Pericles’s Funeral Oration

The statesman’s speech illustrates the importance of articulating higher principles in dire times. 

"Pericles Gives the Funeral Oration," 1877, by Philipp von Foltz. Amsterdam. Public Domain

In 430 B.C., the Athenian statesman Pericles delivered a “Funeral Oration” to commemorate those who had died in war. His speech exalted Athens as a free, beautiful, and courageous city, illustrating the need to articulate higher principles and kindle hope in times of trouble.

The Greatest Statesman of Athens

The 5th century B.C. is often called Greece’s “Golden Age.” Democracy became a legal and political reality, Greek city states successfully deterred a massive Persian invasion and secured two centuries of independence, and philosophers like Socrates began asking probing philosophical questions that continue to concern humanity.

Playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and Euripides wrote some of the most famous dramas to this day, while the physician Hippocrates laid the foundations for modern medicine and the traveling bard Herodotus turned history into an intellectual discipline in its own right.