Peter Hunt (Strasbourg 2018), 'Imagining Athens in the Assembly and on the Battlefield', with Opening Remarks by David M. Pritchard (in French), Audio Recording Only, The Athenian Funeral Oration: 9-11 July 2018: An International Conference at the University of Strasbourg (France). (original) (raw)
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The audience of the epitaphios logos assembled to hear a leading politician recount the earlier military exploits of the Athenians and how they had shaped the contemporary exploits of the war dead. The funeral oration upheld an idealised image of Athenian action in which Athens excelled in war and undertook warmaking only for noble ends. This focus attempted to reconcile the mourners to loss and grief by appealing to common and unquestionably good outcomes. By contrast, it is now orthodox to state that Athenian tragedy encouraged questioning and self-critique among the Athenians. Although the funeral speeches intimately connected past and present, at another level they clearly distinguished between them, as one speaker on one day showed how the war dead of a particular year had exemplified eternal Athenian superiority. Tragedy, however, avoided explicit coverage of the present, operating in a vague space between ancient and contemporary. This vagueness might have offered theatre-goers opportunities for critique of Athens and self-critique. However, what they brought to tragedy from the funeral speeches might equally have pushed them to a strongly affirmative idea of Athenian action. Recent readings often argue that tragedians criticised Athenian warmaking. Yet, every surviving tragedy where Athens features is fully intelligible as an endorsement of Athenian action, often combined with the spectacle of the suffering of others. Clearly to identify as a citizen of a state that helped those who were suffering while remaining untouched by this suffering was pleasurable. The funeral oration and tragedy probably worked together from different perspectives to solidify a strongly positive view of Athens for Athenians.
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.
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.
Nicole Loraux considère l’oraison funèbre athénienne comme le porte-parole de l’idéologie démocratique. Elle considère aussi sur cette base que la représentation de la démocratie est aristocratique et que la démocratie n’a pas trouvé son propre langage. On souligne d’abord ici la variété des oraison funèbres dans leur manière de représenter la démocratie et l’influence du contexte sur la longueur et le contenu de ces représentations. L’éloge de la démocratie y est néanmoins une constante. La démocratie est évoquée avec ses slogans spécifiques (liberté, égalité devant la loi, partage du pouvoir entre tous) sans laisser planer d’ambiguïté sur la nature du pouvoir. Les précisions de Périclès sur la reconnaissance du mérite et la participation différenciée à la vie politique visent à souligner des apports positifs du régime, dans le cadre d’une comparaison avec les régimes oligarchiques. La thèse de Nicole Loraux selon laquelle l’idéologie athénienne reposerait sur une représentation « aristocratique » de la démocratie, propre à satisfaire les oligarques, ne trouve guère d’arguments en sa faveur. Le discours de Périclès propose néanmoins le tableau d’une répartition harmonieuse et consensuelle des fonctions, qui n’a nul besoin d’être à double entente. Enfin, l’oraison funèbre ne résume pas à elle seule les discours publics sur la démocratie et présente des particularités liées au genre et à sa fonction, qui est de consoler les proches des soldats morts et d’exhorter les citoyens à défendre leur cité.
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.
'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 main forum for political speech in the Greek city-state was the Assembly, which all male citizens had the right to attend. Speakers in the Assembly were not members of political parties promoting an ideology but appealed to the interests of the entire community and to shared social values. To win the trust of fellow citizens, speakers employed rhetoric to stress their moral integrity and their personal dedication to public service. The agenda of the Assembly was set by the Council, and speakers had to address a specific proposal for immediate action. The business of the Assembly included foreign affairs, public finance, military campaigns, and religious business—there was no separation of church and state in the ancient Greek world. The Greeks made a strict distinction between speeches before the Assembly (deliberative oratory) and those given in the law courts (forensic oratory) and at festivals and public funerals (epideictic oratory).
Ancient historians regularly argue that the Athenian dēmos held sailors in much lower esteem than hoplites. They cite in support of this the extant funeral speech of Pericles. Certainly this famous speech said a lot about courageous hoplites but next to nothing about sailors. Yet it is also clear that this was not a typical example of the genre. Funeral speeches usually gave a fulsome account of Athenian military history. In 431 Pericles decided to skip such an account because of the difficult politics that he faced. In rehearsing military history funeral speeches actually always mentioned naval battles and recognised sailors as courageous. Old comedy and the other genres of public oratory depicted sailors in the same positive terms. Their sailors displayed no less courage than hoplites and both groups equally benefitted the state. All these non-elite genres assumed that a citizen fulfilled his martial duty by serving as either a sailor or a hoplite. They used a new definition of courage that both groups of combatants could easily meet. In tragedy, by contrast, characters and choruses used the hoplite extensively as a norm. In epic poetry heroes spoke in the same hoplitic idiom. By copying this idiom the tragic poets were setting their plays more convincingly in the distant heroic age. In spite of this, tragedy still recognised Athens as a major seapower and could depict sailors as courageous. In Athenian democracy speakers and playwrights had to articulate the viewpoint of non-elite citizens. Their works put beyond doubt that the dēmos esteemed sailors as highly as hoplites.
RISING DEMOCRACY: ATHENS AFTER CLYSTENES
Miguel Reale, in his work Pluralism and freedom, when dealing with the founding values of democracy, explains that, by affirming that it is born in Greece, it is declared a historical truth associated with the imperative of the search and determination of a historical good, of a founding value, of those who, "once brought into man's enlightening and enlightened conscience, become inseparable from him". [2] Still according to the considerations of the São Paulo philosopher, the so-called "Greek miracle" was linked to the dignity of thought as such, to the self-awareness of logos. The destination of the logos, in fact, allowed the realization of its profound social nature, which has always prevented men from just meeting or crossing paths with each other, but communicating with each other, through word, "which is not the dress of thought, but it is thought even if it opens itself to others, like the flower that bears fruit". [3] "Freedom to think as a plurality of thinking" [4]: this is the great lesson of Greece pointed out by the author of Experience and culture and that leads us to the concept of isegoría [5] from the Greeks, a concept that brings together the predicates of legal equality of speaking and participating in the direction of public affairs, in association with the public debate of government affairs. This exercise of the free word in the room that was now implied democratic rule inspired by the sovereignty of the government of opinion. [6] Greek democracy, notably Athenian, established citizenship gathered and manifested in the agora, in the enclosure of a public square, with hands-on deliberation on all matters of governmental character. The essential political value of Athenian democracy, according to Miguel Reale [7], would be respect for the dignity of thinking and expressing oneself freely, which also means "right to diverge". Athens as an open society explained that, where everyone has an equal right to decide, the majority could only decide. Citizens' freedom, in this context, was one of the first pillars of democratic ideology, which made it possible for others to reveal themselves, demonstrating that: "(...) wherever man lacks the faculty to be faithful to himself, to his own thought; wherever there is a single thought, imposed as a transpersonal and definitive truth; wherever there are organs of political orthodoxy, to determine self-criticisms TRANSLATION