2.1 Introduction

From Homer’s Iliad to the Athenian funeral oration and beyond, the ‘beautiful death’ was the name that the Greeks used to describe a combatant’s death.Footnote ¹ From the world of Achilles to democratic Athens, in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, the warrior’s death was a model that concentrated the representations and the values that served as [masculine] norms.Footnote ² This should not be a surprise: the Iliad depicts a society at war and, in the Achaean camp at least, a society of men, without children or legitimate wives. Certainly, the Athenian polis (‘city-state’) reversed the traditional combatant–citizen relationship by claiming that one must be, first, a citizen before being a soldier.Footnote ³ Nevertheless, this polis distinguished itself from others by the splendour that it gave the public funeral of its citizens that had died in war and especially by the repatriating of their mortal remains (Thuc. 2.34). In a society that believed in autochthony, this repatriation was, undoubtedly, significant. Since the beautiful death crystallised the aretē (‘courage’) of Achilles and Athenians alike, it was, from the outset, linked to speech. Indeed, heroic death and the civic beautiful death were the subject matter of elaborate speech. Such a celebratory discourse gave the warrior’s death an eternal existence in memory. This discourse gave his death its reality, but, conversely, also took for itself all that was valued in his accomplished exploit and claimed to be its truthful expression. In short, the beautiful death was a paradigm.

2.2 The Language of the Funeral: The Living’s Treatment of the Dead

In order to bury their dead, two communities came together: the army of the Achaeans and the Athenian city. The former used two markedly different procedures, depending on whether it was burying the ordinary dead or the elite of the heroes. For the non-elite anonymous dead who had not fallen in the front rank, the army of the Achaeans acted quickly: they washed the bodies of the dead, removing blood and dust, and built a funeral pyre. Once the cremation was finished, they departed, without, apparently, saying a word (e.g. Hom. Il. 7.424–32); for it is certain that the Achaeans, just as the Trojans did, abstained from any lamentation before piling the bodies on the pyre.Footnote ⁴ To the living’s silence corresponds the silence surrounding the dead, who, as an indistinct cohort, will go and join, in Hades, the nōnumoi (‘the nameless’), that is, the masses who are deprived of glory.Footnote ⁵

In order to bury ‘the heroes’, by contrast, whether it be Sarpedon, Hector or especially Patroclus, a ritual was required, to which time had to be allocated. This second funeral accommodated lamentations, a display of the body (prothesis), a banquet and/or games.Footnote ⁶ Next, it fell to the poet to celebrate the klea andrōn, the glorious deeds of the heroes. In brief, one did not bury Thersites, if he were to die, as one would Achilles, or his ‘other’, Patroclus. There was, clearly, one lot for ordinary men and another lot for the heroes.

Democratic practice, in contrast to the epic funeral, granted everyone the same honours; for, at Athens, the funeral was collective, as were the tomb and the eulogy. But each citizen still had an individual right to his share of glory and to the eternal memory of his name, which was inscribed on the funeral monument. A name, it is true, that was both ‘abstract’ and political: being without a patronymic and a demotic, the citizen’s name was stripped naked, as it were, and detached from all relationships, such as those in a family or any other group. His name was placed in a list, next to the names of the year’s other dead, who were enumerated within the civic framework of the ten Cleisthenic tribes. In this way, democratic egalitarianism was able to integrate the aristocratic values of glory. Some anonymity, certainly, governed this funeral, but it was moderate; for, if the dead’s remains, which were collected by tribes, were not individualised, each family, at least, had the right to bring offerings to its deceased loved one during the prothesis. An unwritten law encouraged the orator not to praise any individual’s glory in his epitaphios logos (‘funeral oration’). But the public monument still implemented a fair division between collective glory, which was given by the verse epitaph, and personal renown, which came from the name’s inscription.Footnote ⁷

Might burying a dead man or the dead be a way for a community to give full expression to the values that provide the structure for society? Leaving to one side the truly anonymous dead of book 7 of the Iliad, this question can be answered by returning to two funerals: those of Patroclus and Athenian citizen-soldiers. Yet, before doing so, it is right that we anticipate an objection. It could be objected that, between, on the one hand, the ‘literary’ funeral, whose described ritual is all there is, even if it is realistic,Footnote ⁸ and, on the other hand, the funerary practice attested by archaeological documents, the distance is much too great. Importantly, however, our principal ‘document’ on the Athenian collective funeral is still a text, namely Thucydides 2.34 – a text that plays an essential role in the overall economy of this historian’s account of the Peloponnesian War. Consequently, in both cases, the funeral has already become the subject matter of speech, which is something that we will need to take into account.

