The Athenian Funeral Oration

Lesche: Ancient Greece, New Ideas

David M. Pritchard joins me in the Lesche to discuss what appears to have been, in Nicole Loraux's famous words, a "very Athenian invention": the epitaphios logos, or funeral oration given over the war dead at their public burial. Both the Athenian funeral oration and the legacy of Nicole Loraux's pioneering study of it are the subjects of David's new edited volume The Athenian Funeral Oration: After Nicole Loraux.

About our guest

David M. Pritchard is Associate Professor of Greek History at the University of Queensland in Australia. He is well known internationally for researching the symbiosis between war, democracy and culture in classical Athens. He has held some fifteen fellowships in Australia, Europe and the US. Associate Professor Pritchard speaks on radio and regularly writes for newspapers around the world.
Ancient texts
Athenian funeral orations

• "Historical” texts: Thucydides 2.34-46, Demosthenes 60, Hyperides' Funeral Oration
• "Literary" examples: Gorgias' fragmentary funeral oration, Lysias 2, Plato's Menexenus, Isocrates' Panegyricus

Also mentioned

• Cornelius Castoriadis, L'institution imaginaire de la société (Paris 1975).
• Nicole Loraux, L'invention d'Athènes: Histoire de l'oraison funèbre dans la "cité classique" (Paris 1981 [1st ed.]; 1993 [2nd abridged ed.), translated into English by Alan Sheridan as The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City (HUP 1986/reprint PUP 2006)
• Nicole Loraux, Les enfants d'Athéna. Idées athéniennes sur la citoyenneté et la division des sexes (Paris 1984), translated into English by Caroline Levine as The Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and Division Between the Sexes (PUP 1993).

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Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!
Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius
This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

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