Complete Works (207 page)

M
ENEXENUS
: What woman is that? But obviously you mean Aspasia?

[236]
S
OCRATES
: Yes, I do—her and Connus, son of Metrobius. These are my two teachers, he of music, she of oratory. Surely it’s no surprise if a man with an upbringing like that is skilled in speaking! But even someone less well educated than I—a man who learned music from Lamprus and oratory from Antiphon the Rhamnusian
¹
—even he, despite these disadvantages, could do himself credit praising Athenians among Athenians.

M
ENEXENUS
: And what would you have to say if the speech were yours to make?

S
OCRATES
: On my own, very likely nothing; but just yesterday in my [b] lesson I heard Aspasia declaim a whole funeral oration on these same dead. For she heard that the Athenians, just as you say, were about to choose someone to speak. Thereupon she went through for me what the speaker ought to say, in part out of her head, in part by pasting together some bits and pieces thought up before, at the time when she was composing the funeral oration which Pericles delivered, as, in my opinion, she did.

M
ENEXENUS
: And can you remember what Aspasia said?

S
OCRATES
: I
think
I can. Certainly I was taught it by the lady herself—[c] and I narrowly escaped a beating every time my memory failed me.

M
ENEXENUS
: So why don’t you go ahead and repeat it?

S
OCRATES
: I’m afraid my teacher will be angry with me if I divulge her speech.

M
ENEXENUS
: Have no fear, Socrates. Speak. I shall be very grateful, whether you’re pleased to recite Aspasia’s speech or whosever it is. Only speak.

S
OCRATES
: But perhaps you will laugh at me if I seem to you, old as I am, to go on playing like a child.

M
ENEXENUS
: Not at all, Socrates. In any case, just speak the speech.

S
OCRATES
: Well, certainly you’re a man I’m so bound to gratify that I would even be inclined to do so if you asked me to take off my clothes [d] and dance—especially since we are alone. All right, listen. To begin with she spoke, I think, on the dead themselves—as follows:

“As for deeds, these men have just received at our hands what they deserve,
²
and with it they are making the inevitable journey, escorted at the outset communally by the city and privately by their families. Now we must render them in words the remaining recognition that the law [e] appoints for them and duty demands. For when deeds have been bravely done, it is through an eloquent speech that remembrance and honor accrue to their doers from the hearers. Clearly, what is required is a speech that will praise the dead as they deserve but also gently admonish the living, urging their sons and brothers to imitate the valor of these men, and consoling their fathers, their mothers and any of their grandparents who may remain alive.

“Well then, what speech on our part would display that effect? Where
[237]
would it be right for us to begin our praise of brave men, who in their lives gladdened their families and friends through their valor and by their death purchased safety for their survivors? I think it appropriate to present their praises in an order the same as that in which they became brave—the order of nature: they became brave by being sons of brave fathers. Let us, therefore, extoll first their noble birth, second their rearing and education. After that, let us put on view the deeds they performed, showing [b] that they were noble and worthy of their birth and upbringing.

“The nobility of these men’s origin is rooted in that of their ancestors. The latter were not immigrants and did not, by arriving from elsewhere, make these descendants of theirs live as aliens in the land, but made them children of the soil, really dwelling and having their being in their ancestral home, nourished not, as other peoples are, by a stepmother, but by a mother, the land in which they lived. Now they lie in death among the [c] familiar places of her who gave them birth, suckled them, and received them as her own. Surely it is most just to celebrate the mother herself first; in this way the noble birth of these men is celebrated at the same time.

“Our land is indeed worthy of being praised not merely by us but by all of humanity. There are many reasons for that, but the first and greatest is that she has the good fortune to be dear to the gods. The quarrel of the gods who disputed over her and the verdict that settled it bear witness [d] to what we say.
³
How could it not be just for all humankind to praise a land praised by the gods? The second commendation that is due her is that in the age when the whole earth was causing creatures of all kinds—wild animals and domestic livestock—to spring up and thrive, our land showed herself to be barren of savage beasts and pure. Out of all the animals she selected and brought forth the human, the one creature that towers over the others in understanding and alone acknowledges justice and the gods.

