The first known date in his life is 472 bce, when he paid for the production of the playwright Aeschylus Persian trilogy. Pericles was an Athenian statesman. The Funeral Oration was delivered during a war that was clearly going to continue for some time. The kind of man formed by such a constitution reflects its shortcomings: He lives from day to day indulging the appetite of the hour; and sometimes he is lapped in drink and strains of the flute; then he becomes a water-drinker and tries to get thin; then he takes a turn at gymnastics; sometimes idling and neglecting everything, then once more living the life of a philosopher; often he is busy with politics, and starts to his feet and says and does whatever comes into his head; and, if he is emulous of anyone who is a warrior, off he is in that direction, or men of business, once more in that. Most of Pericles answers to these questions can be found in the Funeral Oration that he delivered in the winter of 431/30, less than two years before his death, at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War. Only one ancient account mentions the existence of Xerxes Canal, long thought to be a tall tale. In his speech, Pericles states that he had been emphasising the greatness of Athens in order to convey that the citizens of Athens must continue to support the war, to show them that what they were fighting for was of the utmost importance. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Pericles was widely seen as the leader of Athens. The bones were kept for the funeral at the end of the year. But we have these speeches because Thucydides reported them, and his subject was war. What we can learn from Chernobyl's strays. .he may not wander about comfortably acting like someone with a clean reputation or else he is beaten by his betters. 2 hours of sleep? Through such a display he hoped to win the kind of fame that would gain him immortality as the memory of his great deeds passed on through the generations, sung and embellished by bards like Homer. 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". Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. The Spartans faced this fundamental problem of the polis in its sharpest form. Plato asserted that democracy unjustly distributes a sort of equality to equal and unequal alike (Republic 55C), and Aristotle later claimed that in democracies justice is the enjoyment of arithmetical equality, and not the enjoyment of proportionate equality on the basis of merit (Politics 1317b). .In the streets he must get out of the way. Pericles met the challenge of the heroic tradition by showing that democracy would bring to all the citizens of Athens the advantages heretofore reserved for the well-born few. Even more simply, it is a democracy because while Athenians "are free and tolerant in our private lives, in public affairs we keep to the law. Pericles ushered in what is considered radical democracy. This meant that ordinary Athenian citizens were paid by the state to participate in public affairs. 1, Routledge, 2016. Optimists may believe that democracy is the inevitable and final form of human society, but the historical record shows that up to now it has been the rare exception. Bomber Command was engraved with a quote from it. Learn how and when to remove this template message, "Thucydides (c. 460/455c. At the Dionysia Festival in 472 B.C. The tale tells us much about Greek values. We are superior in this way, too, that we are the most daring in what we undertake at the same time as we are the most thoughtful before going about it, while with others it is ignorance that brings boldness and thought that makes them hesitate. Unlike some Athenian dramatists, he saw neither metaphorical significance nor divine retribution in the epidemic. Thucydides, who wrote his Periclean speech for his History of the Peloponnesian War, readily admitted that his speeches were only loosely based on memory and shouldn't be taken as a verbatim report. How do we reverse the trend? When you visit the site, Dotdash Meredith and its partners may store or retrieve information on your browser, mostly in the form of cookies. . (2 43. l-2). Around 449 B.C., the Delian League signed the Peace of Callias, which ended nearly 50 years of fighting with the Persians and ushered in two decades of peace. These facts were obvious to all and might be expected to deter aggression. In the second year of the Peloponnesian War a plague struck Athens, which was crowded with evacuees from the countryside, killing perhaps a quarter of the citys inhabitants. That development transformed the character of Athenian democracy and society; lower-class Athenians (called thetes) could now participate as fully as citizens with property. We thought we knew turtles. Pericles. For anyone hopeful that democracy is the best system for coping with the current coronavirus pandemic, the Athenian disaster stands as a chilling admonition. They also complained of the lack of uniform good character in the citizens, who were unpredictably involved in various activities and masters of none, with negative consequences for their military ability and moral quality. ThoughtCo, Jul. The play lacks moral ambiguity within many of the central characters. Nothing further is known until 463, when he unsuccessfully prosecuted Cimon, the leading general and statesman of the day, on a charge of having neglected a chance to conquer Macedonia; this implies that Pericles advocated an aggressive policy of expansion for Athens. Thucydides fervently supported Periclesbut was less enthusiastic about the institution of democracy. But these benefits, important as they were, did not appeal to the most basic spiritual need of all, the need for kleos and immortality. Work began in 447 B.C. Pericles. Unfortunately, the 27-year-long Peloponnesian War resulted in great losses for Athens. . University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. In 461 B.C., he joined the reformer Ephialtes in organizing a vote in the popular assembly that stripped all remaining powers from the Areopagus, the old noble council. The speech begins by praising the custom of the public funeral for the dead, but criticises the inclusion of the speech, arguing that the "reputations of many brave men" should "not be imperilled in the mouth of a single individual". It contained a clear, if often implicit, contrast with the Spartan way of life, which so many Greeks admired but which Pericles regarded as inferior to the Athens he portrayed. But soon after Pericles gave that prideful speech, the original democracy got sick. This is a sobering history, but, reading Thucydides account of the plague while under lockdown, I sometimes found the frosty old historian oddly heartening. Pericles' Funeral Oration - Thucydides' Version. Surviving the disease, he carefully set down the symptoms, knowledge of which will enable it to be recognized, if it should ever break out again. His ancient empirical analysis of catastrophe offers a jot of hope, if not wonder: for as long as there have been plagues, there have been people, scared but tenacious, using reason to try to learn from them. The newer image, provided by Sparta, took shape no earlier than the seventh century but immediately captured the imagination of many and continued to fascinate Greek thinkers for centuries. The more immediate challenge to the democratic vision came from Sparta. 