Let us go, first, to the funeral of Patroclus. It furnishes, at first glance, the classic schema of a hero’s funeral in the Iliad. To begin, the dead man’s body is cared for in multiple ways, after which it is displayed in all its beauty and, next, burnt on a funeral pyre. In this cremation, J.-P. Vernant sees a process that was the opposite of the one characterising sacrificial practice.Footnote ⁹ In the funerary rite, certainly, the corruptible flesh, which was totally consumed, departed in smoke, while the ‘white bones’ survived, which was all that remained of the dead man’s body. In the sacrificial rite, by contrast, the white bones went up as smoke towards the gods, while the flesh remained, destined to be consumed by the community of men. Yet, Patroclus’ funeral only appears to conform to this cremation-schema, since this ritual completely mixes up funeral and sacrifice.Footnote ¹⁰ The sacrifice in it is made aberrant by the status of the victims (men, dogs and horses). In what is an excessive funeral, Patroclus, who is burnt by a double fire, which is both sacrificial and funerary, is the object of funeral ritual as well as the recipient of sacrificial practice. In a word, he is a divine dead man.

What is essential here is that this is what Achilles will soon be because, by honouring Patroclus, to whom he was connected by a ‘living connection’, Achilles accepts his destiny in which death is written.Footnote ¹¹ Patroclus’ funeral is, in reality, celebrated by Achilles alone, although it takes place in the middle of the Achaean army, which includes his own people, the Myrmidons. This funeral tacitly expresses the complex status of Achilles as a hero: his hubris (‘insolence’), which constantly leads from all to nothing, and his standing as a living man whose death is written in his (short) life. Being neither completely dead nor, for that matter, alive, and a mortal, who is, nevertheless, treated like a god, Patroclus reveals Achilles’ status as a living man. Until Achilles dies one day, Patroclus will not truly be one of the dead. His temporary tomb contains what looks like the white bones and the double layer of fat for a sacrifice that has not yet taken (or will never take) place. Until he, in his turn, departs for Hades, Achilles alive is the immortal face of Patroclus, just as Patroclus was his mortal part. In the end, only death will reunite the two halves of this sumbolon (‘token’). Patroclus’ funeral, therefore, brings up to date Achilles’ status, his difficult integration into the societies of the living and the dead, and the tension within him that constantly opposes life to death and god to man. In short, Achilles and Patroclus are the inside and the outside. There is no better way to say that the hero is double.

After the heroic funeral, let us go to the civic funeral’s democratic egalitarianism. Again we need to note how this egalitarianism consisted of giving to all what aristocracy reserved for some. Aristocratic features of this funeral included the prothesis, which was longer than for the ordinary dead, the use of chariots for the cortège (ekphora), the placing of the bones in caskets of cypress, which, as a rot-proof timber, was the bearer of memory and the symbol of immortality, and especially the eulogy. This prose oration may have used the language of political debate. But the doxa athanatos (‘immortal renown’) of the civic orators looks suspiciously like the kleos aphthiton (‘imperishable glory’) of the poet. Therefore, the civic funeral certainly did give everyone what the past’s aristocrats had given only to some. To everyone, the oration and the verse epigram also gave, officially, the title, agathoi andres (‘courageous men’).

We might ask: did death erase differences? It is better to say that it was the city that erased differences in death, as if democracy’s interchangeable egalitarianism was (only) fulfilled on such an occasion. In death, Athenian combatants, who were all mixed up as hoplites, archers, rowers and peltasts, looked like homoioi (‘peers’). In the light of words such as homoioi and agathoi, was this democratic Athens or aristocratic equality? What the public funeral spoke of was democracy such as it wanted to be, that is, as it wanted to be thought of. Consequently, we can say that the Athenian funeral did indeed give expression to the ‘reality’ of the society of the living – as long as we designate as ‘real’ what this society wanted people to say about it or what it said about itself.

