"Pericles's Funeral Oration" (Ancient Greek: Περικλέους Επιτάφιος) is a famous speech from Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War.[2] The speech was supposed to have been delivered by Pericles, an eminent Athenian politician, at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War (BC 431–404) as a part of the annual public funeral for the war dead.
Background
Main article: Funeral oration (ancient Greece)
It was an established Athenian practice by the late BC 5th century to hold a public funeral in honour of all those who had died in war.[3] The remains of the dead[4] were left in a tent for three days so that offerings could be made. Then a funeral procession was held, with ten cypress coffins carrying the remains, one for each of the Athenian tribes, and another left symbolically empty for the missing or those whose remains were unable to be recovered. Finally they were buried at a public grave (at Kerameikos). The last part of the ceremony was a speech delivered by a prominent Athenian citizen chosen by the state.
Several funeral orations from classical Athens are extant, which seem to corroborate Thucydides' assertion that this was a regular feature of Athenian funerary custom in wartime.[a]
The Funeral Oration was recorded by Thucydides in book two of his famous History of the Peloponnesian War. Although Thucydides records the speech in the first person as if it were a word for word record of what Pericles said, there can be little doubt that he edited the speech at the very least. Thucydides says early in his History that the speeches presented are not verbatim records, but are intended to represent the main ideas of what was said and what was, according to Thucydides, "called for in the situation".[5] We can be reasonably sure that Pericles delivered a speech at the end of the first year of the war, but there is no consensus as to what degree Thucydides's record resembles Pericles's actual speech.[b] Another confusing factor is that Pericles is known to have delivered another funeral oration in BC 440 during the Samian War.[8] It is possible that elements of both speeches are represented in Thucydides's version. Nevertheless, Thucydides was extremely meticulous in his documentation, and records the varied certainty of his sources each time. Significantly he begins recounting the speech by saying: "Περικλῆς ὁ Ξανθίππου… ἔλεγε τοιάδε", i.e. "Pericles, son of Xanthippos, spoke like this". Had he quoted the speech verbatim, he would have written "τάδε" ("this", or "these words") instead of "τοιάδε" ("like this" or "words like these"). The authorship of the Funeral Oration is also not certain. Plato, in his Menexenus, ascribes authorship to Pericles's companion, Aspasia.[9]
Pericles's Funeral Oration
Pericles's Funeral Oration is a famous speech attributed to Pericles in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. Pericles, an eminent Athenian politician, delivered it at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War as a part of the annual public funeral for the war dead.
History of the Peloponnesian War
by Thucydides, translated by Richard Crawley
PERICLES, PRINCE OF TYRE
by William Shakespeare
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Joshua Cooper Ramo (author), The seventh sense (book), 2016
pp.232-233
the answer would be measured in blood and treasure and children.
Put yourself in the place of the population of Melos, a peace-loving Mediterranean island whose destruction 2,400 years ago was chronicled by Thucydides in The Peloponnesian War. “Surely you have noticed that you are an island and we control the ocean”, an unwelcome Athenian general intimated to a Melian citizens' council one day 416 BCE, as his soldiers and ships collected menacingly outside the city's walls. Athens wanted the Melians to join an alliance against Sparta. The Melians ── like poor Lin Zexu or Lobengula of the Matabele ── yearned only to be left alone. “You would not agree to our being neutral, friends instead of enemies, but allies of neither side?” they asked. No, the Athenians replied, and then came a line that has resonated throughout the problems of nations ever since: “It is the nature of power that he who has it takes; he who does not must submit.” The Melians voted against surrender. Perhaps the Spartans would mount a relief raid? The Athenians might change their minds? Neither happened. The Melian men were betrayed and then massacred. Their wives and children were sold as slaves.
Joshua Cooper Ramo (author), The seventh sense (book), 2016
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Timothy Ferris, Tribe of Mentors: short life advice from the best in the world, 2017
pp.6-7
Steven Pressfield
The single book that has influenced me most is probably the last book in the world that anybody is gonna want to read: Thucydides' History of the Peloponesian War.
This book is dense, difficult, long, full of blood and guts. It wasn't written, as Thucydides himself attests at the start, to be easy or fun. But it is loaded with hardcore, timeless truths and the story it tells ought to be required reading for every citizen in a democracy.
Thucydides was an Athenian general who was beaten and disgraced in a battle early in the 27-year conflagration that came to be called the Peloponnesian war. He decided to drop out of the fighting and dedicate himself to recording, in all the detail he could manage, this conflict, which he felt certain, would turn out to be the greatest and most significant war ever fought up to that time.
He did just that.
p.7
Have you heard of Pericles' Funeral Oration? Thucydides was there for it. He transcribed it.
He was there for the debates in the Athenian assembly over the treatment of the island of Melos, the famous Melian Dialogue. If he wasn't there for the defeat of the Athenian fleet at Syracuse or the betrayal of Athens by Alcibiades, he knew people who were there and he went to extremes to record what they told him.
Thucydides, like all the Greeks of his era, was unencumbered by the Christian theology, or Marxist dogma, or Freudian psychology, or any of the other “ism” that attempt to convince us that man is basically good, or perhaps perfectible.
