Publié le June 4, 2024 | Updated on June 4, 2024

David M. Pritchard : The Athenian Funeral Oration

After Nicole Loraux

In classical Athens, a funeral speech was delivered for dead combatants almost every year, the most famous being that by Pericles in 430 BC. In 1981, Nicole Loraux transformed our understanding of this genre. Her The Invention of Athens showed how it reminded the Athenians who they were as a people. Loraux demonstrated how each speech helped them to maintain the same self-identity for two centuries. But The Invention of Athens was far from complete. This volume brings together top-ranked experts to finish Loraux's book. It answers the important questions about the numerous surviving funeral speeches that she ignored. It also undertakes a comparison of the funeral oration with other genres that is missing in her famous book. What emerges is a speech that had a much greater political impact than Loraux thought. This volume puts the study of war in Athenian culture on a completely new footing. This book presents the proceedings of a colloquium on "L'Oraison funèbre et Nicole Loraux" held in Lyon in February 2020 and co-financed by the Collegium de Lyon.

  • Editor
    Cambridge University Press
  • Author(s)
    David M. Pritchard is Associate Professor of Greek History at the University of Queensland (Australia). He has authored Athenian Democracy at War (Cambridge University Press: 2019), Sport, Democracy and War in Classical Athens (Cambridge University Press: 2013) and Public Spending and Democracy in Classical Athens (University of Texas Press: 2015), edited War, Democracy and Culture in Classical Athens (Cambridge University Press: 2010) and co-edited Sport and Festival in the Ancient Greek World (Classical Press of Wales: 2013). D.M. Pritchard speaks on the radio and regularly writes for newspapers around the world. His 30 op-eds have been published in, among other outlets Le Monde, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Kathimerini, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Conversation (France).

    He was a 2019-20 Fellow at the Collegium de Lyon.