Abstract
Perhaps the most eloquent praise of democracy ever made, Pericles’s Funeral Oration as set down by Thucydides some 2,500 years ago still evokes intense passion.1 Pericles described the character, values, and activities of his people and his beloved city. He contended that the most cherished possession of Athenian citizens was not their wealth or happiness, as might be the case in other states, but rather their political and economic freedoms. He fully understood the inextricable link between citizens, soldiers, and government. And he insisted that Athenian laws, which established the world’s first civilized democracy, were worth the many deaths his city had come together to mourn.
Such is the city for whose sake these men nobly fought and died; they could not bear the thought that she might be taken from them.
From the Funeral Oration of Pericles
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Notes
Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, translated by Benjamin Jowett (London: Folio Society, 1994), 98.
Arthur Ferrill, The Origins of War (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 91–94.
Frank Adcock, The Greek and Macedonian Art of War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 2.
Hans Delbrück, History of the Art of War, volume 1, translated by Walter Renfroe (Westport, CN: Greenwood, 1975), 256.
Carrol Quigley, Weapons Systems and Political Stability (Washington, DC: University Press, 1983), 271.
Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution, translated by P.J. Rhodes (New York: Penguin, 1984), 4.
Josiah Ober, “Hoplites and Obstacles,” in Victor Hansen (ed.), Hoplites (New York: Routledge, 1991), 180–88.
Robert Littman, Kinship and Politics in Athens 600–400 BCE (New York: Peter Lang, 1990).
See William Everdell, The End of Kings: A History of Republics and Republicans (New York: Free Press, 1983), 31.
Alfred Snodgrass, “The Hoplite Reform and History,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 97 (1977), 84–101.
John K. Anderson, Military Theory and Practice in the Age of Xenophon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 13.
Hilda Lorimer, “The Hoplite Phalanx with Special Reference to the Poems of Archilochus and Tyrtaeus,” Annual of the British School at Athens 42 (1947), 121–24.
Yigael Yadin, The Art of Warfare in Biblical Lands, volume 1 (New York: A. Knopf, 1963), 134–35.
Also called the Vulture Stele, see Trevor Watkins, “The Beginnings of Warfare,” in John Hackett (ed.), Warfare in the Ancient World (New York: Facts on File, 1989), 20.
Robert O’Connell, Of Arms and Men (Oxford: University Press, 1989), 36.
Victor Anderson, “Hoplite Weapons and Offensive Arms,” in Anderson (ed.), Hoplites (London: Routledge, 1991), 28.
Plutarch, The Rise and Fall of Athens (Baltimore: Penguin, 1962), 55–58.
See John Morrison and J.F. Coates’s classic, The Athenian Trireme (Cambridge: University Press, 1986).
Xenophon, Hellenica, translated by Rex Warner (New York: Penguin, 1978).
William Forrest, A History of Sparta 950–192 BCE (London: Hutchinson, 1968), 31.
George Huxley, Early Sparta (London: Faber, 1962), 37–39.
E.L. Wheeler, “The Hoplomachoi and Vegetius’ Spartan Drillmasters,” Chiron 13 (1983), 12.
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© 2004 Everett Carl Dolman
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Dolman, E.C. (2004). Ancient Republics and Radical Democracy: Athens and Sparta. In: The Warrior State. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403978264_3
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