Précis: Patriot Guilt in Pericles’ Funeral Oration

Adam

GSI: Kuan

Précis: Patriot Guilt in Pericles’ Funeral Oration

      Pericles’ Funeral Oration, recounted by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War, celebrates Athenian civic life and affirms the efficacy of words as deeds by eulogizing the city’s recent war dead. Through the dead, Thucydides depicts, via Pericles, features unique to a shared Athenian past and present that demonstrate the monumentality of its civic project and evoke a sense of guilty patriotism in the audience. Pericles eventually praises the honor of the war dead and demonstrates the power of words as deeds in his explicit demand for the audience’s participation in the war. But his initial focus is not a call to action or glorification of the dead, but instead the development of rhetorical decorum with his audience through descriptions of the city’s magnificent qualities in order to garner their support for his eventual argument.

      Pericles begins by presenting himself not a statesman with a political agenda, but a public figure tasked with a “duty to obey the law” and deliver panegyrical remarks. He then moves into a discussion of history, evoking a sense of commonality between himself and his audience. Not ancestors, but “our ancestors;” not fathers, but “our own fathers” (2). Pericles links this common history (“our history”) to a their present condition (“our position”) with the effect of producing identification with the audience and thereby credibility as a speaker (2). In doing so, he also claims to share the audience’s loss. It is his loss and the audience’s loss: their shared loss — a rhetorical move that produces ethos and an extrication of responsibility for the speaker. Pericles now stands on more equal footing with his audience, and in doing so absolves himself of some personal responsibility for his role as a wartime leader.
      Pericles continues with an extolment of the public and private virtues produced by Athenian civic life, which are portrayed in an attempt to inspire patriotism and guilt in his audience so that he can demand their wartime involvement later in the speech. Athens does not imitate its enemies—“it does not copy the laws of neighboring states,” like its enemy Sparta, which is indirectly referenced in this line. Athens is rather an exemplum of virtuous civic life, “a pattern to others [rather] than imitators [themselves]” (2). These statements serves to both solicit pride for the audience’s exemplary form of government and also subtly reshape that pride into a form of incipient anger toward an unnamed enemy, Sparta. But this indirect reference to Sparta is also a reference to the Athenian past, which, like Sparta, Pericles choses not to describe (1). Sparta and their shared Athenian history lacked such civic virtues, including that “afford equal justice to all in their private differences” (2). Pericles’ Athens and its production of equity evoke loyal pride and pleasure in the audience by means of compassion, since Sparta and their ancestor’s city lack a form of government that is both good and proprietary.

      In evoking their shared past and enemy, Pericles lays the ground for the call to action present in the second half of his speech: “sons of brothers of the dead, I see an arduous struggle before you (4). What appears on surface to be a tribute to Athenian civic life is actually an attempt to argue the importance of fighting (“approach [the dead’s] renown”) and supporting the war through “beget[ing] children”(4). Pericles is fostering a sense of Athenian pride while reminding his audience the freedom that they could loose if their enemies to be victorious or if they were to fall back into an archaic way of life.

      Pericles’ next move — explaining that the “freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life” (2)  —is to evoke a sense of fault and guilt in his audience. The speaker says Athens should be celebrated because it “provide[s] plenty of means for the mind to refresh itself from business,” including games, celebrations, scarifies and luxurious produce from across the world (2). Here Pericles’ argument functions much like his earlier praise of Athenian democracy: Athenians should be prideful of their privileges, since Sparta and their past lack these comforts, which could be easily lost were Athens to lose the war. Like before, Pericles is working to create emotional backing for his later call to action, this time in the form of guilt.

      Pericles says that “the points in which our city is worthy of admiration” (3) come at a cost; they are made possible only through a sacrifice of life. But, except for a brief mention (“this funeral prepared at the people’s cost”) at the beginning of his speech (1), the speaker has yet to address this sacrifice. He focuses on “the character of our country” rather than the “heroism” of “these and their like [who] made her” (3). Pericles emphasizes the greatness of Athens and not the greatness of the dead because they are synecdochic with one another: the greatness of Athens represents the greatness of these dead men. This synecdoche is also apparent in the speech’s setting. Pericles does not need to remark on their death because, as Thucydides remarks, “the bones of the dead are laid out in a tent” before the audience (1).

      Only by viewing the speech in its proper context does Pericles’ attempt to provoke guilt in his audience become clear. As he compares the luxury and eminence of Athenian civic life to the past, the speaker is doing so in front of the city’s recent war dead. Pericles mobilizes this implied contrast between the audience’s current station and their dead comrades to produce an emotional sense of guilt that, alongside the previously evoked sense of pride, argues for a call to arms in the speech’s second half. 

Please note: page numbers refer to the printed form of the hyperlinked text.