When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  This is the first great address in praise of the idea of the citizen body. It is for this collection of democratic virtues, says Pericles in an audacious move, that the dead lived and died. The tombs of the dead metaphorically fade from view as the speech shifts from the particular to the general, from people to an idea.

  Only an advocate of the idea of democracy would license such a switch, which explains why the Funeral Oration fell for many an age out of favour until its ideas came back into vogue. Democracy disappeared with the demise of the classical world until it was revived in the nineteenth century. Pericles thus reads better today than he did during most of later history. We bring to his words our anachronistic desire to defend our own practice, and find it described with startling contemporary exactitude in this passage. The survival of the Funeral Oration, and the loss of most of Athenian rhetoric, is not really, as Thucydides tries to persuade us, owed to the intrinsically finer quality of what Pericles says, or the way he says it. Its longevity, and its appeal today, is owed more to the fact that Pericles sounds rather like Thomas Jefferson, who in turn sounds somewhat like us. This section therefore heralds the moment when a tradition is founded.

  To sum up: I say that Athens is the school of Hellas, and that the individual Athenian in his own person seems to have the power of adapting himself to the most varied forms of action with the utmost versatility and grace. This is no passing and idle word, but truth and fact; and the assertion is verified by the position to which these qualities have raised the state. For in the hour of trial Athens alone among her contemporaries is superior to the report of her. No enemy who comes against her is indignant at the reverses which he sustains at the hands of such a city; no subject complains that his masters are unworthy of him. And we shall assuredly not be without witnesses; there are mighty monuments of our power which will make us the wonder of this and of succeeding ages; we shall not need the praises of Homer or of any other panegyrist whose poetry may please for the moment, although his representation of the facts will not bear the light of day. For we have compelled every land and every sea to open a path for our valour, and have everywhere planted eternal memorials of our friendship and of our enmity. Such is the city for whose sake these men nobly fought and died; they could not bear the thought that she might be taken from them; and every one of us who survive should gladly toil on her behalf. I have dwelt upon the greatness of Athens because I want to show you that we are contending for a higher prize than those who enjoy none of these privileges, and to establish by manifest proof the merit of these men whom I am now commemorating. Their loftiest praise has been already spoken. For in magnifying the city I have magnified them, and men like them whose virtues made her glorious.

  Pericles now declares that the democratic spirit that carries his praise also extends glory to the city in its foreign pursuits. There is, again, a highly contemporary resonance to this passage. In recent years it has been common to argue that the provinces of domestic and foreign policy have merged. Here Pericles does exactly that, claiming that the virtues at home in Athens equip the city for its greater good abroad. Under the pressure of war, he suggests, the ethics that Athens follows at home will sustain the glory of the city.

  Pericles makes a major claim here about the superiority of democracy over rival forms of constitution. In one of the best-crafted phrases in the speech he says that only Athens is superior to the report of her. This intriguing phrase has the implication that democracies will, probably from envy, suffer unfair criticism from outside, from states that cannot believe that the advertised virtues of a democracy are real. He is also implying that democracy, by its very nature, will always be subject to critique from within, and there will be spells when the populace loses faith and is tempted by simpler solutions.

  Pericles goes on to elucidate that democratic superiority will be measured by the kindness that a democratic state shows, both to its enemies and to its own subjects. Democracies hold themselves to higher standards of ethical behaviour than autocracies, and so they should. This point is later central to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America – that some of the virtues of democracy are hidden in plain sight yet they prove their worth in the end. Pericles then dismisses the accounts of Homer as if he were swatting away disobliging reports in a hostile press. The test of democracy is time. Its superiority will become clear in the verdict in of the historians. Though there is no reason to suppose that Thucydides is speaking for himself here, it is important to bear in mind that this is his account of Pericles. It would be no great surprise if this were the moment the historian chose to turn up the volume.

  The sacrifice which they collectively made was individually repaid to them; for they received again each one for himself a praise which grows not old, and the noblest of all tombs, I speak not of that in which their remains are laid, but of that in which their glory survives, and is proclaimed always and on every fitting occasion both in word and deed. For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men. Make them your examples, and, esteeming courage to be freedom and freedom to be happiness, do not weigh too nicely the perils of war … Wherefore I do not now pity the parents of the dead who stand here; I would rather comfort them. You know that your dead have passed away amid manifold vicissitudes; and that they may be deemed fortunate who have gained their utmost honour, whether an honourable death like theirs, or an honourable sorrow like yours, and whose share of happiness has been so ordered that the term of their happiness is likewise the term of their life. I know how hard it is to make you feel this, when the good fortune of others will too often remind you of the gladness which once lightened your hearts. And sorrow is felt at the want of those blessings, not which a man never knew, but which were a part of his life before they were taken from him. Some of you are of an age at which they may hope to have other children, and they ought to bear their sorrow better; not only will the children who may hereafter be born make them forget their own lost ones, but the city will be doubly a gainer. She will not be left desolate, and she will be safer. For a man’s counsel cannot have equal weight or worth, when he alone has no children to risk in the general danger. To those of you who have passed their prime, I say: ‘Congratulate yourselves that you have been happy during the greater part of your days; remember that your life of sorrow will not last long, and be comforted by the glory of those who are gone. For the love of honour alone is ever young, and not riches, as some say, but honour is the delight of men when they are old and useless.

