CXII (Re)leituras -- Perikleios Epitaphios, By Pericles, son of Xanthippus, comments by André Bandeira

This is considered as a monument to the concept we call «Democracy», and rightly so. It is a funereal oration pronounced by Pericles, in the context of a return from an expedition to Megara, which he led to victory. All the elements of modern «Democracy» should be found there: the concept of «isonomia» among the athenian citizens, which -- more than equality -- reveals the concept of an essential mingling within the collective of citizens; the concept of social and fortune inequality, as a lenitive for merit and not for hate; the concept of participatory democracy as an intertwinement between Politics and daily life; one may even find the rudiments of a democratic geostrategy, when Pericles vindicates that Athenians used to defend their territory only by themselves, whereas the other hellenic city-states would have had to resort to mercurial alliances. There is nothing in this oral register, reported by Thucydidis, to remind us of the list of degenerate constitutions Aristotle alluded to. But the context, which surfaces in two-thirds of the text, has nothing to do with «isonomia». As a matter of fact, the real motive underpinning the speech, it is the unsurmountable difference which Fate has cleaved between the survivors and the dead, in battle. Pericles begins by serving the speech with the rethorical humility of a person who cannot decide between those who lived to tell, and those who lived up to the deed, but didn't come out alive, to tell the story. And what is the real story? Of course, he concludes, telling that it is the merit of a democratic society, the striving of a lower class army, which covers all discrepancies with an uniform, golden isonomia, enshrined in Athens'Constitution. Of course, the speech would be different if this funereal oration would have been cast on the debris of a defeat. It is victory which pushes «Democracy» ahead. And the «isonomia» is a superb thing for absorbing casualities, when the poorer, and the weaker, are the ones mobilized to overcome the social gap, in the fog of war. There is a warlike genetical code, both in modern and in ancient «Democracy». Pericles had been consistently accused, both by his contemporaries and our contemporairies, of being a consumate demagogue, notwithstanding all his qualities. Is there a thin red line between «Democracy», and Demagogy, when we know for sure that -- if that line ever existed -- it had been hopped over, immediately after Pericles'death? We have a few elements, in this time resistant oration, to answer yes. The motive for this passionate and meticulous speech was not the one of celebrating a constitution, different among their peers. The motive was to overcome the embarrassment that Fate casted on the collective of athenian citizens, especially when the survivors preferred not to speak why some just men died, and some other just men didn't, in a battle, among many battles, they happened to fight. They left the act of speaking to someone else, someone who would be able, by means of rethoric and focus on victory (a banner soldiers know it always comes spotted with defeat), of relieving them from the embarrasment of choice. Choice among memories, among reasons, among words and thoughts. That's why this monument to the «eternal Democracy» ends up with the sentence: «Nin dè 'apolophiramenoi ón prosixei exasxtoi 'apite». And now, when you have made due lament, each for his own dead, depart...