1.1 Introduction

The French can be surprised that foreigners come to France to study ancient Greece.Footnote ¹ They understand why Anglophone philosophers do so, as it is a matter of genuine national pride that ‘French theory’ conquered the world in the 1980s.Footnote ² But relatively few French people realise that among English-speaking researchers of ancient Greece the so-called Paris school was no less influential.Footnote ³ The leading figures of this Paris-based circle of ancient historians were Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet.Footnote ⁴ Reading their books as well as those of younger circle-members has profoundly shaped our historiography. It turned me and other budding foreign researchers of ancient Greece into the cultural historians that we are today.Footnote ⁵ The book of the Paris school that exerted the greatest influence on my generation was The Invention of Athens by Nicole Loraux. It was the first book-length study of the speech that democratic Athens staged for the war dead. Before this book’s publication in 1981, ancient historians had accorded little importance to the funeral oration. For them, the genre consisted only of dubious clichés. It also endorsed a pronounced cultural militarism: funeral orators claimed that war brought only benefits and sought to deny the human costs. This was at odds with the strong anti-militarism on the French left during the 1970s. In writing a book about this genre, Loraux clearly was a trailblazer. The Invention of Athens established for the first time the vital importance of this almost annual speech in the formation of Athenian self-identity. Loraux showed how each staging of it helped the Athenians to maintain the same shared civic identity for over two centuries. The Invention of Athens was also clearly different from the other books of the Paris school. At the time, Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, for example, were researching the basic structures of Greek thought.Footnote ⁶ What Loraux had discovered was more complex: a detailed narrative about who the Athenians were and a set of discursive practices for its maintenance.

The Invention of Athens truly was a remarkable achievement. Yet, in spite of its transformative impact, it was still far from a complete work. Loraux deliberately played down individual authorship as a topic of study, which helped her to prove that the surviving funeral speeches were part of a long-stable genre. But this meant that The Invention of Athens left unanswered important questions about each of the seven surviving examples. An even larger gap concerned intertextuality. The Invention of Athens rightly saw traces of the funeral oration right across Athenian literature, but it never systematically compared the funeral oration with other types of public speech or drama. Therefore, Loraux was unable to demonstrate whether the other literary genres of classical Athens were ever a counterweight to the funeral oration’s cultural militarism. Without such intertextuality, her ability to prove many of her bold hypotheses was limited. The principal aim of this edited volume is to complete methodically The Invention of Athens. To this end, our book dedicates a chapter to each extant funeral speech in order to answer the important questions that Loraux left unanswered. It completes the vital intertextual analysis of the genre that is missing in The Invention of Athens. In filling such gaps, our chapters also aim to reassess numerous bold arguments and claims that Loraux made in her celebrated first book. Another aim of ours is to furnish a rich analysis of war’s overall place in the culture of democratic Athens.

1.2 The Transformative Impact of Nicole Loraux

The classical Athenians claimed to be the only Greeks to honour the war dead with a funeral oration.Footnote ⁷ Seven examples of what does appear to be a unique Athenian genre have survived in whole or part. The most famous of them is the epitaphios logos (‘funeral speech’) attributed to Pericles from 431/0 BC.Footnote ⁸ We also have the actual speeches that Demosthenes delivered in 338/7 and Hyperides in 323/2. The other four examples were by authors who never intended to speak at a public funeral for the fallen. In the early fourth century, Lysias and Plato published long literary versions of a funeral oration, while Isocrates, in his first major publication, drew extensively on the genre. Several decades earlier, Gorgias, soon after arriving in Athens from Sicily, had written his own epitaphios logos. Today, there is broad agreement that the official speech was a vitally important institution for articulating how the classical Athenians thought of themselves.Footnote ⁹ Therefore, when they study Athenian public discourse, cultural historians now invariably put this genre on a par with forensic and deliberative oratory as well as old comedy and tragedy.Footnote ¹⁰

Such a clear consensus makes it easy to forget how the funeral oration was viewed completely differently forty or more years ago. Indeed, before 1981, ancient historians considered the genre to be of little importance.Footnote ¹¹ As funeral orators always repeated ‘the same banalities’, theirs was ‘an untruthful genre’ that shed no light on Athenian politics.Footnote ¹² Instead, the funeral oration was taken only as an example of what Aristotle came to call epideictic oratory: a display speech with no serious purpose.Footnote ¹³ Admittedly, the epitaphios logos of 431/0 was still regularly studied because Pericles, many ancient historians thought, had brilliantly succeeded in escaping the funeral oration’s deadening constraints.Footnote ¹⁴ But no one ever saw the need for a dedicated study of this genre as a whole.Footnote ¹⁵

Therefore, a veritable paradigm shift has occurred in our understanding of the Athenian funeral oration. In the 1970s, Nicole Loraux, against the tide, decided to study the genre. Her The Invention of Athens, published in French in 1981 and in English five years later, is almost entirely responsible for this shift. One of its most important findings concerned Pericles’ funeral speech. Loraux put beyond doubt that it was part of an oral tradition that remained stable for over a century. The epitaphios logos of Pericles had the same structure as the others and touched on the same topics.Footnote ¹⁶ It included 31 of the 38 topoi (‘commonplaces’) that the fourth-century funeral speeches shared.Footnote ¹⁷ The Invention of Athens also found that the genre had a surprising focus. As a speech in honour of combatants who had fallen in a particular year, it, predictably, praised them,Footnote ¹⁸ exhorted the living to show as much courage as they had,Footnote ¹⁹ and consoled their bereaved relatives.Footnote ²⁰ Surprisingly, however, it directed most of its praise to the Athenians as a people.Footnote ²¹ Consequently, every citizen who listened to an epitaphios logos felt ‘greater, nobler and finer’ (Pl. Menex. 235b). Loraux confirmed that this praise usually consisted of a positive narrative about Athenian military history,Footnote ²² in which the Athenians were almost always victorious.Footnote ²³ In fighting for the freedom or safety of others, they always waged just wars. Funeral orators characterised the Athenians in the same way for 130 years. They did so, according to Loraux, because this was how the dēmos (‘people’) continued to think of themselves.Footnote ²⁴ Loraux really was the first ancient historian to identify such complex collective thinking. Therefore, the final important finding of The Invention of Athens was the existence itself of Athenian self-identity.

Loraux closely analysed how this epitaphic narrative operated. It basically was a series of disconnected erga, or exploits.Footnote ²⁵ In discussing this catalogue of exploits, funeral orators always distinguished between mythical and historical erga.Footnote ²⁶ The Invention of Athens demonstrated how each historical exploit revealed standard characteristics of the Athenians. Such exploits always showed them to be agathoi andres (‘courageous men’),Footnote ²⁷ who surpassed all others in aretē (‘courage’).Footnote ²⁸ Historical Athenians regularly fought for the freedom of other Greeks or for justice.Footnote ²⁹ Several of their erga concerned the protection of persecuted weak states.Footnote ³⁰ This recital of erga gave pride of place to the Persian Wars of 490 and 480–79.Footnote ³¹ These wars, after all, included several great victories, in which the Athenians had demonstrated all their ‘national’ characteristics.

Loraux was clear-eyed about how the catalogue of exploits distorted history. Because the dēmos believed that a defeat was usually due to deilia (‘cowardice’),Footnote ³² funeral orators avoided mentioning defeats because they would call into question the aretē that the dēmos claimed.Footnote ³³ When this was not possible, they turned a defeat into a temporary setback.Footnote ³⁴ Alternatively, they attributed it to, for example, the will of the gods or the mistakes of other people.Footnote ³⁵ A second distortion was the catalogue’s Athenocentrism.Footnote ³⁶ Like the other Greeks, the Athenians fought as part of a military coalition most of the time.Footnote ³⁷ Funeral orators often twisted such joint military efforts into purely Athenian ones.Footnote ³⁸ When such a distortion would be too farfetched, they made Athens the undisputed military leader.Footnote ³⁹

The classical Greeks often used myth to justify a claim about themselves.Footnote ⁴⁰ Loraux rightly saw that the mythical erga had this function in the epitaphic narrative. The extant epitaphioi logoi (‘funeral speeches’) had in common three standard myths. In the first, the Athenians repelled the invasion of Greece by the Amazons (e.g. Dem. 60.8; Lys. 2.4–6; Pl. Menex. 239b). Loraux recognised the parallels between this ‘barbarian’ people and the funeral oration’s Persians.Footnote ⁴¹ This myth clearly supported what the genre claimed about Athens in the Persian Wars. The second myth concerned the Thebans’ refusal to let their defeated enemy, the Argives, bury their war dead (e.g. Dem. 60.8–9; Lys. 2.7–10; Pl. Menex. 239b). Because the classical Greeks believed such a burial to be a divine nomos (‘custom’ or ‘unwritten law’),Footnote ⁴² this myth helped to justify the claim that Athens always fought for justice. The final myth had the Athenians protecting the children of Heracles, who had come to Athens as refugees (e.g. Dem. 60.8; Lys. 2.11–16; Pl. Menex. 239b). In order to do so, they had to defeat an enormous coalition army from the Peloponnese. This myth lent support to, among other things, the epitaphic characterisation of the Athenians as the protectors of the persecuted and weak.

The Invention of Athens put beyond doubt the genre’s vital importance in maintaining Athenian self-identity. The premature death of fellow citizens in battle had the potential to call into question core beliefs that the dēmos held.Footnote ⁴³ It could lead to dangerous political opposition during a war. Loraux plausibly suggested that a major function of the funeral oration was to affirm what the dēmos believed in the face of such potential negative responses.Footnote ⁴⁴ What made it more effective for this discursive maintenance was its frequency.Footnote ⁴⁵ Athens staged a public funeral for the war dead each year when there were Athenian casualties.Footnote ⁴⁶ Because it went to war in two out of three years in the fifth century and even more frequently in the fourth century,Footnote ⁴⁷ an epitaphios logos would have regularly been an annual event. The genre also furnished the most detailed account of Athenian history to which the dēmos had access.Footnote ⁴⁸ The other genres of public oratory and drama focussed much less on self-identity and the past. This was due to their different primary functions. Politicians and litigants wanted to win a political debate or a legal case.Footnote ⁴⁹ They mentioned a core belief or a military campaign only if it helped them to do so.Footnote ⁵⁰ Since the poets of old comedy had to raise as many laughs as possible, their comedies were rarely lessons in civic education. The tragic poets set the majority of their plays outside Athens,Footnote ⁵¹ which meant that it was less common for them to focus explicitly on Athenian self-identity.

In spite of their different functions, these literary genres are still all good evidence for how non-elite Athenians viewed themselves and their world more generally. Although dramatists, politicians and litigants belonged almost always to the elite, their audiences were predominantly non-elite.Footnote ⁵² In dramatic agōnes (‘contests’), state-appointed judges might have formally voted on who the winner would be,Footnote ⁵³ but they clearly took their lead from how the non-elite theatregoers had responded to each play (e.g. Dem. 18.265, 19.33, 21.226). The result was that comic and tragic poets needed to reproduce the non-elite viewpoint (e.g. Pl. Leg. 659a–c, 700a–1b). Politicians and litigants had to do this even more because the outcomes of their agōnes depended on the actual votes of their audiences (e.g. Pl. Resp. 493d). By contrast, funeral orators were not competing for votes in a formal agōn (‘contest’).Footnote ⁵⁴ Nevertheless, Loraux was absolutely right to assume that they articulated no less how the dēmos generally thought. After all, the democratic council chose a funeral orator from among the leading politicians.Footnote ⁵⁵ Such orators knew that they had to meet the expectations of a large crowd of mourners.Footnote ⁵⁶

The Invention of Athens played a major role in the cultural turn in Classical Studies. As a result, it can be forgotten that Loraux lacked the theoretical tools that contemporary cultural historians take for granted.Footnote ⁵⁷ Today, discourse analysis and the studies of oral tradition and social memory are well established. This was not the case when Loraux wrote The Invention of Athens. Consequently, her discovery, in the funeral oration, of a complex narrative of self-identity was a remarkable achievement. Vincent Azoulay and Paulin Ismard (Chapter 3) remind us that Marxism was one of the few tools that Loraux had at her disposal. In capitalism, Karl Marx argued, the bourgeoisie had created an ideology to obscure their economic exploitation of the working class.Footnote ⁵⁸ In his eyes, ideology lacked any independence from economics.Footnote ⁵⁹ Because it was only an illusory reflection of this reality, studying it was of little importance.Footnote ⁶⁰ Instead, for Marx, the economic base was the key for understanding capitalist society. Azoulay and Ismard rightly point out that The Invention of Athens explicitly rejected Marx’s traditional argument.Footnote ⁶¹ In its conclusion, Loraux argued that ‘an institutional illusion is still a fact’.Footnote ⁶² Athenian self-identity, according to her, was thus ‘an integral part of Athenian political practice’. It mediated the relations that the Athenians had with reality and was independent of the economic base. Loraux reinforced this rejection by choosing, not ideology, but l’imaginaire (‘the imaginary’) for describing ‘all figures in which a society apprehends its identity’. Loraux made abundantly clear that she had borrowed this term from the exiled Greek, Cornelius Castoriadis,Footnote ⁶³ who, with Claude Lefort, had founded a left-wing anti-Stalinist intellectual circle (Figure 1.1).Footnote ⁶⁴ Among their criticisms of Marx was his unwarranted devaluing of culture.Footnote ⁶⁵

Figure 1.1 Nicole Loraux speaks at a conference in Montrouge (Paris) in 1987, along with, from left to right, Claude Lefort, Louis Dumont and François Furet.

