Pericles, Funeral Oration

Thucydides’s “Funeral Oration of Pericles” comes from The History of the Peloponnesian War. Although Thucydides was an eyewitness to the war, he promised never to report anything without interviewing multiple witnesses. He died with his treatise incomplete—stopping mid-sentence—yet every historian of ancient Greece who succeeded him began where his narrative stopped. The best-known and most-quoted portion of his work is the funeral oration given by the military leader Pericles in 431 BCE, after the first year of the war; it commemorated the Athenians who died in battle that year, giving them an equal burial at the expense of the state. Thucydides notes that none of the speeches is recorded verbatim.

This guide uses the text from the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University. All quotes from this text are cited based on the traditional divisions of the work: book, chapter, and section.

Just before the funeral oration begins, Thucydides explains the customs associated with this memorial celebration. The dead were cremated on the battlefield and brought back to Athens to be interred in one of 10 coffins representing each of the tribes, or demes. There is an 11th coffin for those missing in action.