regularly argue that the classical Athenians held sailors in much lower esteem than hoplites. They cite in support of this the extant funeral speech of Pericles. Certainly, this famous speech said a lot about courageous hoplites but next to nothing about sailors. Yet, it is also clear that this was not a typical example of the genre. Funeral speeches usually gave a fulsome account of Athenian military history. In rehearsing military history, funeral speeches always mentioned naval battles and recognised sailors as courageous. Old comedy and the other genres of public oratory depicted sailors in the same positive terms. All these non-elite genres assumed that a citizen fulfilled his martial duty by serving as either a sailor or a hoplite. They used a new definition of courage that both groups of combatants could easily meet. In tragedy, by contrast, characters and choruses used the hoplite extensively as a norm. In spite of this, tragedy still recognised Athens as a major seapower and could depict sailors as courageous. In Athenian democracy, speakers and playwrights had to articulate the viewpoint of non-elite citizens. Their works put beyond doubt that the Athenian people esteemed sailors as highly as hoplites.

The Invention of Athens by Nicole Loraux was the first book-length study of the Athenian funeral oration. Before its publication, ancient historians had accorded little importance to this genre. Loraux established for the first time the vital importance of this almost annual speech in the formation of Athenian self-identity. She showed how each staging of it helped the Athenians to maintain the same civic identity for over a century. Yet, in spite of its impact, Loraux’s first book was still far from complete. It left unanswered important questions about each of the surviving funeral speeches. An even larger gap concerned intertextuality: Loraux rightly saw traces of the funeral oration right across Athenian literature, but she never systematically compared the funeral oration with other types of public speech as well as drama. Therefore, she was unable to demonstrate whether the other literary genres of classical Athens were ever a counterweight to the funeral oration’s cultural militarism. The principal aim of this volume is to finish The Invention of Athens. Our book answers the important questions that Loraux left unanswered. It completes the vital intertextual analysis of the genre that is missing in The Invention of Athens.

Funeral orators came to rehearse four ‘standard’ myths. The classical Athenians believed that the earliest was the victory of their ancestors against an army that the Thracian Eumolpus had led into Attica. The widely held position is that these four mythical erga were a part of the genre from its beginning. Yet, this chapter firmly establishes that this position simply does not hold when it comes to the myth about Eumolpus. Indeed, the first funeral speech to mention it was only the one that Plato wrote soon after the end of the Corinthian War. Before this, there had existed an older myth about Erechtheus, an early Athenian king, and Eumolpus fighting each other. Importantly, however, this myth presented their fight as a civil war between Eleusis, a deme in Attica, and Athens. The new myth, which, by contrast, made Eumolpus and his army foreign invaders, first appeared in Erechtheus, which Euripides wrote at the end of the 420s. As Euripides regularly changed old myths or, simply, invented new ones, Hanink argues that the epitaphic exploit about Eumolpus was originally his invention.

Assembly-speeches and funeral speeches invite comparison. In both, prominent politicians addressed a large and predominantly non-elite audience, and war played a predominant role. Yet, contrasts between them abounded. The funeral oration emphasised the nobility of Athens and more particularly the selflessness and the patriotism of the war dead, whereas assembly-speeches criticised the decadence of Athenian politics and the short-sighted selfishness of Athenian citizens. The speaker of a funeral speech was self-effacing. The speaker in the assembly, by contrast, asserted his insight and knowledge, while he criticised his fellow citizens almost undemocratically. The funeral oration addressed a united Athens and avoided divisive issues, whereas disagreement was the raison d’être of assembly-speeches. In spite of all these differences, similarities lay just below the surface. Insofar as their advice for the future depended on the past, assembly speakers invoked the patriotic and slanted history that was conspicuously promulgated in the funeral oration. Funeral speeches insisted on Athenian exceptionalism in the Greek world. Assembly-speeches did the same, if only to contrast Athens’s current policies with its true role as the leader of the Greek world and the guardian of freedom and justice.

