Pericles Athenian Democracy in Ancient Term Paper

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Most movingly, perhaps, in the final part of his speech, Pericles turns to the fathers and mothers who have given up sons and spouses to the war. He states that the parents who are still young should have more children, children who will be able to enjoy the democracy that their older siblings fought and died for, and he tells the women to be strong too, in the face of the sorrows that they and their city are enduring over the course of the war. Pericles thus admits, without falsely creating a beautiful image of wartime, that casualties are inevitable during a violent conflict, and it is only because Athenian democracy is so unique, so worth fighting for, that men are willing to give up the comforts of peacetime to sacrifice their lives.

Of course, it might be protested that the ideal Pericles speaks of in the funeral oration was not always in practice, in Athens.

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Pericles himself was married to a foreign woman, and his son was only made a citizen through special dispensation by the government. Only men could vote, and only free-born Greeks who had two Athenian parents were full voting citizens of Athens, even though, as Pericles noted, Athens was more open and willing to tolerate foreigners and Greeks from other city-states in its midst than many of its neighbors. Athens was also guilty of bloody wartime actions against its enemy, just as it accused the oligarchic Sparta of practicing during war. But even if the ideal of Athenian democracy was not always as pure as the vision lauded by Pericles in his speech, the very presence of the ideal, and the idea that freedom is worth fighting for, was unique, and uniquely expressed in this leader's words.

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