Paris © École des hautes études en sciences sociales, photograph of a session of the EHESS conference held on 12 and 13 June 1987, Grig Pop collection, photo no.152  EHE 520.

The surprise of Azoulay and Ismard’s chapter is that Loraux’s relationship to Marxism was more nuanced than her conclusion suggests. Indeed, in a later abridged edition of The Invention of Athens for French readers, Loraux exchanged the imaginary for the Marxist concept of ideology that she had first encountered in the 1970s.Footnote ⁶⁶ It is tempting to interpret this exchange simply as her combative response to Castoriadis’ public criticism of her use of his new term.Footnote ⁶⁷ Yet, the chapter of Azoulay and Ismard puts beyond doubt that a version of Marxism was always a critical tool for her. The famous re-reading of Marx by Louis Althusser clearly echoes throughout The Invention of Athens.Footnote ⁶⁸ Certainly, Althusser, as a longstanding Marxist, held that ideology was more or less about the economic base because it articulated for individuals what economic roles they were supposed to perform. Nevertheless, he also went beyond Marx by seeing ideology as largely independent from economics and as a key phenomenon for understanding any society.Footnote ⁶⁹ Loraux, of course, extended Althusser’s re-reading by disconnecting ideology entirely from the economic base and making it a product, not of an economic class, but of the political community as a whole.Footnote ⁷⁰ Even here, however, Azoulay and Ismard conclude, there were still echoes of Marx, for Loraux had taken over both extensions from the many Marxism-inspired studies of classical Greece in the 1970s.Footnote ⁷¹ Cultural historians today do not always acknowledge their debts to Marxism.Footnote ⁷² The Invention of Athens shows us how important it was as a tool for their pioneering figures.

1.3 The Public Honours for the War Dead

Thucydides set the scene for Pericles’ famous funeral speech of 431/0 by describing the public funeral for the war dead (2.34). Rich as his description was, it actually failed to mention three timai (‘honours’) that classical Athens granted them.Footnote ⁷³ His chapter 2.34 also did not provide sufficient background for measuring how exceptional these honours were. The Invention of Athens was strong on filling this chapter’s gaps.Footnote ⁷⁴ By the late 430s, the Athenians had for a long time brought home the bones of their war dead, whom they had cremated on or near the battlefield.Footnote ⁷⁵ The first stage of the public burial was the prothesis (‘display’) of these bones for two days in cypress-wood coffins.Footnote ⁷⁶ Here there was one coffin for each of the ten Cleisthenic phulai, or tribes (Thuc. 2.34.2–3). The bereaved deposited offerings next to the coffin that contained, supposedly, the bones of their loved one.Footnote ⁷⁷ On the third day, an ekphora (‘funeral procession’) escorted these ten coffins to the vicinity of the public tombs. These tombs were located in the Ceramicus – the potters’ district, which was, according to Thucydides, ‘the most beautiful suburb of the city’ (5; cf. Ar. Av. 395–9). That the Athenians used wagons for this ekphora points to it covering a reasonable distance, which suggests that the prothesis probably took place in the Athenian agora (‘civic centre’).Footnote ⁷⁸ Loraux brought to the fore what was exceptional in these first stages of the public funeral. In classical Athens, it was illegal for a family to stage a prothesis of more than a day.Footnote ⁷⁹ The longer one for the war dead helped to make the public funeral itself a substantial timē (‘honour’). Loraux plausibly proposed that the armed forces played a large part in this ekphora.Footnote ⁸⁰ She was the first to appreciate the significance of the cypress wood of the coffins.Footnote ⁸¹ The palaces of epic poetry were built out of this timber (e.g. Hom Od. 17.340), while the classical Greeks considered cypress to be precious, like silver and gold, and a guarantor of deathless memory (e.g. Pind. Pyth. 5.39; Plut. Vit. Per. 12.6).

The first timē that Thucydides failed to mention was the public tomb before which the funeral orator spoke. Such a burial place took the form of a tumulus or a walled rectangular enclosure.Footnote ⁸² The most conspicuous constituent of it was a list of the year’s casualties that was organised by tribe.Footnote ⁸³ This list could be a line of ten individual slabs or a continuous wall with recesses between the phulai (Figure 1.2). A casualty list was often two metres in height and several metres in length.Footnote ⁸⁴ Plato’s Socrates understandably described this burial as ‘beautiful and magnificent’ (Menex. 234c). In the early years of Athenian democracy, rich Athenians abandoned the archaic practice of building lavish private tombs.Footnote ⁸⁵ As a group, they began to provide such tombs for their relatives again only in the 430s. Because the rectangular ones that they now built cost thousands of drachmas,Footnote ⁸⁶ Plato’s Socrates was right to assert that a penēs (‘poor man’) who had died in battle gained a tomb for which his family could never have paid (Menex. 234c). But a public tomb for the fallen was also always grander than elite private ones (Xen. Hell. 2.4.17), as it had to accommodate ten tribal coffins and a long list of casualties.

Figure 1.2 The list of the war dead from one Cleisthenic tribe that was part of a collective tomb of 460 BC or thereabouts. Paris, Louvre Museum, inv. no. MA 863 (IG i³ 1147).

Photo courtesy of H. R. Goette.

Such a tomb could also include a figural relief. Loraux was not alone in overestimating the commonness of these reliefs.Footnote ⁸⁷ Indeed, only two of the many casualty lists that survive from the fifth century had such decoration.Footnote ⁸⁸ The earliest known one was the list of the war dead from 433/2. Although the relief itself is lost, a drawing of it by L. F. S Fauvel shows three hoplites fighting.Footnote ⁸⁹ The fragment of the next relief in date is today in Oxford.Footnote ⁹⁰ Coming from the second half of the fifth century, it depicts a fallen hoplite who is being protected by another. The final known relief is on the casualty list of 394/3 (Figure 18.2).Footnote ⁹¹ This well-preserved relief has a horseman attacking a fallen hoplite, whom, again, another hoplite tries to protect. These three reliefs were not depictions of outright military victory.Footnote ⁹² Instead, they focussed on ‘the struggles, dangers and risks of war’.Footnote ⁹³ In doing so, they depicted the fallen bearing the kindunoi (‘dangers’) that would kill them.

By contrast, it was much more common for a casualty list to include an inscribed poem.Footnote ⁹⁴ Such epigrams drew heavily on epic poetry in their praise of the war dead.Footnote ⁹⁵ The three recorded epigrams from 433/2 make a good example. The first praised the fallen for revealing aretē and acquiring a mnēma (‘memorial’) of their military success (IG i³ 1179.3–5), while the second noted how the enemy’s cowardice had resulted in their slaughter or retreat (8–9). The final epigram reinforced what the Athenian dead had gained. By dying in battle, they had put their aretē beyond doubt and created eukleia (‘glory’) for the state (12–13). We find a comparable cluster of ideas in the epigram for those who fell in 447/6 (IG i³ 1162.45–8):

Funeral orators expanded upon such ideas about this ‘most becoming (euprepestatē)’ or ‘most beautiful (kallistē)’ death.Footnote ⁹⁶ They explained that falling in battle for the state or for public ideals resulted in deathless praise and eukleia.Footnote ⁹⁷ From such a death the war dead secured athanatos mnēmē (‘deathless memory’) of their courage (Hyper. 6.27–30; Lys. 2.79–81). This mnēmē – the orators added – extended to their youthfulness, as, by dying young, they had escaped the decline of old age (Dem. 60.32–3; Hyper. 6.42–3; Lys. 2.78–9).

Thucydides also failed to mention the two timai that came after the funeral oration. The first of them were the agōnes (‘contests’) that Athens staged in honour of all war dead each year.Footnote ⁹⁸ The annual sacrifices for them were presumably made as part of this competitive festival.Footnote ⁹⁹ These agōnes in athletics, music and horsemanship were extensive enough to attract foreign competitors.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The first evidence of them are a hydria and two lebētes.Footnote ¹⁰¹ These bronze vessels range in date from soon after the Second Persian War to the second half of the fifth century. The inscription on each confirms that it was a prize from the games in honour of the Athenian war dead (IG i³ 523–5). These contests clearly continued into the fourth century (e.g. Dem. 60.13; Lys. 2.80). In classical times, the Greeks staged public agōnes only for gods and demi-gods.Footnote ¹⁰² Therefore, the staging of them for the war dead points to the dēmos considering them to be heroes.Footnote ¹⁰³ Loraux rightly saw corroboration of this heroisation in epitaphioi logoi.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Lysias, like Demosthenes (60.36), had the war dead receiving ‘the same honours as the gods’ (Lys. 2.80; cf. Isoc. 4.84). In his non-extant funeral speech of 440/39, Pericles appears to have gone further, for he argued, according to Stesimbrotus, that the war dead’s immortality was evident not only in their cultic timai but also in the agatha (‘benefits’) that they continued to give.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Of course, it was in the hope of such supernatural agatha that the Greeks worshipped their demi-gods.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The final timē on which Thucydides 2.34 was silent was the state’s material support of the war dead’s families.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ For their sons, this support culminated in a civic ceremony at the annual festival of the City Dionysia, when they turned eighteen years old. Before the tragic agōn (‘contest’) started, the state publicly gave the sons the gifts of a hoplite-panoply and proedria (‘front-row seating’).Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Some of the honours that the dēmos granted the war dead were derived from epic poetry. Loraux began comparing these honours and the epic ones for fallen warriors in The Invention of Athens.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ A year after finishing the writing of her first book, she completed this comparison for what would become a celebrated Franco-Italian conference on death in ancient societies.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Her chapter in our edited volume (Chapter 2) is the first English translation of her famous conference paper from 1977. It leaves us in no doubt that what the funeral orators described as ‘the most beautiful death’ went back to Homer.Footnote ¹¹¹ In his Iliad, a hero’s death in battle proved for all time his aretē and gave him deathless memory of his glory and youthfulness.Footnote ¹¹² What guaranteed all this was his mnēma, which triggered the memories of passers-by, and the recounting of klea andrōn, that is, his glorious exploits, in a poet’s song.Footnote ¹¹³ Loraux’s chapter explores how the Athenian dēmos copied – or more often transformed – this epic model. Homer gave his ‘beautiful death’ only to the heroes, such as Hector and Patroclus, who were elite leaders.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In the Iliad, non-elite soldiers who had fallen in battle were granted much less, as they were cremated and buried in a mass grave without any ceremony.Footnote ¹¹⁵ It was assumed that in Hades they would join only the nōnumoi (‘the nameless’), that is, the masses that were deprived of any eternal glory. Among the important transformations that the Athenian dēmos made to this epic model was their granting of the ‘beautiful death’ of the elite heroes to all fellow citizens, regardless of their military rank and social class.