There are two reasons why the funeral speech of Demosthenes has largely been ignored by ancient historians. The first reason is that it has always been judged as less important than the great funeral speeches of Pericles, Lysias and Hyperides. The second is that many ancient historians have thought it unworthy of Demosthenes in terms of content and style. The lack of sustained research on this funeral speech is thus unsurprising. This speech, however, is of considerable historical interest. Demosthenes, like other funeral orators, may have manipulated the genre’s commonplaces, but his speech is the only example of the surviving ones that had to react to a crushing Athenian defeat. In this situation, evoking the glorious past, which was a mainstay of the genre, seemed inappropriate. This chapter discusses the historical context of this neglected work and compares its lines of argumentation with those of other funeral speeches. It attempts to explain why Demosthenes delivered the funeral speech of 338 at all and why he said what he did.

In 1981, when Nicole Loraux published The Invention of Athens, it still seemed possible to take Isocrates’s Panegyricus as evidence for the funeral oration because of his treatise’s explicit appropriation of this genre. At the time, Isocrates was seen as a simple pamphlet-writer, who reflected the popular morality of fourth-century Athens. Forty years later, however, Isocratesʼ ‘pamphlets’ are now seen as rhetorical declamations or even real philosophical works. This chapter reconsiders Isocrates’ relationship to the funeral oration in light of this new reading of his oeuvre. It demonstrates that Isocrates took a critical, if not hostile, stance towards the public funeral for the war dead. While he acknowledged myth’s value as a moral paradigm for contemporary politics, Isocrates repeatedly argued that history since the Persian Wars had all been a moral decline for both Athens and Sparta. Since the public funeral had always commemorated the Athenian war dead of this period, Isocrates described it as a display of Athens’s abject failure. While he did appropriate some aspects of the funeral oration for his own purposes, Isocrates’s breaking of the continuity between Athens’ mythical and historical exploits challenged a central contention of this prestigious genre.

Compared to other extant examples, Plato’s Menexenus presents an unusual funeral speech: an oration delivered by Socrates, embedded within a Platonic dialogue and supposedly written by Pericles’ lover, Aspasia, whom Socrates claims as his own tutor in rhetoric. Nicole Loraux’s The Invention of Athens convinced almost all of the necessity of reading this speech alongside the others, without, however, investigating Plato’s own political and philosophical aims. Building on others, this chapter reopens the question of the dialogue’s tone. Is the fictional Socratic funeral speech ironic or serious, or somehow both? In order to approach this question, it is necessary, first, to examine the speech’s intertextual relations with Pericles’ funeral speech in Thucydides. Then, with the gender politics of this speech in mind, it will be possible to grasp the largely neglected significance of Aspasia, both as a woman and a foreigner. These considerations lead to the conclusion that Plato had both a critical and a constructive purpose: critical, in challenging the Periclean presentation of democratic courage, and constructive, in providing a kind of political therapy for democratic citizens, who stood, albeit unwittingly, in need of a healthier and more coherent self-understanding.

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.

From Homer’s Iliad to the Athenian funeral oration and beyond, the ‘beautiful death’ was the name that the Greeks used to describe a combatant’s death. From the world of Achilles to democratic Athens, the warrior’s death was a model that concentrated the representations and the values that served as masculine norms. This should not be a surprise: the Iliad depicts a society at war and, in the Achaean camp at least, a society of men, without children and legitimate wives. Certainly, the Athenian city-state distinguished itself from others by the splendour that it gave the public funeral of its citizens that had died in war and especially by the repatriating of their mortal remains. In a society that believed in autochthony, this repatriation was, undoubtedly, significant. Since the beautiful death crystallised the courage of Achilles and Athenians alike, it was, from the outset, linked to speech. Indeed, heroic death and the civic beautiful death were the subject matter of elaborate speech.

