Classical Quarterly, 2013

In this article, I ask what the Athenian funeral orations’ relationship to memory is and how exactly they worked to create it. Looking at these speeches through their politics of remembrance shows that they are not limited to celebrating the good death of citizens and to promulgating the ideology of the city, as the scholarly discourse currently suggests, nor are they focused only on adult male Athenians. As I argue, the processes of remembering are integral to the dynamics of these orations, the purpose of which is to create memory. The ritual context generates remembrances which would not otherwise exist both for the survivors, the children, parents, and brothers of the dead, and for the Athenians as a corporate group; it also ensures that these memories are ‘national’ ones shared by the whole city. The work of remembrance done in the epitaphioi intersected with other strategies of memorialisation elsewhere in the city and their juxtaposition brings out the complexities of remembering in classical Athens; indeed, the orations formed a critical part of this larger context and can not be understood without it. The speeches further show in exemplary fashion how one individual’s memory may become collective remembrance.

2014

The aim of this paper is to study the funeral oration given by Demosthenes in 338 BC, to better understand the role of the past as a source of resilience during the Athenian identity crisis after the defeat by Macedon at Chaironeia. The funeral oration or epitaphios has often been offhandedly treated as an uninventive and repetitive genre, employing stock themes to reach a never-changing goal: to praise the war dead by promoting polis identity. In 1981 however, Nicole Loraux published a groundbreaking work on the Athenian funeral oration, L’invention d’Athènes. In this book, she focused on the shared mythical and historical past as an important theme in the genre. This type of ‘memory study’ has become immensely popular in the past two decades, but where the ancient world is concerned it has mostly focused on classical fifth-century Athens. I would however like to shed more light on the function of memories of a shared past at the end of the fourth century BC, in what is now known as the Lycurgan period. Ushered in by the battle of Chaironeia in 338 BC, at which Athens suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of Philip II of Macedon, the Lycurgan period was a time of identity crisis for the Athenians. This sense of desperation and loss of identity inspired a series of reforms aimed at reinforcing not only military strength, but also civic pride. New insights into the mechanics of the shaping of civic identity have greatly increased interest in this turbulent episode of Athenian history in the past five years, coinciding with the current ‘boom’ in memory studies. The funeral oration, even though two of the six extant samples are dated to this period, has however not received much attention in this light. Indeed, after Loraux, the only one to devote serious attention to the epitaphios was Rosalind Thomas in her 1989 Oral Tradition & Written Record in Classical Athens. The funeral oration is however still only rarely seen as a useful source from which we can learn more about a specific moment in time. The goal here is to bring the funeral oration by Demosthenes into narrower focus, relating it to its specific historical circumstances and focusing on its evocation of social memory to show its unique and inventive character. Contrasting this epitaphios with that of Hypereides, which was held in 322 BC after Athens had booked several victories over Macedonian armies, will especially highlight its importance as an instrument of resilience in the city’s time of crisis.

H. Whittaker – G. Lee – G. Wrighston (eds.), Ancient Warfare: Introducing Current Research, Cambridge 2015, 229-251

The commemoration of the war dead in ancient Greece is usually investigated on the basis of a rigid classification of both ancient documentary evidence and modern categories. Through two historical examples, different in space and time, this paper argues instead that it must be thought in the light of the fluidity and malleability which are intrinsic to the social practices of memory. Giorgia Proietti focuses on the commemoration of the war dead in Classical Athens. On the one hand, she disputes the common assumption according to which they were honored with a strictu sensu heroic cult and argues instead that they were the recipient of a canonical dead cult, though extended in a civic dimension. On the other hand, she recognizes that they were at the core of a complex web of discursive strategies, which, through time, actually represented them as ‘founding heroes’. The heroic paradigm of the war dead can therefore be grasped only in the light of the fluidity and malleability of the different means of commemoration, notably the level of cultual rituality and that of narration, images and memory. Elena Franchi advances a new interpretation of the base of a Phocian monument dedicated at Delphi in the IV or III century B.C., commemorating an archaic battle fought against the Thessalians recorded by Herodotus (8.27 ff). This base, which preserves the marks of the statues’ feet and a fragmentary dedication (Syll.3 202B), is likely to be identified with the monument mentioned by Pausanias in 10.1.10, representing the leaders and heroes of that battle. However, most of these leaders and heroes were invented by local post-Herodotean narrative traditions dating to the IV or III century B.C. Hence this monument shows both the Classical and Hellenistic-Roman attitude to reshape the collective memory of an archaic event and the permeability between different means of commemoration.

Epideictic discourse has been and remains an enigma in rhetorical studies. The concept has been considered from numerous perspectives, but praise and blame, the purposes Aristotle ascribed to his third genre, still remain pervasive in our understanding of it. Following scholars who have questioned how well Aristotelian definitions of the concept can explain epideictic discourse in antiquity (Chase, 1961; Duffy, 1983; Walker, 2000), these essays will examine the political functions of the classical funeral oration (Epitaphios Logos), a quintessentially epideictic form of rhetoric. To date, few studies (Hesk, 2013 is a notable exception) explore the influence of political exigencies that confronted the ancient orator when speaking in ceremonial contexts. Responding to the sparse treatment of the subject, this project applies close reading of two extant funeral orations from classical Athens to investigate the connection between funerary discourse the prosecution of war efforts. As a work of conceptually oriented criticism, it aims to add to, modify, or reconceive of the epideictic genre and illuminate aspects of the text and context of the speeches under study. I propose that Aristotle's conception of epideictic is insufficient to explain the discourse of his contemporaries because it ignored the political ends ceremonial orators pursued, in particular, those of Demosthenes and Hyperides, two orators for whom we have extant texts of a funeral oration each delivered. By drawing on the works of modern rhetorical theorists including Chaïm Perelman, Lloyd Bitzer, and Kenneth Burke, I argue for a more fluid conception of the epideictic genre, one that is determined more by the immediate exigencies of the rhetorical situation than by the traditional tropes thought to govern the tradition.

