Athens was a superpower whose ambitions required the ongoing sacrifice of men. To ensure those sacrifices were willingly made, the Athenians embraced a distinct form of ultra-patriotism, which was transmitted almost annually via the funeral speech. In this genre of public oratory, Athens was the leader and the protector of Greece, the wars that she fought were always altruistic and justified, and those who died in them were celebrated for their selfless courage. As this chapter will reveal, however, the obligation to fight was so readily embraced that most men had direct experience of combat. As a result, in Athens, the rhetoric of the funeral oration and the experience of war co-existed uneasily. On the one hand, the form of the funeral speech was determined by its function, which was to perpetuate the self-sacrifice of Athenian men. Other types of public discourse were free of such constraints, and whilst patriotism is reinforced by drama and forensic oratory, these genres could also explore the adverse human experience of war. These sometimes converging, sometimes diverging portrayals of war reveal a society that acknowledged the consequences of conflict but considered the patriotic cause worth the human cost.

Nicole Loraux’s great study of the funeral oration stresses the theme of timelessness. Loraux argued that the funeral orators typically presented an account of Athenian military history that avoided any focus on recent military actions. For this argument, Hyperides’s funeral speech presented a difficulty. Loraux described it as the ‘least conformist’ of the surviving speeches and as a ‘subversion’ lacking ‘fidelity’ to the epitaphic tradition. Certainly, the unique features of this speech have always been emphasised since its first publication in 1858. This speech focussed almost exclusively on the recent actions that led up to the public funeral of 322. It also broke with the genre’s general anonymity by singling out the fallen general, Leosthenes, for extensive praise. Loraux tried to account for all this by referring to the ‘exceptional circumstances’ that motivated Hyperides to compose his speech as a eulogy for an individual. This chapter studies closely the timeliness of this funeral speech. It connects the depiction of recent events with Hyperides’ wider political policies. It cautions against regarding the speech as an unusual subversion by recalling how few funeral speeches we have and by linking Hyperides’s speech to other examples of timeliness in what survives of the genre.

This chapter tests (and largely confirms) Nicole Loraux’s intriguing hypotheses concerning the authenticity of Pericles’ famous funeral oration and Thucydides’s ambivalent attitude towards this genre. It argues that Thucydides’ funeral speech of Pericles (2.35–46) owes much to the actual speech that the historical Pericles delivered in 431/0 BC to calm the widespread dissatisfaction with his policy of restraint vis-à-vis the Peloponnesian invaders. To achieve this end, Pericles focussed on one of the epitaphic commonplaces, namely the Athenians’ democracy and way of life as one of the reasons for their exceptional courage. Considering that Thucydides is highly critical of the epitaphic orators’ distorted version of the Athenian past (1.21.1), the inclusion of this funeral speech in his history may seem surprising, but it allowed Thucydides to explore the institutional/cultural reasons for the Athenians’ remarkable war-making ability, which his Corinthians had attributed earlier to the Athenians’ nature (1.70). Thucydides is not uncritical of Pericles’ idealization of Athens, though. By creating deliberate verbal echoes of Pericles’s eulogy in earlier and later passages of his work, Thucydides used the epitaphios logos of Pericles as a crucial point of comparison to illustrate the destructive impact of the war on the Athenians.

Nicole Loraux’s understanding of ideology as a system of representations and her analysis of the beauty of the dead would all seem to offer an opening for the incorporation of material culture into an analysis of the funeral oration. In spite of this, images had almost no function in her The Invention of Athens. For Loraux, the denial of an oracular spectacle of the body offered a contrast with Homeric valuations of death. She charted a move from the beautiful dead to the beautiful death that entailed a shift from aesthetics to morals. Loraux denied any role for visual culture in the funeral oration because, she argued, hearing had replaced sight. While Loraux’s analysis emerged from iconographic and structuralist approaches that implicitly contrasted abstraction and figuration, a conception of material culture that incorporates materiality and phenomenology offers important new perspectives. The funeral oration was only one component of a ritual that moved through spaces that were laden with objects and images articulating, manipulating, appropriating and, at times, rejecting the funeral oration’s beautiful death. Considering this wider material frame allows us to nuance some of Loraux’s central arguments.

