Pericles, Funeral Oration

Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | BCE

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Literary Devices

Understatement

Pericles begins the “Funeral Oration” with the trope of false modesty or false humility. He suggests that his own public speaking is insufficient to honor the Athenian dead, saying, “I could have wished that the reputations of many brave men were not to be imperiled in the mouth of a single individual, to stand or fall according as he spoke well or ill” (2.35.1). This kind of understatement, or intentionally portraying something as less significant or of lesser quality than it actually is, is a common rhetorical device that accentuates the gap between the orator’s words and reality. As a politician and the general leading the war efforts against Sparta, Pericles is an admired and accomplished figure who is respected for his skills as a speaker and controls the narrative regarding the fallen soldiers. Thus, their reputations are not at risk of being “imperiled” by his speech. Pericles’s intentional diminishment of his own abilities is intended to emphasize the profundity of the fallen soldiers’ sacrifice and to shift his audience’s focus from his individual prestige to their shared victory and identity.

Mood

While the mood, or emotional characteristic, of a funeral oration is typically one of somber remembrance, Pericles wants the commemoration of fallen soldiers to be celebratory. He emphasizes the glory and heroism of those who sacrificed themselves for their nation:

For the Athens that I have celebrated is only what the heroism of these and their like have made her, men whose fame, unlike that of most Hellenes, will be found to be only commensurate with their deserts (2.42.2).

To promote his ideals regarding the greatness of his city—and his own leadership of it—Pericles wanted everyone to feel uplifted by the glory of being Athenian. To emphasize this patriotic mood, Pericles draws a utopian image of the city, depicting it as an idealized space in which democracy provokes a sense of community spirit. In contrast to the constant oversight and suspicion required by the war context, the people of Athens are “far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other” (2.27.2). This image of being free from spectacle extends to the spectacle of the mass funeral where Pericles speaks: The commemoration was carried out at state expense to prevent a display by the wealthy that might make the poorer classes envious. To further avoid any negative emotional associations with the war, Pericles concludes his speech with the suggestion that his listeners should emulate and honor the dead rather than mourn them. By emphasizing the valor of the dead, Pericles shifts the mood of the oration from grief to celebration.

Parallelism

Pericles uses parallelism, or a repeated phrase or sentence structure, to emphasize the glory of Athens and how the victory of the dead both stems from and exemplifies Athenian virtues. Early in the speech, Pericles offers a series of questions, repeating the word “what”:

But what was the road by which we reached our position, what the form of government under which our greatness grew, what the national habits out of which it sprang; these are questions which I may try to solve before I proceed to my panegyric upon these men; since I think this to be a subject upon which on the present occasion a speaker may properly dwell, and to which the whole assemblage, whether citizens or foreigners, may listen with advantage (2.36.4).

The parallel structure of the questions makes them more memorable to the listener, thus contextualizing all that follows them. Pericles hopes that as his audience considers the valor of the fallen soldiers, they will ascribe their victories to the implied, inherent greatness of Athens. This instance of parallelism suggests that the soldiers had merit because they were Athenian, rather than Athens gaining merit through the honorable actions of its soldiers.