This society kept saying the same thing, despite all the transformations that it underwent. In the fourth century, the funeral oration with its strict orthodoxy resisted the intrusion of private values that were again growing in the city.Footnote ¹² But the historian cannot forget that even on the edges of the dēmosion sēma (‘public cemetery’), private tombstones began again to proliferate. Some of them even went as far as celebrating individually citizens who had been interred in a collective monument. In this way, family devotion duplicated official values, just as, in the Ceramicus, the ‘street of tombs’ duplicated the dēmosion sēma. The most remarkable case is that of Dexileos, who was, probably, interred in the collective monument of 394. He was definitely twice celebrated individually: first, with the hippeis (‘horsemen’) who had distinguished themselves at the same time as him and, second, by the monument that his family erected for him.Footnote ¹³ This tomb’s epitaph formed a biography, while its relief cut him off from the other combatants.Footnote ¹⁴ In the face of all this, however, the civic funeral and its speech never tired of saying that the collective had primacy over the individual and the public over the private. It is time that we really get into this speech.

2.3 Heroic and Citizen Deaths: From the Beautiful Dead to the Beautiful Death

In Homer’s world as much as in the Athenian city, an important place was made for speech on the beautiful death because ceremonial practices in both honoured the dead by speaking to the living. While speaking the ‘language’ of rites, we are not overlooking that the combatant’s death is literally surrounded on all sides by speech. This speech, whether it be the poet’s or the orator’s, formed the beautiful death by celebrating it. Yet, inside this speech, there was another speech that the combatants were supposed to have rehearsed for themselves before risking their lives. We find this internal deliberative speech in, for example, Sarpedon’s address to Glaucus, this ‘other’ who is just like him, in book 12 of the Iliad,Footnote ¹⁵ and in the monologue of the Athenian combatant in Lysias’ epitaphios logos.Footnote ¹⁶ This internal speech is like the poem’s matrix and the funeral oration’s truth. The bard and the orator take it upon themselves to be its faithful interpreters.

Certainly, this internal speech had a ‘deliberative’ form because it came before a choice, even if it was only possible to choose immortal glory and so the beautiful death. The reasons for this choice, in Homer, were ‘metaphysical’, because men cannot escape death nor old age, which was like a living death, and because it was better to immortalise the hero’s beautiful youth.Footnote ¹⁷ The reasons in the funeral oration were ‘political’ because the city wanted it, but we could say that this politics was another form of metaphysics. Because the warrior’s death, as a supreme exploit, irresistibly called for the poet’s song or the orator’s prose, it turns out that the beautiful death was already in itself speech. It was a rhetorical topos (‘commonplace’) that was the privileged place for the implanting of an ideology. From the heroic death to the civic death there was, like a long chain’s outermost links, a real continuity, even if gaps and ruptures or, most accurately, a series of gaps and ruptures had their place.

Speech on the beautiful death was built on a certain number of common claims. All at once, this death realised the aretē of a combatant. It established the youthfulness of Homeric warriors, who were immortalised in the flower of their life, and sanctioned the Athenian soldier’s access to the status of anēr (‘man’, that is, a virile adult), who was inextricably a citizen and a soldier. There are two ways to understand ‘they died, after having shown themselves as courageous men (andres genomenoi agathoi)’, which was the funeral speech’s key phrase, depending on whether we put the accent on agathoi or privilege andres. In the first reading, which is the most common, it appears that an Athenian became courageous only in death. If more weight is given to andres, the more unusual reading, the funeral oration appears to be saying that an Athenian becomes a man, that is to say, a citizen, only in death.Footnote ¹⁸

The glorious death also widened a gulf between the hero, or the agathoi, and the rest of humanity. In the Iliad, where people died only in war, the dividing line went between the anonymous death of ordinary people and the beautiful death of Sarpedon or Patroclus. In the funeral oration, the spectacular death of the anēr agathos (‘courageous man’) separated him forever from passive humanity, who, trapped on earth, waited to suffer their fate.Footnote ¹⁹ Nevertheless, in both cases, the elite’s chosen death is opposed to ordinary men’s unchosen one. Therefore, the glorious death unfurled in the domain of the absolute: all the world’s treasure could not counterbalance the demands of honour that drove Achilles, while no prestige [off the battlefield] would be sufficient to launch Sarpedon into battle’s melee. The military exploits of the Athenians likewise responded, not to any utilitarian consideration, but only to the quest for aretē.

