e-space
Manchester Metropolitan University's Research Repository

    Fighting talk: war’s human cost in drama and law-court speeches

    Crowley, Jason ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1836-2777 (2024) Fighting talk: war’s human cost in drama and law-court speeches. In: The Athenian Funeral Oration: after Nicole Loraux. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 280-297. ISBN 9781009413053 (online); 9781009413084 (hardback)

    [img]
    Preview
    Accepted Version
    Available under License In Copyright.

    Download (544kB) | Preview

    Abstract

    Athens was a superpower whose ambitions required the ongoing sacrifice of men. To ensure those sacrifices were willingly made, the Athenians embraced a distinct form of ultra-patriotism, which was transmitted almost annually via the funeral speech. In this genre of public oratory, Athens was the leader and the protector of Greece, the wars that she fought were always altruistic and justified, and those who died in them were celebrated for their selfless courage. As this chapter will reveal, however, the obligation to fight was so readily embraced that most men had direct experience of combat. As a result, in Athens, the rhetoric of the funeral oration and the experience of war co-existed uneasily. On the one hand, the form of the funeral speech was determined by its function, which was to perpetuate the self-sacrifice of Athenian men. Other types of public discourse were free of such constraints, and whilst patriotism is reinforced by drama and forensic oratory, these genres could also explore the adverse human experience of war. These sometimes converging, sometimes diverging portrayals of war reveal a society that acknowledged the consequences of conflict but considered the patriotic cause worth the human cost.

    Impact and Reach

    Statistics

    Activity Overview
    6 month trend
    72Downloads
    6 month trend
    158Hits

    Additional statistics for this dataset are available via IRStats2.

    Altmetric

    Repository staff only

    Edit record Edit record