A grave stele (headstone or column) dating back to about 430-420 BC, the opening years of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC). It shows a young man with a little bird in his left hand, reaching up with his right to a birdcage. Near him is a forlorn-looking servant and crouching cat. Like other Greeks of his time, Pericles had no concept of life after death, and was painfully aware that he could offer no consolation to the bereaved for the loss of children and husbands except the knowledge that “their story lives on, woven into the stuff of other men’s lives”. Four centuries later, the resurrection of Jesus Christ emboldened the Christians to a sure and certain hope: see St Bede on Run for Glory.
Part 1 of 2
COUNTING the quest to avenge her [the City’s] honour as the most glorious of all ventures, and leaving Hope, the uncertain goddess, to send them what she would, they faced the foe as they drew near him in the strength of their own manhood; and when the shock of battle came they chose rather to suffer the uttermost than to win life by weakness. So their memory has escaped the reproaches of men’s lips, but they bore instead on their bodies the marks of men’s hands, and in a moment of time, at the climax of their lives, were rapt away from a world filled for their dying eyes not with terror but with glory.
Such were the men who lie here and such the city that inspired them. We survivors may pray to be spared their bitter hour, but must disdain to meet the foe with a spirit less triumphant.
Précis
In 431 BC, the first year of the Peloponnesian War against Sparta, Athenian statesman Pericles gave the City’s annual Rembrance Day address. He reminded his listeners of the courage shown by the armed forces, and said they though all should pray never to undergo such a trial, they should hope also to meet it just as bravely. (56 / 60 words)
Part Two
Admiralty Arch, on the south side of Trafalgar Square, in 1923, looking along The Mall to the Victoria Monument and Buckingham Palace beyond. In 1923, classical historian Sir Richard Winn Livingstone (1880-1960) invited readers to reflect on Pericles’s words in the light of the Great War of 1914-18. “In certain points the contrast between the austere discipline of Sparta and the freer life of Athens reads like a comparison between pre-war Prussia and Britain. Fully to appreciate the speech let the reader think: (1) How a speech by a modern statesman on the dead of 1914-18 would differ from it; (2) Whether our ideal of a state is that which Pericles propounds, and whether we fall short or have gone beyond it.”
LET us draw strength, not merely from twice-told arguments — how fair and noble a thing it is to show courage in battle — but from the busy spectacle of our great city’s life as we have it before us day by day, falling in love with her as we see her, and remembering that all this greatness she owes to men with the fighter’s daring, the wise man’s understanding of his duty, and the good man’s self-discipline in its performance — to men who sacrificed their lives as the best offerings on her behalf.
So they gave their bodies to the commonwealth and received each for his own memory praise that will never die and with it the grandest of all sepulchres, not that in which their mortal bones are laid but a home in the minds of men where their glory remains afresh to stir to speech or action as the occasion comes by. For the whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men; and their story is not graven only on stone over their native earth, but lives on far away, without visible symbol, woven into the stuff of other men’s lives. For you now it remains to rival what they have done.*
* This superb speech helped cement Pericles’s place in the hearts of Athenians, but he was unsentimentally cast aside as soon as things did not go so well. See Pericles and the Fickle Public of Athens.
Précis
Pericles went on to say that the most fitting monument for the fallen of Athens was not the place where they were buried, however grand, but the minds of Athenians — so long as the living matched the dead in courage, duty and self-discipline, and cherished the ideals for which they had made the ultimate sacrifice. (56 / 60 words)
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