All occurred as if the heroic beautiful death continued to inform the civic version of the combatant’s death – as if, as it were, the city’s discourse were feeding off epic representations. Yet, this does not mean that there was no rupture between the civic beautiful death and the heroic one. Indeed, we can detect multiple gaps from one to the other. We can observe them more easily by taking as our reference point the civic beautiful death, which looks like the end of a long history. While epic gave itself as subject matter the klea andrōn, that is, glory that had already been realised in actions, the Athenian speech resolutely erased the action behind the decision to die.Footnote ²⁰ In the funeral oration, everything comes down to this choice, which leads to death. Between the decision to die and the report of the beautiful death (andres genomenoi agathoi), there is no room for action nor for an account of exploits. Consequently, life is erased behind death for the reason that all that counts is the instant of the decision that is both the beginning and the end of the (true) life. Another reason for this erasure is that the eulogy’s collective character requires that all the dead share the same praise, without consideration being given to the quality of their past lives.

For epic’s heroes, such as Achilles in book 9 of the Iliad, there was, by contrast, no other value than life. It was precisely for this reason that it was worth putting one’s own life at stake: one found death but became exemplary, while the beautiful death took on all the weight of the lost life. It was left to the poet to sing of the hero’s life that had been perfected forever by his death. The hero went to his death because life was everything for him. The funeral oration, by contrast, encouraged the citizen to risk a life that was nothing in order to serve the city that was everything: for there was no other life than the city’s, which was also his [personal] history. To the citizens, there remained only death. Whereas epic, which, once again, was more ‘realistic’, mentioned wounded men, who even got better, the Athenian speech celebrated the citizens only in death. In brief, everything in the Athenian funeral conspired to erase life. This is the meaning of the transfer that made ‘eternal youthfulness’, characterising the person of the dead warrior in epic, a feature of glory or the praise of citizens. To the Athenian dead, the funeral oration promised agērōs epainos, that is, praise that did not grow old. But who, if not the city, possessed this praise? Following the funeral speech’s criteria, we might wonder whether a citizen was even a person.

A person is a sōma (‘body’) and a psukhē (‘soul’). In epic, sōma is the term for the dead person, while what gives formal unity to his body, after his death, is his face. It is this face that an enemy tries hard to destroy and that a dead man’s relatives immortalise in the funeral ritual. The body, which has been embellished and consumed, is broken down, but the psukhē, which is liberated in this way, reaches Hades’ shores.Footnote ²¹ Finally, sitting atop the white bones, which are the absent body’s sole remains, the mnēma (‘funeral monument’) speaks to the living about the dead man. In the kingdom of the shades, there is the psukhē and, in the world of humans, the memory of the dead man, which is immortalised by the mnēma and the poet’s song.Footnote ²² In epic, all is played out between these three terms: sōma, psukhē and mnēma.

The funeral oration, which is based on cut-and-dry oppositions, knows only two terms: there is, on the one hand, mnēmē (‘memory’), which is always immortal, and, on the other, ‘life’, of which citizens can only have usufruct. This ‘life’ is always undervalued and described indiscriminately as sōma, psukhē or bios – almost to the point of unfamiliarity. From this there is an enormous consequence: the dead, it appears, have no more body than they do life. Here the essential point is evident: the change from the beautiful dead man to the beautiful death.

