The leader mounts the podium. Countless men have died for the great cause, and he memorializes them with a speech for the ages while rallying a mourning nation to carry on the fight.
But is it 431 B.C. in Athens, Greece, or 1863 A.D. in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania? Is the conflict over slavery or the leadership of Greece?
The speeches — Pericles’s Funeral Oration and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address — share the same structure. They use the same emotional appeals and exhort listeners to the same resolution.
Although historians have found no solid evidence that Lincoln deliberately copied Pericles’s Funeral Oration, as presented by Thucydides1, Lincoln was classically (self) educated and very familiar with the genre of ancient Greek speeches. He undoubtedly read Thucydides’s popular history or one of the glosses of his era.
Consciously or unconsciously, Lincoln, — like Marcus Aurelius before him — built on the ruins of the past, spliced in his time’s milieu, and created a work for the ages.
But Why?
Lincoln could have spouted dry statistics about the North’s growing industrial might, manpower reserves, and the logistical networks that would doom the Confederacy. He had plenty of facts to draw on.
But these arguments would have turned to ash in his mouth. The pile of corpses whose blood had soaked the ground under his podium had to be acknowledged, but also spun. You do not bring statistics to a story fight, and if ever the United States needed a new story, this was it.
Lincoln was a savvy politician and knew this. And if he was to weave a story, he’d be a fool to ignore the best examples the past had to offer.
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address Recipe:
Ingredients:
Two parts Pericles
One part Declaration of Independence & Enlightenment Philosophy
One part King James Bible
Directions: Radically pair down and condense all ingredients until not a word is wasted and the resonant remains wash over listeners like a tide.
The Play-by-Play
Let’s examine how Lincoln took the pieces of Pericles’s speech and modified them to fit the moment.
Praise The Ancestors & Their Project
Lincoln and Pericles connect the ongoing struggle and its horrible costs with the “great cause” of their ancestors.
Pericles: “I make the ancestors my opening theme, since it is right, it is appropriate here, to pay them memory’s tribute. They, who dwelt nowhere but here, passed this land down to us, generation by generation, kept free by their valor.”
Lincoln: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Lincoln skips the Constitution, which had clauses supporting slavery, and reaches back further to the idealistic Declaration of Independence: dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
He frames the struggle as living up to the noble ideals of the founders rather than the flawed governing document they produced.
Praise Democracy:
Much of Lincoln’s address is indirectly about democracy, but Pericles’s oration has a paean to it as well. The governments created in Athens and the United States were both revolutionary — direct democracy in one, and representative republic in the other.
Pericles: It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while there exists equal justice to all and alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized; and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty an obstacle, but a man may benefit his country whatever the obscurity of his condition.
Acta Non Verba: Deeds, Not Words
Pericles and Lincoln discount talk and lionize action, praising those who ponied up and fought for what was most important. Deeds are self-memorializing and transcendent. Words are but shadows and dust.
Pericles: But I should have preferred that, when men's deeds have been brave, they should be honored in deed only…Then the reputation of many would not have been imperiled on the eloquence or want of eloquence of one…
…For by offering their lives in common they each individually received that renown which never grows old, and for a sepulchre, not so much that in which their bones have been deposited, but that noblest of shrines wherein their glory is laid up to be eternally remembered upon every occasion on which deed or story shall call for its commemoration. For heroes have the whole earth for their tomb; and in lands far from their own, where the column with its epitaph declares it, there is enshrined in every breast a record unwritten with no tablet to preserve it, except that of the heart.
Lincoln: But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
Immortality & Legacy
Humans hunger for legacy, and Pericles and Lincoln imply that the dead have found a sort of transcendent imortality beyond death through their sacrifice. They’ve left behind something with staying power.
Pericles: In a joint offering of their bodies [the men] won their several rewards of ageless praise… their glory is laid up imperishable, recallable at any need for remembrance or example…Strive then, with these, convinced that happiness lies in freedom.
Lincoln: …these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
The Dead Must Not Die in Vain
If the survivors do not carry the struggle to victory, the dead will have died in vain. The speeches shift from “they” to “us,” connecting the fallen and the survivors who must carry on the fight:
Pericles: Such was the city these men fought for, rather than lose to others; and shall we, their survivors, not take up the labor?
Lincoln: It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain…
The Power Of Condensing
Pericles’s funeral oration is 2,810 words. The Gettysburg Address is a tight 268. Lincoln’s ability to adopt all the important pieces of Pericles’s oration while decreasing the word count by 165% speaks to his mastery of the form.
Part of this is accomplished by throwing out whole sections. But even the remaining core is dramatically less wordy.
How is this done? I wrote about the simple formula that decreases wordiness by 10% or more here.
In Menexenus, Plato tells us that Pericles’s Funeral Oration was written by Pericles’s talented lover Aspasia, who also carried out a fruitful intellectual discourse with Socrates. Thucydides probably adapted the speech rather than reporting it verbatim, so we might consider him the actual author of the text we have.