Taking the reading of the Gettysburg Address in New York City on the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks as its starting point, this chapter situates the choice of eulogy in its Ancient Greek and American historical contexts to suggest how the choice corresponded to Socrates’ critique of the funeral oration tradition in Plato’s Menexenus: one that suggested eulogies were necessarily platitudinous, anachronistic, and banal. Drawing on Thucydides’ presentation of Pericles’ Funeral Oration in his History of the Peloponnesian War, the chapter then shows how both Thucydides, and later Lincoln, subverted the funeral oration tradition and Plato’s criticism. In so doing, it suggests, they offered productive critiques of their respective democracies, employing a critical perspective – predicated upon a worldview borrowed from Greek tragedy, and imbued with complexity, contradiction, and conflict – that sought to address their respective polities’ most pressing problems. The chapter seeks, within the broader framework of the book, to establish both the problems posed to democracy by a nationalist mode of mourning committed to imperialism, bellicosity, and exceptionalism, and the contrasting promise of a tragic mourning that, it argues, offers the possibility a democratically productive critical patriotism.