In epic, the body was a spectacle. By immobilising it, the heroic death dramatised the body’s beauty. This beauty of the young fallen warrior was like his glory’s visible sign. The ritual aimed to emphasise it by focussing on it. Such is the meaning of the prothesis, in which a corpse that has been meticulously embellished is displayed because, at this point in the funeral, the dead man’s person is entirely linked to his sōma.Footnote ²³ The Athenian funeral, by contrast, was built around the systematic occultation of the body. In the speech, first of all, there appeared no ‘beautiful dead man’ but only always the beautiful death. In it, all aesthetic value had disappeared and the ‘beautiful’ was moral. Therefore, a double transfer had taken place: from the dead man to death, that is, from an exemplary individual towards a formal model of civic behaviour, and then, from the beautiful as the body’s quality to the beautiful as the action’s quality.Footnote ²⁴ As the action, moreover, was absorbed into logos (‘speech’), in the end, the beautiful was used for describing the quality of the civic speech. For Priam, ‘all that appears (phanēēi) is beautiful on the young dead warrior’ (Hom. Il. 22.73). The civic speech responded to epic’s ‘appears’ with the always repeated epiphany of Athens’ aretē.

Nevertheless, it was not just the funeral ceremony that failed to make room for showing the bodies of the dead. In the Iliad, the assembly of the gods decided to force Achilles to return Hector’s corpse (24.35–137), since it had to be delivered before the eyes of, first, his spouse, then, his mother, son and father, and, finally, his people. In Athens, by contrast, the dead no longer looked like a sōma and what the city agreed to display for family devotion were bones.Footnote ²⁵ In this way, the dead were already abstract and already deprived of all that gave them their physical appearance and all that permitted them to be identified.Footnote ²⁶ In actual fact, the order of the funeral ritual had been reversed for Athenian citizens: first, the funeral pyre, on the battlefield,Footnote ²⁷ and, then, for the families, a prothesis without a spectacle or individualisation.

In view of this, we cannot underestimate the significance of the cremation of the bodies. Was burning the dead instead of burying them only a prophylactic measure? Was it simply about conserving their remains until the funeral ceremony at the combat season’s end? Certainly, there are a great number of historians who are convinced that the real is rational and so answer in the affirmative. But to him or her who acknowledges that ancient Greece is also a matter of anthropology,Footnote ²⁸ such ‘rationality’ appears very suspect. To tell the truth, the recourse to cremation strongly resembles a choice that was dictated by ideological imperatives. We can note that this prophylactic measure would have had no raison d’être if the Athenians did not repatriate the remains of their citizens. In doing so, they distinguished themselves from other Greek cities who normally buried their dead on the battlefield. Now the meaning of this Athenian practice is clearer still when it is related to the dominant myth of autochthony. For the Athenians, their civic earth was both ‘a mother and a fatherland’.Footnote ²⁹ Was their entrusting of their war dead’s bones to it, therefore, not about a way to guarantee the city’s reproduction? This choice of repatriation, at least, made it necessary for the Athenians to concern themselves with prophylactic measures.

Yet, there was more to cremation than this. As a funerary practice, it was a matter of symbolism and could, itself, be subject to choice. After the battle of Marathon, combatants were buried on the battlefield. What was absolutely symbolic, in this case, was the dividing up of, on the one hand, the citizens, for whom the Athenians resorted to cremation, and, on the other, the Plataeans and the slaves, who were simply buried some distance away. In interpreting this division, we can take into account that cremation, as a more costly practice, was reserved for those whom the city wanted to honour highly.Footnote ³⁰ Undoubtedly, we need also to take into account that the Athenian citizens, who, by their deaths, had put beyond doubt their status as andres, were, as was natural, on the side of the cooked, while the Plataeans and the slaves, like the children in Eretria’s princely tombs,Footnote ³¹ were on the side of the raw. Earlier, we noted how the funeral oration habitually presented those who had fallen in battle as having, at last, definitively left behind their childhood.

When it comes to funerary practice, were there, it can be asked, behaviours that escaped symbolism? Because I do not believe that there were, I have had to dwell at some length on the Athenian refusal to make a place for seeing in the funeral ceremony.

From the beautiful dead man to the beautiful death, a major event had occurred: the effacing of the person of the dead man or, more precisely, the dead themselves before [the ideal of] the city. To put it differently, this was the creation of the city-ideal beyond all the representations of the polis as a community. In short, this creating of an ideal was a process of abstraction.

