Death as an ideological stimulant : epitaphios and logos hegemonikos through Nicole Loraux’s The Invention of Athens (original) (raw)
Related papers
A Funeral to Remember. The imagined past of the Athenian funeral oration as a source of resilience.
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.
In classical Athens, a funeral speech was delivered for dead combatants almost every year, the most famous being that by Pericles in 430 BC. In 1981, Nicole Loraux transformed our understanding of this genre. Her The Invention of Athens showed how it reminded the Athenians who they were as a people. Loraux demonstrated how each speech helped them to maintain the same self-identity for two centuries. But The Invention of Athens was far from complete. This volume brings together top-ranked experts to finish Loraux's book. It answers the important questions about the numerous surviving funeral speeches that she ignored. It also undertakes the comparison of the funeral oration and other genres that is missing in her famous book. What emerges is a speech that had a much greater political impact than Loraux thought. The volume puts the study of war in Athenian culture on a completely new footing.
From Homer’s Iliad to the Athenian funeral oration and beyond, the ‘beautiful death’ was the name that the Greeks used to describe a combatant’s death. From the world of Achilles to democratic Athens, the warrior’s death was a model that concentrated the representations and the values that served as masculine norms. This should not be a surprise: the Iliad depicts a society at war and, in the Achaean camp at least, a society of men, without children and legitimate wives. Certainly, the Athenian city-state distinguished itself from others by the splendour that it gave the public funeral of its citizens that had died in war and especially by the repatriating of their mortal remains. In a society that believed in autochthony, this repatriation was, undoubtedly, significant. Since the beautiful death crys
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.
'Their memories will never grow old': the politics of remembrance in the Athenian funeral orations
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.
The French can be surprised that foreigners come to France to study ancient Greece. They understand why Anglophone philosophers do so, as it is matter of genuine national pride that ‘French theory’ conquered the world in the 1980s. But relatively few French people realise that among English-speaking researchers of ancient Greece the so-called Paris school was no less influential. The leading figures of this Paris-based circle of ancient historians were Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Reading their books as well as those of younger circle-members profoundly shaped our historiography. It turned me and other budding foreign researchers of ancient Greece into the cultural historians that we are today. The book of the Paris school that exerted the greatest influence on my generation was The Invention of Athens by Nicole Loraux. It was the first book-length study of the speech that democratic Athens staged for the war dead. Before this book’s publication in 1981, ancient historians had accorded little importance to the funeral oration. For them, the genre consisted only of dubious clichés. It also endorsed a pronounced cultural militarism: funeral orators claimed that war brought only benefits and sought to deny the human costs. This was at odds with the strong anti-militarism on the French left during the 1970s. In writing a book about this genre, Loraux clearly was a trailblazer. The Invention of Athens established for the first time the vital importance of this almost annual speech in the formation of Athenian self-identity. Loraux showed how each staging of it helped the Athenians to maintain the same shared civic identity for over a century. The Invention of Athens was also clearly different from the other books of the Paris school. At the time, Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, for example, were researching basic structures of Greek thought. What Loraux had discovered was more complex: a detailed narrative about who the Athenians were and a set of discursive practices for its maintenance. The Invention of Athens truly was a remarkable achievement. Yet, in spite of its transformative impact, it was still far from a complete work. Loraux deliberately played down individual authorship as a topic of study, which helped her to prove that the surviving funeral speeches were part of a long-stable genre. But this meant that The Invention of Athens left unanswered important questions about each of the seven surviving examples. An even larger gap concerned intertextuality. The Invention of Athens rightly saw traces of the funeral oration right across Athenian literature, but it never systematically compared the funeral oration with other types of public speech as well as drama. Therefore, Loraux was unable to demonstrate whether the other literary genres of classical Athens were ever a counterweight to the funeral oration’s cultural militarism. Without such intertextuality, her ability to prove many of her bold hypotheses was limited. The principal aim of this edited volume is to complete methodically The Invention of Athens. To this end, our book dedicates a chapter to each extant funeral speech in order to answer the important questions that Loraux left unanswered. It completes the vital intertextual analysis of the genre that is missing in The Invention of Athens. In filling such gaps, our chapters also aim to reassess numerous bold arguments and claims that Loraux made in her celebrated first book. Another aim of ours is to furnish a rich analysis of war’s overall place in the culture of democratic Athens.
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.
The Epitaphios, civic ideology and the cityscape of classical Athens Space and cultural memory
The Ideologies of Lived Space, eds.J.J.H. Klooster and J. Heirman, 2013
The spatial context of ancient Greek oratory can not be left out of consideration as it may help us in explaining certain features of the text or in envisaging their performance and the effects on their contemporary audience. This articles studies Athenian funerary oratory and demonstrates that the orators selected topics, both concrete mytho-historical and abstract ones, that are displayed or evoked in the spatial ambience of the funeral, either visible somewhere in the backdrop of the cityscape or related to significant landmarks. In doing so, the orators sought to express and steer Athenian popular thought at a solemn, ceremonial occasion. They found support in the physical surroundings, as they spoke at a site where the cultural memory of the Athenians was collectively cherished, and they referred to items that were part of this memory and which they endeavoured to harmonize with their over-all political message. Thus they caused ceremonial space to be ‘lived’ in an ideological way. This spatial aspect made the funeral oration a vulnerable target for its critics Thucydides and Plato.
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.