Loraux’s chapter also boldly claims that democratic egalitarianism was the main organising principle of the Athenian public funeral.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Certainly, egalitarianism was among the strongest principles of Athenian democracy.Footnote ¹¹⁷ For his part, Euripides called Athens an isopsēphos polis (‘equal-voting city’), in which the rich and the poor ruled ‘equally’, enjoying equality in public speech as well as the law-courts (Supp. 353, 407–8, 430–41). Greek democrats justified this equal granting of political and legal timai on the grounds that all citizens shared in vital respects an equal nature.Footnote ¹¹⁸ For Loraux and others, this egalitarianism could be seen most clearly in the Athenian casualty lists, as they gave the same space to the name of every combatant.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Loraux saw it too in how funeral orators narrated military history: they almost always attributed Athenian victories anonymously to ‘the ancestors’, ‘the fathers’, ‘the Athenians’ or those being buried.Footnote ¹²⁰ Such anonymity gave equal responsibility for military success to every combatant.Footnote ¹²¹ It came at the expense of elite generals, who, in other public contexts, continued to be honoured individually for such military success.Footnote ¹²² Literary evidence backs up this bold claim of Loraux (e.g. Dem. 18.208). In a tragic fragment from the 420s, for example, mythical Athenians who die in war were collectively given a koinos (‘common’) tomb and isē (‘equal’) glory.Footnote ¹²³ The classical Athenians regularly employed koinos and compound words with isos to describe or to justify democratic egalitarianism.Footnote ¹²⁴

Loraux also understood well that that the public funeral marginalised the normally central role of families.Footnote ¹²⁵ In classical Athens, relatives were still obliged to bury their dead and to look after their graves.Footnote ¹²⁶ Therefore, by fulfilling this obligation for the fallen, the Athenian state was intruding deeply into private affairs. Those who felt this intrusion most acutely were Attic women because this traditional mortuary obligation mainly fell on them.Footnote ¹²⁷ It was they who washed and clothed the dead, mourned for them at the prothesis, played a conspicuous part in funeral processions and took care of their graves.Footnote ¹²⁸ Yet, in the state’s burial of the war dead, there were no longer bodies for them to care for. Now they could leave grave offerings only next to a tribal coffin or at the public burial itself. The funeral orators did acknowledge the penthos (‘mourning’) and the lupē (‘pain’) of the bereaved.Footnote ¹²⁹ Nevertheless, they also instructed them to suppress these feelings by remembering instead the ‘beautiful death’ of their men.Footnote ¹³⁰ Indeed, the public funeral generally strove to ignore the private lives of the fallen.Footnote ¹³¹ By omitting their patronymics and demotics, the casualty lists had an important role in this.Footnote ¹³² But so did the funeral oration in its focus on their death in battle instead of what they had done in life.Footnote ¹³³ In praising all the dead equally, this speech also erased the social differences between them.Footnote ¹³⁴

Nathan Arrington (Chapter 4) studies the painted pots that fifth-century families purchased as grave offerings for the war dead. His chapter shows how such purchases helped the bereaved to resist their marginalisation by the state. Loraux categorically refused to study such private art. In part, this was due to her argument about the transformation of the ‘beautiful death’.Footnote ¹³⁵ In archaic times, the beauty of the fallen elite soldier resided in his sōma (‘body’) at the pre-burial display. In transferring this beauty to his decision to die, the Athenian dēmos, Loraux argued, no longer wanted to represent the war dead’s bodies. However, Arrington draws our attention to the many pictures of the war dead on red-figure loutrophoroi and white-ground lēkuthoi. As both these types of Athenian pot were employed in readying a body for the prothesis, they were common grave offerings. Loutrophoroi often had paintings of combat or of a soldier leaving home or standing beside his grave.Footnote ¹³⁶ Sometimes they even depicted a casualty list.Footnote ¹³⁷ Such ‘warrior’ loutrophoroi were among the grave goods in the one public tomb for the war dead that has been excavated.Footnote ¹³⁸ The iconography of many lēkuthoi was no less tightly linked to the fallen.Footnote ¹³⁹ Because potters generally needed to produce what their customers wanted, these paintings let us see how families thought privately about their loss.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

Certainly, they were proud of the death of their men in battle because this iconography always styled the dead as soldiers. Importantly, though, Arrington puts beyond doubt that it also reveals other thoughts that harmonised far less with public discourse. For example, loutrophoroi frequently depicted elite private tombs that were well tended by females. While all of this was no longer possible, relatives, it seems, still imagined their fulfilling of the traditional obligation to their dead. Families, clearly, also wanted to remember what their dead relatives had done in life, as pots often depicted them as, for example, men who had practised hunting or horsemanship. Because such activities were exclusive elite pursuits,Footnote ¹⁴¹ these images show a rejection of the epitaphic idea that there had been no social differences among the war dead. In addition, the soldiers on these loutrophoroi and lēkuthoi were invariably physically fit and handsome,Footnote ¹⁴² suggesting that the archaic idea of the ‘beautiful dead’ still had wide currency. These pots, finally, poignantly depicted the intense grief that family members continued to feel years after the premature loss of their loved ones.Footnote ¹⁴³ For them, suppressing their direct experience of war’s personal cost was far harder than the funeral oration glibly suggested.

1.4 Dating the Honours for the Fallen

The Invention of Athens furnished a new dating of the epitaphios logos. Pericles himself confirmed that this timē was a late addition to the public funeral (Thuc. 2.35.1). Postclassical authors dated this addition to the immediate aftermath of the Second Persian War.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ It is still quite common to accept their dating,Footnote ¹⁴⁵ but Loraux argued that content in the genre could not be so old.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The standard myth about Heracles’ children is a good example (e.g. Dem. 60.8; Lys. 2.11–16; Pl. Menex. 239b). Among other things, it clearly supported a hostile stance towards Sparta. Eurystheus, after all, had invaded Attica with a coalition army from the Peloponnese. Loraux is surely right to date this myth to several years after the decisive rupture between Athens and Sparta in 462/1 (Thuc. 1.102). The same applies to autochthony, which is another standard topic in funeral speeches.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Athenian thinking about their indigenous origin was fully elaborated only mid-century.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Therefore, the funeral oration in the form that has survived was probably added to the public funeral only in the 450s. This suggests that it was, in fact, the last timē that fifth-century Athenians added to the extensive group of honours that they granted their war dead.

Loraux’s downdating of the funeral speech initially met with wide acceptance.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ It has an important consequence for our understanding of the epitaphic genre. There are clear antecedents, well before the 450s, for what we find in the funeral oration. For example, in his Persians of 471/0, Aeschylus reduced the Persian Wars to the naval battle of Salamis, which he characterised as a purely Athenian victory.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Such Athenocentrism would become a hallmark of the epitaphios logos. Another hallmark was the treating of Athenian military history as a catalogue of mythical and historical erga. From the early fifth century, monuments celebrating military victories in the Athenian agora already had simple versions of such a catalogue (e.g. Aeschin. 3.183–5). For instance, the painted colonnade displayed side-by-side paintings of the mythical victories at Troy and against the Amazons as well as historical ones at Marathon and Oenoe (Figure 15.1).Footnote ¹⁵¹ It is true that the funeral oration would become vitally important for the maintenance of civic self-identity from the mid-fifth century. Nevertheless, important elements of this imaginary had already been elaborated in other forums of Athenian public discourse decades earlier.

Thucydides described the public burial itself as a patrios nomos, or ancestral custom (2.34.1; cf. Lys. 2.81), which implied that it was old and stable. His chapter 2.34 also claimed that Athens had always buried the war dead in the dēmosion sēma, or public cemetery (Figure 1.3). It described those who died at Marathon as the one exception. Because of their exceptional aretē, Thucydides claimed, they had been honoured with a public tomb on the battlefield. Certainly, Thucydides was right to see this custom as old because we will see that burying the war dead at public expense dated back to 507/6. Nevertheless, Thucydides still ‘made a blunder’ in his often-quoted chapter.Footnote ¹⁵² The war dead of 490/89 were far from exceptional: the Athenians who died at Salamis and Plataea, for example, were buried just as closely to where they had fallen.Footnote ¹⁵³ Indeed, the dēmos decided to move such burials to the Ceramicus permanently only in the 460s.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Before this decision, they generally buried their war dead on or near the battlefield.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ The timai for the war dead were also not stable. It is true that even the earliest public burials could have an epigram or a tribal list of casualties.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ However, the games for the war dead are attested only after the Second Persian War. Loraux convincingly argued that the funeral oration was a much later addition. This means that the dēmos added or modified timai for their fallen for well over fifty years.

Figure 1.3 Tombs in the dēmosion sēma (‘public cemetery’) in the Ceramicus.

Photography courtesy of H. R. Goette.

The Invention of Athens certainly recognised that the public funeral of the late 430s had emerged out of a decades-long process.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ But Loraux was wrong to infer from this that the nomos lacked ‘a definitive date of birth’.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The democratic revolution of 508/7 quickly transformed Athenian warmaking. The public burial of the war dead mirrored this transformation and could even have been one of the reforms of Cleisthenes himself.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Before Athenian democracy, most soldiers belonged to the elite, while Athenian leaders usually initiated wars on their own initiative.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ In archaic Athens, therefore, polemos (‘war’) was by and large a private elite activity. The treatment of the war dead reflected this situation: it was rich families that privately buried those of their members who had died in war. Many pots from sixth-century Athens depicted the return of the bodies of dead soldiers to these families.Footnote ¹⁶¹ The tombs that elite Athenians built at home often depicted the dead as soldiers.Footnote ¹⁶² The epigrams on such tombs drew heavily on Homer’s idea of ‘the beautiful death’.Footnote ¹⁶³

In 508/7, the dēmos rose up against an elite leader who wanted to be Athens’ new tyrant.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ They had had enough of the internal struggles of their elite and now demanded the leading role in politics.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Cleisthenes quickly realised this popular demand: he made the assembly and a new democratic council the final arbiters of public actions and laws.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Although it took another fifty years for Athenian democracy to be fully consolidated, it was still the political reforms of Cleisthenes that had put the dēmos in charge and made possible such consolidation. Therefore, these reforms are often rightly seen as the true beginning of Athenian dēmokratia.Footnote ¹⁶⁷

It is noted much less often that Cleisthenes also proposed military reforms.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ In 508/7, neighbouring states were in fact preparing to invade Attica.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Archaic Athenians had been particularly inept at stopping such invasions.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Cleisthenes created a new public army of hoplites and the first-ever effective mechanism for mobilising combatants.Footnote ¹⁷¹ The dēmos also quickly assumed the sole responsibility for foreign affairs (e.g. Hdt. 5.66, 73, 96–7). Classical-period writers recognised that Cleisthenes had made Athens much stronger militarily.Footnote ¹⁷² Certainly, his military reforms immediately helped the Athenians to perform much better in war: in 507/6, the new public army of Athenian hoplites defeated those of Chalcis and Boeotia in back-to-back battles (Hdt. 5.74–7). Polemos was now a public activity, which was wide open to non-elite participants. The treatment of those who fell in these first battles reflected this transformation. The dēmos agreed to bury all of them ‘at public expense (dēmosiai)’.Footnote ¹⁷³ That the epigram on their battlefield tomb explicitly noted this significant change points to it being a conscious decision.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Therefore, it appears that the new collective burial of the war dead had been introduced in part to legitimise the new popular regime.Footnote ¹⁷⁵

1.5 The Timeliness of the Historical Funeral Speeches

Loraux rightly saw that a major function of the funeral oration was to reassure the dēmos. In the face of premature deaths and military setbacks, each speaker sought to convince them that they remained the same people. Depicting the most recent war as another example of their virtuous warmaking greatly helped him to do so.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ The Invention of Athens clearly showed how funeral speeches twisted erga in order to preserve such a story. But it never explained what motivated the speakers to assimilate the often-unsettling present into the epitaphic narrative. The main motivation probably came from the strong personal interest that each funeral orator had in the actual immediate internal politics. However, Loraux repeatedly denied that the genre ever engaged with contemporary internal politics.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ For her, an official speech seeking to foster unity could exhibit only timelessness. Nevertheless, the three historical speeches that survive call her assumption into question. Pericles, Demosthenes and Hyperides were the main proponents of the wars in which those being buried had died. Pericles faced ongoing criticism of his war, while Demosthenes had been the politician most responsible for a crushing defeat. Although going well in 323/2, Hyperides’ new war against the Macedonians had been for years a contentious proposal. This means that their fitting of the current war into the epitaphic tradition was not a simple act of patriotism. They were also defending their original proposals and discouraging further public criticism.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ That they saw the public funeral for the war dead as an important opportunity to achieve this goal proves again the genre’s central role in Athenian public discourse. Of course, it was the boulē (‘council’) that selected leading politicians to speak in honour of the war dead. It appears that councillors often chose the one that had the greatest personal motivation for putting a positive ‘spin’ on the most recent war.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ In their spins, we will see, these three speakers omitted or minimised the catalogue of erga. This suggests that a funeral orator had a greater freedom in his treatment of the genre’s stock topics than Loraux thought.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Since antiquity, there has been a debate about the authorship of the epitaphios logos of 431/0. This speech’s clear timeliness strengthens the case that Pericles rather than Thucydides was the actual author.

Traditionally, the extant funeral speech of Pericles was viewed as superior to the other epitaphioi logoi and so rarely compared to them. Among the most important findings of The Invention of Athens was that his speech was an integral part of a longstanding tradition. Yet, in making her strong case for this, Loraux deliberately neglected three fundamental questions about this specific epitaphios logos. Answering these questions is the goal of Bernd Steinbock’s contribution to our edited volume (Chapter 5). The first question is whether Pericles or Thucydides was the real author. Loraux strongly sided with those who primarily saw it as Periclean.Footnote ¹⁸¹ However, she felt no need to make an equally strong case for his authorship. Her best argument was the speech’s inclusion of epitaphic topoi.Footnote ¹⁸² The weakness here is evident in the two other examples to which this epitaphios logos was closest in date: Lysias and Plato included no fewer commonplaces in theirs, but they never intended to speak at a public funeral for the war dead.Footnote ¹⁸³ Since many a writer in classical Athens, it seems, could pen a decent funeral speech, Thucydides could easily have put one together years afterwards.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ The second fundamental question is why Pericles’ epitaphios logos differed so much from what Lysias and Plato would write. They spent over half of their speeches cataloguing military erga in mythical and historical times,Footnote ¹⁸⁵ whereas Pericles skipped this catalogue entirely (Thuc. 2.36.2–4).