2.4 The Dead and the Abstraction of the City: Achilles and Athens

Such a process is not carried out in a day. Indeed, clearly, this process was not carried out in all places nor at the same speed. Different speeds, delays and gaps are, of course, peculiar to ideological phenomena. While limiting this examination to the two extremes of the beautiful death’s history, we must not forget that between the Homeric world and Athenian democracy essential stages had occurred, such as the archaic period’s aristocratic cities or Sparta.Footnote ³² In the classical period, the Greeks saw Sparta as embodying very rigorously the civic obligation of the beautiful death. It is worth studying it, if only briefly, in order to take note of the remarkable discrepancy there between discourse and practice. This city, from its sixth-century beginning, was protected from the temptation of development by its immoveable [social] structures and, in the next century, looked like an archaic polis that had been miraculously preserved.Footnote ³³

Sparta demonstrates that the process of abstraction was not an irresistible phenomenon across the Greek world. In many respects, Sparta’s choices are even more reminiscent of those of epic. In Sparta, room was made for the life of the courageous warrior. Let us recall the quasi-institutional opposition, in the city of the homoioi, between he who had fought gloriously and so merited, in his lifetime, honours, admiration and sexual attention, and the tresas (‘trembler’), who was pushed out of the city and even its age-classes, since he was required to give up his seat to a younger (and more courageous) Spartan.Footnote ³⁴ Along the same lines, probably, the Spartans, like the Homeric laoi (‘peoples’), judged it essential to possess not just the remains but also the bodies of their kings. If a king died away from Sparta, his body, which was embalmed in honey or wax, had to be brought back, with special care taken to preserve his face.

Sparta’s male–female opposition excluded women less from the city than in Athens. Attic women had to be content with the (small) place that was allotted them in the [public] funeral. Beyond this ceremony, as Pericles politely reminded them (Thuc. 2.45.2), they were counselled not to be spoken of. For Pericles, feminine aretē was simply a contradiction in terms.Footnote ³⁵ Spartan women, who enjoyed the right to attend a royal funeral, could even win renown in the sphere of reproduction, even if this sphere, it is true, was tightly confined.Footnote ³⁶ Only Spartan men who had fallen in battle and Spartan women who had died in childbirth had the right to the inscription of their names on their tombs. While this equivalence might conform to the Greek orthodoxy about the division between the sexes, it is no less remarkable for being institutionalised. From the Spartan viewpoint, we can see more clearly the abstraction process that was implemented in Athens. This, however, does not mean that other essential stages did not exist along the way to this Athenian beautiful death.Footnote ³⁷

This process of abstraction, besides not being implemented in every place, was implemented or, at least, was orchestrated on an exceptional scale in a very exact place: Athens. This, too, happened at a very exact time. The funeral oration’s moment, let us say, fell between Cleisthenes and Ephialtes.Footnote ³⁸ More generally, it fell between Cleisthenes and the start of the Peloponnesian War. This second period witnessed the disappearance of the dead’s figurative representation on Athenian private tombs, although such representation did continue on public monuments. In funerary representations, there existed, therefore, a gap separating archaic sculpture, such as the kouros stela, from the late classical period’s innumerable figurative reliefs. Certainly, this phenomenon merits an in-depth study. To understand this gap, we, undoubtedly, would need to explore the civic ban that weighed against the individual’s representation in death and – in a more general way – against sight to the benefit of speech. Subsequently, we would need to bring together this ban and the study of the public funeral.

Clearly, the Athenian city never stopped exorcising sight: it substituted white bones for bodies. It diverted the eye from the collective monument, on which a relief sculpture celebrated symbolic combatants,Footnote ³⁹ towards the rostrum of the dēmosion sēma, where the official orator’s speech transformed the public into an audience.Footnote ⁴⁰ Therefore, the speech that the classical city had about the beautiful death was formed by a rejection of archaic representation or, indeed, of all representation.Footnote ⁴¹ Here, perhaps, we see less the rejection of archaic discourse than of representation.

Let us return to this speech one last time. Everything occurs in the funeral oration as if Athens were taking the place that Achilles had occupied in epic.Footnote ⁴² Achilles, the most valorous of the Greeks, parallels Athens, the city of aretē, to which the Greeks, by mutual agreement, supposedly award the aristeion (‘the first prize for valour’). No one, in the Achaean camp, contests Achilles’ eminent merit. No Greek city, if we are to believe the funeral orators, denies for a second that Athens merits universal admiration and the first rank. Like Achilles, the city can only be the greatest. This is why the victory at Marathon, which was an initiatory exploit of the hero-Athens, gained paradigmatic value. While Plataeans actually fought besides the Athenians, the funeral orators ‘forget’ them because Athens gives no thought to allies.Footnote ⁴³ Finally, just as Achilles-bard sings of the klea andrōn, so too, within civic discourse, does the city give speech to the orator and glory to the dead citizens.