Pericles’ funeral oration has played a significant public role, especially in Anglophone countries, over the last century. Renaissance humanists had valued it simply as a masterful piece of oratory, to be studied for its literary qualities. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was seen primarily as a source of historical information about Athenian culture, with no present significance. The great change came in the early nineteenth century, when radical and liberal thinkers in Britain, for whom democracy was no longer a threat but a promise, focussed increasingly on the contents of the speech. Cultural achievement was, they argued, intimately bound up with the participation of the people in public life. For them, the proof was in Pericles’ praise of Athens and its institutions. Ancient and modern democracy were now elided, and the words of this funeral speech were thus made available for politicians seeking to celebrate their own societies, from the United States of America to the European Union. These readers of the funeral oration as a celebration of democracy almost entirely ignored the original context of the speech. Developments in modern warfare as well as the rise of the mass citizen army changed this.

Lysias’s funeral speech is a paradoxical work. In theory a funeral speech by a foreign speech-writer should not exist. At first glance, this oration seems to point to a failure of process. What does it say about Athenian democracy that it had carefully selected a man to deliver a speech who needed to employ a speech-writer because, presumably, he was not up to the task of writing the speech himself? Moreover, how could it be that the best person to write an encomium of Athens is not an Athenian, but a metic? Lysias, what is more, was not just any metic, but one to whom Athenian democracy had repudiated a grant of citizenship. Lysias’ funeral speech thus potentially disrupts any straightforward story that we might want to tell about the relationship between the funeral oration, citizenship and civic ideology. His speech highlights the constructed nature of the genre’s statements about normative values. This chapter explores the implications of this speech for our understanding of the epitaphic tradition. It reviews the evidence for the authorship and authenticity of Lysias’ funeral speech. It canvasses the various possibilities for the construction and dissemination of his text.

Within the group of classical Greek texts that we call funeral speeches, two have been passed down to us only in fragmentary form. We have just one single sentence from Archinus’ Epitaphios, and we know only a small number of relatively short quotations and paraphrases from Gorgias’ Epitaphios. Not surprisingly, these two texts are the least studied and the least well understood within the group of known funeral speeches. This chapter show shows that Gorgias’ Epitaphios played a vitally important role in the early formation of the literary genre. It begins with an overview of the text and the tradition of Gorgias’ literary version of a funeral oration before exploring its content, date, audience and purpose as well as its impact on the later funeral speeches. This chapter concludes that Gorgias’ Epitaphios was most likely composed and disseminated at some point in the last quarter of the fifth century, that the text was intended to be received primarily by an elite literary audience, and that Gorgias’ Epitaphios conveyed direct criticism of Athenian power politics at the time.

In a volume, Secrecy in Religions, Kees Bolle, as editor responsible for the introduction and author of the lead essay, excoriates scholars for attempting to explain mystery that he counts as the essence of religion. He writes as if secrecy and mystery are sui generis givens and neglects the role of human agency in producing secrecy. The concepts of secrecy and of concealment differ from the concept of the unknown in that the former entails the idea of agency and mind. They are activities involving intentionality. I am one of those who believe that religion is most usefully treated in the academy as the study of human practices that involve imagining interaction with certain classes of agents, that is, gods, ancestors, saints, spirits, the world as mind and many other types of non-obvious beings. Most study of secrecy in religion has treated esoteric traditions, mysticism and social formations that feature secret knowledge. Instead, I want to think about the way that various kinds of practices involve different modes of imagining the secrets of and about these non-obvious agents.

I begin with a central characteristic of conceiving these agents across cultures that ensures a large role for secrecy in religion. Normally humans do not have full and direct access to gods, ancestors and so on, but recognize their activity in traces that the gods have left. A trace could be a strike of lightening, an illness, a bountiful crop, a healing, a heightened mood, a possessed individual, divine embodiments in plants, animals or natural features, or a deposit of divine words that needs an interpreter. One usually sees not the god but the results of divine activity as in Ps 77:19; “The rumble of your thunder was in the whirlwind; your lightening flashed light at the world; the earth trembled and shook. Your way was through the sea, your path through the great waters; yet your footprints were not seen.” Traces are partial, mysterious and require interpretation such as the writer of the Psalm and other authors are eager to supply. Most of all, traces often raise the question of divine intentions. Thus, religion has involved enormous investment in human interpretive practices.

