“Menexenus” by Plato (translated by Paul Ryan)

This dialogue was known in antiquity as the “Funeral Oration” and is mainly comprised of a speech that Socrates claims was handed down to him by Aspasia, Pericles’ renown mistress. Socrates tells Menexenus that he takes no responsibility for its contents, themes, and veracity. Still, Menexenus has his doubts about who is the speech’s real author. The oration concerns Athens’ war dead and the themes of courage, virtue, glory, and heroism. Socrates begins, “Indeed, dying in war looks like a splendid fate in many ways…. 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 that they were noble and worthy of their birth and upbringing.”

Socrates proceeds to recount not only Athens’ recent war heroes, but first goes back, past the Peloponnesian War even, to the ancient wars with Persia. He begins with Athens’ most illustrious ancestors. “Those men were fathers not only of our bodies but of our freedom, ours and that of everyone on this continent.” He then continues to boast about Athens, “The opinion gained currency that our city could never be defeated in war, not even by all mankind. And that belief was true. We were overcome by our own quarrels, not by other men; by them we remain undefeated to this day, but we conquered ourselves and suffered defeat at our won hands.” After all, the more recent loss to Sparta in the Peloponnesian War and the Civil War of the Thirty Tyrants have to be explained away.

Finally, Socrates returns to the valor of the war dead and what the present generation of Athenians owe to their ancestors, “We must remember the fallen, and every man, just as in war, must encourage their descendants not to desert the ranks of their ancestors and not to yield to cowardice and fall back…. Free to live on ignobly, we prefer to die nobly rather than subject you and your descendants to reproach and bring disgrace on our fathers and all our ancestors. We consider the life of one who has brought disgrace on his own family no life…. Do whatever you do to the accompaniment of valor, knowing that without it all possessions and all ways of life are shameful and base. For neither does wealth confer distinction on one who possesses it with cowardice (the riches of a man like that belong to another, not himself) nor do bodily beauty and strength, when they reside in a worthless and cowardly man, seem to suit him…. All knowledge cut off from rectitude and the rest of virtue has the look of low cunning, not wisdom…. For a man with self-respect nothing is more disgraceful than to make himself honored not through himself, but through his ancestors’ glory…. For that man’s life is best arranged for whom all, or nearly all, the things that promote happiness depend on himself.”