  ‘The whole earth is the tomb of famous men.’ Their memorial will be graven on the hearts of men rather than on stone. Pericles lays it on thick for the war dead, deploying the full scale of rhetorical flattery to disguise the fact that this is a truly brutal passage which, stripped of its eloquent veneer, more or less says: ‘Try not to worry about your dead sons because you will be dead yourself soon.’ This is the one moment in the speech when the greater glory of the city sounds a rather callous objective.

  But Pericles is trying to inspire his listeners to summon their courage. That is why he goes as far as to say that there can be no greater demonstration of moral virtue, of arete, than willing death in battle. There is more than a hint of rhetorical duplicity here. Is it actually true, in fact, that the dead lost their lives for the glory of Athens? Does Pericles have privileged access to the thoughts of the valiant men as they went to their deaths? No, this is rhetorical projection. He is conjuring glory from demise, glory for the greater good of the city.

  Speaking at a moment of crisis, Pericles is trying to head off the criticism that democracy stifles individual excellence. The usual way to do this would be to list the achievements of the war to date. It would be the first instance of a speech that will become a political staple – the ‘a lot done, a lot still to do’ speech. But Pericles has no achievements to offer to his a
udience. He therefore has to return to the higher principle for which valour has been spent, namely the love of honour. Athens was a society that held to a code of honour, and so Pericles is saying that the men of Athens who died have nevertheless graduated with honours. The supreme standard of honour was martial valour, so those whose lives had been given in the service of the city deserved the renown that Pericles is here bestowing.

  This is an awkward passage in which the gap between the requirement of a funeral oration and the political desire to heap laurels on the city opens to its widest. It is evident too how sensibilities have changed. Few would now venture to argue that not having children made someone care less about the future of the state. Indeed, when, in 2016, Andrea Leadsom implied just that of her rival for the Conservative Party leadership, Theresa May, Ms Leadsom was forced to resign from the process. It probably would not have rescued her, but she might have presented Pericles as a witness in her defence.

  I have paid the required tribute, in obedience to the law, making use of such fitting words as I had. The tribute of deeds has been paid in part; for the dead have them in deeds, and it remains only that their children should be maintained at the public charge until they are grown up: this is the solid prize with which, as with a garland, Athens crowns her sons living and dead, after a struggle like theirs. For where the rewards of virtue are greatest, there the noblest citizens are enlisted in the service of the state. And now, when you have duly lamented, everyone his own dead, you may depart.

  Although it lay in cold storage for a long time during the wilderness years between the end of the classical era and nineteenth-century Europe, the Funeral Oration has been, since then, regarded as a classic, and Pericles has turned up in many guises. He was quoted in advertisements designed to boost morale during the First World War, and after the conflict his words appeared on war memorials. At Gettysburg, Lincoln begins, as Pericles does, with a reference to the city fathers. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Congressman Major Robert Owens declared: ‘Defiant orations of Pericles must now rise out of the ashes.’

  The state that Pericles describes has little in common with the faction-ridden, highly political atmosphere of Athens, but this is a eulogy and a little exaggeration is in order. That is not to say, however, that this is really a conventional funeral oration, because Pericles is doing the opposite of posting an obituary. He is defining an ideal state for the future. He has come not so much to bury the dead as to praise a living democracy. You can hear that in the opening to this passage: ‘I have paid the required tribute’. He could hardly be more perfunctory. His enthusiasm only fires when he gets to the reason for the sacrifice. Real people died in the war, says Pericles, for the idea of the people in the abstract.

  This is a gloriously expressed cold comfort, which is echoed, in its purpose, centuries later by David Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill, all of whom make speeches seeking simultaneously to raise the morale of their audience and define the war for the higher cause of democracy. The Funeral Oration is an unusual, unexpected speech which is more a paean to politics than it is a panegyric to the war dead. The words of Pericles echo to us down the ages as we struggle to recall that this gift, the idea of democracy, is so precious an inheritance.

  DAVID LLOYD GEORGE

  The Great Pinnacle of Sacrifice

  Queen’s Hall, London

  19 September 1914

  The most famous Welshman to be born in Manchester, David Lloyd George (1863–1945) was the unrivalled rhetorical genius of the first years of twentieth-century British politics. His admirers, who were many, called him the Welsh Wizard, and he was known as the Goat to those, just as many, who did not trust him. In his years in office Lloyd George was known as the Big Beast, and from the beginning he was the self-styled Man from the Outside, a solicitor from Porthmadog in Wales with no university education. This attitude explains the sharp edges to his rhetoric and the alliances he struck up with others whom he viewed as coming from without the established fold.

