The Invention of Athens by Nicole Loraux was the first book-length study of the Athenian funeral oration. Before its publication, ancient historians had accorded little importance to this genre. Loraux established for the first time the vital importance of this almost annual speech in the formation of Athenian self-identity. She showed how each staging of it helped the Athenians to maintain the same civic identity for over a century. Yet, in spite of its impact, Loraux’s first book was still far from complete. It left unanswered important questions about each of the surviving funeral speeches. An even larger gap concerned intertextuality: Loraux rightly saw traces of the funeral oration right across Athenian literature, but she never systematically compared the funeral oration with other types of public speech as well as drama. Therefore, she was unable to demonstrate whether the other literary genres of classical Athens were ever a counterweight to the funeral oration’s cultural militarism. The principal aim of this volume is to finish The Invention of Athens. Our book answers the important questions that Loraux left unanswered. It completes the vital intertextual analysis of the genre that is missing in The Invention of Athens.

Funeral orators came to rehearse four ‘standard’ myths. The classical Athenians believed that the earliest was the victory of their ancestors against an army that the Thracian Eumolpus had led into Attica. The widely held position is that these four mythical erga were a part of the genre from its beginning. Yet, this chapter firmly establishes that this position simply does not hold when it comes to the myth about Eumolpus. Indeed, the first funeral speech to mention it was only the one that Plato wrote soon after the end of the Corinthian War. Before this, there had existed an older myth about Erechtheus, an early Athenian king, and Eumolpus fighting each other. Importantly, however, this myth presented their fight as a civil war between Eleusis, a deme in Attica, and Athens. The new myth, which, by contrast, made Eumolpus and his army foreign invaders, first appeared in Erechtheus, which Euripides wrote at the end of the 420s. As Euripides regularly changed old myths or, simply, invented new ones, Hanink argues that the epitaphic exploit about Eumolpus was originally his invention.

Assembly-speeches and funeral speeches invite comparison. In both, prominent politicians addressed a large and predominantly non-elite audience, and war played a predominant role. Yet, contrasts between them abounded. The funeral oration emphasised the nobility of Athens and more particularly the selflessness and the patriotism of the war dead, whereas assembly-speeches criticised the decadence of Athenian politics and the short-sighted selfishness of Athenian citizens. The speaker of a funeral speech was self-effacing. The speaker in the assembly, by contrast, asserted his insight and knowledge, while he criticised his fellow citizens almost undemocratically. The funeral oration addressed a united Athens and avoided divisive issues, whereas disagreement was the raison d’être of assembly-speeches. In spite of all these differences, similarities lay just below the surface. Insofar as their advice for the future depended on the past, assembly speakers invoked the patriotic and slanted history that was conspicuously promulgated in the funeral oration. Funeral speeches insisted on Athenian exceptionalism in the Greek world. Assembly-speeches did the same, if only to contrast Athens’s current policies with its true role as the leader of the Greek world and the guardian of freedom and justice.

Few historians would associate Nicole Loraux with the great Marxist historians who wrote on classical antiquity. Nevertheless, Loraux implicitly presented herself as such, when, in 1981 and, again, in 1993, she made ideology and the imaginary central notions in her work on the funeral oration. This chapter investigates the complex uses of these two ‘re-invented’ notions in The Invention of Athens. In particular, it situates the career of Nicole Loraux within her rich intellectual milieu and teases out how she broke from it. This encompassed Classical Studies because The Invention of Athens, by moving the object of study to the imaginary, was clearly responding to some Marxist readings of antiquity, such as those of Moses Finley and the Italian School. But this milieu also included the French intellectual scene because Loraux, in fact, was always engaged in a dialogue with philosophers and anthropologists, such as Louis Althusser, Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis and Pierre Clastres.

There are two reasons why the funeral speech of Demosthenes has largely been ignored by ancient historians. The first reason is that it has always been judged as less important than the great funeral speeches of Pericles, Lysias and Hyperides. The second is that many ancient historians have thought it unworthy of Demosthenes in terms of content and style. The lack of sustained research on this funeral speech is thus unsurprising. This speech, however, is of considerable historical interest. Demosthenes, like other funeral orators, may have manipulated the genre’s commonplaces, but his speech is the only example of the surviving ones that had to react to a crushing Athenian defeat. In this situation, evoking the glorious past, which was a mainstay of the genre, seemed inappropriate. This chapter discusses the historical context of this neglected work and compares its lines of argumentation with those of other funeral speeches. It attempts to explain why Demosthenes delivered the funeral speech of 338 at all and why he said what he did.