Paul of the New Testament letters was not a philosopher, but more than a century of scholarship has shown that he nevertheless knew and used philosophical terms and concepts. The letters possess a philosophical element, but how to construe both the philosophical affinities of those features and the degree of coherence among them remains a matter of debate. Troels Engberg-Pedersen has made a brilliant case for a substantial and coherent Stoic element. Others, including myself, have argued for significant Platonic features also and an appropriation that is more piecemeal and adapted to Paul's particular interests. The bulk of scholarship on Paul and philosophy has focused on moral psychology, ethics and educational-psychagogic elements in the letters. Very recent work has meanwhile taken up features that we can rightly think of as involving physics and ontology.

Paul ranks by broad scholarly agreement as a thinker centrally informed by Judean apocalyptic beliefs and he interprets Jesus Christ according to these beliefs. My own thesis about the genesis and sense of the major physical ideas in Paul's thought is as follows. Sometime in the 30s ce Paul came into contact with people who organized themselves around the belief that the executed Judean teacher, Jesus, had returned to life and had become a god serving the Judean high god. His resurrection was the beginning of a crisis in history that would eventuate in a resurrection of the righteous dead. Paul came to accept these beliefs and claimed that he had a vision in which Christ commanded him to teach about this scenario to non-Jews. After so many centuries of Christian culture in the West, this may not seem a striking idea, but the very notion of a “salvation” movement of Judeans for non-Judeans based on ideas about a Jew who became a god should be odd for the critical historian and in need of explanation. I would argue that central to this puzzle is Paul's conviction that when God brought Jesus Christ back to life he had been remade of a particular substance, a very special kind or quality of πνϵύμα (hereafter pneuma).

Albert Schweitzer made the classic case for the idea that participation in Christ is the central or most basic or most important element in Paul's thought. But it is due to Ed Sanders’ incisive critical reassessment of Schweitzer's position in Paul and Palestinian Judaism that the centrality of participation has been widely accepted in New Testament scholarship. Among other things, Schweitzer and Sanders showed decisively that in forming arguments for moral advice, Paul draws these arguments from facts about participation in Christ and not justification by the believer's faith. If there has been wide acceptance of the centrality of participation, the agreement has ended on how to characterize the phenomenon indicated in Paul's discourse. From incomprehensible mystery to a form of corporate personality, the proposals have varied greatly and failed to win wide assent. As argued in Chapter Six, I understand participation as assimilation to Christ by way of God's pneuma. Here I want to focus on one aspect that features Gentile paternity.

Schweitzer's answer was clearer than most. He proposed a historical explanation of sorts for the origins of the idea and a broad cultural context. The context was a rather uniform Jewish eschatology, or as New Testament scholars might say today, apocalypticism, that he posited. Jews, including Paul, held to a series of strict and logically interrelated doctrines about their own age, past ages and the world to come. Paul created the idea of participation in Christ as a solution to the dilemma caused by his belief that the Messiah had come and been raised from the dead well ahead of the end time and its general resurrection. Paul had to make the elect mystically share in the death and resurrection of the Messiah already in this natural age. He writes:

The way the concept of “communities” and “community” is deployed in scholarship hinders historical work on early Christianity, especially if early Christianity is to be treated as a normal human social phenomenon studied in the non-sectarian university. In contemporary English, “community” has a number of senses connected to uses developed in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe and North America. One sense of the word is territorial or features place as in “rural communities” and “flooding affected many households in the community.” A neighborhood in this sense can be called a community even if its inhabitants have almost no social interaction with one another. We also speak of a “linguistic community,” although there may be enormous cultural and political differences among those speakers. The range of meanings that has been important for scholarship on ancient Christianity, however, has a different history not only in Christian thought, but also in European and American social and political thought. This is the idea of community as a deep social and mental coherence, a commonality in mind and practice. Although Enlightenment traditions sometimes approached the idea, as in the French Revolution's fraternity in “liberty, equality and fraternity,” it has been the anti-Enlightenment and Romantic traditions that have featured community in this sense. Most famously, the sense was central to Fascism, National Socialism, many other twentieth century pre-World War Two conservative movements, and both Christian and non-Christian forms of communitarianism. A now much criticized, but influential, sociological approach to the concept is found in the work of Ferdinand Tönnies with his dualism between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society), the former supposedly based upon the essential will (Wesenwille) of the participant. The idea of an essential and totalizing identity and commitment is very much like the idea of early Christian conversion. Factors within Christian traditions, together with broader European culture, have contributed to the pervasive appeal of communities and community, which have made the study of early Christian history oddly different from other ancient histories. The uses of the concepts in the study of early Christianity are far from descriptive and analytical.

