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Funeral Oration (16-20)

urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0540.tlg002.perseus-eng2:16-20
Refs {'start': {'reference': '16', 'human_reference': 'None 16'}, 'end': {'reference': '20', 'human_reference': 'None 20'}}
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So much happier in the event were these, the children, than the father; for he, though author of many benefits to all mankind, devoting his life to a laborious quest of victory and honor, did indeed chastise those who wronged others, but was unable to punish Eurystheus, who was both his enemy and his oppressor. Whereas his sons, thanks to this city, saw on the same day both their own deliverance and the punishment of their enemies.

Now in many ways it was natural to our ancestors, moved by a single resolve, to fight the battles of justice: for the very beginning of their life was just. They had not been collected, like most nations, from every quarter, and had not settled in a foreign land after driving out its people: they were born of the soil, and possessed in one and the same country their mother and their fatherland.

They were the first and the only people in that time to drive out the ruling classes[*] of their state and to establish a democracy, believing the liberty of all to be the strongest bond of agreement; by sharing with each other the hopes born of their perils they had freedom of soul in, their civic life,

and used law for honoring the good and punishing the evil. For they deemed that it was the way of wild beasts to be held subject to one another by force, but the duty of men to delimit justice by law, to convince by reason, and to serve these two in act by submitting to the sovereignty of law and the instruction of reason.

For indeed, being of noble stock and having minds as noble, the ancestors of those who lie here achieved many noble and admirable things; but ever memorable and mighty are the trophies that their descendants have everywhere left behind them owing to their valor. For they alone risked their all in defending the whole of Greece against many myriads of the barbarians.

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