“The fact that everything that gives birth is supplied with the food [e] its offspring needs is weighty testimony for this assertion that the earth hereabouts gave birth to these men’s ancestors and ours. For by this sign it can be seen clearly whether or not a woman has really given birth: she is foisting off an infant not her own, if she does not have within her the wellsprings of its nourishment. The earth here, our mother, offers precisely this as sufficient testimony that she has brought forth humans. She first
[238]
and she alone in that olden time bore food fit for humans, wheat and barley, which are the finest and best nourishment for the human race, because she really was the mother of this creature. And such testimonies are to be taken more seriously on earth’s behalf than a woman’s, inasmuch as earth does not mimic woman in conceiving and generating, but woman earth.

“She was not miserly with this grain; she dispensed it to others too. Later she brought olive oil to birth for her children, succor against toil. And when she had nourished them and brought them to their youthful [b] prime, she introduced the gods to rule and teach them. They (it is fitting to omit their names on an occasion like this: we know them) equipped us for living, by instructing us, earlier than other peoples, in arts for meeting our daily needs, and by teaching us how to obtain and use arms for the defense of the land.

“With the birth and education I have described, the ancestors of these men lived under a polity that they had made for themselves, of which it [c] is right to make brief mention. For a polity molds its people; a goodly one molds good men, the opposite bad. Therefore I must show that our ancestors were molded in a goodly polity, thanks to which both they and the present generation—among them these men who have died—are good men. For the polity was the same then and now, an aristocracy; we are now governed by the best men and, in the main, always have been since that remote age. One man calls our polity democracy, another some other [d] name that pleases him; in reality, it is government by the best men along with popular consent. We have always had kings; at one time they were hereditary, later elected.
⁴
Yet in most respects the people have sovereign power in the city; they grant public offices and power to those who are thought best by them at a given time, and no one is excluded because of weakness or poverty or obscurity of birth, nor is anyone granted honors because of the corresponding advantages, as happens in other cities. There is, rather, one standard: he who is thought wise or good exercises power and holds office.

“The reason we have this polity is our equality in birth. The other [e] cities have been put together from people of diverse origin and unequal condition, so that their polities also are unequal—tyrannies and oligarchies. Some of their inhabitants look on the others as slaves, while the latter look on the former as masters. We and our fellows-citizens, all brothers sprung
[239]
from one mother, do not think it right to be each other’s slaves or masters. Equality of birth in the natural order makes us seek equality of rights in the legal and defer to each other only in the name of reputation for goodness and wisdom.

“Because of this splendid polity of ours, the fathers of these men—our fathers—and the men themselves, brought up in complete freedom and well-born as they were, were able to display before all humanity, in both the private and the public spheres, many splendid deeds. They thought that they were obliged to fight on the side of freedom both for Greeks [b] against Greeks and against barbarians for Greece as a whole. My time is too brief to narrate as the matter deserves how they defended their country against Eumolpus and the Amazons and even earlier invaders, or how they defended the Argives against the Cadmeans and the sons of Heracles against the Argives.
⁵
Besides, poets have already hymned the valorous exploits of the ancients in splendid song and made them known to all; so if we should try to elaborate the same subjects in prose, we would perhaps [c] finish a clear second.

“I think it best to pass those deeds by for that reason as well as because they already have a reward worthy of them. But in regard to deeds for which no poet has yet received glory worthy of worthy themes, and which remain in virgin state
⁶
—those I think I ought to mention with praise and woo out of seclusion for others to put into choral odes and poems of other kinds in a manner that befits the men who performed them.

