THE FUNERAL ORATION PROJECT: PERICLES AND BEYOND

Abstract

In democratic Athens a funeral speech was regularly delivered for citizens who had died in war. In 1981, Nicole Loraux published a transformational study of this genre. Loraux claimed that the funeral oration had played the central role in maintaining a stable Athenian identity for two centuries. In spite of its huge impact, her The Invention of Athens was far from complete. It did not compare the funeral oration with the other genres of Athenian popular literature. Loraux was thus not able to prove three of her bold claims about the genre. She also left many important questions about the five extant funeral speeches unanswered. I am directing a large international project to complete The Invention of Athens. The Funeral Oration Project is undertaking the
intertextual analysis that Loraux did not attempt. Project-members first met in Strasbourg in 2018. There was a second meeting in Lyon in 2020. Cambridge University Press is going to publish our nineteen chapters in 2022. This article summarises some of our preliminary results. It focusses on those chapters in our edited volume that directly confirm or refute Loraux’s three bold claims. It discusses another chapter that answers important questions about the famous funeral speech of Pericles.