Pericles, Funeral Oration

Little is known about Thucydides. The available information about him comes from his few references to himself in The History of the Peloponnesian War. His writing suggests that he was educated as an upper-class Athenian. He must have been more than 30 years old in 424 BCE, when he was elected Strategos (general), as that was a requirement of that office. This makes 454 BCE the latest possible date for his birth; most scholars suggest 460 BCE as his birth year. As a general, he was not a success; he failed in his mission and was exiled from Athens for 20 years. He addresses this as follows: “By reason of my exile, I had leisure to observe affairs somewhat particularly” (5.26.5).

Thucydides notes that he wanted to write the story of this war but intended to do so differently than had been previously attempted. In his era, the writing of history, a word derived from the ancient Greek term for inquiry, was slowly taking shape as an intellectual and analytical enterprise, rather than a poetic one, as in the case of Homer’s epics. Other writers, such as Herodotus, also attempted to document historical events, but they relied on the gods for things they could not explain. Thucydides, however, dedicated himself to using only human agency to explain events. He writes that his history of the war “rests partly on what I saw myself, partly on what others saw for me, the accuracy of the report being always tried by the most severe and detailed tests possible” (1.22.2).

Thucydides’s work appears to have been widely read not long after his death, which is believed to have occurred shortly after the end of the war, since he mentions his return to Athens from exile. As this would have been possible only after the government that exiled him was replaced following the loss to Sparta, the date of his death is estimated as 404 BCE, the year the Peloponnesian War ended. Historians generally accept most of Thucydides’s work as reliable in general but likely to have been influenced by his personal views in its details. Today, he is also noted for providing a record of the extent to which both sides of the war behaved inhumanly.

There is debate as to how much of the “Funeral Oration” belongs to Thucydides and how much of it represents the true words of Pericles. Regarding the sources of the orations he records, Thucydides writes:

[S]ome were delivered before the war began, others while it was going on; some I heard myself, others I got from various quarters; it was in all cases difficult to carry them word for word in one’s memory, so my habit has been to make the speakers say what was, in my opinion, demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said (1.22.1).