Thank Goodness It's Monday #358

MEMORIAL DAY TAKEAWAY

FROM ANCIENT ATHENS

On Memorial Days past we’ve talked here about the domestic origins and meaning of this day of remembrance.

This year I’d like to briefly revisit the underlying significance of the commemoration on a slightly larger scale.

Set the Wayback Machine.

Destination: Ancient Greece.

Time: About 404 BCE.

Event: The Peloponnesian War.

Stay with me now. I’m not going to launch into a boring history lesson. (At least I hope not.)

Bust of Pericles bearing the inscription
"Pericles, son of Xanthippus, Athenian".
Roman copy after a Greek original
from ca. 430 BCE

On the table for TGIM purposes this Memorial Day is just a wee bit of that ancient history, a speech the preeminent Athenian historian Thucydides attributes to Pericles -- a prominent and influential Greek statesman, orator, and general of Athens during the city's Golden Age.

“Golden” because: It is principally through his efforts that Athens holds the reputation of being the educational and cultural centre of the ancient Greek world. Pericles promoted the arts and literature. He started an ambitious project that generated most of the surviving structures on the Acropolis (including the Parthenon). This project beautified the city, exhibited its glory, and gave work to the people. Pericles also fostered Athenian democracy to such an extent that critics call him a populist.

If you want many more details, read Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War 

Or –

Just read excerpts of the speech that is the object of our attention for the next few minutes.  

More specifically that speech is --

A Funeral Oration. Pericles is speaking at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War. The oration that’s cited is delivered at an annual “funeral” for those who lost their lives fighting. So it has a –

Memorial Day connection: In many respects it has much in common with the speechifying you may encounter this Memorial Day – if you allow that this Monday Holiday is more than a day off from work, a bargain sales bonanza, and cookouts and a prelude to full blown summer.

The speech begins by praising the custom of the public funeral for the war dead, but criticizes the inclusion of the speech, arguing that the "reputations of many brave men" should "not be imperiled in the mouth of a single individual.”

Sounds like something you’d expect to hear today, right? 

Next Pericles argues that the speaker of the oration has the impossible task of satisfying the associates of the dead, who would wish that their deeds be magnified, while everyone else might feel sheepish and jealous and suspect exaggeration.

Again, sentiments familiar in the modern Memorial Day address.

Next Pericles departs significantly from the example of other Athenian funeral orations and skips over the great martial achievements of Athens' past. He proposes to focus instead on "the road by which we reached our position, the form of government under which our greatness grew, and the national habits out of which it sprang".

"If we look to the laws,” he says, “they afford equal justice to all in their private differences... If a man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition. The freedom we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbor for doing what he likes..."

Sound familiar? These lines form the roots of the famous modern day ideal: "Equal justice under law." And in a year of significant national-level elections, you’ll hear similar talk throughout the campaigns as well as on this Memorial Day.

Finally, Pericles links his praise of the city/state to the dead Athenians for whom he is speaking, "...for the Athens that I have celebrated is only what the heroism of these and their like have made her.”

No doubt you’ll hear such ancient and universal sentiments expressed today.

Easy-to-grasp American parallel: American Civil War scholar Garry Wills sees parallels of Pericles' funeral oration in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address – certainly a “Memorial Day” touchstone if ever there was one. 

And while it‘s uncertain to what degree Lincoln was directly influenced by Pericles' Funeral Oration, Edward Everett, who delivered a lengthy speech at the same ceremony at Gettysburg, began by describing the "Athenian example.”

In the 21^st Century: Take an additional moment this modern Memorial Day to absorb one more Periclean lesson from the Golden Age of Athens. 

TGIM ACTION IDEA: Official commemorations, and parades, and monuments, and speeches are all well and good. But these public, collective proclamations are not the ultimate tribute and miss the point somewhat. 

Just as our modern Memorial Day observance began with decorating the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers in the late 1860s, we must hold firmly to the understanding that, no matter who is victorious or whose cause is “right,” the ultimate sacrifice made in pursuit of sincerely held beliefs is no less painful for the living of either side.

Thucydides has Pericles remind us: 

“For this offering of their lives made in common by them all, they, each of them, individually, received that renown which never grows old; and for a sepulcher, not so much that in which their bones have been deposited, but that noblest of shrines wherein their glory is laid up to be eternally remembered upon every occasion on which deed or story shall call for its commemoration. 

“For heroes have the whole earth for their tomb; and in lands far from their own, where the column with its epitaph declares it, there is enshrined in every breast a record unwritten with no tablet to preserve it, except that of the heart.”

TGIM IDEA IN ACTION: In some quiet moment today, examine your heart.  I hope this Memorial Day provides you with an opportunity to reflect on the ideas of contribution and sacrifice as well as effective ways we all can contribute to making this age a Golden Age for ourselves and our world. 

Geoff Steck
Chief Catalyst
Alexander Publishing & Marketing

8 Depot Square

Englewood, NJ 07631
201-569-5373
tgimguy@gmail.com

P.S. Thucydides/Pericles ends the Funeral Oration: "My task is now finished. I have performed it to the best of my ability, and in word, at least, the requirements of the law are now satisfied. If deeds be in question, those who are here interred have received part of their honors already, and for the rest, their children will be brought up till manhood at the public expense: the state thus offers a valuable prize, as the garland of victory in this race of valor, for the reward both of those who have fallen and their survivors. And where the rewards for merit are greatest, there are found the best citizens. 

"And now that you have brought to a close your lamentations for your relatives, you may depart."