On Justice Power and Human Nature

Pericles’s Funeral Oration in honor of the first war casualties is generally agreed to be the most famous speech from Thucydides’s History. Pericles opened by asserting that men don’t need famous speeches to immortalize their greatness since their deeds on the battlefield speak for themselves. He praised the city for its unique government that respected the law and acknowledged all citizens as equal under it, for its “contests and sacrifices,” its openness, and love of nobility and wisdom. He described Athens’s virtues to contrast favorably against Sparta’s and declared Athens “a lesson for Greece” (78).

Thucydides immediately follows Pericles’s speech by recounting events in Athens during the plague that struck in 430 BC. Pericles’s strategy was to abandon the countryside to Spartan raids and bring citizens inside the city walls. This led to unsanitary and overcrowded conditions that made citizens vulnerable to plague. Thucydides notes that it seemed to indiscriminately strike the weak and the strong, the pious and the impious, and that no treatment proved consistently effective. Law and morality were cast aside as citizens didn’t expect to live long enough to be punished for wrongdoing. Being diagnosed with the plague led to loss of hope, which led to more rapid decline, but those who recovered didn’t become reinfected and “were thought to be blessedly happy” (84).