A short Platonic dialogue framing a funeral oration for Athens' war dead, which Socrates claims to be reciting from memory as taught by Aspasia.
The Menexenus is one of Plato's shortest and strangest dialogues: a brief conversation between Socrates and the young Menexenus about who will be chosen to deliver the customary public funeral oration for Athenians killed in war, followed by Socrates reciting, almost in full, a funeral speech he says he learned from his teacher Aspasia of Miletus, Pericles' companion. Socrates opens by mocking the genre itself, describing how such orations flatter both the dead and the living audience into feeling nobler than they are, and how their spell can last for days. He nonetheless delivers Aspasia's speech, which follows the standard structure of an Athenian public funeral oration: praise of the land and ancestry of Athens, praise of her constitution (described here as an aristocracy with the people's approval, not a democracy in the ordinary sense), and a survey of Athenian military history from the Persian Wars through the recent Corinthian War, praising those who died in each conflict.
The speech culminates in an imagined address from the dead themselves to their surviving children and parents, urging the children to live up to their fathers' reputations rather than merely trade on them, and urging the parents to bear their grief with restraint rather than despair, since a life that ends nobly deserves honor rather than mourning. The dialogue closes with a brief return to Socrates and Menexenus, in which Menexenus marvels that a woman, Aspasia, could compose such a speech, and Socrates promises to report more of her political speeches if Menexenus keeps his secret.
The work matters chiefly as a puzzle: it is either an earnest, if minor, entry in the funeral-oration genre (comparable to the one Thucydides gives Pericles), or a pointed parody of that genre's clichés, delivered with such technical skill that ancient readers debated its purpose for centuries. Its attribution of Pericles' own rhetorical training to a woman, and its claim that this famous type of civic speech was itself second-hand and rehearsed, gives it a satirical edge that sits uneasily alongside its genuinely moving passages on grief and legacy.
“Even a poor man gets a beautiful, splendid funeral for it, and even a worthless one gets praised”
— Menexenus · read this chapter →
“it isn't even hard to improvise something like this”
— Menexenus · read this chapter →
“For a constitution is the nourishment of human beings”
— Menexenus · read this chapter →
“our natural equality of birth compels us to seek equality under the law”
— Menexenus · read this chapter →
“The old saying, nothing too much, has long seemed well said; and in truth it is well said.”
— Menexenus · read this chapter →
It is a dialogue in which Socrates recites a funeral oration for Athenian war dead that he claims to have learned from Aspasia, Pericles' companion. The speech praises Athens' land, constitution, and military history, then imagines the dead addressing their families about grief and legacy.
Scholars have long disagreed; Socrates' opening remarks mock how funeral orations flatter their audience into feeling nobler than they are, yet the speech he then delivers follows the genre's conventions closely and contains genuinely moving passages on consolation.
Aspasia of Miletus is Socrates' claimed teacher in rhetoric, credited with training Pericles himself; Socrates says the funeral speech he recites is hers, and Menexenus is amazed that a woman composed it.
The speech argues Athens has always in truth been an aristocracy exercised with the approval of the majority, whatever name people give it, ruled by whoever is judged wise or good rather than by birth or wealth.
The imagined dead ask their children to live up to, not merely trade on, their fathers' reputations, and ask their parents to bear the loss with restraint rather than mourning, since dying well deserves honor rather than lamentation.
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