  Lloyd George was a contradictory man. He was, as A. J. P. Taylor has written, the champion of the poor who fell in with the rich; the scourge of Ireland who offered it the Free State. Some part of the suspicion Lloyd George incurred was due to his oratorical gifts. The famous address in Limehouse, east London, in defence of his tax-raising budget of 1909 was seen by opponents as an effort to stir up class warfare. ‘Limehousing’ became a byword for rabble-rousing and demagoguery.

  David Lloyd George was brought up in a dissenting, Welsh-speaking household in North Wales. For the first decade of his political career as a Liberal MP, he confined himself to Welsh issues, but he later gained a reputation as a radical opponent of the Boer War. His first Cabinet post was as president of the Board of Trade, in 1905. After the Liberal landslide of 1906 – the victory, as George Dangerfield famously said, from which the Liberals never recovered – Lloyd George served as chancellor of the exchequer. During these years he introduced reforms which, in retrospect, began the process of creating a national welfare state from the scattered voluntary provision of the time. With the start of war, he became, successively, Herbert Asquith’s minister of munitions and minister of war, before the 1916 coup in which he took the top job himself. He remained prime minister until October 1922, when he and the rest of the coalition ministry were toppled by a backbench Conservative revolt, commemorated to this day in the collective name the Tory backbenchers give to themselves: the 1922 Committee.

  In the speech that follows we see Lloyd George as chancellor of the exchequer charged with making the case that, on the brink of war, national honour demands that the country stand and fight. He did it so well that he talked himself into the role he had always coveted, as prime minister. His response was in striking contrast with Asquith’s, who seemed too weak a leader to carry a nation through war. Asquith was never able to articulate the case for conscription with the poetic splendour that Lloyd George mustered in 1915 and 1916, and he never began to match the passion exhibited here.

  I have come here this afternoon to talk to my fellow countrymen about this Great War and the part we ought to take in it. I feel my task is easier after we have been listening to the greatest battle-song in the world. There is no man in this room who has always regarded the prospects of engaging in a great war with greater reluctance, with greater repugnance, than I have done throughout the whole of my political life. There is no man, either inside or outside of this room, more convinced that we could not have avoided it without national dishonour. I am fully alive to the fact that whenever a nation has been engaged in any war she has always invoked the sacred name of honour. Many a crime has been committed in its name; there are some crimes being committed now. But, all the same, national honour is a reality, and any nation that disregards it is doomed.

  Even after the stirring sound of ‘Men of Harlech’, which the audience had sung before he spoke, Lloyd George begins with a note that comes close to apology. Of all the people to make the case for war, he is in one sense the least likely. His early reputation as a politician had been forged in his opposition to the Boer War. He had only joined the war Cabinet after a great deal of anguished deliberation. When he did relent, he steered a middle way at first between those who had favoured intervention even before the demise of Belgium and those who opposed any intervention at all. He took a long time to acknowledge the threat of German aggression.

  Not that you get any sense of doubt from this speech. Lloyd George commits himself to his case with characteristic gusto, using his previous scepticism to cast himself as the radical who came in from the cold. The case really needed the advocacy that Lloyd George offers. The standard picture of August 1914, with men rushing to join up, has been amended by more recent historical scholarship. Many men entertained the same doubts as Lloyd George. Here the zealous convert launches the task of persuading the reluctant that the cause is just.

  Why is our honour as a country involved in this war? Because, in the first place, we
are bound in an honourable obligation to defend the independence, the liberty, the integrity of a small neighbour that has lived peaceably, but she could not have compelled us, because she was weak. The man who declines to discharge his debt because his creditor is too poor to enforce it is a blackguard. We entered into this treaty, a solemn treaty, a full treaty, to defend Belgium and her integrity. Our signatures are attached to the document. Our signatures do not stand alone there. This was not the only country to defend the integrity of Belgium. Russia, France, Austria, and Prussia – they are all there. Why did they not perform the obligation? It is suggested that if we quote this treaty it is purely an excuse on our part. It is our low craft and cunning, just to cloak our jealousy of a superior civilisation we are attempting to destroy.

  This is a very Welsh speech. Lloyd George took his rhetorical lessons from his uncle, a Welsh preacher, who had brought him up. Throughout his long career as a speaker, Lloyd George retained an evangelical, nonconformist air. The audience was made up of three thousand of the Welsh community in London, and Lloyd George was, at the time, in the thick of a battle to persuade Kitchener, the war secretary, to allow the creation of a specifically Welsh army corps. Repeated references to Wales assert the speaker’s credentials by associating him with the nation, and the speech is thus constructed around the appeal to the honour of a small country, of which Wales is a resonant example.