This chapter argues that the affirmative function of tragedy, by which it aligns with rather than opposes the funeral speech, has been underemphasised in recent critical trends. While this multivocal genre encompasses and promotes conflicting perspectives through which questions about the city are raised, the chapter argues that Athenian spectators viewing theatrical representations of the stories about Athens that they heard glorified annually in the funeral speeches were quite likely to interpret them as affirmations of Athenian political and military action. Moreover, the multivocality of tragedy actually enables affirmatory interpretations because spectators are always provided with ‘escape routes’ away from any uncomfortable self-criticism. This is especially true of the tragedies bringing ‘ancient Athens’ to life. Most tragedies were set outside Athens, and thus allowed spectators a degree of distance, within which questioning and criticising their own city, and especially its warmaking, could be easier.

A striking feature of old comedy is its cannibalising of contemporaneous Athenian literature. The comic poets integrated the funeral oration into their comedies in three ways. Their first way was to bring on stage the funeral oration’s ancestors. Aristophanes characterised his choruses as such in three of his surviving plays. When these ancestors came to praise their own military exploits, they used the same terms as the funeral speeches and privileged the same historical period: the Persian Wars. Aristophanes clearly used this characterisation of the chorus for the sake of persuasion. By having these proud old men support the effort of a comic protagonist to bring peace, he defused the criticism that this effort went against the martial reputation of the Athenian people. The second way in which old comedy integrated the funeral oration was to warn theatregoers about the general dangers of praise. While Aristophanes sometimes quoted praise from dithyrambs as an example of what public speakers said in order to deceive the people, at other times, Aristophanes quoted from funeral speeches. The third way in which comedy engaged with the funeral oration was the deliberate confounding of the epitaphic genre’s characterisation of the Athenians as selfless and courageous.

Athens was a superpower whose ambitions required the ongoing sacrifice of men. To ensure those sacrifices were willingly made, the Athenians embraced a distinct form of ultra-patriotism, which was transmitted almost annually via the funeral speech. In this genre of public oratory, Athens was the leader and the protector of Greece, the wars that she fought were always altruistic and justified, and those who died in them were celebrated for their selfless courage. As this chapter will reveal, however, the obligation to fight was so readily embraced that most men had direct experience of combat. As a result, in Athens, the rhetoric of the funeral oration and the experience of war co-existed uneasily. On the one hand, the form of the funeral speech was determined by its function, which was to perpetuate the self-sacrifice of Athenian men. Other types of public discourse were free of such constraints, and whilst patriotism is reinforced by drama and forensic oratory, these genres could also explore the adverse human experience of war. These sometimes converging, sometimes diverging portrayals of war reveal a society that acknowledged the consequences of conflict but considered the patriotic cause worth the human cost.

Nicole Loraux’s great study of the funeral oration stresses the theme of timelessness. Loraux argued that the funeral orators typically presented an account of Athenian military history that avoided any focus on recent military actions. For this argument, Hyperides’s funeral speech presented a difficulty. Loraux described it as the ‘least conformist’ of the surviving speeches and as a ‘subversion’ lacking ‘fidelity’ to the epitaphic tradition. Certainly, the unique features of this speech have always been emphasised since its first publication in 1858. This speech focussed almost exclusively on the recent actions that led up to the public funeral of 322. It also broke with the genre’s general anonymity by singling out the fallen general, Leosthenes, for extensive praise. Loraux tried to account for all this by referring to the ‘exceptional circumstances’ that motivated Hyperides to compose his speech as a eulogy for an individual. This chapter studies closely the timeliness of this funeral speech. It connects the depiction of recent events with Hyperides’ wider political policies. It cautions against regarding the speech as an unusual subversion by recalling how few funeral speeches we have and by linking Hyperides’s speech to other examples of timeliness in what survives of the genre.

