Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/164

 1 12 HISTORY OF GREECE. pared for the occasion, closed the ceremony with his address. The law of Athens not only provided this public funeral and commemorative discourse, but also assigned maintenance at the public expense to the children of the slain warriors until they attained military age : a practice which was acted on throughout the whole war, though we have only the description and discourse belonging to this single occasion. 1 The eleven chapters of Thucydides which comprise this funeral speech are among the most memorable relics of anti- quity ; considering that under the language and arrangement of the historian, always impressive, though sometimes harsh and peculiar, like the workmanship of a powerful mind, misled by a bad or an unattainable model, we possess the substance and thoughts of the illustrious statesman. A portion of it, of course, is and must Lc common-place, belonging to all discourses com- posed for a similar occasion. Yet this is true only of a compar- atively small portion : much of it is peculiar, and every way worthy of Perikles, comprehensive, rational, and full, not less of sense and substance than of earnest patriotism. It thus forms a strong contrast with the jejune, though elegant, rhetoric of other harangues, mostly 2 not composed for actual delivery ; and 1 Thucyd. ii, 34-45. Sometimes, also, the allies of Athens, who had fallen along with her citizens in battle, had a part in the honors of the public burial (Lysias, Orat. Funebr. c. 13). most part, in pronouncing the feeble Aoyof 'E-fru^tof, ascribed to Demos- thenes, to be not really his. Of those ascribed to Plato and Lysias also, the genuineness has been suspected, though upon far less grounds. The Menexenus, if it be really the work of Plato, however, does not add to his fame : but the harangue of Lysias, a very fine composition, may well be his, and may, perhaps, have been really delivered, though probably not delivered by him, as he was not a qualified citizen. See the general instructions, in Dionys. Hal. Ars Rhetoric, c. 6, pp. 258- 268, Reisk, on the contents and composition of a funeral discourse, Lysias is said to have composed several, Plutarch, Vit. x, Orator, p. 836, Compare, respecting the funeral discourse of Perikles, K. F. Weber, Ubcr die Stand-Rede des Perikles (Darmstadt, 1827) ; "Westermann, Geschichte der Beredsamkeit in Griechenland und Rom. sects. 35, 63, 64 ; Kutzen, Perikles, als Staatsman, p. 158, sect. 12 (Grimma, 1834). Dahlmann (Historische Forschungen, vol. i, p. 23) seems to think that the original oration of Perikles contained a large sprinkling of mythical
 * The critics, from Dionysius of Halikarnassus downward, agree, for the