He wasnt wrong. The first is to have a set of good institutions; the second is to have a body of citizens who possess a good understanding of the principles of democracy, or who at least have developed a character consistent with the democratic way of life; the third is to have a high quality of leadership, at least at critical moments. Pericles also elevated Athenss role within the Delian League, a naval alliance of Greek city-states unified to fight the Persians. He maneuvered Athens to primacy over other league members, first by transferring the leagues treasury to Athens in 454 B.C. The crisis had only just begun. Its military power and tradition of leadership among the Greeks, the discipline and devotion to the public good displayed by its citizens, had already created an aura of virtue and excellence that a modern scholar has called the Spartan mirage. Pericles needed to confront this challenge, and much of the Funeral Oration is therefore a direct comparison with Sparta. Optimists may believe that democracy is the inevitable and final form of human society, but the historical record shows that up to now it has been the rare exception. The polis was a political community and a sovereign entity competing in a world of similar communities. Pericles Funeral Oration in Depth. These were evidence of his freedom and importance, and so a source of pride. [2] The speech was supposed to have been delivered by Pericles, an eminent Athenian politician, at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War (431404BCE) as a part of the annual public funeral for the war dead. Through such a display he hoped to win the kind of fame that would gain him immortality as the memory of his great deeds passed on through the generations, sung and embellished by bards like Homer. References. Cleon's rhetoric resembles that of Herodotus' Sosicles, the Corinthian delegate to the Peloponnesian assembly after the Peisistratids' fall, who uses images of Athenian Democracy Primary Source Doc.docx - Document A: The Spartans were famous for their piety and reverence for law, and their blind obedience to it was thought to be the source of their great military prowess. Here, front-line workers grapple with their anxieties about how the coronavirus has affected their city. And, once it arrived, its damage knew no bounds, doing terrible harm to democracy itself. Democracy of today can be traced back to the Funeral Oration speech of Pericles'. But the most original aspect of Pericles vision for Athens was its expectation of an enduring peace. Aside from its value as a study in political greatness, therefore, Pericles career offers instruction in how a new and fragile democracy can be brought to maturity. 2 hours of sleep? While the rest of the world continued to be characterized by monarchical, rigidly hierarchical, command societies, democracy in Athens was carried as far as it would go before modern times, perhaps further than at any other place and time. The audience is then dismissed. Rats invaded paradise. Millennia later, the plague reminds us that the legacy of the eternal wonder of Athens contains within it a cautionary tale: the failure of democratic society to cope with a lethal epidemic. Athenian democracy has become a model for . The characteristics of Athenian democracy as presented by Pericles in his funeral oration are that it is an ideal democracy, that it is animated by a shared sense of civic virtue, and that in it .
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pericles speech on democracy