The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City

by Nicole Loraux

How does the funeral oration relate to democracy in ancient Greece? How did the death of an individual citizen-soldier become an occasion to praise the city of Athens? In The Invention of Athens , Nicole Loraux traces the different rhetoric, politics, and ideology of funeral orations from Thucidydes, Gorgias, Lysias, and Demosthenes to Plato.

This new edition of The Invention of Athens includes Loraux’s significant revisions undertaken in 1993 to render this groundbreaking work accessible to nonspecialists. Loraux’s introduction to this revised volume, as well as important revisions to the existent 1986 English translation, make this publication an important addition to scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences.

Genres: History, Classics, Nonfiction, Greece, Ancient History, Anthropology, Academic

544 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

Reviews

[Laura]

Es muy engorroso y aburrido ;-;

[Grace Hobbs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loraux is brilliant, almost frighteningly lucid, and her probing exploration of the ways in which the epitaphios logos both formed and reflected the ideology of the classical city - indeed, embodying the permanence the city wished to see in itself - offers much to think about, and is not irrelevant to the study of democracy today.