He saw things as they were, in my opinion. It's a dark vision but tremendously bracing and empowering because it's true. On the island of Corcyra, a great naval power in its day, one faction of citizens trapped their neighbors and fellow Corcyreans in a temple. They slaughtered the prisoners' children outside because their eyes and when the captives gave themselves up based on pledges of clemency and oaths sworn before the gods, the captors massacred them as well.
This was not a war of nation versus nation, this was brother against brother in the most civilized cities on earth.
To read Thucydides is to see our own world in microcosm.
It's the study of how democracies destroy themselves by breaking down into warring factions, the Few versus the Many.
Hoi polloi in Greek means “the many”.
Oligoi means “the few”.
I can't recommend Thucydides for fun, but if you want to expose yourself to a towering intellect writing on the deepest stuff imaginable, give it a try.
(Timothy Ferris, Tribe of Mentors: short life advice from the best in the world, 2017, 650.1 Ferriss, )
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John Bartlett.──17th ed., Bartlett's familiar quotations, [2002]
p.73
Thucydides3
c. 460─400 B.C.
16 With reference to the narrative of events, far from permitting myself to derive it from the first source that came to hand, I did not even trust my own impression, but it rests partly on what I saw myself, partly on what others saw for me, the accuracy of the report being always tried by the most severe and detailed tests possible. My conclusions have cost me some labor from the want of coincidence between accounts of the same occurrences by different eyewitnesses, arising sometimes from imperfect memory, sometimes from undue partially for one side or the other. The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but I shall be content if it is judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it. My history has been composed to be an everlasting possession, not the show piece of an hour.
Peloponnesian war, I, 22
3 translated by Richard Livingstone unless otherwise noted.
• Thucydides, oft-cited history of Peloponnesian war between Sparta and Athens that “the present, while never repeating the past exactly, must inevitably resemble it. Hence, so must the future.”, p.219, Bina Venkataraman., The optimist's telescope : thinking ahead in a reckless age, 2019.
( Bartlett's familiar quotations : a collection of passages, phrases, and proverbs traced to their sources in ancient and modern literature / John Bartlett; edited by Justin Kaplan.──17th ed., rev. and enl., 1. quotation, English, PN6081.B27 1992, 808.88'2──dc20, 2002, )
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Joshua Cooper Ramo (author), The seventh sense (book), 2016
pp.10-11
At the turn of the last century, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche suggested that humans needed a “Sixth Sense” to survive what then seemed like insane madness: the Industrial Revolution. He didn't mean by this that we should all go study history. At least that wasn't all he meant. He thought a Sixth Sense should be a feel for the rhythms of history. There was a certain pace and tone to human life, he said, sort of like a runner on a long race, and you or I would need a sense of the whole course in order to pace ourselves. Without it, we might end up slowing down at the wrong moments. Or ── and this particularly worried him ── we might run too fast and exhaust ourselves just as a big hill was coming up. Nietzsche thought the world was about to have to face a very steep, unforgiving incline on the way to a new kind of social order, and that most people in the 1890s were skipping along as if it was all downhill from there on out. A feeling for history, he hoped, might help. But he also felt pretty sure no one would develop this new sense. He expected tragedy. “The more abstract the truth you wish to teach”, he said, “the more you must allure the senses to it.” But no one was attracted to the idea of danger in those gilded days.
p.86
Generals in World War I lamented that the whole war might have been prevented if diplomatic communication had been conducted at the stately speed of the horse-carried message. It was the damn velocity of the telegraph that baffled the judgment of statesmen, they claimed.
p.88
Antoine-Henri, baron de Jomini, Napoleon's inspired tactical accomplice, was on to something when he remarked that it was the interior, networked lines of communication and logistics that had delivered victory for history's great empires. “Method changes”, Jomini observed, “but principles are unchanging.” The skeins [a string or thread from a ball of yarns] of links running inside national war machines are as essential for security as any ability to strike out ── a lesson Jomini and Napoleon expensively relearned at the end of their gasping supply lines in Russia in the winter of 1812.
p.127
The military had already spent a fortune on the problem (plus half a fortune, it turned out, trying to hide it). The result was an expensively designed telephone network linking military bases to strategic command posts.
p.127
But because the lines and their switching centers were laced out in a pattern with just a few big, central nodes, like a bicycle wheel with spokes, the network had almost no chance of surviving the very thing it was designed to help prevent. If you saw a diagram of this network, with its main hub staffed by senior commanders and its lines radiating out to bases and missile silos, it even looked like a target. If the Soviet Union could bull's-eye those hubs with a bomb or two, then the rest of the network would fold right away. America's military would be deaf. And as Soviet missiles became more accurate, the communications vulnerability became more acute. “We will soon be living in an era”, Baran wrote, “in which we cannot guarantee survivability of any single point.”
The situation, as a carefully screened handful of scientists knew, was in fact even more perilous.
p.127
“Our communications were so vulnerable”, Baran said, “that each missile base commander would face the dilemma of either doing nothing in the event of a physical attack, or taking action that would mean an all-out irrevocable war.”
p.210
The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk and the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, writing about the way in which some people breeze through airports and borders (with first-class tickets and preapproved immigration) while others struggle to move at all out of refugee camps or poverty traps, have labeled the winners of this new order a kind of “kinetic elite.” They are the first-class passengers of topological travel, in possession of golden keys to a special, frictionless topology that gives them not only afinacial and an information edge but also the ability to eliminate space and capture time.
Joshua Cooper Ramo (author), The seventh sense (book), 2016
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