Steinbock finds answers to these two questions in the timeliness of this specific funeral speech. His chapter demonstrates that Pericles’ epitaphios logos was part of his careful management of an immediate political crisis. Months earlier, this politician had convinced the dēmos to abandon Attica in the face of Sparta’s anticipated invasion (Thuc. 2.13–14). When, however, they saw their khōra (‘countryside’) being ravaged, they grew angry with him, demanding to be led out to fight.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Nevertheless, fighting remained much too dangerous because Sparta’s coalition army was several times larger. Therefore, Pericles was forced to manage their anger as carefully as he could (2.22.1–2). It is clear that this management extended into the war’s first public funeral. The funeral oration’s catalogue included standard erga in which the Athenians had defeated invaders with much larger armies (e.g. Lys. 2.4–6, 11–17, 20–7). Because rehearsing them now ran the risk of reviving the popular clamour to fight, Pericles replaced the catalogue with a eulogy of Athenian democracy.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ While brief praise of dēmokratia was a standard topic of the genre, Pericles described it in much more detail than the other funeral orators did.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ He showed how it had taught the dēmos not just courage but also other characteristics that supported their military success.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ This epitaphios logos, it is clear, is not a generic example that Thucydides put together years afterwards. Steinbock is surely right that its close fit with the internal politics of 431/0 points strongly to Periclean authorship. This timeliness also explains why this example lacked a catalogue of exploits.

In general, Thucydides, as a historian, criticised the version of Athenian history that funeral orators carefully maintained.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ In their catalogues of exploits, for example, Athens never changed: it had always been Greece’s most powerful state.Footnote ¹⁹¹ In his book 1, Thucydides directly challenged this account by arguing that other states, in mythical times, had been more powerful, with Athens rising to the top only after the Second Persian War.Footnote ¹⁹² Therefore, the third fundamental question about Pericles’ funeral speech is why Thucydides, who was a critic of the epitaphic genre, included it at all. Steinbock’s answer is that he shared the interest that Pericles had displayed in democracy’s impact on military affairs. Elsewhere in book 1, Thucydides reconstructed the debate about starting the Peloponnesian War that the Spartans had had with their allies. In this debate, the Corinthians compared the ‘national’ characteristics of the two sides.Footnote ¹⁹³ The Athenians, they argued, were innovative and courageous risk-takers, who were selfless (Thuc. 1.70.1–6). The Spartans, according to them, were, by contrast, slow, risk-averse and selfish (71.1–3). In books 3 and 4, Thucydides illustrated how these different characteristics had resulted in Athenian military success in the war’s first phase.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ His Corinthians, of course, saw such characteristics as innate (Thuc. 1.70.9). By putting Pericles’ epitaphios logos in book 2, Thucydides was instead suggesting that the Athenians had actually learnt these characteristics from being socialised in their democracy. Including this epitaphios logos, Steinbock concludes, did not undermine his historical revisionism, since Pericles had, helpfully for Thucydides, skipped the genre’s traditional account of Athenian history.

In his epitaphios logos, Demosthenes exhibited as much timeliness as Pericles had. Nevertheless, the immediate internal politics of 338/7 that he was trying to get under control were even more difficult than those of 431/0. The Athenians had lost a thousand hoplites in the recent battle against Philip II.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ With the defeat at Chaeronea, their decades-long independence in foreign affairs had come to a shocking end.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ In the months that followed, the dēmos struggled to make sense of this reversal. Out of anger, they were lashing out at political leaders whom they thought to be the most responsible for the disaster.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ As he rose to deliver his funeral speech, Demosthenes knew that he was one of their targets because fighting Philip II had more or less been his failed policy.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ Leonhard Burckhardt (Chapter 6) captures the spin that Demosthenes put on this crushing defeat. This politician argued that the Athenians had fought at Chaeronea for the sake of the freedom of the Greeks (e.g. Dem. 60.18, 23). He reminded the dēmos that they, as a people, had always done this (e.g. 10–11). In choosing his policy, therefore, the war dead had acted consistently with the ‘national’ character of the Athenians. Burckhardt shows how this spin made the defeat meaningful and neatly justified Demosthenes’ failed policy: it had been chosen by the ‘courageous men’ who were being buried because it perfectly matched traditional Athenian characteristics.Footnote ¹⁹⁹

It is true that making the most recent war another instance of Athenian aretē was a conventional manoeuvre. In general, Demosthenes rehearsed as many of the genre’s topoi as possible. Yet, as Burckhardt shows, his epitaphios logos also departed from convention for the sake of making his spin persuasive. The first departure concerned the catalogue of exploits. For Demosthenes, this catalogue was a serious problem because it was in essence a list of victories, against which Chaeronea looked really terrible.Footnote ²⁰⁰ In 338/7, unfortunately, Demosthenes could not skip the catalogue, as Pericles had done, because his spin relied heavily on the state’s past military record. Instead, Demosthenes made his catalogue as brief as possible (60.8–12), which explains the striking shortness of his epitaphios logos overall,Footnote ²⁰¹ and why, with an interlude (13–14), he separated the catalogue, as best as he could, from Chaeronea. In itself, his description of this defeat was another departure, for funeral orators were loath to mention a defeat because, in the eyes of the dēmos, it was usually considered a result of cowardice, which was incompatible with Athenian aretē. Again, though, for Demosthenes the current politics ruled out such silence. He could only put the defeat in as good a light as possible. His funeral speech thus attributed it to divine will and rightly pointed out that the war dead had proven their aretē by fighting to the death (e.g. 19–21). His epitaphios logos added that they had, in a sense, ‘saved’ the state because their ferocious fighting had dissuaded Philip from invading Attica itself (20).

Demosthenes’ third departure was his description of how the fallen had taken inspiration from the eponymous demi-gods of their tribes (27–31). No other epitaphios logos ever discussed such tribal mythology.Footnote ²⁰² The standard explanation is that this was a clumsy attempt to distract the mourners from the defeat.Footnote ²⁰³ Burckhardt argues that Demosthenes was doing a great deal more.Footnote ²⁰⁴ The myths that he chose were primarily about self-sacrifices that had saved Athens. Therefore, in introducing them, Demosthenes was suggesting that the self-sacrifice for the safety of the state made by the fallen of 338/7 was as much a part of the Athenian tradition as self-sacrifice for victory. It is clear that Demosthenes’ spin was highly persuasive: the dēmos quickly honoured him as a benefactor and continued to think of Chaeronea in his terms.Footnote ²⁰⁵ Therefore, a timely epitaphios logos had significantly assisted him, as it had Pericles, in regaining control during a political crisis.

Loraux argued that Hyperides 6 was not a part of the epitaphic tradition.Footnote ²⁰⁶ For her, this funeral speech was a ‘subversion’ that lacked ‘fidelity’ to the genre.Footnote ²⁰⁷ Judson Herrman (Chapter 7) establishes that this was among the weaker arguments in The Invention of Athens. Loraux’s first reason for this exclusion was that Hyperides skipped the catalogue of exploits in order to focus on an ongoing war.Footnote ²⁰⁸ Herrman reminds us that, in doing this, Hyperides was in good company: Pericles and Demosthenes likewise skipped or minimised this catalogue because they realised that rehearsing it risked reawakening trenchant criticism. Happily for Hyperides, when he delivered his epitaphios logos in 323/2, he could focus on the initial stunning victories of the Lamian War.Footnote ²⁰⁹ Yet, Herrman shows how his speech was no less timely than those of 431/0 and 338/7.Footnote ²¹⁰ In the political debates of the 320s, Hyperides had been the leading proponent of a risky uprising against the Macedonians.Footnote ²¹¹ Therefore, the focus of Hyperides 6 on immediate military success was not simply a patriotic rallying of the dēmos for a war effort. It also served as justification for Hyperides’ contentious proposal to fight in the first place.

Herrman demonstrates that Hyperides remained faithful to several other features of the genre. A good example is the sun simile that he used in place of the catalogue: it evoked standard topics of the funeral oration and gave the Athenians standard characteristics (Hyper. 6.4–5; cf. 6–8). Hyperides also made out that, in the Lamian War, the Athenians were fighting an invading barbarian people for the sake of the freedom of the Greeks (e.g. 10, 12, 16, 19–22, 37). Of course, this is the same cluster of terms that other funeral orators used to describe the Persian Wars.Footnote ²¹² In the same vein, Hyperides emphasised how the recent battles against the Macedonians had occurred on actual battle sites of the Second Persian War (12, 18). Hyperides’ treatment of the fallen’s ‘beautiful death’ was no less conventional: he repeatedly praised their aretē, which he defined in the same terms as the other funeral orators, and, like them, spoke of their ‘deathless glory’.Footnote ²¹³ In reproducing such features, Herrman concludes, Hyperides was writing well within the genre of epitaphioi logoi.

Nevertheless, Herrman’s chapter readily acknowledges that this funeral speech contained two major innovations. Hyperides attributed a great deal of the recent success to the leadership of Leosthenes (e.g. 10–14, 35–40). In singling out this general for praise, he broke with the genre’s standard attribution of victory to the war dead or the Athenians as an anonymous group. The second innovation concerned the relationship that the fallen of 323/2 had with their ancestors. In other funeral speeches, those being buried were simply the latest example of an unchanging Athenian aretē.Footnote ²¹⁴ Hyperides 6, by contrast, proposed a rupture: these dead were more virtuous and more successful than their ancestors (e.g. 1–3, 19, 35, 38–9). For Loraux, these innovations were further reason for seeing Hyperides 6 as ‘the least conformist’ of the extant speeches.Footnote ²¹⁵ Interestingly, though, this second apparent innovation was not unprecedented. Immediately after the Persian Wars, the dēmos compared their recent victories with what their mythical ancestors had achieved at Troy.Footnote ²¹⁶ Yet, by mid-century, funeral orators were arguing that the extraordinary military achievements of contemporary Athenians were far superior to those of the Trojan War.Footnote ²¹⁷ An unlikely victory against the Macedonians could well have convinced the dēmos to see the Lamian War as a comparable rupture. Sadly, of course, this was not to be: within months of this epitaphios logos, the Macedonians had crushed the uprising.Footnote ²¹⁸ They moved swiftly to overthrow Athenian democracy and to hunt Hyperides down.Footnote ²¹⁹

1.6 Accounting for the Literary Examples

Loraux was convinced that the focus of previous scholarship on the ‘great names’ behind the extant epitaphioi logoi had prevented their study as a coherent genre.Footnote ²²⁰ Therefore, The Invention of Athens deliberately downgraded authorship as a topic of study.Footnote ²²¹ Certainly, this made it easier for Loraux to demonstrate how the seven examples belonged to a long-stable tradition. Yet, by rejecting such a focus, she left unanswered important questions about each speech. This rejection also prevented her from accounting for a fundamental difference between the surviving epitaphioi logoi.Footnote ²²² Those of Pericles, Demosthenes and Hyperides had been delivered at actual public funerals for the war dead. But the four others had been published only ever as literary works.Footnote ²²³ Their authors had clearly never spoken in the Ceramicus: Gorgias and Lysias, as foreigners, were not legally entitled to do so,Footnote ²²⁴ while Isocrates and Plato, famously, avoided political leadership at home. Therefore, why exactly each of them ended up writing an epitaphios logos cries out for an explanation. It is no less important to consider what light their literary works, as a group, shed on the public standing of the official speech.

Plato’s Socrates was sure that the usually foreign sophists who worked in Athens often possessed their own models of a funeral speech (Pl. Menex. 235e–6c). For him, they could also teach their rich students how to deliver one. Lysias’ epitaphios logos is, perhaps, the only one that comes close to such a model. While no teacher of public speaking, Lysias most probably wrote his example as an advertisement for his local speech-writing business. Gorgias, Isocrates and Plato, by contrast, actually were higher-education teachers, but they each made abundantly clear that theirs were not simple how-to-write examples of a funeral speech. For his part, Gorgias integrated a veritable critique of Athenian militarism into his epitaphios logos, while Isocrates transformed his into a plausible Panhellenic speech. Because of its sustained gentle parody, Castoriadis memorably described Plato’s Menexenus as ‘a cabaret version’ of the funeral oration.Footnote ²²⁵ We will see that each of these authors had his own combination of business-related and educational reasons for publishing an epitaphios logos. On the other hand, it is telling that all three felt it necessary to publicise their mastery of the genre. Although they belonged to the top rung of Greece’s higher-education market, they were not prepared to leave the funeral oration to rival private teachers. This, in itself, suggests that their main customers, namely rich Athenian fathers, thought that their sons, potential future leaders, needed to learn about the epitaphios logos. Consequently, this group of four literary examples furnishes further proof of the perceived importance of the official speech for classical Athenians.

