Demosthenes, Speeches 60 and 61, Prologues, Letters

60. Funeral Oration

60. FUNERAL ORATION introduction Demosthenes was chosen by the Athenians to deliver the Funeral Oration (epitaphios) over those Athenians who had died fighting Philip II of Macedonia at the Battle of Chaeronea in September 338 (Dem. 18.285, Plut., Demosthenes 21.2). Athens was the only polis in Greece to honor those who had recently died in battle with a public oration (Dem. 20.141), and this solemn ceremony, attended by foreigners as well as citizens, followed a rigid procedure. Although our principal source is the later fifth-century historian Thucydides (2.34), there is no reason to think that the procedure as he described it had changed by the later fourth century. Thucydides tells us, The bones of the departed lie in state for the space of three days in a tent erected for that purpose, and each one brings to his own dead any offering he desires. On the day of the funeral, coffins of cypress wood are borne on wagons, one for each tribe, and the bones of each are in the coffin of his tribe. One empty bier, covered with a pall, is carried in the procession for the missing whose bodies could not be found for burial. Anyone who wishes, whether citizen or stranger, may take part in the funeral procession, and the women who are related to the deceased are present at the burial and make lamentation. The coffins are laid in the public sepulchre, which is situated in the most beautiful suburb of the city; there they always bury those fallen in war, except indeed those who fell at Marathon; for their valor the Athenians judged to be preeminent and they buried them on the spot where they fell. But when the remains have been laid away in the earth, a man chosen by the state, who is 22 demosthenes 1On the genre, see Kennedy 1963 pp. 152–173; Loraux 1986; Usher 1999, pp. 349–352; Carey 2006; and Roisman 2006. There is an excellent discussion also by Clavaud in the Budé Text of Dem. 60. 2 A translation of this speech by Stephen Todd is in Lysias in this series. regarded as best endowed with wisdom and is foremost in public esteem, delivers over them an appropriate eulogy. After this the people depart. A funeral oration belonged to the genre of epideictic (demonstrative ) oratory. It dealt with honor and exhortation rather than expediency , as in the case of deliberative oratory, or justice, as in the case of forensic oratory.1 The aim was twofold. Firstly, it was to honor those who had died with the argument that in fighting to preserve freedom (eleutheria) and autonomy, their deaths had not been needless. Freedom and autonomy were ideals that the Greeks valued the most and whichwereinherenttotheirpolis system.Secondly,itwastoawakenadmiration in the listeners by glorifying the city, its form of government, and the exploits of its ancestors. The epideictic genre was highly rhetorical . It had a conventional or solemn formula (see further below); historical narrative within it was naturally patriotic, with the speaker lauding the deeds of the Athenians’ ancestors and then linking these to praise of the more recent dead, the subject of the funeral speech. Given the many decades in the fifth and fourth centuries that Athens was at war with other Greek states and then with Macedonia, there must have been a large number of funeral orations delivered, yet only six have survived. In chronological order, these are: (1) Pericles’ Funeral Oration, delivered in 430 at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides gives us a version of the speech (2.35– 46), which is almost certainly not a verbatim account. (2) Gorgias’ Funeral Oration, of which only a fragment survives. This was probably written as a rhetorical exercise, not for delivery at an actual funeral ceremony. (3) Lysias 2, set in the context of the Corinthian War (395–386), and perhaps dating to 392. If the speech was actually spoken and was not merely a rhetorical exercise, it must have been written for someone else, for Lysias was a metic (resident alien) and could not have delivered it himself.2 60. funeral oration 23 3 A translation of this speech is inDinarchus, Hyperides, and Lycurgus in this series . For a text, translation, and commentary, see Worthington 1999). 4 For further details, see Worthington 1999, pp. 34 –35. (4) Socrates’ Funeral Oration, in...