Tag Archives: Funeral Oration

By Ben Potter, Contributing Writer, Classical Wisdom What springs to mind when we think about literature of the Ancient World? Maybe it’s Homer’s Achilles dragging the corpse of Hector around Troy or Sophocles’ Oedipus stabbing out his polluted eyes. Perhaps it’s Plato’s Socrates holding forth or Herodotus’ Leonidas and his 300 Spartans. It even might

By Van Bryan, Contributing Writer, Classical Wisdom Recently, your editor asked a question… Is nationalism “good”? How interesting, we thought to ourselves. Immediately, hand went to chin. We furrowed our eyebrows in earnest ponderance. Some questions stay with you, dear reader. Like a sore on the roof of your mouth that would go away if

Pericles: “I Shall Begin With Our Ancestors” “I shall begin with our ancestors,” said Pericles, in his speech for the dead soldiers. This was 431-430BC, the first year of the Peloponnesian War. The custom was to give a public eulogy – a kind of Thanksgiving and Veterans’ Day rolled into one – each year. “They