Episode 5 in the Speeches of the Peloponnesian War series.

The war had begun. Sparta had burned the Attic countryside. Thousands of Athenians had abandoned their farms and crowded inside the city walls at Pericles' instruction. The anger toward him was real, raw, and barely contained.

That winter, Athens buried its dead. And by tradition, a man chosen by the city stepped forward to speak over the open graves.

Athens chose Pericles.

What followed was not a conventional eulogy. It was one of the most extraordinary pieces of political oratory ever delivered, and 2,500 years later, it still is.

Pericles did not dwell on grief. He did not catalogue victories. Instead he described Athens — not as a set of laws or institutions, but as a philosophy made into a state. A democracy where merit, not birth, deter ...