In democratic Athens a funeral speech was regularly delivered for citizens who had died in war. In 1981, Nicole Loraux published a transformational study of this genre. Loraux claimed that the funeral oration had played the central role in maintaining a stable Athenian identity for two centuries. In spite of its huge impact, her The Invention of Athens was far from complete. It did not compare the funeral oration with the other genres of Athenian popular literature. Loraux was thus not able to prove three of her bold claims about the genre. She also left many important questions about the five extant funeral speeches unanswered. I am directing a large international project to complete The Invention of Athens. The Funeral Oration Project is undertaking the intertextual analysis that Loraux did not attempt. Project-members first met in Strasbourg in 2018. There was a second meeting in Lyon in 2020. Cambridge University Press is going to publish our nineteen chapters in 2023. This article summarises some of our preliminary results. It focusses on those chapters in our edited volume that directly confirm or refute Loraux's three bold claims. It discusses another chapter that answers important questions about the famous funeral speech of Pericles.

Each year the classical Athenians held a public funeral for fellow citizens who had died in war. On the first two days they displayed the war dead's coffins in the centre of Athens. On the third day they carried them in a grand procession to the public cemetery. There they placed the coffins in a funeral monument that the democracy had built at great expense. Beside it a leading politician delivered an oration ostensibly in the war dead's honour. In 1981 N. Loraux published a transformational study of this funeral oration. Before her The Invention of Athens ancient historians had considered this speech of little importance. But Loraux proved that it played an absolutely central role in the self-perception of the Athenian people. Each funeral oration rehearsed the same image of them: the Athenians were always victorious and capable of repelling foreign invaders, because they were braver than the other Greeks, while their wars only brought benefits and were always just. The Invention of Athens proved that the funeral oration typically created this image by narrating Athens's military history in mythical and historical times. Her study also made bold claims about the genre. For Loraux it was the most important one for the maintenance of Athenian self-identity, whose content, she asserted, was confined to what the funeral oration rehearsed. The Invention of Athens claimed that this self-identity adversely affected how the dēmos ('people') conducted foreign affairs. Yet her study did not systematically compare the funeral oration and the other genres of Athens's popular literature. Consequently Loraux was unable to prove these bold claims. The Athenian Funeral Oration builds on Loraux's rightly famous study by making this comparison. The first way that this new book does so is by exploring the extent to which the other genres reproduced the funeral oration's commonplaces. In dramatising the genre's mythical military exploits tragedy certainly rehearsed its image of the Athenians, while comedy regularly parodied it. All this shows the funeral oration's importance. At other times, however, these two genres contradicted its commonplaces, depicting, for example, not just the benefits but also the huge human costs of war. If Loraux's claim about the funeral oration's adverse impact is correct, its image of the Athenians must have had a big part in the assembly's debates about war. The political speeches that survive partially support her claim; for they do show how proposals for war often were couched in terms of justice. But, it appears, again, that this genre's treatment of war also went well beyond the funeral oration. The second way that the book makes this comparison is by studying how these different genres depicted the state's military history, democracy and sailors. This, too, will force us to modify Loraux's claims. There is no doubt that the funeral oration set the pattern for the depiction of Athens's wars. But this, apparently, was not the case with the other common topics; for tragedy, it seems, took the lead with democracy, while all genres equally reflected the dēmos's positive view of sailors.

2024

This chapter tests (and largely confirms) Nicole Loraux’s intriguing hypotheses concerning the authenticity of Pericles’ famous funeral oration and Thucydides’ ambivalent attitude towards this genre. It argues that Thucydides’ epitaphios logos of Pericles (2.35-46) owes much to the actual speech that the historical Pericles delivered in 431/0 BC to calm the widespread dissatisfaction with his policy of restraint vis-à-vis the Peloponnesian invaders. To achieve this end, Pericles focused on one of the epitaphic topoi, namely the Athenians’ democracy and way of life as one of the reasons for their exceptional aretē. Considering that Thucydides is highly critical of the epitaphic orators’ distorted version of the Athenian past (1.21.1), the inclusion of this epitaphios logos in his history may seem surprising, but it allowed Thucydides to explore the institutional/cultural reasons for the Athenians’ remarkable war-making ability, which his Corinthians had attributed earlier to the Athenians’ nature (1.70). Thucydides is not uncritical of Pericles’ idealization of Athens, though. By creating deliberate verbal echoes of Pericles’s eulogy in earlier and later passages of his work, Thucydides used the epitaphios logos of Pericles as a crucial point of comparison to illustrate the destructive impact of the war on the Athenians and the growing distance between the Periclean ideal of Athens and the brutal historical reality.

Carroll, P.M. 2011, "Memoria and Damnatio Memoriae. Preserving and erasing identities in Roman funerary commemoration," in P.M. Carroll & J. Rempel (eds), Living through the dead: burial and commemoration in the Classical world, 65-90.