Less than ten per cent of Gorgias’ epitaphios logos survives. In spite of this, Johannes Wienand (Chapter 8) is able to demonstrate how important it was for the emergence of the funeral oration as a literary genre. Gorgias privileged the Persian Wars as funeral orators always did (fr. D30a Laks and Most), while his characterisation of the war dead as the defenders of justice was no less conventional (fr. D28). Therefore, it is unsurprising that postclassical authors erroneously believed that Gorgias had delivered his work at a public funeral for the war dead (e.g. Philostr. V S 1.9). In his Lives of the Sophists, Philostratus also noted how this speech argued unconventionally for the genre that the Greeks should fight the Persians instead of each other. Nevertheless, as far as this Roman-period author was concerned, Gorgias carefully downplayed what effectively was direct criticism of the dēmos’ warmaking. For Philostratus, criticism went no further than the claim (fr. D29): ‘Trophies over the barbarians call for hymns of praise, those over Greeks call for lamentations.’Footnote ²²⁶

Wienand demonstrates that Philostratus seriously underestimated the extent of Gorgias’ critique. His funeral speech also mentioned vultures feeding on unburied war dead.Footnote ²²⁷ As the classical Greeks saw burying the fallen as a divinely sanctioned custom, which stasis (‘civil war’) often prevented,Footnote ²²⁸ here, too, Gorgias seems to be criticising inter-Greek wars. This criticism, Wienand argues, carried over to the characterisation of the Athenian dead themselves. The epitaphic convention was to praise them primarily or, at times, exclusively for their decision to die in battle.Footnote ²²⁹ Gorgias, by contrast, also lauded them at length for their significant contributions to civilian life (fr. D28). For Wienand, this is another clear statement about the human costs of Athenian wars against fellow Greeks.

His chapter makes a detailed case for the date of this text. As the epitaphios logos appears to have been a uniquely Athenian genre, all agree that it must have been composed after 427,Footnote ²³⁰ when Gorgias first arrived and made Athens a regular place of residence.Footnote ²³¹ But there is no consensus when exactly, in the next fifty years, he wrote his version of the genre.Footnote ²³² Wienand gives two reasons for him doing so in the late 420s. The first is the battle of Delium of 424/3, after which the Thebans refused to let the Athenians promptly bury their fallen soldiers (Thuc. 4.97–101). Gorgias’ vulture metaphor seems to evoke this controversy. The second reason is Gorgias’ use of the speech to display his mannered rhetoric. As the Athenians, it seems, quite quickly grew tired of it,Footnote ²³³ this too points to an early date. Wienand’s dating suggests that it was Gorgias who invented the writing of a funeral oration as a text primarily for publication. In writing their own literary epitaphioi logoi, Isocrates and Plato followed him in interweaving criticism of the dēmos. Wienand’s dating gains further support from the fact that within a month of arriving, Gorgias, as a foreigner, was required to register as a metoikos (‘metic’).Footnote ²³⁴ As the classical Athenians expected metics to support the status quo,Footnote ²³⁵ the sheer brazenness of the criticism of them in his epitaphios logos suggests that Gorgias had not been in Athens for very long.

Wienand’s chapter, finally, sheds light on discourses about war in classical Athens. Gorgias regularly gave display speeches,Footnote ²³⁶ which, it seems, helped him to attract elite students for his higher-education classes in public speaking (Pl. Meno 95c). He also used texts that he had written as learning tools in such classes.Footnote ²³⁷ His decision to demonstrate his mastery of the epitaphios logos suggests that elite Athenian fathers judged it important for their sons to learn such a speech. This means that it attests to the oral genre’s importance and prestige under Athenian democracy. Wienand notes what this speech also tells us about private discourses on war. On the Peace, which Isocrates wrote in the 350s, is often seen as the earliest sustained critique of the dēmos’ militarism among elite Athenians.Footnote ²³⁸ Wienand’s conclusion is that Gorgias’ speech pushes such elite critique right back to the 420s.

Loraux judged Lysias 2 to be ‘a perfect example’ of a funeral speech.Footnote ²³⁹ Her judgement, which continues to be influential, was entirely sound.Footnote ²⁴⁰ Lysias’ epitaphios logos rehearses more generic topoi than any other example, is organised like the others and covers all the standard topics.Footnote ²⁴¹ Consequently, Loraux quite rightly drew heavily on Lysias 2 in her analysis of the genre.Footnote ²⁴² In spite of this, The Invention of Athens said very little about Lysias as an author.Footnote ²⁴³ Again, this was due to Loraux’s efforts to prove that the extant funeral speeches emerged out of a long-stable genre. The result was that her first book left unanswered two fundamental questions about Lysias 2. The first is whether Lysias actually wrote it. For a long time, the modern consensus was that he did not.Footnote ²⁴⁴ If he did write it, the second question is why. Lysias’ decision to author an epitaphios logos would require an explanation because he, as a metoikos, could never have spoken at a public funeral for the war dead.

In answering these questions, Alastair Blanshard (Chapter 9) helps to re-integrate authorship into the study of the epitaphic genre. In the 1860s, Friedrich Blass argued that Lysias 2 was a school writing exercise.Footnote ²⁴⁵ Blanshard’s chapter shows how weak this argument always was. In the 380s, Isocrates, in his Panegyricus, copied passages from Lysias 2, while Plato, in the contemporaneous Menexenus, parodied other passages.Footnote ²⁴⁶ If Lysias 2 were a forgery, it would have been published at the height of Lysias’ career as a speech writer, which is highly unlikely. Blanshard points out that postclassical writers also debated which of the speeches that were attributed to Lysias were genuine. Significantly, they all agreed that Lysias 2 was one of the genuine ones. Clearly, we have good reason to believe that Lysias actually authored this epitaphios logos.

Blanshard locates the explanation of why Lysias wrote it in both his metic and economic status. Lysias lost his considerable personal fortune during the short oligarchy that followed after Athens’ defeat in 404.Footnote ²⁴⁷ The oligarchs stole most of his assets and Lysias spent what he had left on helping the dēmos to regain power in 403. Afterwards, Lysias was forced to earn his living as a logographos (‘speech writer’). To drum up business, he is known to have delivered display speeches to private audiences (e.g. Pl. Phdr. 227c–8d). We know too that he published at least one speech that he never publicly delivered. Lysias 12 was ostensibly his speech, at an extraordinary euthuna (‘public audit’), against the Athenian oligarch who had done his family the most harm. Because a metic could not speak in such a court case, Lysias 12 was only ever a published work.Footnote ²⁴⁸

As the funeral oration was such a prestigious genre, Lysias, according to Blanshard, also saw a business advantage in publishing one.Footnote ²⁴⁹ Blanshard links this speech’s entirely conventional content to Lysias’ personal circumstances. Whereas Plato, as a citizen, could parody the genre, this was not an easy option for Lysias. As a metic, he was expected not to rock the boat, while, as a logographos, he got work because he was good at writing what non-elite jurors wanted to hear.Footnote ²⁵⁰ Therefore, it is not surprising that Lysias 2 carefully reproduces as many of the genre’s topoi as possible as well as its flattering characterisation of the dēmos. For Blanshard, Lysias’ status also accounts for the speech’s sole unconventional feature: the praise of the xenoi (‘foreigners’) who died fighting the oligarchs (Lys. 2.66). Here Lysias was again poignantly reminding the Athenians of the high price that metics, like him, had paid in helping to restore their democracy.

Ancient historians have always struggled to account for Plato’s Menexenus, in which Plato, whose dialogues typically included harsh criticisms of Athenian democracy, paradoxically had Socrates deliver a conventional epitaphios logos.Footnote ²⁵¹ His speech rehearsed most of the standard topoi as well as the same flattering characterisation of the Athenians: they were unsurpassed in aretē and always just in foreign affairs.Footnote ²⁵² Therefore, in spite of Plato’s persistent criticism of Athenian democratic politics, the Menexenus provides surprisingly strong evidence for the epitaphic tradition in the early fourth century. Ryan Balot (Chapter 10) finds an explanation of this paradox in the primary use to which Plato put his dialogues. In his school, such texts served as starting points for discussions on ethics. Balot argues that Plato matched his dialogues to the general levels of his students. This means that accounting for the Menexenus requires us to work out how advanced its intended readers were in their philosophical studies. For Balot, this should have been the same as the attainment-level of the dialogue’s eponymous character. Menexenus, clearly, is at the beginning of his higher education: he uncritically believes in what funeral orators claim and relies entirely on Socrates’ guidance.Footnote ²⁵³ This suggests that Plato wrote the Menexenus for students who were new to the study of philosophy.

Certainly, such a readership accounts for this dialogue’s decidedly gentle treatment of the funeral oration. In other dialogues, such as Gorgias and Protagoras, Plato harshly attacked some of this genre’s core claims because his readers were much more advanced in their study of philosophy. For beginners, however, who were still immersed in civic ideology, such an attack could have easily offended and alienated them. Balot shows how Plato, in his Menexenus, aimed for less: he wanted his students to begin to see the problems in how this prestigious genre praised the Athenians. Plato’s main method for achieving this aim was straightforward: he exaggerated the discursive practices that the funeral orators habitually used for the sake of perpetuating the stereotypical characterisation of the Athenians.Footnote ²⁵⁴ Plato has Socrates conclude his epitaphios logos by recounting the advice about aretē that the war dead supposedly left their sons. Balot shows how the pronounced incoherence of this advice cast serious doubt on the epitaphic topos that democracy was a good teacher of aretē.Footnote ²⁵⁵ Therefore, Plato’s new students were left with the clear impression that their group discussions with him about ethics really were indispensable.Footnote ²⁵⁶ In short, he could teach them what Athenian democracy could not.

Isocrates was another higher-education teacher who publicised his mastery of the epitaphic genre. For her part, Loraux thought that ‘the first half’ of his Panegyricus could be ‘easily reduced to a sort of epitaphios’.Footnote ²⁵⁷ Isocrates knew well the business-related reasons for publishing such literary speeches.Footnote ²⁵⁸ He had started his working life as a logographos. In the 380s, when he wrote the Panegyricus,Footnote ²⁵⁹ he was setting up his own school for philosophy, which specialised in public speaking.Footnote ²⁶⁰ In this new business, two of his rivals, Gorgias and Plato, had already published literary epitaphioi logoi. His old rival as a logographos, Lysias, had done the same. Therefore, Isocrates could see the value of publicising what he could do in this prestigious and important genre.Footnote ²⁶¹ He also followed Gorgias and Plato in giving his version of the funeral oration an unexpected twist: he embedded it in an epideictic speech supposedly for a Panhellenic festival. The result was that the Panegyricus acquired a respectable Panhellenic argument: the Greeks should stop fighting each other in order to wage a new Persian War (e.g. 4.3, 6, 15, 19, 66, 166, 173, 187). Nevertheless, there was still an enormous amount of epitaphic content in his first major literary work.Footnote ²⁶² For example, Isocrates appeared to characterise the Athenians in the same terms as the funeral orators did: they had always fought just wars (e.g. 4.52–4, 71, 75, 85, 91, 95). As proof, he introduced the genre’s standard myths as well as its standard battles from the Persian Wars (51–98). His Panegyricus even cannibalised specific passages from the funeral speeches of Pericles, Gorgias, Lysias and Plato.Footnote ²⁶³ For Loraux, this reworking was no more than ‘obvious plagiarism’.Footnote ²⁶⁴

Thomas Blank (Chapter 11) makes clear that Isocrates’ relationship to the funeral oration was more complex. In his Panegyricus, Isocrates was adapting, as he acknowledged (4.74, 98), the genre for the sake of his Panhellenic argument. As he was arguing for a new Persian War under the joint leadership of Athens and Sparta, Isocrates, in contrast to funeral orators, restricted his historical erga to the Persian Wars, expanding Sparta’s role in them.Footnote ²⁶⁵ In reworking Pericles, moreover, he transformed boasts about Athens into proofs of its longstanding Panhellenism.Footnote ²⁶⁶ Blank’s chapter also suggests that Isocrates’ speech served a further educational purpose. In the classroom, Isocrates, it is clear, used his literary speeches as examples of arguments.Footnote ²⁶⁷ He wanted to teach his students how to match them to a target audience, which was a must-have skill for future political leaders of Athenian democracy.Footnote ²⁶⁸ The Panegyricus, according to Blank, purposefully mismatched the two by rehearsing parochial Athenian content for a supposed audience of non-Athenians. Consequently, it could serve as a useful example of how not to make an effective argument.

Blank reminds us that Isocrates’ relationship to the genre drastically changed a quarter of a century later. On the Peace, which he wrote after the costly defeat of Athens in the Social War of 357–5,Footnote ²⁶⁹ was an unparalleled condemnation of Athenian militarism.Footnote ²⁷⁰ It shows us the direct criticism of this state’s wars that was simply missing in Athenian public discourse.Footnote ²⁷¹ Funeral speeches typically argued that the Athenians always fought justly, that their arkhē (‘empire’) had been unambiguously good and that their wars had always brought benefits. In contrast, On the Peace contends that the Athenian dēmos stopped fighting justly after the Persian Wars (e.g. 25–7, 30, 37–8, 42, 47, 90–1), had been corrupted by their arkhē (e.g. 64, 77, 88), and often died in appalling numbers in crushing defeats (e.g. 84–7). This appears to be a deliberate refutation of what speakers said in the Ceramicus.