In 1981, when Nicole Loraux published The Invention of Athens, it still seemed possible to take Isocrates’s Panegyricus as evidence for the funeral oration because of his treatise’s explicit appropriation of this genre. At the time, Isocrates was seen as a simple pamphlet-writer, who reflected the popular morality of fourth-century Athens. Forty years later, however, Isocratesʼ ‘pamphlets’ are now seen as rhetorical declamations or even real philosophical works. This chapter reconsiders Isocrates’ relationship to the funeral oration in light of this new reading of his oeuvre. It demonstrates that Isocrates took a critical, if not hostile, stance towards the public funeral for the war dead. While he acknowledged myth’s value as a moral paradigm for contemporary politics, Isocrates repeatedly argued that history since the Persian Wars had all been a moral decline for both Athens and Sparta. Since the public funeral had always commemorated the Athenian war dead of this period, Isocrates described it as a display of Athens’s abject failure. While he did appropriate some aspects of the funeral oration for his own purposes, Isocrates’s breaking of the continuity between Athens’ mythical and historical exploits challenged a central contention of this prestigious genre.

Compared to other extant examples, Plato’s Menexenus presents an unusual funeral speech: an oration delivered by Socrates, embedded within a Platonic dialogue and supposedly written by Pericles’ lover, Aspasia, whom Socrates claims as his own tutor in rhetoric. Nicole Loraux’s The Invention of Athens convinced almost all of the necessity of reading this speech alongside the others, without, however, investigating Plato’s own political and philosophical aims. Building on others, this chapter reopens the question of the dialogue’s tone. Is the fictional Socratic funeral speech ironic or serious, or somehow both? In order to approach this question, it is necessary, first, to examine the speech’s intertextual relations with Pericles’ funeral speech in Thucydides. Then, with the gender politics of this speech in mind, it will be possible to grasp the largely neglected significance of Aspasia, both as a woman and a foreigner. These considerations lead to the conclusion that Plato had both a critical and a constructive purpose: critical, in challenging the Periclean presentation of democratic courage, and constructive, in providing a kind of political therapy for democratic citizens, who stood, albeit unwittingly, in need of a healthier and more coherent self-understanding.

Nicole Loraux saw the genre of the funeral oration as ‘the spokesman of official ideology’ and even as ‘the only developed discourse that the Athenian city officially had on democracy’. Nevertheless, the funeral oration was not the only public treatment of democracy. Indeed, Athens was the only ancient Greek state in which citizens produced representations of their own regime and did so in a variety of literary genres. This chapter begins by considering the place that the funeral oration generally accorded democracy, as well as the specific democratic practices and principles that the surviving speeches mentioned. It then refutes what is, probably, the most famous argument in The Invention of Athens, namely that the funeral oration represented democracy only in aristocratic terms. Thirdly, the chapter clarifies the uniqueness of the epitaphic genre’s treatment of democracy by bringing in as comparison-points two tragedies and a famous legal speech. It concludes by drawing attention to the multiplicity of the self-portraits that Athenian democracy produced and to the ways in which the clear military function of the funeral oration constrained its portrait of the regime.

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 crystallised the courage of Achilles and Athenians alike, it was, from the outset, linked to speech. Indeed, heroic death and the civic beautiful death were the subject matter of elaborate speech.

This chapter argues that the affirmative function of tragedy, by which it aligns with rather than opposes the funeral speech, has been underemphasised in recent critical trends. While this multivocal genre encompasses and promotes conflicting perspectives through which questions about the city are raised, the chapter argues that Athenian spectators viewing theatrical representations of the stories about Athens that they heard glorified annually in the funeral speeches were quite likely to interpret them as affirmations of Athenian political and military action. Moreover, the multivocality of tragedy actually enables affirmatory interpretations because spectators are always provided with ‘escape routes’ away from any uncomfortable self-criticism. This is especially true of the tragedies bringing ‘ancient Athens’ to life. Most tragedies were set outside Athens, and thus allowed spectators a degree of distance, within which questioning and criticising their own city, and especially its warmaking, could be easier.

A striking feature of old comedy is its cannibalising of contemporaneous Athenian literature. The comic poets integrated the funeral oration into their comedies in three ways. Their first way was to bring on stage the funeral oration’s ancestors. Aristophanes characterised his choruses as such in three of his surviving plays. When these ancestors came to praise their own military exploits, they used the same terms as the funeral speeches and privileged the same historical period: the Persian Wars. Aristophanes clearly used this characterisation of the chorus for the sake of persuasion. By having these proud old men support the effort of a comic protagonist to bring peace, he defused the criticism that this effort went against the martial reputation of the Athenian people. The second way in which old comedy integrated the funeral oration was to warn theatregoers about the general dangers of praise. While Aristophanes sometimes quoted praise from dithyrambs as an example of what public speakers said in order to deceive the people, at other times, Aristophanes quoted from funeral speeches. The third way in which comedy engaged with the funeral oration was the deliberate confounding of the epitaphic genre’s characterisation of the Athenians as selfless and courageous.