Funeral Oration (26-28)

Such were the aims with which these men accepted labor upon labor, and with the dangers of the passing hour dispelled the terrors which the whole future held for citizens and Greeks, sacrificing their lives that others might live well.

To them we owe it that fathers have grown famous, and mothers looked up to in the city, that sisters, through the benefit of law, have made, and will make, marriages worthy of them, that children too will find a passport to the people’s hearts in these men’s valor; these men who, far from dying—death is no word to use where lives are lost, as theirs were, for a noble cause—have passed from this existence to an eternal state.

For if the fact of death, to others a most grievous ill, has brought to them great benefits, are we not wrong indeed to count them wretched or to conclude that they have left the realm of life? Should we not rather say they have been born anew, a nobler birth than the first? Mere children then, they had no understanding, but now they have been born as valiant men.