Pericles' Funeral Oration (431 BC): Athens Praises Democracy

Pericles’ Funeral Oration is the speech that the Athenian leader Pericles gave in the winter of 431/430 BC at the state funeral for citizens who had died in the first year of the Peloponnesian War. Preserved in the history of Thucydides, it praises the Athenian way of life and its democracy rather than simply mourning the dead. It is one of the most quoted texts of the ancient world and has shaped how later generations imagined democracy.

The Athenian state funeral

Athens honoured its war dead with a public ceremony that Thucydides describes as an ancestral custom. The bones of the fallen were laid out in a tent for three days, so that families could bring offerings. Then they were carried in cypress coffins, one for each of the ten Athenian tribes, with an empty bier for those whose bodies had not been recovered.

The procession went to the public burial ground outside the city walls, in the Kerameikos district, which Thucydides calls the most beautiful suburb of Athens. The only exception to burial there was made for the dead of Marathon, who were buried on the battlefield because of their exceptional courage.

After the burial, a man chosen by the city for his judgment and standing delivered a speech of praise, known in Greek as an epitaphios logos. In 431 BC, after the first year of the war against Sparta, the choice fell on Pericles, the most influential politician in Athens.

Context: the first year of war

The Peloponnesian War began in the spring of 431 BC. Following Pericles’ strategy, the people of the Attic countryside moved inside the city walls while the Spartan army ravaged their farms. The Athenian fleet raided the coasts of the Peloponnese. Casualties in this first year were relatively light.

The speech therefore came at a moment of confidence, but also of hardship. Many Athenians had abandoned their homes and were crowded into the city. Thucydides deliberately places the speech immediately before his account of the plague that struck Athens the next summer, creating a sharp contrast between the ideal city of the speech and the suffering that followed.

What Pericles said

Pericles begins by noting how hard it is to praise the dead in a way that satisfies both those who knew them and those who did not. Rather than dwelling on old victories, he says he will explain the way of life and the form of government that made Athens great.

Democracy and equality

The central passage describes the Athenian constitution. Pericles says that Athens does not copy its neighbours but is a model to them. Its government is called a democracy because it is run in the interests of the many and not of the few.

He stresses equality before the law in private disputes, and says that public office goes to merit, not to class or wealth, so that poverty does not keep a capable man from serving the city. Athenians, he says, do not resent how their neighbours choose to live in private, but they respect the laws and the magistrates in public life.

An open society

Pericles contrasts Athens with Sparta without naming it at every turn. Athens opens its city to foreigners and does not expel them for fear they might learn military secrets. Its citizens enjoy festivals and comfort, yet face danger as bravely as those trained from childhood in hard discipline.

He praises Athenian love of beauty and of learning, and insists that discussion is not an obstacle to action but a necessary preparation for it. A citizen who takes no interest in public affairs, he says, is regarded not as quiet but as useless. In one of his best-known phrases he calls Athens “the school of Hellas”, an education for the whole Greek world.

Consolation to the families

Only after this praise of the city does Pericles turn to the dead. Their courage, he argues, has given them a fame that will not age, with the whole earth as their tomb. He urges the living to fix their eyes on the greatness of Athens and to become its lovers.

He then addresses the families. Parents of child-bearing age are encouraged to have more children, older parents to take comfort in the fame of their sons. To the widows he offers a single, much-discussed piece of advice: that their greatest glory is to be talked about as little as possible among men, whether in praise or blame. The speech closes by announcing that the city will raise the children of the fallen at public expense until they come of age.

How accurate is Thucydides’ version?

Thucydides was an Athenian, probably present in the city at the time, and may have heard the speech himself. He is open about his method. He says that he could not remember speeches word for word, so he made speakers say what he thought the situation required, while keeping as close as possible to the general sense of what was actually said.

As a result, scholars do not treat the text as a transcript. It is polished in Thucydides’ distinctive style, and its themes fit closely with the rest of his work. Many historians believe it reflects genuine Periclean ideas, but presented as Thucydides understood them. A few have suggested that it may idealise Athens on purpose, to sharpen the tragedy of what follows.

Myths and facts

• Myth: the speech celebrates democracy in the modern sense. Athenian democracy excluded women, slaves and resident foreigners from political rights, and Athens ruled an empire of subject cities. The speech praises a citizen community, not universal rights.
• Myth: Pericles mourns the dead at length. In fact most of the speech praises the city. Personal grief takes up only a short final section.
• Fact: it belongs to a genre. Other Athenian funeral orations survive, attributed to Lysias, Demosthenes and Hyperides, and Plato’s dialogue Menexenus offers a playful imitation of the genre.

Timeline

• 431 BC, spring: the Peloponnesian War begins with the Theban attack on Plataea and the Spartan invasion of Attica.
• 431 BC, summer: Athenian fleets raid the Peloponnesian coast.
• Winter 431/430 BC: Pericles delivers the Funeral Oration in the Kerameikos.
• 430 BC, summer: plague breaks out in Athens.
• 429 BC, autumn: Pericles dies, probably from the effects of the plague.
• 1863, 19 November: Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, often compared with the oration, is delivered.

Legacy

From the Renaissance onward the Funeral Oration was read as a portrait of Athens at its height. In the 19th century, as liberal and democratic ideas spread, it became a favourite text of reformers and educators in Britain, Germany and the United States. Philipp Foltz’s mid-19th-century painting of Pericles speaking reflects this admiration.

The comparison with Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is often made. In his book Lincoln at Gettysburg (1992), the historian Garry Wills argued that Lincoln’s short speech followed the pattern of the Greek funeral oration, turning a burial into a statement of national ideals.

In the early 2000s, a sentence from the speech about democracy being government by the many was placed as an epigraph in the draft of a constitution for the European Union. It was dropped from the final text, but the episode showed how the speech still serves as a reference point.

Why it matters

Pericles’ Funeral Oration is one of the earliest and most eloquent attempts to explain what makes a free, self-governing society worth defending. Its ideals, and the gap between those ideals and the reality of a slave-owning, imperial city, continue to make it a key text for anyone thinking about democracy and its limits.