When I was its president the Teagle Foundation, the Foundation made a grant to Project Pericles, a consortium of several dozen liberal arts colleges committed to encouraging civic engagement among their students. I was delighted we could make the grant, in part because Project Pericles had been inspired by Eugene Lang, an entrepreneur and philanthropist who never forgot reading the Periclean Funeral Oration in the second book of Thucydides. And I had a certain weakness for Thucydides, too.
But, there was dissonance between the idealism of those who were inspired by the Periclean Funeral Oration and a view widespread in recent scholarship, which often treats the speech as a way by which Thucydides projected his own anti-democratic views onto Pericles. In the view of these scholars far from being praise of democracy, the Funeral Oration deplored it. Pericles, they thought, was made to say that Athens was only “in name a democracy.”
So, when I retired from the Teagle Foundation, I undertook a close reading of the Greek of the passage on which these views are based. I found that several ostensibly minor stylistic details when brought into focus showed clearly that the speech was indeed a strong, if somewhat quirky, affirmation of democracy as practiced in ancient Athens. And more than that: it affirmed the link between participation in civic life and resilience.
I wrote a short article on what I found, hoping to persuade my classical colleagues, but also to reach friends, former students, the leaders of Project Pericles, and others inside and outside academia who realized the urgency of thinking freshly about democracy at a time when it is often under fire, sometimes literally so. I was not just affirming an older, idealistic readimng of the Funeral Oration, but was exploring some new territory where participation (we’d say “civic engagement”) produces astonishing endurance e and vitality, both at the individual and the civic level. I’m not sure the Greeks had a word for it, but we could call it “resilience.”
We need it, now, more than ever.
But, there was dissonance between the idealism of those who were inspired by the Periclean Funeral Oration and a view widespread in recent scholarship, which often treats the speech as a way by which Thucydides projected his own anti-democratic views onto Pericles. In the view of these scholars far from being praise of democracy, the Funeral Oration deplored it. Pericles, they thought, was made to say that Athens was only “in name a democracy.”
So, when I retired from the Teagle Foundation, I undertook a close reading of the Greek of the passage on which these views are based. I found that several ostensibly minor stylistic details when brought into focus showed clearly that the speech was indeed a strong, if somewhat quirky, affirmation of democracy as practiced in ancient Athens. And more than that: it affirmed the link between participation in civic life and resilience.
I wrote a short article on what I found, hoping to persuade my classical colleagues, but also to reach friends, former students, the leaders of Project Pericles, and others inside and outside academia who realized the urgency of thinking freshly about democracy at a time when it is often under fire, sometimes literally so. I was not just affirming an older, idealistic readimng of the Funeral Oration, but was exploring some new territory where participation (we’d say “civic engagement”) produces astonishing endurance e and vitality, both at the individual and the civic level. I’m not sure the Greeks had a word for it, but we could call it “resilience.”
We need it, now, more than ever.
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