Historiographies of the tradition of rhetoric: A brief history of classical funeral orations

Abstract

This essay argues that the six surviving funeral orations from the classical Greek period should be understood as instances of laudatory discourse designed to fulfill the institutional function of glorifying the Athenian state. This perspective enables the critic to examine the changes this discourse underwent as the object of its glorification—the state‐changed. It also reveals the incompleteness of treatments by Kennedy and others that present funeral orations as essentially similar parts of a continuous tradition. This project demonstrates how history functions as interpretation and why rhetorical artifacts should be understood as functioning both to veil and to unveil the concrete operations of structures of domination.