Pericles, Funeral Oration

Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | BCE

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Background

Historical Context: The Peloponnesian War (431 BCE-404 BCE)

In the fifth century BCE, ancient Greece comprised several major city-states. Each city-state was a nation unto itself, though they also shared the Greek language, a sense of cultural identity, and a public religion, as evidenced in shared gods and the Olympic Games. With the exception of Sparta’s military, the city-states’ armies were mostly made up of citizen-soldiers who were not professional warriors, but farmers and craftspeople who could not be away for campaigns without great personal loss of money and property. By the time of the Peloponnesian War, when Pericles gave his speech, the two most powerful city-states were Athens, which had a powerful navy, and Sparta, which had a strong infantry.

Sparta founded the Peloponnesian League around 550 BCE, based around the Peloponnese, a peninsula that forms the southern half of mainland Greece. The alliance included Sparta and Corinth, the two biggest city-states of the Peloponnese. In 490 BCE, the mighty Persian Empire attempted but failed to conquer all the Greeks. They renewed their attempt in 480 BCE and were decisively defeated the following year. During this second invasion, Athens was occupied and burned to the ground by the Persians.

In response to the Persian War, Athens founded the Delian League. This was an alliance mostly of Greek city-states on islands in the Aegean Sea, between the Greek mainland and modern Turkey, then claimed by the Persian Empire. The alliance was named for the island of Delos, where it was agreed to; according to legend, the twin gods Apollo and Artemis were born there. The alliance treasury was initially kept at Delos, but around 454 BCE, Athens announced that the treasury would be safer in Athens and removed it to their city. Pericles was one of the politicians who authorized using the Delian League’s treasury money to rebuild the city. Any member of the alliance that objected to this plan or tried to leave the league was stopped, either by the destruction of its city or by the installation of an Athens-friendly government, and so the Delian League became an Athenian empire.

The Delian League and the Peloponnesian League became the two sides in the Peloponnesian War. Athens used the alliance treasury to build walls, known as the Long Walls, around Athens, the major port city of Piraeus, and along the road that connected the two. This made Sparta suspicious, and in 433 BCE Athens directly conflicted with Spartan interests when a former colony of Corinth, Sparta’s most important ally, signed a treaty with Athens. After minor skirmishes, full-scale war broke out in 431 BCE. Spartan forces invaded and occupied Athenian territory, though usually temporarily. Athenian policy, attributed to Pericles, was to move people under threat inside the Long Walls for their protection instead of confronting the Spartan forces directly. After the Spartans left for home in the winter, which was a standard practice at that time, the Athenian forces attacked Spartan territory, then returned to the safety of their Long Walls. The “Funeral Oration” was delivered as a memorial to the men who lost their lives in the first year of the war. After nearly three decades of war, Sparta defeated Athens in 404 BCE.

Cultural Context: Ancient Greece

In the fifth century BCE, the Greeks were not a unified society, but certain aspects of the cultural identity of the ancient Greeks, especially the Athenians, undergird the “Funeral Oration.” Cultural characteristics that most Greeks shared and Athens demonstrated included being societies that enslaved people, isolating upper-class women from public life, and allowing a limited number of foreign people to live in the city-state.

At the time of the Peloponnesian War, the Greek city-states enslaved anyone who was not Greek and fought wars among themselves constantly. During the Peloponnesian War, they sold defeated cities’ people into slavery elsewhere, such as the Persian Empire. In many cases, enslaved people were the majority of a city-state’s residents; this is believed to be true of Athens, the setting of Pericles’s funeral oration. Those who were enslaved often performed the most labor-intensive jobs, such as mining. Even if an enslaved person became emancipated or was the child of the enslaver, they were never considered citizens of the city-state. In Sparta, they were simply never freed. Enslaved people provided much of the labor that supported programs Pericles mentions, such as the provision of support for the children of fallen soldiers.

The Greeks, especially the Athenians, also insisted that the woman’s place was in the home. This is reflected in Pericles’s comments to the widows encouraging them to avoid becoming talked about, whether for their virtue or their vices; a Greek woman was supposed to be absent from public life. Only the poorest women appeared in public, often forced by necessity to sell things in the marketplace. In fact, Greeks had a special class of public women, known as hetaera, who were allowed to mingle with men outside the home. Hetaeras were always foreign-born and were highly trained in music, poetry, and debate. They were often sexual companions as well.

Last, while most Greek city-states did allow foreign people from certain places to live in their cities, they were never considered citizens. In most city-states, these outsiders were simply from other Greek city-states, but in Athens, they might be from other areas of the Mediterranean world. Athens depended on maritime trade, so allowing residents from outside the city-state was necessary. Like formerly enslaved people, foreigners were never allowed to become Athenian citizens.

While Athens was a democracy, only its citizens were allowed to participate in government. This means that only a small percentage of the population—adult male citizens—had political power, and the many advantages of Athenian life that Pericles references would only have been available to certain members of the upper classes.