The Athenian Funeral Oration

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 a comparison of the funeral oration with other genres that is missing in her famous book. What emerges is a speech that had a much greater political impact than Loraux thought. This volume puts the study of war in Athenian culture on a completely new footing.

Author: David M. Pritchard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 02/01/2024
Pages: 554
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 2.37lbs
Size: 9.61h x 6.69w x 1.19d
ISBN: 9781009413084

About the Author
Pritchard, David M.: - David M. Pritchard is Associate Professor of Greek History at the University of Queensland, where he has chaired the Discipline of Classics and Ancient History. He has authored Athenian Democracy at War (Cambridge, 2019), Public Spending and Democracy in Classical Athens (2015) and Sport, Democracy and War in Classical Athens (Cambridge, 2013), edited War, Democracy and Culture in Classical Athens (Cambridge, 2010) and co-edited Sport and Festival in the Ancient Greek World (2003). He has held fifteen fellowships in Australia, Europe and the US, most recently at l'Institut d'études avancées de Nantes, and speaks on radio and regularly writes for newspapers around the world.

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