all is a much more critical point than it might on first hearing sound. The priest, the king, the tyrant, simply act. In a democracy, the judgement of words replaces the asserted wisdom of the tyrannical fiat. Democracy anoints the argument rather than the individual. For this reason, the public speech is essential to democracy. It is also the principal innovation of the new form of politics. Pericles insists that he is going to talk about Athens itself, reinterpreting the deaths of the citizens for the glory of its name. He is going to establish the polis as so splendid that death in war is a glorious, almost a desirable, contribution to the national story.
Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the institutions of others. Our government does not copy our neighbours’, but is an example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while there exists equal justice to all and alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognised; and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty an obstacle, but a man may benefit his country whatever the obscurity of his condition. There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private business we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbour if he does what he likes; we do not put on sour looks at him which, though harmless, are not pleasant. While we are thus unconstrained in our private business, a spirit of reverence pervades our public acts; we are prevented from doing wrong by respect for the authorities and for the laws, having a particular regard to those which are ordained for the protection of the injured as well as those unwritten laws which bring upon the transgressor of them the reprobation of the general sentiment.
This speech contains democratic multitudes. Here is the first usage of the cliché that some might have thought a New Labour coinage: the many not the few. Here is ‘equal justice to all’, which later becomes the subject of a speech by Thomas Jefferson. Here is equality before the law, modern meritocracy, the private liberty of the citizen, respect for the public interest, protection of the vulnerable, the dignity of the institutions of state, and here is the court of public opinion. In this passage Pericles is inventing the democratic idiom, fashioning the phrases that come to define government by the people.
This is the first great address in praise of the idea of the citizen body. It is for this collection of democratic virtues, says Pericles in an audacious move, that the dead lived and died. The tombs of the dead metaphorically fade from view as the speech shifts from the particular to the general, from people to an idea.
Only an advocate of the idea of democracy would license such a switch, which explains why the Funeral Oration fell for many an age out of favour until its ideas came back into vogue. Democracy disappeared with the demise of the classical world until it was revived in the nineteenth century. Pericles thus reads better today than he did during most of later history. We bring to his words our anachronistic desire to defend our own practice, and find it described with startling contemporary exactitude in this passage. The survival of the Funeral Oration, and the loss of most of Athenian rhetoric, is not really, as Thucydides tries to persuade us, owed to the intrinsically finer quality of what Pericles says, or the way he says it. Its longevity, and its appeal today, is owed more to the fact that Pericles sounds rather like Thomas Jefferson, who in turn sounds somewhat like us. This section therefore heralds the moment when a tradition is founded.
To sum up: I say that Athens is the school of Hellas, and that the individual Athenian in his own person seems to have the power of adapting himself to the most varied forms of action with the utmost versatility and grace. This is no passing and idle word, but truth and fact; and the assertion is verified by the position to which these qualities have raised the state. For in the hour of trial Athens alone among her contemporaries is superior to the report of her. No enemy who comes against her is indignant at the reverses which he sustains at the hands of such a city; no subject complains that his masters are unworthy of him. And we shall assuredly not be without witnesses; there are mighty monuments of our power which will make us the wonder of this and of succeeding ages; we shall not need the praises of Homer or of any other panegyrist whose poetry may please for the moment, although his representation of the facts will not bear the light of day. For we have compelled every land and every sea to open a path for our valour, and have everywhere planted eternal memorials of our friendship and of our enmity. Such is the city for whose sake these men nobly fought and died; they could not bear the thought that she might be taken from them; and every one of us who survive should gladly toil on her behalf. I have dwelt upon the greatness of Athens because I want to show you that we are contending for a higher prize than those who enjoy none of these privileges, and to establish by manifest proof the merit of these men whom I am now commemorating. Their loftiest praise has been already spoken. For in magnifying the city I have magnified them, and men like them whose virtues made her glorious.
Pericles now declares that the democratic spirit that carries his praise also extends glory to the city in its foreign pursuits. There is, again, a highly contemporary resonance to this passage. In recent years it has been common to argue that the provinces of domestic and foreign policy have merged. Here Pericles does exactly that, claiming that the virtues at home in Athens equip the city for its greater good abroad. Under the pressure of war, he suggests, the ethics that Athens follows at home will sustain the glory of the city.
Pericles makes a major claim here about the superiority of democracy over rival forms of constitution. In one of the best-crafted phrases in the speech he says that only Athens is superior to the report of her. This intriguing phrase has the implication that democracies will, probably from envy, suffer unfair criticism from outside, from states that cannot believe that the advertised virtues of a democracy are real. He is also implying that democracy, by its very nature, will always be subject to critique from within, and there will be spells when the populace loses faith and is tempted by simpler solutions.
Pericles goes on to elucidate that democratic superiority will be measured by the kindness that a democratic state shows, both to its enemies and to its own subjects. Democracies hold themselves to higher standards of ethical behaviour than autocracies, and so they should. This point is later central to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America – that some of the virtues of democracy are hidden in plain sight yet they prove their worth in the end. Pericles then dismisses the accounts of Homer as if he were swatting away disobliging reports in a hostile press. The test of democracy is time. Its superiority will become clear in the verdict of the historians. Though there is no reason to suppose that Thucydides is speaking for himself here, it is important to bear in mind that this is his account of Pericles. It would be no great surprise if this were the moment the historian chose to turn up the volume.
The sacrifice which they collectively made was individually repaid to them; for they received again each one for himself a praise which grows not old, and the noblest of all tombs, I speak not of that in which their remains are laid, but of that in which their glory survives, and is proclaimed always and on every fitting occasion both in word and deed. For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men. Make them your examples, and, esteeming courage to be freedom and freedom to be happiness, do not weigh too nicely the perils of war … Wherefore I do not now pity the parents of the dead who stand here; I would rather comfort them. You know that your dead have passed away amid manifold vicissitudes; and that they may be deemed fortunate who have gained their utmost honour, whether an honourable death like theirs, or an honourable sorrow like yours, and whose share of happiness has been so ordered that the term of their happiness is likewise the term of their life. I know how hard it is to make you feel this, when the good fortune of others will too often remind you of the gladness which once lightened your hearts. And sorrow is felt at the want of those blessings, not which a man never knew, but which were a part of his life before they were taken from him. Some of you are of an age at which they may hope to have other children, and they ought to bear their sorrow better; not only will the children who may hereafter be born make them forget their own lost ones,
