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Thucydides Funeral Oration In The Peloponnesian War

496 Words2 Pages

Patterson’s argument that our modern definition of freedom and its three chords: sovereignal, civic, and personal; is clearly seen in Thucydides’ “funeral oration” in the work History of the Peloponnesian War.
The first of the Patterson’s chords is sovereignal or sovereignty, the ability for a group of people to govern themselves. Thucydides communicates this idea in the following manner, “and a keen feeling of honour in action that men were enabled to win all this, and that no personal failure in an enterprise could make them consent to deprive their country of their valour,”(Thucydides, 3). Sovereignty here is gain through sacrifice. Sacrifice of multitudes Athenians afforded sovereignty to the people of the city state, and this sacrifice is honor with recognition as valor. Without this altruism it is implied that those outside forces that Athens defended against would proceed to sack the city and installing their own rule. The valor lead to politically stable time as the government was able to maintain control over the people they claim to be, Athenians. With the ability to govern …show more content…

In this instance, Thucydides supports the idea that his society is a democracy, “Our public men have, besides politics, their private affairs to attend to, and our ordinary citizens, though occupied with the pursuits of industry, are still fair judges of public matters;”(Thucydides, 2). Whether a common man or a noble elite the Athenians valued the input of all the citizens or “public men” in the making of their constitutions. In an uncompromising fashion democracy appears to be the civic of the free in the case of Peterson’s argument. Civics is the operations in which a democracy functions, with the Athenians it is evidently freedom. The freedoms do not end in the political spectrum they are also crucial in the peoples’ personal

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