Pericles’ Funeral Oration and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address complement each other like a piece of dark chocolate and a glass of red wine. Each brings out the flavors, textures, and beauties of the other.
Both orators took the same approach to a national tragedy: honor the dead by extolling the virtues and principles for which they died.
Pericles spoke of the greatness of the Athenian state — their military, cultural, and intellectual prowess. He reminded his listeners of why they should be proud to be Greek.
That I have not on this occasion made use of a pomp of words, but the truth of facts, that height to which by such a conduct this state hath risen, is an undeniable proof. For we are now the only people of the world who are found by experience to be greater than in report…
In the just defense of such a state, these victims of their own valor, scorning the ruin threatened to it, have valiantly fought and bravely died. And every one of those who survive is ready, I am persuaded, to sacrifice life in such a cause. And for this reason I have enlarged so much on national points, to give the clearest proof that in the present war we have more at stake than men whose public advantages are not so valuable, and to illustrate, by actual evidence, how great a commendation is due to them who are now my subject, and the greatest part of which they have already received.
Pericles reminded them why they fought. And he inspired them to keep fighting for the principles and civilization they held dear.
In the same way, Abraham Lincoln reminded his audience at Gettysburg of their heritage as Americans:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, an new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
This is what they held dear — liberty and equality. And now they were fighting for it.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
Pericles and Lincoln both were mindful of the fact that other civilizations, other nations were watching them. They reminded their audience that this fight was not just for their country, but to prove if the ideals that Greece and the United States were founded upon could and would stand strong.
They both extolled the men who died. Pericles called their death the “surest evidence of their merit–an evidence begun in their lives and completed in their deaths… it extends to the public, [while] their private demeanors reached only to a few.” Lincoln praised the men “who here gave their lives that [their] nation might live.”
Death gave birth to life — life to a people, life to a nation, life to a renewed commitment to valor and honor and duty. And in Lincoln’s case, a new life for a people who had been denied the very ideals upon which the United States was founded.
