Funeral Oration

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The "Funeral Oration" is a speech written by the Athenian orator Lysias around the late 390s BCE. It purports to be the address given at the public funeral of Athens's war dead, commemorating those who died in a year of the Corinthian War, in which Athens sent troops to assist the city of Corinth against its rival Sparta. It is unlikely that Lysias ever delivered the speech, as he was probably ineligible, as a metic (resident foreigner), to speak at the public funeral. It is known as an epideictic or "showpiece" work, and may have been composed as a rhetorical exercise or display of skill. The speech narrates several myths of Athens's past, including the Amazonomachy and the Athenians' part in the stories of the Seven against Thebes and the children of Heracles, as well as historical episodes from the Greco-Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. The treatment of these stories glorifies heroic defeat as well as victory, and is unusual among Athenian funeral orations in commemorating the non-citizen dead alongside those of Athens. The speech may have been the object of criticism and parody from Plato in his Menexenos, and has been criticised on artistic and stylistic grounds by modern scholars: both they and Plato tend to see it as highly conventional and awkward in its expression. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several critics argued that it was not a work of Lysias, but rather a late fourth-century imitation by an unknown sophist. It may have been drawn upon by the rhetorician Isokrates for his Panegyrikos, written around 380 BCE.

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Lysias