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Rise of the PHX

Ancient greeks on Memorial Day

Posted by Gregg on June 1, 2011 in Imagine if this stuff was lost in the dirt, Inspiration |

Like many Americans it is often non until the flags of memorial day catch breeze that my thoughts turn to those who have risked and given all so that I can enjoy my many freedoms and rest easy in the thought that my children will live and die under the same flag and in similar freedom. I know I am 3 days late in posting but the words which I dust off, though roughly 2400 years old, stirred me to a post. The stirring words were those of Pericles in his funeral oration, as penned by Thucydides in his The History of the Peloponnesian War. It is striking that though spoken over the dead of the Athenians, Pericles’s oration so timelessly captures the emotion and thought of any age where we sacrifice a generation to ensure the existence of those to come. So if you have a quiet moment then surrender some time to reading or listening to the words of Pericles as he exalts those that have fallen.

“…you must reflect that it was by courage, sense of duty, and a keen feeling of honor 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 valor, but they laid it at her feet as the most glorious contribution that they could offer.”

Funeral Oration of Pericles
read it: (http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pericles.htm)
hear it: (http://ia600306.us.archive.org/28/items/nonfiction002_librivox/funeralorationpericles_thucydides_mlc.mp3)
read about it on wikipedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pericles’_Funeral_Oration)