Ancient History

Pericles’ Funeral Oration, recorded by Thucydides in History of the Peloponnesian War (Book II), is Athens’ most famous self-portrait. Spoken over the first dead of the war with Sparta, it becomes less a eulogy for fallen soldiers than a meditation on the city they died to defend. Pericles praises a daring, open, law-governed democracy that blends freedom with discipline and honors both courage in battle and usefulness in peace. This oration asks what makes a community worthy of sacrifice—and challenges listeners to live so that their city deserves such loyalty, honor, and remembrance across generations and in every crisis.

Marcus Aurelius opens Meditations with one of the most remarkable exercises in gratitude in all of ancient literature. In Book 1, the emperor-philosopher thanks the people who shaped him: his family, his tutors, and the mentors who taught him steadiness, justice, humility, and self-control. Rather than listing his own virtues, he traces each good habit to someone who modeled it first. In doing so, Marcus quietly defines what it means to form a good man. Character is not an accident of birth, nor a sudden revelation, but the patient inheritance of example. One learns honesty from the honest, restraint from the restrained, piety from the pious, and a kind of calm strength from those who bear misfortune well. Book 1 is Marcus’s acknowledgment that every moral achievement rests on the shoulders of others — and his reminder that we, too, are called to pass such examples on.