In this chapter I want to try and answer the question of whether Paul's moral teachings were meant to be fitting for ordinary humans. This may seem a strange question, but perhaps less so when we remember that the concept of the sage loomed as central to Hellenistic ethical thought. And, according to Seneca, the sage was an ideal human (Ep. 42.1; also, Alexander, De Fato 196.24–197.3) as rare as the Phoenix that appears only once in 500 years, so hardly an ordinary human. Stoics did not even consider as sages the extraordinary founders of Stoicism: Zeno and Chrysippus. The concept of the sage affected moral thought widely well into the Roman Empire and the later Christian idea of the saint.

But I take my start on Paul's moral thought from another characteristic of ancient philosophy and ancient thought more broadly. Unlike the principled rejections of the metaphysical and the ontological that arose in the wake of Kant's self-proclaimed “Copernican Revolution” and which in the middle third of the last century characterized modern philosophy, the ancients held that rigorous moral thinking must be based on some conception of the way the world is, including what it consists of and how it works. Platonists had a cosmos made up of something like thought, the noetic, and its relative absence, matter. Epicureans had a world of colliding and sometimes compounding atoms and Stoics a world composed of pneuma in various degrees of tension creating a scala naturae, a hierarchy of being. This physics in each case plays an indispensable role in how the system brings about achievement of the ethical goal. In some forms of Platonism, by proper use of the mind one acquires a noetic existence and the abilities to exercise that noetic power. In Epicureanism, recognition of the non-teleological nature of a world of colliding atoms allows an untroubled life shared with others. In Stoicism, being in harmony with the divine pneumatic nature of the world allows one to live according to its providential order and unfolding.

This assumption that the question “how should we live and act?” only makes sense on the basis of understanding how the world is, coheres with ancient Mediterranean folk and West Asian scribal traditions.

In a volume celebrating the scholarship of Ed Sanders, Shaye Cohen considered the evidence of Greek and Roman writings for Sanders's notion of “common Judaism.” There he makes a point important for my effort here: These writers mention things distinctive to Jews, but have almost nothing to say about what was common across the Mediterranean. Thus, for instance, they say nothing about Jewish hymns and prayers. But what exactly is the price to pay for characterizing Jewish religion by difference only?

Ed Sanders's idea of common Judaism has been a hit, albeit with a number of dissenters. The idea beautifully expresses intuitions underlying conceptions of Jewish and Christian origins that have been and still are normative for many. In my estimation, there is clearly something right about common Judaism. There were, for instance, social mechanisms that allowed for ethnic-religious self-identification and identification by others. But the idea contradicts much of the scholarship about social groups that has become dominant in the social sciences, parts of the humanities and the mind sciences in the last several decades. The academy is in the midst of a major revolution in thinking about social groups. I will briefly discuss why the common belief/practice model that “common Judaism” assumes cannot adequately deal with the dynamics of ancient Mediterranean religion.

Psychology and other fields have shown dramatically that we know far less than we think we know. With unrealistic confidence individuals hold fragmentary outlines of knowledge and what is known varies greatly across individuals in a population. This overconfidence has in many ways served our species well. The unfounded confidence has made us bold about acting and going forward even when we really do not know. The mentally efficient fragments and outlines often pay off because they allow us just enough information to discover where to go for types of expertise or to technologies of knowledge for answers. Brains/minds with intrinsic limits can not survive unless they are efficient and adapted to the resources of their social environment. The key resource of social environments comes in that many people in any culture are experts in some small corner of knowledge.