will not be left desolate, and she will be safer. For a man’s counsel cannot have equal weight or worth, when he alone has no children to risk in the general danger. To those of you who have passed their prime, I say: ‘Congratulate yourselves that you have been happy during the greater part of your days; remember that your life of sorrow will not last long, and be comforted by the glory of those who are gone. For the love of honour alone is ever young, and not riches, as some say, but honour is the delight of men when they are old and useless.
‘The whole earth is the tomb of famous men.’ Their memorial will be graven on the hearts of men rather than on stone. Pericles lays it on thick for the war dead, deploying the full scale of rhetorical flattery to disguise the fact that this is a truly brutal passage which, stripped of its eloquent veneer, more or less says: ‘Try not to worry about your dead sons because you will be dead yourself soon.’ This is the one moment in the speech when the greater glory of the city sounds a rather callous objective.
But Pericles is trying to inspire his listeners to summon their courage. That is why he goes as far as to say that there can be no greater demonstration of moral virtue, of arete, than willing death in battle. There is more than a hint of rhetorical duplicity here. Is it actually true, in fact, that the dead lost their lives for the glory of Athens? Does Pericles have privileged access to the thoughts of the valiant men as they went to their deaths? No, this is rhetorical projection. He is conjuring glory from demise, glory for the greater good of the city.
Speaking at a moment of crisis, Pericles is trying to head off the criticism that democracy stifles individual excellence. The usual way to do this would be to list the achievements of the war to date. It would be the first instance of a speech that will become a political staple – the ‘a lot done, a lot still to do’ speech. But Pericles has no achievements to offer to his audience. He therefore has to return to the higher principle for which valour has been spent, namely the love of honour. Athens was a society that held to a code of honour, and so Pericles is saying that the men of Athens who died have nevertheless graduated with honours. The supreme standard of honour was martial valour, so those whose lives had been given in the service of the city deserved the renown that Pericles is here bestowing.
This is an awkward passage in which the gap between the requirement of a funeral oration and the political desire to heap laurels on the city opens to its widest. It is evident too how sensibilities have changed. Few would now venture to argue that not having children made someone care less about the future of the state. Indeed, when, in 2016, Andrea Leadsom implied just that of her rival for the Conservative Party leadership, Theresa May, Ms Leadsom was forced to resign from the process. It probably would not have rescued her, but she might have presented Pericles as a witness in her defence.
I have paid the required tribute, in obedience to the law, making use of such fitting words as I had. The tribute of deeds has been paid in part; for the dead have them in deeds, and it remains only that their children should be maintained at the public charge until they are grown up: this is the solid prize with which, as with a garland, Athens crowns her sons living and dead, after a struggle like theirs. For where the rewards of virtue are greatest, there the noblest citizens are enlisted in the service of the state. And now, when you have duly lamented, everyone his own dead, you may depart.
Although it lay in cold storage for a long time during the wilderness years between the end of the classical era and nineteenth-century Europe, the Funeral Oration has been, since then, regarded as a classic, and Pericles has turned up in many guises. He was quoted in advertisements designed to boost morale during the First World War, and after the conflict his words appeared on war memorials. At Gettysburg, Lincoln begins, as Pericles does, with a reference to the city fathers. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Congressman Major Robert Owens declared: ‘Defiant orations of Pericles must now rise out of the ashes.’
The state that Pericles describes has little in common with the faction-ridden, highly political atmosphere of Athens, but this is a eulogy and a little exaggeration is in order. That is not to say, however, that this is really a conventional funeral oration, because Pericles is doing the opposite of posting an obituary. He is defining an ideal state for the future. He has come not so much to bury the dead as to praise a living democracy. You can hear that in the opening to this passage: ‘I have paid the required tribute’. He could hardly be more perfunctory. His enthusiasm only fires when he gets to the reason for the sacrifice. Real people died in the war, says Pericles, for the idea of the people in the abstract.
This is a gloriously expressed cold comfort, which is echoed, in its purpose, centuries later by David Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill, all of whom make speeches seeking simultaneously to raise the morale of their audience and define the war for the higher cause of democracy. The Funeral Oration is an unusual, unexpected speech which is more a paean to politics than it is a panegyric to the war dead. The words of Pericles echo to us down the ages as we struggle to recall that this gift, the idea of democracy, is so precious an inheritance.
DAVID LLOYD GEORGE
The Great Pinnacle of Sacrifice
Queen’s Hall, London
19 September 1914
The most famous Welshman to be born in Manchester, David Lloyd George (1863–1945) was the unrivalled rhetorical genius of the first years of twentieth-century British politics. His admirers, who were many, called him the Welsh Wizard, and he was known as the Goat to those, just as many, who did not trust him. In his years in office Lloyd George was known as the Big Beast, and from the beginning he was the self-styled Man from the Outside, a solicitor from Porthmadog in Wales with no university education. This attitude explains the sharp edges to his rhetoric and the alliances he struck up with others whom he viewed as coming from without the established fold.
Lloyd George was a contradictory man. He was, as A. J. P. Taylor has written, the champion of the poor who fell in with the rich; the scourge of Ireland who offered it the Free State. Some part of the suspicion Lloyd George incurred was due to his oratorical gifts. The famous address in Limehouse, east London, in defence of his tax-raising budget of 1909 was seen by opponents as an effort to stir up class warfare. ‘Limehousing’ became a byword for rabble-rousing and demagoguery.
David Lloyd George was brought up in a dissenting, Welsh-speaking household in North Wales. For the first decade of his political career as a Liberal MP, he confined himself to Welsh issues, but he later gained a reputation as a radical opponent of the Boer War. His first Cabinet post was as president of the Board of Trade, in 1905. After the Liberal landslide of 1906 – the victory, as George Dangerfield famously said, from which the Liberals never recovered – Lloyd George served as chancellor of the exchequer. During these years he introduced reforms which, in retrospect, began the process of creating a national welfare state from the scattered voluntary provision of the time. With the start of war, he became, successively, Herbert Asquith’s minister of munitions and minister of war, before the 1916 coup in which he took the top job himself. He remained prime minister until October 1922, when he and the rest of the coalition ministry were toppled by a backbench Conservative revolt, commemorated to this day in the collective name the Tory backbenchers give to themselves: the 1922 Committee.
In the speech that follows we see Lloyd George as chancellor of the exchequer charged with making the case that, on the brink of war, national honour demands that the country stand and fight. He did it so well that he talked himself into the role he had always coveted, as prime minister. His response was in striking contrast with Asquith’s, who seemed too weak a leader to carry a nation through war. Asquith was never able to articulate the case for conscription with the poetic splendour that Lloyd George mustered in 1915 and 1916, and he never began to match the passion exhibited here.
I have come here this afternoon to talk to my fellow countrymen about this Great War and the part we ought to take in it. I feel my task is easier after we have