That On the Peace really was an anti-funeral oration is suggested by how it treated the public funeral for the war dead and the parade of their male orphans at the Great Dionysia. The dēmos saw both ceremonies as significant timai for the fallen, which encouraged the living to be courageous.Footnote ²⁷² On the Peace makes them perversities advertising the appalling human cost of Athenian wars (82, 87–8). The Social War had been a huge financial burden on rich Athenians.Footnote ²⁷³ As they paid his school fees, it might be argued that Isocrates’ only motivation for now writing against the funeral oration was to curry their favour. Against this, Blank shows that Isocrates 4 and 8 were less inconsistent than appearances might suggest. Although it is subtle, the Panegyricus actually also characterised Athenian Wars after 479/8 as unjust (Isoc. 4.6, 100–2, 110, 158, 166, 172). This means that Isocrates criticised Athenian militarism in published works for several decades.Footnote ²⁷⁴ That he got away with it implies that such criticism was a common conversation topic among elite Athenians throughout the fourth century.Footnote ²⁷⁵

1.7 Completing the Intertextual Analysis of the Genre

Perhaps the biggest gap in The Invention of Athens was intertextuality. Loraux correctly recognised that there were ‘traces’ of the funeral oration across Athenian literature.Footnote ²⁷⁶ But she never systematically compared the epitaphic genre with other public oratory and drama.Footnote ²⁷⁷ Therefore, The Invention of Athens could not put beyond doubt whether the other forums of Athenian public discourse reinforced, questioned or ignored the funeral oration’s standard content. A major goal of our edited volume is to fill this significant gap in Loraux’s first book.

Of course, the Athenians of the epitaphios logos went to war for just reasons, such as the protection of persecuted weak states, and were almost always victorious. The traditional belief is that this rosy-coloured characterisation of Athenian polemos had no place in deliberative oratory.Footnote ²⁷⁸ For a long time, ancient historians believed that foreign-policy debates in the Athenian assembly were based solely on the calculation of ‘national’ interest (Figure 1.4).Footnote ²⁷⁹ For them, the funeral oration was simply an illusion that obscured the Realpolitik of Athenian foreign affairs.Footnote ²⁸⁰ From the Marxism of the 1970s, however, Loraux learnt that the self-identity of a people mediates their relationship to reality and has a significant impact on their public life.Footnote ²⁸¹ Indeed, Loraux repeatedly hypothesised that this rosy-coloured account of Athenian wars could well have affected enormously foreign affairs.Footnote ²⁸² But she never undertook the systematic comparison of the funeral oration with deliberative oratory that was required to put her hypothesis beyond doubt. Peter Hunt (Chapter 12) completes this critical intertextual analysis of the two genres.

Figure 1.4 The meeting place of the Athenian assembly on the hill of the Pnyx.

Photograph courtesy of H. R. Goette.

Initially, Hunt’s chapter casts serious doubt on Loraux’s hypothesis. Athenian politicians, when debating war or peace, always introduced security-related reasons.Footnote ²⁸³ Typically, they emphasised such reasons by beginning or concluding their assembly-speeches with them.Footnote ²⁸⁴ Their reasons ranged from calculations about Greece’s balance of power or the state’s armed forces to, for example, the cost of a war to the public purse.Footnote ²⁸⁵ The school of Realism in International Relations assumes that a state calculates foreign policy only on the basis of such reasons.Footnote ²⁸⁶ Therefore, it is understandable that Realists see classical Greece as a historical example supporting their school.Footnote ²⁸⁷ Nevertheless, Hunt shows that Athenian politicians, in their foreign-policy debates, also regularly called into question the funeral oration’s characterisation of the Athenians.Footnote ²⁸⁸ Andocides, for example, reminded them of the heavy costs that they had paid for protecting persecuted weak states (e.g. 3.9, 28–31), while Aeschines said the same while also arguing that the victories that their funeral speeches celebrated were no proof of future success.Footnote ²⁸⁹ Hunt rightly points out that the need that Athenian politicians felt to argue against the funeral oration reveals the genre’s real impact on debates about war and peace.

No less surprising is the fact that the same speeches that emphasised security-related reasons regularly reproduced standard epitaphic content in support of a war.Footnote ²⁹⁰ This is a clear reminder that incongruous ideas could easily subsist side-by-side in Athenian public discourse.Footnote ²⁹¹ Hunt argues that the funeral oration’s biggest political impact came from its rosy-coloured account of Athenian wars.Footnote ²⁹² Non-elite Athenians learnt most about their military history from the funeral oration. Because defeats were usually attributed to cowardice, funeral orators tried to ignore them. When this was not possible, they turned a defeat into a temporary setback or explained it away. The result was that the dēmos came to believe that defeats were much less common than they actually were. This erroneous belief compromised their ability accurately to assess the risks of proposed wars.Footnote ²⁹³ Politicians regularly used this one-sided account of military history as an argument in support of a military campaign.Footnote ²⁹⁴ They argued no less often that the dēmos could maintain their reputation for justice in foreign affairs only by siding with a weak persecuted state in a war.Footnote ²⁹⁵ Although Athenian politicians, Hunt concludes, could, if they needed to do so, call into question the funeral oration, this genre, nonetheless, generally nudged assemblygoers towards riskier and more frequent wars. Hunt’s chapter thus furnishes a clear confirmation of Loraux’s original hypothesis: the epitaphios logos had a significant impact on political debates about war and peace.

The funeral oration idealised Athenian polemos. Epitaphic Athenians were only ever courageous and were almost always victorious. Their virtuous wars brought large practical benefits, such as empire, freedom, security and military might.Footnote ²⁹⁶ As the genre generally minimised war’s negative aspects, funeral orators never detailed the violent deaths of those being buried.Footnote ²⁹⁷ While they could not avoid acknowledging the grief of bereaved family members, they told them to supress their painful feelings as much as possible.Footnote ²⁹⁸ Therefore, the epitaphios logos exhibited a strong cultural militarism. The Invention of Athens simply did not consider whether forensic and deliberative oratory, as well as old comedy and tragedy, furnished an effective counterweight to this idealisation of war. In contemporary consolidated democracies, there normally is a strong public critique of war and state violence.Footnote ²⁹⁹ It is common to view both activities as problems, which should be reduced as much as possible. Today, strong democratic norms encourage us to favour non-violent forms of conflict resolution. It is important to attempt to discover whether Athenian dēmokratia ever created a comparable anti-war discourse. The only way to do this is to compare systematically the epitaphios logos with other public oratory and drama. Loraux generally assumed that the impact of these genres on each other was a one-way street: while influencing the others, the funeral oration took nothing from them.Footnote ³⁰⁰ Intertextual analysis also helps us to test this assumption of hers.

Jason Crowley (Chapter 13) reminds us that the actual experience that the dēmos had of war was considerably less one-sided than the funeral oration suggested, since every adult male citizen was obliged to fight for the state and did so frequently.Footnote ³⁰¹ Crowley shows how the dēmos expected other literary genres to give much more rounded depictions of their first-hand experience of war. The fact that these genres did not have to affirm core beliefs in the face of battlefield deaths and military setbacks made it easier for them to do so. Admittedly, legal speeches still mentioned many courageous Athenians, as litigants typically sought to prove their own aretē.Footnote ³⁰² Yet, in proving their courage or their meeting of moral obligations more generally, they often recognised defeats and other negative aspects of polemos.Footnote ³⁰³ When they could, for example, litigants mentioned the wounds that they had acquired in battles or their ransoming of Athenian prisoners of war, which implied that others had preferred surrender to death in battle.Footnote ³⁰⁴ Wounds, like prisoners of war, were entirely absent from funeral speeches.Footnote ³⁰⁵ Forensic oratory also conceded that some Athenians proved to be cowards, since litigants regularly alleged that their opponents had fled from a battle or had refused to serve in the first place.Footnote ³⁰⁶

Crowley shows how old comedy’s depiction of war was no less multifaceted (Figure 1.5). Aristophanes eulogised what the Athenians had done in the Persian Wars as much as the funeral orators did.Footnote ³⁰⁷ In praising their past military exploits, he even appropriated their topoi.Footnote ³⁰⁸ Therefore, the chorus of his Knights claim that their fathers were always victorious ‘because no one of them, when they saw the enemy, ever counted their number’ (569–70). Ignoring numbers was, of course, an epitaphic commonplace.Footnote ³⁰⁹ For Aristophanes, polemos also brought tangible practical benefits (e.g. Pax 929–35; Vesp. 667–9, 862–85, 1075–100). Nevertheless, he also went on to depict war’s negative side. In his Acharnians, Peace and Lysistrata, characters complained about the ponoi (‘toils’) of military campaigns as well as about the bad food and the lack of sex that they entailed.Footnote ³¹⁰ All the same, it is telling that old comedy carefully avoided any mention of war casualties,Footnote ³¹¹ which parallels the reluctance of politicians to speak about this human cost.Footnote ³¹² The Athenians of these anti-war comedies fantastically escape military service for the sake of better food and more sex.Footnote ³¹³ For them ‘peace is a matter of private interest and welfare’.Footnote ³¹⁴ While funny, all this was manifestly immoral: every Athenian was obliged, when serving the state, to put public interests ahead of his personal ones.Footnote ³¹⁵ That the dēmos enjoyed comedies where the opposite happened points again to their recognition that war was indeed burdensome.

Figure 1.5 The theatre of Dionysus on the southern slope of the Acropolis where the state’s dramatic agōnes (‘contests’) took place.

Photograph courtesy of A. Loxias.

Tragedy, by contrast, focussed on the negative impact of polemos on other people.Footnote ³¹⁶ Crowley rightly argues that this non-Athenian focus allowed this genre to depict many more of war’s human costs. Therefore, the tragic poets could acknowledge, among other downsides, that land battles left some survivors with horrific wounds, that prisoners of war could be executed and that acts of genocide were committed against defeated poleis (‘city-states’).Footnote ³¹⁷ They put on stage relatives of war dead who found it much harder than the funeral orators assumed to supress their grief.Footnote ³¹⁸ Euripides famously made such human costs the focus of his many plays about the Trojan War’s denouement.Footnote ³¹⁹ Indeed, his Trojan Women is aptly described as ‘a pageant of the miseries of war’.Footnote ³²⁰ Athena’s prologue, in this tragedy, confirms that the victorious Greeks will perish in great number on their voyage home, as they have broken a divinely sanctioned nomos by sacking her Trojan temple.Footnote ³²¹ Cassandra, before she is led away as a slave, accurately rehearses the high personal costs that the Greeks continue to pay for their victory (e.g. Eur. Tro. 365–82, 427–43). She claims that the Trojans, by contrast, died nobly, defending their polis (‘city-state’), and so leave behind great glory (e.g. 386–96, 403–5). However, Trojan Women calls this last claim into question: Troy has been destroyed, its men massacred, and its women and children enslaved.Footnote ³²²

Vernant viewed such questioning of fundamental norms as the principal purpose of tragedy.Footnote ³²³ He famously argued that this genre treated the Homeric hero as problematic.Footnote ³²⁴ Consequently, the tragic poets generally dramatised the clash between the Homeric values that were still current and the new values that were emerging in the classical polis.Footnote ³²⁵ By watching tragedies, according to Vernant, theatregoers learnt that their own ethical reasoning could be ‘a problem’.Footnote ³²⁶ Many Anglophone scholars of tragedy embraced his argument.Footnote ³²⁷ They went on to claim that such questioning was more extensive: the genre ‘problematised’ civic ideology in general.Footnote ³²⁸ In the light of this view’s wide currency, it is understandable that scholars often read Euripides’ Trojan War plays as a critique of Athenian militarism.Footnote ³²⁹ For them, Euripides was treating as problems the occasional acts of genocide against captured cities that the fifth-century Athenians committed as well as their general idealisation of polemos. This is the common reading that Sophie Mills (Chapter 14) calls into question. Euripides, of course, wrote these anti-war tragedies during the Peloponnesian War. Certainly, this timing points to their being reflections of the high costs that the dēmos personally bore in fighting this thirty-year conflict. Nevertheless, Mills argues that tragedy as a genre was never an effective counterweight to the epitaphic depiction of war.

The first problem with this common reading is tragic distance.Footnote ³³⁰ In the early decades of the genre, Phrynichus staged a tragedy that dramatised Persia’s recent sacking of Miletus in 494 (Hdt. 6.21). As the Athenians had fought to save this polis, theatregoers became visibly distressed. Consequently, the dēmos imposed a huge fine on Phrynichus for ‘reminding them of their troubles’. After this, the tragic poets set their plays, excepting a few about the Second Persian War, only in the distant age of the heroes.Footnote ³³¹ To play it safer still, they also set them, most of the time, in other cities, such as Argos, Troy or especially Thebes.Footnote ³³² Mills explains how such settings made theatregoers feel safely distant from the unpleasantness on stage (e.g. Arist. Poet. 1448b10–20). Consequently, they could interpret a play, such as Trojan Women, as a general reflection on war’s human costs or, if it still felt too close to home, as a sad story about other people in the olden days.Footnote ³³³ In recent times, Peter Meineck’s therapeutic use of tragedy with US combat veterans confirms the importance of such distance.Footnote ³³⁴ Meineck shows that while veterans with combat-trauma benefit psychologically from seeing their adverse experiences reflected in tragedies, this depends on them feeling that there is a safe gap between their world and the ancient plays.