This chapter tests (and largely confirms) Nicole Loraux’s intriguing hypotheses concerning the authenticity of Pericles’ famous funeral oration and Thucydides’s ambivalent attitude towards this genre. It argues that Thucydides’ funeral speech of Pericles (2.35–46) owes much to the actual speech that the historical Pericles delivered in 431/0 BC to calm the widespread dissatisfaction with his policy of restraint vis-à-vis the Peloponnesian invaders. To achieve this end, Pericles focussed on one of the epitaphic commonplaces, namely the Athenians’ democracy and way of life as one of the reasons for their exceptional courage. Considering that Thucydides is highly critical of the epitaphic orators’ distorted version of the Athenian past (1.21.1), the inclusion of this funeral speech in his history may seem surprising, but it allowed Thucydides to explore the institutional/cultural reasons for the Athenians’ remarkable war-making ability, which his Corinthians had attributed earlier to the Athenians’ nature (1.70). Thucydides is not uncritical of Pericles’ idealization of Athens, though. By creating deliberate verbal echoes of Pericles’s eulogy in earlier and later passages of his work, Thucydides used the epitaphios logos of Pericles as a crucial point of comparison to illustrate the destructive impact of the war on the Athenians.

Nicole Loraux’s understanding of ideology as a system of representations and her analysis of the beauty of the dead would all seem to offer an opening for the incorporation of material culture into an analysis of the funeral oration. In spite of this, images had almost no function in her The Invention of Athens. For Loraux, the denial of an oracular spectacle of the body offered a contrast with Homeric valuations of death. She charted a move from the beautiful dead to the beautiful death that entailed a shift from aesthetics to morals. Loraux denied any role for visual culture in the funeral oration because, she argued, hearing had replaced sight. While Loraux’s analysis emerged from iconographic and structuralist approaches that implicitly contrasted abstraction and figuration, a conception of material culture that incorporates materiality and phenomenology offers important new perspectives. The funeral oration was only one component of a ritual that moved through spaces that were laden with objects and images articulating, manipulating, appropriating and, at times, rejecting the funeral oration’s beautiful death. Considering this wider material frame allows us to nuance some of Loraux’s central arguments.

Pericles’ funeral oration has played a significant public role, especially in Anglophone countries, over the last century. Renaissance humanists had valued it simply as a masterful piece of oratory, to be studied for its literary qualities. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was seen primarily as a source of historical information about Athenian culture, with no present significance. The great change came in the early nineteenth century, when radical and liberal thinkers in Britain, for whom democracy was no longer a threat but a promise, focussed increasingly on the contents of the speech. Cultural achievement was, they argued, intimately bound up with the participation of the people in public life. For them, the proof was in Pericles’ praise of Athens and its institutions. Ancient and modern democracy were now elided, and the words of this funeral speech were thus made available for politicians seeking to celebrate their own societies, from the United States of America to the European Union. These readers of the funeral oration as a celebration of democracy almost entirely ignored the original context of the speech. Developments in modern warfare as well as the rise of the mass citizen army changed this.

Lysias’s funeral speech is a paradoxical work. In theory a funeral speech by a foreign speech-writer should not exist. At first glance, this oration seems to point to a failure of process. What does it say about Athenian democracy that it had carefully selected a man to deliver a speech who needed to employ a speech-writer because, presumably, he was not up to the task of writing the speech himself? Moreover, how could it be that the best person to write an encomium of Athens is not an Athenian, but a metic? Lysias, what is more, was not just any metic, but one to whom Athenian democracy had repudiated a grant of citizenship. Lysias’ funeral speech thus potentially disrupts any straightforward story that we might want to tell about the relationship between the funeral oration, citizenship and civic ideology. His speech highlights the constructed nature of the genre’s statements about normative values. This chapter explores the implications of this speech for our understanding of the epitaphic tradition. It reviews the evidence for the authorship and authenticity of Lysias’ funeral speech. It canvasses the various possibilities for the construction and dissemination of his text.

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.