A striking feature of old comedy is its cannibalising of contemporaneous Athenian literature. The comic poets integrated the funeral oration into their comedies in three ways. Their first way was to bring on stage the funeral oration’s ancestors. Aristophanes characterised his choruses as such in three of his surviving plays. When these ancestors came to praise their own military exploits, they used the same terms as the funeral speeches and privileged the same historical period: the Persian Wars. Aristophanes clearly used this characterisation of the chorus for the sake of persuasion. By having these proud old men support the effort of a comic protagonist to bring peace, he defused the criticism that this effort went against the martial reputation of the Athenian people. The second way in which old comedy integrated the funeral oration was to warn theatregoers about the general dangers of praise. While Aristophanes sometimes quoted praise from dithyrambs as an example of what public speakers said in order to deceive the people, at other times, Aristophanes quoted from funeral speeches. The third way in which comedy engaged with the funeral oration was the deliberate confounding of the epitaphic genre’s characterisation of the Athenians as selfless and courageous.

Athens was a superpower whose ambitions required the ongoing sacrifice of men. To ensure those sacrifices were willingly made, the Athenians embraced a distinct form of ultra-patriotism, which was transmitted almost annually via the funeral speech. In this genre of public oratory, Athens was the leader and the protector of Greece, the wars that she fought were always altruistic and justified, and those who died in them were celebrated for their selfless courage. As this chapter will reveal, however, the obligation to fight was so readily embraced that most men had direct experience of combat. As a result, in Athens, the rhetoric of the funeral oration and the experience of war co-existed uneasily. On the one hand, the form of the funeral speech was determined by its function, which was to perpetuate the self-sacrifice of Athenian men. Other types of public discourse were free of such constraints, and whilst patriotism is reinforced by drama and forensic oratory, these genres could also explore the adverse human experience of war. These sometimes converging, sometimes diverging portrayals of war reveal a society that acknowledged the consequences of conflict but considered the patriotic cause worth the human cost.

Nicole Loraux’s great study of the funeral oration stresses the theme of timelessness. Loraux argued that the funeral orators typically presented an account of Athenian military history that avoided any focus on recent military actions. For this argument, Hyperides’s funeral speech presented a difficulty. Loraux described it as the ‘least conformist’ of the surviving speeches and as a ‘subversion’ lacking ‘fidelity’ to the epitaphic tradition. Certainly, the unique features of this speech have always been emphasised since its first publication in 1858. This speech focussed almost exclusively on the recent actions that led up to the public funeral of 322. It also broke with the genre’s general anonymity by singling out the fallen general, Leosthenes, for extensive praise. Loraux tried to account for all this by referring to the ‘exceptional circumstances’ that motivated Hyperides to compose his speech as a eulogy for an individual. This chapter studies closely the timeliness of this funeral speech. It connects the depiction of recent events with Hyperides’ wider political policies. It cautions against regarding the speech as an unusual subversion by recalling how few funeral speeches we have and by linking Hyperides’s speech to other examples of timeliness in what survives of the genre.

This chapter tests (and largely confirms) Nicole Loraux’s intriguing hypotheses concerning the authenticity of Pericles’ famous funeral oration and Thucydides’s ambivalent attitude towards this genre. It argues that Thucydides’ funeral speech of Pericles (2.35–46) owes much to the actual speech that the historical Pericles delivered in 431/0 BC to calm the widespread dissatisfaction with his policy of restraint vis-à-vis the Peloponnesian invaders. To achieve this end, Pericles focussed on one of the epitaphic commonplaces, namely the Athenians’ democracy and way of life as one of the reasons for their exceptional courage. Considering that Thucydides is highly critical of the epitaphic orators’ distorted version of the Athenian past (1.21.1), the inclusion of this funeral speech in his history may seem surprising, but it allowed Thucydides to explore the institutional/cultural reasons for the Athenians’ remarkable war-making ability, which his Corinthians had attributed earlier to the Athenians’ nature (1.70). Thucydides is not uncritical of Pericles’ idealization of Athens, though. By creating deliberate verbal echoes of Pericles’s eulogy in earlier and later passages of his work, Thucydides used the epitaphios logos of Pericles as a crucial point of comparison to illustrate the destructive impact of the war on the Athenians.

Nicole Loraux’s understanding of ideology as a system of representations and her analysis of the beauty of the dead would all seem to offer an opening for the incorporation of material culture into an analysis of the funeral oration. In spite of this, images had almost no function in her The Invention of Athens. For Loraux, the denial of an oracular spectacle of the body offered a contrast with Homeric valuations of death. She charted a move from the beautiful dead to the beautiful death that entailed a shift from aesthetics to morals. Loraux denied any role for visual culture in the funeral oration because, she argued, hearing had replaced sight. While Loraux’s analysis emerged from iconographic and structuralist approaches that implicitly contrasted abstraction and figuration, a conception of material culture that incorporates materiality and phenomenology offers important new perspectives. The funeral oration was only one component of a ritual that moved through spaces that were laden with objects and images articulating, manipulating, appropriating and, at times, rejecting the funeral oration’s beautiful death. Considering this wider material frame allows us to nuance some of Loraux’s central arguments.