The second problem with such a reading is the tragic depiction of mythical Athens. Mills reminds us that the tragedians, when they set plays at home, confirmed the epitaphic characterisation of the Athenians.Footnote ³³⁵ This made it even less likely that theatregoers would directly connect any anti-war tragedies to Athenian warmaking. The best examples are the plays of Euripides that dramatised standard myths of the funeral oration. In his Suppliant Women, for example, Theseus deliberates democratically before leading the Athenian army to a decisive victory against the Thebans.Footnote ³³⁶ In doing so, he defends a Panhellenic nomos, helps the Argive suppliants and wins for Athens a beneficial military alliance.Footnote ³³⁷ In his Children of Heracles, Euripides depicted another Athenian war in the same eulogistic terms: Theseus’ son agrees to protect Heracles’ persecuted vulnerable children, leads the Athenians to another great victory and earns a no less valuable practical benefit for the state.Footnote ³³⁸ The implication of Mills’ chapter is that tragedy, on balance, probably supported Athenian bellicosity. To keep fighting wars, the dēmos needed to acknowledge the human costs.Footnote ³³⁹ Tragedy let them do this safely by depicting the suffering that polemos had caused other people a long time ago. At the same time, it also confirmed that the Athenians had always fought and won just wars from which they had gained significant practical benefits.

Johanna Hanink (Chapter 15) argues that tragedy did more than confirm the funeral oration’s flattering account of Athenian wars: it also invented actual epitaphic content. In time, funeral orators came to rehearse four standard myths (e.g. Dem. 60.7–9). The dēmos believed that the earliest was the victory of their ancestors against an army that the Thracian Eumolpus had led into Attica. The widely held position is that these four mythical erga were a part of the genre from its beginning.Footnote ³⁴⁰ Yet Hanink’s chapter establishes that this position is not defensible when it comes to the myth about Eumolpus. Indeed, the first epitaphios logos to mention this ergon (‘exploit’) was the one that Plato wrote soon after the end of the Corinthian War (Menex. 239b). Before this, there had existed an older myth about Erechtheus, an early Athenian king, and Eumolpus fighting each other.Footnote ³⁴¹ Importantly, however, this myth presented their fight as a civil war between Eleusis, a deme in Attica, and Athens (e.g. Thuc. 2.15.1). The new myth, which, by contrast, made Eumolpus and his army foreign invaders, first appeared in Erechtheus, which Euripides wrote at the end of the 420s.Footnote ³⁴² As Euripides regularly changed old myths or, simply, invented new ones,Footnote ³⁴³ Hanink argues that the epitaphic ergon about Eumolpus was originally his invention.

Euripides wrote Suppliant Women, Children of Heracles and Erechtheus during the Archidamian War of 431–21, in which Sparta repeatedly invaded Attica with a large army that included Thebans and other Peloponnesian-league members.Footnote ³⁴⁴ Mythical Athenians resoundingly defeated, in the first of these tragedies, the Thebans and, in the second, an invading army from the Peloponnese. Therefore, as Hanink suggests, both plays allowed theatregoers to fantasise about easily defeating contemporary enemies. Euripides probably invented his new myth about Eumolpus in order to give the dēmos another fantasy about an invader being crushed.Footnote ³⁴⁵ Such tragic fantasies were another way in which the genre supported the Athenian war machine. For Hanink, the impetus, forty years later, for introducing Euripides’ new myth into the funeral oration was the addition of an ‘ancient drama’ to the Great Dionysia.Footnote ³⁴⁶ Because the dēmos now saw fifth-century tragedies as a means to encourage patriotism,Footnote ³⁴⁷ they decided, in 387/6, to add a regular restaging of such a drama to their annual festival. Isocrates, interestingly, also introduced the new myth into his literary funeral speech a few years after Plato did (Isoc. 4.68). That the two of them did so raises the possibility that Erechtheus was restaged in the later 380s. It is well recognised that funeral orators changed their lists of historical erga in order to suit the times.Footnote ³⁴⁸ Nevertheless, Hanink is the first to show that the mythical erga changed in the fourth century. Her finding challenges once again Loraux’s claim about an unchanging genre.

Old comedy thrived on appropriating the different strands of Athenian public discourse. It especially did so with respect to the other literary genres that were part of the state’s dramatic festivals. Aristophanes repeatedly mocked individual tragic and dithyrambic poets.Footnote ³⁴⁹ He regularly parodied known tragedies or tragic language more generally.Footnote ³⁵⁰ Because comedy engaged with contemporary current affairs, it also alternated between confirming and confounding the commonplaces of political debate and legal disputes.Footnote ³⁵¹ As an almost annual public speech that rehearsed core beliefs of the dēmos, the funeral oration was no less prominent as a major genre. Therefore, it is entirely understandable that the comic poets also incorporated it into their plays. Bernhard Zimmermann (Chapter 16) investigates the rich but largely unexplored intertextuality between these two genres. The first way in which old comedy appropriated the funeral oration was by putting its progonoi (‘ancestors’) on stage. Aristophanes characterised three of his choruses as epitaphic ancestors. In praising their past military erga, they used the same terminology as the epitaphios logos and privileged the same historical period: the Persian Wars.Footnote ³⁵² Aristophanes brought them on stage in support of his comic fantasies about peace. By having these war heroes support a protagonist’s effort to stop the war, he diffused the objection that such a fantasy went against the reputation of the dēmos for outstanding courage.

Zimmermann’s chapter identifies two other ways in which old comedy appropriated the epitaphios logos. The second concerned the warnings that Aristophanes made about the dangers of flattery. Aristophanes sometimes quoted funeral speeches as examples of what elite citizens said in order to deceive the dēmos.Footnote ³⁵³ He repeatedly warned theatregoers to be on guard against such flattery.Footnote ³⁵⁴ The third way that old comedy appropriated funeral speeches was the calling into question of their characterisation of the Athenians and their cherished democracy. Funeral speeches presented the Athenians as selfless in their fighting for others and in their willingness to die for the state in war. Comic protagonists rarely lived up to this epitaphic ideal.Footnote ³⁵⁵ They typically sought to evade military service, to ignore appeals for help and to monopolise the good times for themselves. Funeral orators presented dēmokratia as a reason for Athenian military success.Footnote ³⁵⁶ Aristophanes, by contrast, regularly called its efficiency into question.Footnote ³⁵⁷ He showed Athenians failing to respect the political ideals, such as freedom of speech, that funeral orators praised.Footnote ³⁵⁸

1.8 Acquiring a New Democratic Language

Perhaps the weakest argument of The Invention of Athens was about ‘aristocratic values’.Footnote ³⁵⁹ Loraux argued that the dēmos was never able to escape the values that had come from archaic aristocrats. For her, this inability was most evident in how the epitaphios logos depicted Athenian dēmokratia. She saw this genre as ‘the only methodical discourse that the Athenian city officially maintained on democracy’.Footnote ³⁶⁰ Certainly, praising democracy was another standard topic of the funeral oration.Footnote ³⁶¹ In spite of this, funeral orators, according to Loraux, hid as many democratic principles and practices as possible, and chose ‘aristocratic’ terms to describe what could not be hidden.Footnote ³⁶² Because funeral speeches were, for Loraux, the public discourse on the Athenian regime,Footnote ³⁶³ she deduced from all this that ‘democracy never acquired a language of its own’.Footnote ³⁶⁴ The Invention of Athens concluded that the classical Athenians had avoided inventing a new language for praising their democracy in order to appease its oligarchic opponents.Footnote ³⁶⁵ Loraux implied that this cultural powerlessness on the part of the dēmos could also be seen in the genre’s treatment of sailors. The Invention of Athens stated repeatedly that funeral orators defined aretē only in terms of the hoplite and always sought to hide the navy. This would suggest that the dēmos were unable to challenge the low estimation that archaic aristocrats had had of sailors.

In the 1980s, Loraux was already criticised for this argument about ‘aristocratic values’.Footnote ³⁶⁶ For his part, Castoriadis emphasised that Athenian democracy succeeded in redefining such values.Footnote ³⁶⁷ He disparagingly described what Loraux wrote about sailors as ‘a surprising idea’.Footnote ³⁶⁸ Certainly, this general argument of hers sat uneasily with good ones that she had made. Loraux put beyond doubt that democratic equality largely shaped the new public funeral for the war dead. Non-elite Athenians – she also plausibly argued – had transformed the elite archaic idea of ‘the beautiful death’. It is hard to see why the dēmos’ manifest cultural power here failed when it came to democracy and sailors. Her argument about ‘aristocratic values’ was also at odds with the modern reception of Pericles’ epitaphios logos. For a century or so, we will see, his speech of 431/0 has had great public prominence in Anglophone countries. This is due almost entirely to the common modern belief that it contains a detailed and profound defence of democracy.

Dominique Lenfant (Chapter 17) refutes Loraux’s argument about the funeral oration’s depiction of democracy. Admittedly, this genre described only a few democratic practices.Footnote ³⁶⁹ Nevertheless, Lenfant’s chapter puts beyond doubt that it never hid democratic principles. In fact, funeral orators described dēmokratia as a law-bound regime in which all had legal equality (e.g. Hyper. 6.25; Lys. 2.19; Thuc. 2.37.3). Their praise of democratic eleutheria (‘freedom’) extended to isēgoria (‘political equality of speech’) and parrhēsia (‘freedom of speech’).Footnote ³⁷⁰ Plato’s funeral speech made no less of isonomia or political equality.Footnote ³⁷¹ Pericles, of course, decided to make the genre’s brief standard praise of democracy the main topic of his speech because it helped him to manage a political crisis.Footnote ³⁷² Consequently, he was able to praise much more of Athenian democracy, including, for example, that it did not make poverty a bar to political participation (e.g. Thuc. 2.37.1–2, 40.2).

Lenfant shows that such descriptions neither contained ‘aristocratic values’ nor mollified the oligarchs. Certainly, opponents of democratic government had often used moral terms, such as agathoi (‘good’), to describe the rich and had attributed aretē (‘merit’) solely to this social class.Footnote ³⁷³ But Lenfant reminds us that funeral orators never did this: they employed these terms in an exclusively moral sense in their praise of the courage of the Athenians as a whole. She also points out that fifth-century oligarchs actually detested democratic freedom and isēgoria, and saw poverty as a good reason for political exclusion,Footnote ³⁷⁴ which means that little of what was said in the Ceramicus ever appeased them. Lenfant also demonstrates that the genre’s representation of democracy was not unique: tragedy and other public oratory praised no less methodically the same democratic principles.Footnote ³⁷⁵ Therefore, Loraux was clearly mistaken to make the funeral oration the sole public discourse on democracy. As the terminology that the tragic poets and all public speakers used to describe these principles was new, Athenian democracy, it seems, had succeeded in acquiring its own language.

Nonetheless, Lenfant acknowledges two important differences in these multiple self-portraits of the democracy. Firstly, tragedy, along with forensic and deliberative oratory, treated quite a few more democratic practices than the funeral oration.Footnote ³⁷⁶ Secondly, these genres were also much less reluctant then the epitaphios logos to recognise division, whether that be the permanent one between the rich and the poor or the short-term one that political debate inevitably created.Footnote ³⁷⁷ Lenfant attributes the first difference to the function that the epitaphic genre gave democracy. It always made out that the Athenian politeia (‘constitution’) was a major cause of Athenian aretē.Footnote ³⁷⁸ Typically, funeral orators proved this causality by showing how one or two democratic principles made the dēmos courageous (e.g. Dem. 60.26–7). They found, it seems, that their audiences were content with such a cursory treatment of their politeia. Pericles, by contrast, focussed on the wider range of virtues that accounted for military success.Footnote ³⁷⁹ Nevertheless, and perhaps unsurprisingly, he remained silent on many democratic features that had no link to war. For Lenfant, the second difference was due to the fact this was a wartime speech.Footnote ³⁸⁰ In spite of painful losses, the funeral orator had to do all that he could to maintain political unity for sake of the war effort. Avoiding any mention of division among Athenians helped him to achieve this goal.

Ancient historians regularly argue that the dēmos esteemed sailors less than hoplites.Footnote ³⁸¹ According to their argument, such an estimation led the classical Athenians to define aretē in terms of what the hoplite needed to do for victory in a land battle. Certainly, the tragic poets defined courage like this.Footnote ³⁸² For them, the courageous man remained ‘by his spear’ (e.g. Eur. El. 388–90; cf. Phoen. 1003). While cowards fled (e.g. HF 158–61), he accepted the risk of ‘the spear’s sudden wound’ (e.g. 162–4; cf. Aesch. Pers. 1025). The brave man also performed individual erga (‘exploits’).Footnote ³⁸³ Because sailors employed flight as a tactic and fought as a collective,Footnote ³⁸⁴ they could not meet this hoplite-based definition. As a result – it is often argued – the dēmos questioned their courageousness.Footnote ³⁸⁵ In support of this argument, ancient historians regularly cite The Invention of Athens.Footnote ³⁸⁶ Loraux tirelessly claimed that the funeral oration defined courage exclusively in hoplitic terms and generally concealed the navy.Footnote ³⁸⁷ It is true that esteeming sailors below hoplites was common before Athenian democracy.Footnote ³⁸⁸ In the Iliad, for example, Homer made the elite heavily armed soldier the norm for social differentiation.Footnote ³⁸⁹ His aretē was based on what this soldier had to do in a land battle.Footnote ³⁹⁰ In The Odyssey, by contrast, Homer made sailors exhibit cowardice or other moral shortcomings.Footnote ³⁹¹ In classical Athens, there were twice as many citizen nautai (‘sailors’) as there were hoplites.Footnote ³⁹² Consequently, sailors would have always been a significant presence in the assembly, the law-courts and the theatre. Along with the public funeral for the war dead, these were the main forums for formulating public discourse. Therefore, the inability of Athenian nautai to challenge the low esteem in which archaic aristocrats had held them would indeed be a most surprising idea.