12. The freedom we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. He soon left their political camp, probably on the question of relations with Persia, and took the then new path of legal prosecution as a political weapon. The law also may have passed because of a general wish to restrict access to the benefits of office and public distributions, but there was never any disposition on the part of Athenians to restrict economic opportunities for foreignerswho served in the fleet, worked on public buildings, and had freedom of trade and investment, with the crucial, but normal, exception of land and houses. The citizen of a free society has the right to ask, Why should I risk my life for my city? Pericles, a prominent and influential Politian in Athens, has argued that democracy is the best form of government because it fairly produces the most educated and excellent citizens, through freedom to act as they please, which will eventually shape there soul into a great person (Warner 145). No fear of god or law of man had a restraining influence.. 105 Copy quote. It is from the greatest dangers that the greatest glories are to be won, he stated in front of the assembly. The audience is then dismissed. 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. As Thucydides recounts Pericles claiming in a famous speech, "Our natural bravery springs from our way of life, not from the compulsion of laws.We are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the arts without loss of manliness." Pericles begins by praising the dead, as the other Athenian funeral orations do, by regard the ancestors of present-day Athenians (2.36.12.36.3), touching briefly on the acquisition of the empire. Plus: each Wednesday, exclusively for subscribers, the best books of the week. The Athenians prized thought, deliberation, and discussion. In Athenians society, one of the important custom is their funeral. Its ideas are still important for people living in democractic nations today. When the Mytilenean poet Alcaeus was sent into exile the loss he complained of was not his house and fields but the scenes of political life: I yearn, Agesilaidas, to hear the herald summon the assembly and the council (Alcaeus, fragment 130). A dynasty or tyranny or clique may be deposed, but it is invariably replaced by another or by a chaotic anarchy that ends in the establishment of some kind of command society. The Athenians gave him a public burial on the spot where he fell [only the men who died at Marathon received the same extraordinary honor] (1.30). The willingness to perform military service for his homeland is the most fundamental and demanding duty of the citizen. Their national poet, Tyrtaeus, specifically rejected the Homeric values and replaced them with a single definition of arete: the courage to stand bravely in the ranks of a hoplite phalanx fighting for Sparta. ), who said he was quoting Pericles himself. Thucydides maintained a rationalists sensibility even in wartime and plague. He maneuvered Athens to primacy over other league members, first by transferring the leagues treasury to Athens in 454 B.C. The new and emerging democracies of our time are very fragile, and they all face serious challenges. At this point, however, Pericles departs most dramatically from the example of other Athenian funeral orations and skips over the great martial achievements of Athens' past: "That part of our history which tells of the military achievements which gave us our several possessions, or of the ready valour with which either we or our fathers stemmed the tide of Hellenic or foreign aggression, is a theme too familiar to my hearers for me to dwell upon, and I shall therefore pass it by. A woman's greatest glory is to be little talked about by men, whether for good or ill. It might have been smallpox, a fungal poisoning called ergotism, or something worse. At any rate, Pericles eventually succumbed to and died from this plague. Thucydides' funeral speech about democracy delivered by Pericles. The period in which he led Athens, in fact, has been called the Age of Pericles due to his influence, not only on his city 's fortunes, but on the whole of Greek history during the 5th century BCE and even after his death. He rejected the notion that democracy turned its back on excellence, reducing all to equality at a low level. The Funeral Oration is significant because it differs from the usual form of Athenian funeral speeches. Pericles allowed all people to participate in government which also made Athens more of a direct democracy. Thucydides' Greek is notoriously difficult, but the language of Pericles Funeral Oration is considered by many to be the most difficult and virtuosic passage in the History of the Peloponnesian War. But soon after Pericles gave that prideful speech, the original democracy got sick. They did not believe that man was entirely trivial, a mere bit of dust in the vast Cosmic order, such that his passing was a thing of no account. But Thucydides chronicle of what happened just after Pericles funeral oration is unsparingand should be as enduring as the speech itself. In the following speech, Pericles made these points about democracy: Democracy allows men to advance because of merit rather than wealth or inherited class. First, he said, I shall make clear through what practices we have come to our present position and with what political constitution and way of life our city has become great. The institutions are democratic, but Pericles explanation of what that means is a refutation of the attacks made by the enemies of democracy.