Here are the first among the deeds I mean. When the Persians held [d] dominion over Asia and were trying to enslave Europe, the sons of this land checked them—our fathers, whose valor it is both right and necessary to mention first in praise. Clearly one who is to praise it well must contemplate it after he has, in thought, been transported into that time when the whole of Asia was already subject to a third Persian king. Cyrus, the first of them, when by his keen spirit he liberated his fellow citizens, the Persians, [e] enslaved the Medes, their masters, at the same time and became lord over the rest of Asia as far as Egypt; his son over as much of Egypt and Libya as it was possible to penetrate. Darius, third of the line, with his land forces set the bounds of his sway as far as Scythia, and with his ships
[240]
gained so much control over the sea and its islands that no one presumed to oppose him. The minds of all humankind were in bondage: so many, such great and warlike, peoples had the realm of Persia enslaved.

“Now Darius denounced us and the Eretrians. On the pretext that we had plotted against Sardis he dispatched five hundred thousand men in transport and combat ships, with three hundred ships of war, and ordered Datis, their commander, to come back with the Athenians and Eretrians in tow if he wanted to keep his head on his shoulders.

[b] “Datis sailed to Eretria, against men who were the most highly esteemed in warfare of the Greeks of that time and were quite numerous besides. He overpowered them in three days. He also scoured their whole country to keep anyone from escaping. This he accomplished in the following way: his soldiers proceeded to the border of Eretria’s territory and posted themselves at intervals from sea to sea; they then joined hands and passed [c] through the entire country, so that they would be able to tell the king that no one had escaped them.

“Datis and his force left Eretria and came ashore at Marathon with the same intention, confident that it would be easy for them to force the Athenians under the same yoke as they had the Eretrians and lead them captive too. Even though the first of these operations had been accomplished and the second was underway, none of the Greeks came to aid either the Eretrians or the Athenians except the Lacedaemonians—and [d] they arrived on the day after the battle. All the others were panic-stricken and lay low, cherishing their momentary safety.

“By being transported into that situation, I say, one might realize just how great the valor really was of those men who withstood the might of the barbarians
⁷
at Marathon, chastened the arrogance of all Asia, and were first to erect a trophy
⁸
over the barbarians. They showed the way and taught the rest that Persian power is not invincible and that there is no multitude of men and mass of money that does not give way to valor. I declare that those men were fathers not only of our bodies but of our [e] freedom, ours and that of everyone on this continent. For it was with eyes on that deed that the Greeks dared to risk the battles for their deliverance that followed—pupils of the men who fought at Marathon.

“So the highest rank in honor must be assigned to them by my speech,
[241]
but the second to the men who fought and won at sea off Salamis and at Artemisium.
⁹
For one could give a lengthy account of those men, too—the kind of assaults they withstood on land and sea, and how they fought them off. But I shall mention what I think is their finest achievement: they accomplished the successor to the task accomplished at Marathon. The men there showed the Greeks only that a few of them could fight off many barbarians by land; by sea there was still doubt, and the Persians had a [b] reputation for invinciblity because of their numbers, wealth, skill, and strength. This in particular is what merits praise in the men who fought the sea battles of those times: they freed the Greeks from this second terror and made them stop fearing preponderance in ships and men. So it turns out that the other Greeks were educated by both—by those who fought at Marathon and those who took part in the naval battle at Salamis: as [c] pupils of the former by land and the latter by sea, they lost their habit of fearing the barbarians.

“And of the exploits for the deliverance of Greece that at Plataea was, I maintain, the third, both in number and in valor—at last an effort shared by both the Lacedaemonians and the Athenians.

“So all the men in those battles fought off a very great and formidable danger. They are being eulogized for their valor now by us, and will be eulogized in the future by posterity. Afterwards, though, many Greek cities were still subject to the barbarian, and it was reported that the king [d] himself had a new attempt on the Greeks in mind. Therefore, it is right for us to mention those, too, who, by cleansing the sea and driving from it the entire barbarian force, brought to completion what their predecessors had done for our deliverance. These were the men who fought in the naval battle at Eurymedon, those who made the expedition to Cyprus, and those who sailed to Egypt and many other places. They must be mentioned with [e] gratitude, because they instilled fear in the king and forced him to ponder his own safety rather than plot the destruction of the Greeks.