Compared to other extant examples, Plato’s Menexenus presents an unusual funeral speech: an oration delivered by Socrates, embedded within a Platonic dialogue and supposedly written by Pericles’ lover, Aspasia, whom Socrates claims as his own tutor in rhetoric. Nicole Loraux’s The Invention of Athens convinced almost all of the necessity of reading this speech alongside the others, without, however, investigating Plato’s own political and philosophical aims. Building on others, this chapter reopens the question of the dialogue’s tone. Is the fictional Socratic funeral speech ironic or serious, or somehow both? In order to approach this question, it is necessary, first, to examine the speech’s intertextual relations with Pericles’ funeral speech in Thucydides. Then, with the gender politics of this speech in mind, it will be possible to grasp the largely neglected significance of Aspasia, both as a woman and a foreigner. These considerations lead to the conclusion that Plato had both a critical and a constructive purpose: critical, in challenging the Periclean presentation of democratic courage, and constructive, in providing a kind of political therapy for democratic citizens, who stood, albeit unwittingly, in need of a healthier and more coherent self-understanding.

Nicole Loraux saw the genre of the funeral oration as ‘the spokesman of official ideology’ and even as ‘the only developed discourse that the Athenian city officially had on democracy’. Nevertheless, the funeral oration was not the only public treatment of democracy. Indeed, Athens was the only ancient Greek state in which citizens produced representations of their own regime and did so in a variety of literary genres. This chapter begins by considering the place that the funeral oration generally accorded democracy, as well as the specific democratic practices and principles that the surviving speeches mentioned. It then refutes what is, probably, the most famous argument in The Invention of Athens, namely that the funeral oration represented democracy only in aristocratic terms. Thirdly, the chapter clarifies the uniqueness of the epitaphic genre’s treatment of democracy by bringing in as comparison-points two tragedies and a famous legal speech. It concludes by drawing attention to the multiplicity of the self-portraits that Athenian democracy produced and to the ways in which the clear military function of the funeral oration constrained its portrait of the regime.

From Homer’s Iliad to the Athenian funeral oration and beyond, the ‘beautiful death’ was the name that the Greeks used to describe a combatant’s death. From the world of Achilles to democratic Athens, the warrior’s death was a model that concentrated the representations and the values that served as masculine norms. This should not be a surprise: the Iliad depicts a society at war and, in the Achaean camp at least, a society of men, without children and legitimate wives. Certainly, the Athenian city-state distinguished itself from others by the splendour that it gave the public funeral of its citizens that had died in war and especially by the repatriating of their mortal remains. In a society that believed in autochthony, this repatriation was, undoubtedly, significant. Since the beautiful death crystallised the courage of Achilles and Athenians alike, it was, from the outset, linked to speech. Indeed, heroic death and the civic beautiful death were the subject matter of elaborate speech.

This chapter argues that the affirmative function of tragedy, by which it aligns with rather than opposes the funeral speech, has been underemphasised in recent critical trends. While this multivocal genre encompasses and promotes conflicting perspectives through which questions about the city are raised, the chapter argues that Athenian spectators viewing theatrical representations of the stories about Athens that they heard glorified annually in the funeral speeches were quite likely to interpret them as affirmations of Athenian political and military action. Moreover, the multivocality of tragedy actually enables affirmatory interpretations because spectators are always provided with ‘escape routes’ away from any uncomfortable self-criticism. This is especially true of the tragedies bringing ‘ancient Athens’ to life. Most tragedies were set outside Athens, and thus allowed spectators a degree of distance, within which questioning and criticising their own city, and especially its warmaking, could be easier.