This ‘heroic’ position of the city in the speech was not without consequences. It basically gave the combatants an interchangeable face, which in reality meant that they did not have a face at all. Therefore, the funeral oration proclaimed the dominance of the polis over andres, of the city over men. To speak plainly, this should discourage the historian of the Greek city from overemphasising the importance of the well-known adage: ‘men are the city’. Against the idea that Greece of the poleis knew only the community’s concrete lived experience, the study of the funeral oration’s beautiful death urges us to emphasise the dominant position that the abstraction of the polis held in civic discourse.Footnote ⁴⁴ This abstract polis was the indivisible unity around which speech was organised.

In order to complete the comparison of Achilles in epic and the city in the epitaphios logos, we should also note that the city, if it takes Achilles’ place, does so in a moralising fashion. The funeral oration is a (civic and hoplitic) lesson in morality, which epic poetry, clearly, was not. Therefore, this speech represents the end of the hubris that formed the Homeric hero in all his ambiguity.Footnote ⁴⁵ In the epitaphios logos, excess lies opposite among enemies, while all justice has taken refuge in Athens. With this major difference is associated the very strong opposition between, as I called it earlier, epic’s realism and the Athenian speech’s metaphysical absolutism.

We can also associate it with the funeral oration’s systematic occultation of the kratos (‘power’) that was a large part of epic’s definition of the warrior. When it came to the kratos that the people exercised within the city, the epitaphioi logoi (‘funeral speeches’) suggested that democracy was, not the kratos of the people, but the fatherland of aretē.Footnote ⁴⁶ Funeral speeches, likewise, suppressed the imperial city’s kratos, transforming it into a recognition of the merit of Athens in a contest for excellence.Footnote ⁴⁷ Power per se simply did have a place in the funeral oration.

Therefore, what was stated in the public cemetery, on the occasion of the death of Athenians, merits the name ideology of the city.Footnote ⁴⁸ To this, perhaps, we should add ‘ideology of democracy’, since manifest egalitarianism existed only in death and by a claimed adherence to aretē. Yet, it is very significant that the funeral oration contained the only methodical discourse that the Athenian city officially maintained on democracy. Democracy spoke for itself in the public cemetery. It described itself as the one true value and even as the model of the polis. In order, however, for this description to succeed, the democratic city still had to depart from political practice, for in the ekklēsia (‘assembly’) the citizens had less scruples about calling kratos by its name, and also from the town because the Ceramicus, as the ‘most beautiful suburb’ (Thuc. 2.34.5), was still beyond the walls. The city also deliberately departed from time, as Pericles all but stated in Thucydides (‘we will be admired by men today and in the future’ – 2.41.4). The pause that death brought allowed such a breaking away.

2.5 Conclusion: Ideology and ‘Funerary Ideology’

But was this funerary ideology? Rather I would say: ideology in death. Unless we are prepared to read ‘ideology’ in ‘funerary ideology’ vaguely as a ‘system of representations’, we really must try to understand the process that allowed an ideological discourse’s dissemination in a death celebration. A ritualised death had become an effective factor in social cohesion. Therefore, it is important that civic ideology was formed against the beautiful death’s background. The hero, Achilles, set up a unique ceremony for honouring Patroclus in a manner that had never (and would never) be seen. But this hero was unique among the heroes. At least, he should be or even had to be in order to fit in – in his paradoxical manner – in Homeric society. Against time and against its own history, which had not consisted of [heroic] agonistic wars nor of unsullied prestige, the Athenian city set up a ceremonial that distinguished it from other cities and in which it proclaimed that it was the only polis. This is a discourse that historians have had (and continue to have) difficulty in abandoning. We are accustomed to paying little attention to the phraseology of our modern speeches for the dead. It is thus pleasing to me that the most effective of the Athenian models of Athens was articulated in a cemetery.