Book 2, Chapter 6 — Beginning of the Peloponnesian War—First Invasion of Attica—Funeral Oration of Pericles
Pericles delivers the most celebrated speech in classical antiquity — and Thucydides places it just before the catastrophe.
Summary
The first Spartan invasion of Attica is strategically inconclusive: Athens retreats behind its walls, Archidamus ravages the countryside, neither side forces a decisive engagement. But the human cost is real. Athenian farmers watch their land destroyed, their generation-old olive trees burned, their family properties laid waste, and are forbidden by Pericles's strategy from the satisfaction of fighting back. The anger in the city is reported by Thucydides with his characteristic compression: it was great, and Pericles refused to call the assembly while it lasted, knowing that the people in passion would vote for exactly the kind of land battle he had forbidden.
The Funeral Oration is delivered at the end of the first year's fighting, at the public ceremony for the year's dead. Pericles begins by questioning the convention of the funeral speech — not modest demurral but a genuine methodological challenge: deeds speak for themselves; words are inadequate and often inaccurate; the reputation of the brave should not depend on one speaker's eloquence. Having said this, he proceeds to give the most eloquent speech in the History. Athens is described as a democracy where advancement is by merit, where laws protect private life from public intrusion, where beauty is cultivated without extravagance, where intellectual culture is pursued without loss of physical courage.
The speech ends with an address to the survivors and the newly bereaved. To the city's men still living: consider the power that these dead built and died for; be worthy of it. To the bereaved parents: the city's honor is your consolation. To the widows: your greatest glory is to be spoken of as little as possible, for praise or for blame. The final sentences to the widows have been debated ever since: is Thucydides's Pericles endorsing a severe gender ideology, or is he reporting, without endorsement, what an Athenian aristocrat of the mid-fifth century would actually have said? Either reading produces a different portrait of both Pericles and Thucydides.
- Book 1Book 1 opens not with battle but with argument.
- Book 1The immediate causes of the war begin with Epidamnus — a small colony on the Adriatic whose civil strife triggers a chain of interventions that pulls Corinth against Corcyra and Corcyra toward Athens.
- Book 1The congress at Lacedaemon is the Peloponnesian War's diplomatic overture.
- Book 1The Pentecontaetia — the fifty years between the Persian Wars and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War — is Thucydides's compressed account of how Athens turned from war-leader to empire.
- Book 1Chapter 5 is the last diplomatic chapter before war breaks out.
- Book 2The war formally begins with the Theban attack on Plataea.
- Book 2The plague of Athens is the History's most famous sustained passage outside the Funeral Oration.
- Book 2Chapter 8 covers the third year of the war across multiple theatres.
- Book 3Book 3 opens with the revolt of Mytilene, the largest and most strategically significant of the Athenian allied cities.
- Book 3Two episodes in Book 3's second half illustrate what civil and inter-state war does to the norms that normally govern violence.
- Book 3Chapter 11 follows the Athenian general Demosthenes through a remarkable arc: from the catastrophic defeat in Aetolia, where he led light-armed Athenian troops into wooded hill country they were utterly unequipped to fight in and lost the greater part of them, to the brilliant campaign in Acarnania, where he used his knowledge of irregular warfare, learned at severe cost, to ambush and nearly annihilate a Peloponnesian and Ambraciot force.
- Book 4The Pylos campaign is the tactical and psychological turning point of the war's first decade.
- Book 4Chapter 13 moves across multiple theatres in the war's seventh and eighth years.
- Book 4Book 4's final chapter belongs to Brasidas — the one Spartan commander who combined military brilliance with political intelligence, the qualities Sparta as an institution consistently undervalued.
- Book 5The tenth year of the war produces one of history's more striking coincidences of elimination.
- Book 5The peace after Cleon and Brasidas is a peace in name only.
- Book 5The Melian Dialogue is ten pages in most editions and has been discussed for two and a half thousand years.
- Book 6Book 6 opens with the debate and vote on the Sicilian Expedition — one of the History's great scenes of collective irrationality.
- Book 6While the Athenian expedition crosses the sea, Syracuse holds its own debate about whether to believe the threat.
- Book 6With Alcibiades gone and Lamachus increasingly the operational commander, the Athenian force finally moves seriously against Syracuse in the expedition's second year.
- Book 7Book 7 opens with the Athenian position deteriorating on every front simultaneously.
- Book 7Demosthenes arrives with the reinforcements and immediately does what Nicias had been unable to do: he assesses the situation, decides on a bold stroke, and acts.
- Book 7Book 7's final chapters are the most sustained tragic narrative in classical literature.
- Book 8Book 8 opens with Athens after Sicily — a city that could not believe what it had done to itself, then could not stop the consequences.
- Book 8Chapter 25 covers one of the strangest episodes in Athenian history: the oligarchic revolution of 411 BCE, in which a conspiracy of four hundred men overthrows the Athenian democracy at the city's moment of maximum strategic vulnerability.
- Book 8The History's final chapter covers the collapse of the Four Hundred, the restoration of a modified democracy in Athens, the recall and rehabilitation of Alcibiades, and the Athenian naval victory at Cynossema — a victory that demonstrates Athens's ability to recover even now.