The Invention of Athens
The Funeral Oration in the Classical City
Recommended by Johanna Hanink, and 1 others. See all reviewsRanked #30 in Athens
How does the funeral oration relate to democracy in ancient Greece? How did the death of an individual citizen-soldier become the occasion to praise the city of Athens? In The Invention of Athens, Nicole Loraux traces the different rhetoric, politics, and ideology of funeral orations--epitaphioi--from Thucidydes, Gorgias, Lysias, and Demosthenes to Plato. Arguing that the ceremony of public burial began circa 508-460 BCE, Loraux demonstrates that the institution of the funeral oration developed under Athenian democracy. A secular, not a religious phenomenon, a literary genre with fixed... more
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Johanna Hanink This remains my favourite book in the field. The Invention of Athens is the book that really got me interested in this time period and in the question, ‘How were the Athenians just so capable of convincing not only other people who lived in their own time, but even people in later generations, that their city was so profoundly special?’ (Source)
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