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In his funeral oration, Pericles described Athens as the "school of Hellas." What did he mean?

To many in Pericles’ time, Athens was the center of the universe, not in a literal astronomical sense, but in their perception of Athens as being the finest of Greece’s centers of learning and culture. “Hellas” simply means “Greece,” and is used by Pericles and others as reference to a greater Greece, or the sum of its parts. Pericles, a prominent Greek general and orator, played a major role in Thucydides’ The History of the...

To many in Pericles’ time, Athens was the center of the universe, not in a literal astronomical sense, but in their perception of Athens as being the finest of Greece’s centers of learning and culture. “Hellas” simply means “Greece,” and is used by Pericles and others as reference to a greater Greece, or the sum of its parts. Pericles, a prominent Greek general and orator, played a major role in Thucydides’ The History of the Peloponnesian Wars, the main source of information on that period, and the author and historian’s admiration for Pericles is clear. Writing about the “Lacedaemonian (i.e., Spartan) ultimatum” issued to Athens, Thucydides notes that this ultimatum precipitated a spirited debate among Athenian generals and diplomats, including, in his words, “the most powerful man of his time, and the leading Athenian statesman,” Pericles. Pericles, in short, was totally dedicated and committed to Greece, and to Athens in particular. Further emphasizing his respect for the esteemed general, Thucydides goes on to refer to Pericles as “the first man of his time at Athens, ablest alike in counsel and in action.”


In offering his now-famous funerary oration, Pericles once again, and for the ages, expressed his love for Athens and his enduring belief that this one city was, intellectually and culturally, the center of the universe. In the following passage from his speech, he calls Athens “the school of Hellas”:



 “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.”



This was, remember, a funeral oration intended to commemorate the Athenian soldiers who fell in the early phases of the Peloponnesian Wars. Pericles associated those soldiers killed in battle with the greatness that was Athens itself. His oration commemorates Athens as much or more as it memorializes those who died in its defense. This dedicated general and statesman revered the idea of Athens, and he viewed, as did most Athenians, his city as the finest of Greece and the model to which the rest of Greece should aspire. That was his purpose in referring to Athens as “the school of Hellas.” Athens could teach the rest of Greece about culture, erudition, bravery, and, now, sacrifice.

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