I demonstrate (Chapter 18) how this argument of Loraux has the same problems as her one about dēmokratia. It misrepresents the standard content of the extant epitaphioi logoi and ignores the parallels with the depiction of sailors in the other genres of non-elite Athenian literature. In making her argument, Loraux relied solely on Pericles’ speech, which said, admittedly, very little about the navy (Thuc. 2.39.2). Nevertheless, his epitaphios logos was not a typical one. In 431/0, when he spoke, it was standard for a funeral speech to give a fulsome catalogue of Athenian military exploits.Footnote ³⁹³ Pericles skipped this catalogue because of the political crisis that he faced.Footnote ³⁹⁴ The two speeches to which his is closest in date show us what exploits were normally included. Lysias and Plato catalogued sea battles as much as they did land battles.Footnote ³⁹⁵ In so doing, they regularly praised the aretē of sailors.Footnote ³⁹⁶ There is no concealment of the navy here. Loraux’s other claim that the funeral oration defined courage exclusively in terms of the hoplite is no stronger. Funeral orators always defined aretē as the bearing of dangers in spite of the personal risk.Footnote ³⁹⁷ This was a simplification of the older definition of courage in terms of just the hoplite. Because this new definition was no longer based on his specific experience, sailors had no difficulty in meeting it. Old comedy and the other genres of public oratory esteemed nautai just as highly.Footnote ³⁹⁸ Their sailors displayed courage no less than hoplites.Footnote ³⁹⁹ In these non-elite genres, Athens received equal benefits from both groups of combatants.Footnote ⁴⁰⁰

Tragedy differed from the other non-elite literary genres in using the hoplite extensively as a norm. In addition to its hoplitic definition of aretē, it made him, for example, the reference-point for social differentiation (e.g. Eur. Med. 248–51). The tragic poets used this striking hoplitic idiom as part of their efforts to set their plays in the distant heroic age. Getting this setting right was vitally important because tragedies were usually disturbing.Footnote ⁴⁰¹ Without such tragic distance, theatregoers could find them unbearable. Critically, the dēmos imagined epic heroes to be hoplites.Footnote ⁴⁰² Therefore, in order for them to be like Homer’s heroes, they, along with their interlocutors, had to discuss, for example, social differentiation as well as the requirements of aretē only in terms of the hoplite. In spite of this, the tragic poets never concealed contemporary Athenian seapower. In their plays, Athenian heroes commanded fleets,Footnote ⁴⁰³ mythical Athenians served as sailors or praised their own seapower,Footnote ⁴⁰⁴ and sailors were generally courageous.Footnote ⁴⁰⁵ In Athenian democracy, public speakers and playwrights had to articulate the viewpoint of non-elite citizens. Their speeches and plays leave us in no doubt that the classical Athenians esteemed sailors as highly as hoplites. In the military realm, therefore, the dēmos had also clearly succeeded in redefining traditional aristocratic values.

The epitaphios logos of Pericles has played striking public roles in English-speaking countries. Pericles’ words are still engraved on their war memorials or other public building s (Figure 1.6).Footnote ⁴⁰⁶ Anglophone politicians continue to quote his famous speech,Footnote ⁴⁰⁷ which remains a set text at school and at university.Footnote ⁴⁰⁸ Neville Morley (Chapter 19) shows that such roles began little more than a century ago. His chapter provides three reasons for this more recent history of reception. The first is the centrality that this speech gave to dēmokratia. While every funeral speech, of course, praised democracy, Pericles made this passing topic the mainstay of his.Footnote ⁴⁰⁹ Consequently, he said quite a lot about democratic principles and their impact on the dēmos (Thuc. 2.37–41). In the mid-nineteenth century, this drew the attention of those Englishmen who were campaigning for the extension of voting-rights.Footnote ⁴¹⁰ This campaign’s leader was the ‘radical’ member of parliament, George Grote, who happened to be a revisionist historian of classical Athens. By portraying its democracy as a success, Grote was effectively bolstering the campaign for British democratisation.Footnote ⁴¹¹ For him, this funeral speech was important because it countered the charge that working-class men could never be good citizens.Footnote ⁴¹² Pericles, Grote argued, had demonstrated that democracy could make such men courageous, selfless, tolerant and politically engaged.

Figure 1.6 The entrance to the original Faculty of the Arts in the oldest surviving building at the University of Queensland. The inscription above the door comes from Pericles’ funeral oration (Thuc. 2.40.1): φιλοκαλοῦμέν τε γὰρ μετ᾽ εὐτελείας καὶ φιλοσοφοῦμεν ἄνευ μαλακίας (‘for we are both thrifty lovers of beauty and lovers of wisdom without softness’ – tr. D. M. Pritchard).

Brisbane, the University of Queensland, archive no. UQA S178 b292. Photograph courtesy of the University of Queensland Archives.

Working-class British men finally gained the right to vote in subsequent decades. Morley sees this as the second reason for the public prominence of Pericles’ epitaphios logos. With their enfranchisement, this speech went from being a partisan campaign text to a touchstone of the new democratic norms.Footnote ⁴¹³ Morley’s chapter argues that this reception still cut off Pericles’ oration from its original context: the public funeral for the war dead. The First World War changed this, as it gave private readers the chance to appreciate the speech’s military character.Footnote ⁴¹⁴ For Morley, their appreciation is the third reason for its prominence in public life. The British government quickly saw the potential of this now celebrated speech for propaganda. Pericles’ oration exhorted the living to fight for the state as those being buried had done (Thuc. 2.43; cf. Pl. Menex. 246b–9d). To encourage British men to do the same, the government plastered Pericles’ exhortation on London buses and throughout the underground railway system.Footnote ⁴¹⁵ The use of his speech for commemorating the First World War’s casualties brought right to the fore its original context. The war memorials of Anglophone countries drew heavily on the military burials of democratic Athens.Footnote ⁴¹⁶ Indeed, the egalitarianism of this classical model probably encouraged them to honour equally each of their dead.Footnote ⁴¹⁷ The public memorials for this war as well as subsequent ones regularly quote the epitaphios logos of Pericles.

1.9 Conclusion: The Genre Forty Years after Loraux

Democracy transformed how the Athenians waged wars. It immediately changed the way in which they buried those who fell in them. Before 508/7, most soldiers came from the elite, while war was usually a private activity. Elite families privately buried their relatives who had died on the battlefield. Immediately after Cleisthenes’ reforms, the Athenian dēmos made war an exclusive public activity. Democracy resulted in non-elite Athenians joining the armed forces in ever-increasing numbers. Within a few decades, the Athenians were waging war more frequently than ever before. When at war, the dēmos spent more on the armed forces than all other public activities combined.Footnote ⁴¹⁸ Even in times of peace, this expenditure was higher than what they spent on democratic politics or state religion. The public burial of the fallen paralleled this transformation. After the first democratic war in 507/6, the war dead were buried for the first time at public expense. The dēmos added or modified honours for the fallen over the next fifty years. In doing so, they continued to respect the principle of democratic equality. Therefore, the dēmos always treated non-elite casualties in the same way as elite ones.

The last honour that the dēmos added to this public funeral was the epitaphios logos. The loss of men in war often was deeply unsettling. Therefore, the chief function of this speech was to offer reassurance. Because the dēmos were so committed to war, it would simply not have been reassuring to question Athenian polemos. Instead, the most effective reassurance was to affirm what the classical Athenians were doing in foreign affairs. Therefore, funeral orators usually provided an idealised narrative about Athenian military history: the Athenians always fought just wars and were almost always victorious, with their warmaking consistently bringing substantial benefits, such as empire, security and power. The funeral oration minimised as much as possible war’s human costs. It was silent on the violent deaths of those being buried, while the bereaved were told to supress their grief as much as possible. Offering reassurance often required assimilating the unsettling present into this idealised narrative. The democratic council selected a leading politician to deliver an epitaphios logos. It usually chose the one who had been the main proponent of the war in which those being buried had died. It is understandable that such a funeral orator wanted to put the most positive spin on the current war.

The funeral oration demonstrates that the dēmos was able profoundly to change public culture. Speakers at the public funeral were not formally competing for the support of those present. Therefore, their performance-context was different to what other public speakers and playwrights faced. But funeral orators were still required to deliver a narrative that appealed to a large crowd. They wanted to get as many mourners as possible to accept their spin. This meant that their speeches also had to articulate the non-elite viewpoint. This genre clearly shows how the dēmos had redefined traditional aristocratic values. Archaic aristocrats had given Homer’s ‘beautiful death’ only to elite soldiers. The epitaphios logos, by contrast, granted it to all combatants. Every Athenian, by dying in battle for the dēmokratia, now gained a deathless memory of his courage. In archaic times, elite Greeks had despised sailors and defined aretē only in terms of the hoplite. The funeral oration esteemed sailors as highly as hoplites. It employed a new non-hoplitic definition of aretē that sailors had no difficulty in meeting. Funeral orators also found it easy to praise democratic principles. Most of the terms of praise that they used had not existed before the dēmos had come to power.

The funeral oration had an enormous impact on decisions about war and peace. Funeral orators rehearsed the same characterisation of the Athenians for more than a century. They did so because this was how the dēmos continued to think of themselves. The sheer frequency of Athenian wars regularly made this rehearsal of the Athenian imaginary an annual event. For non-elite Athenians, the genre was the only detailed narrative of military history that they knew. Therefore, it is unsurprising that there are so many epitaphic echoes in deliberative oratory. It is true that politicians always emphasised security-related reasons in debates about foreign affairs, but this did not stop them from also engaging with what was said in the Ceramicus. Sometimes, a politician needed to argue against an epitaphic idea because it clearly undermined his proposal. His need to do so shows that the dēmos, when sitting on the Pnyx, did not stop imagining themselves in epitaphic terms. More often, however, politicians employed the funeral oration in support of their calls for yet another war. For example, in such calls, they regularly drew on the genre’s victory-focussed account of Athenian military history. No matter what he was arguing in a foreign-policy debate, every politician knew full well that he could not question the dēmos’ commitment to war.Footnote ⁴¹⁹ He was always most reluctant to rehearse the human costs of their past wars.

Athenian drama did acknowledge that war could be burdensome. But it was still never an effective counterweight to the funeral oration’s idealisation of polemos. The tragic poets often dramatised a range of the human costs of war. What made it possible for them to do this was the setting. Plays critical of war were never set in Athens. This meant that theatregoers did not have closely to associate the unpleasantness on stage with their own warmaking. Less often, the tragic poets made Athens the setting. In these tragedies, the Athenians always exhibited epitaphic characteristics. These tragic wars, which the Athenians always won, were just and invariably brought them benefits. We find a comparable pattern in old comedy. As the comic poets always played it safe with respect to war’s downsides, they focussed only on personal inconveniences of war, avoiding entirely any mention of Athenian casualties. But they also praised the Athenians for their past military successes, duly noting the benefits that had come from them. On balance, tragedy and old comedy probably supported the Athenian war machine. To keep fighting, the dēmos had to acknowledge the inevitable human costs. Drama let them do this safely, but it also affirmed that the Athenians always won wars, which were usually just and beneficial.

Athenian democracy lacked the developed public critique of war that is common in contemporary democracies. Clearly, no other non-elite genre provided a counterweight to the funeral oration’s cultural militarism. Yet this did not stop elite Athenians from sharing with each other criticism of the dēmos’ wars. On the Peace is usually taken as the earliest evidence of their criticism. Isocrates wrote this treatise for elite readers in the 350s. Certainly, it is a scathing critique of the dēmos’ foreign affairs. On the Peace is the direct criticism of Athenian polemos that is simply missing in public discourse. Nevertheless, two of our literary epitaphioi logoi prove that this elite criticism was several decades older. Of course, rich Athenians considered the funeral oration to be prestigious and important. In writing their own examples, Gorgias and Isocrates were seeking to demonstrate to this social class their mastery of the genre. This explains why their funeral speeches contained a great deal of standard epitaphic content. Yet, in contrast to the historical speeches, theirs could include criticism of the dēmos, as they were writing only for an elite audience.Footnote ⁴²⁰ Consequently, Gorgias, who published his epitaphios logos in the 420s, was able roundly to criticise Athenian wars after 480/79. While a little gentler, Isocrates’ Panegyricus made the same criticism forty years later. The fact that they could both do so points to such criticism being common among elite Athenians from the 420s.