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Pericles with the helmet pushed back and one arm out. Thucydides admits he wrote the words the occasion required.

The custom was fixed. At the end of a year of fighting, the bones of the Athenian dead were laid out for three days in a tent so families could bring offerings, then carried out on ten cypress coffins, one for each tribe, plus an empty bier for the missing. Anyone could join the procession. They were buried in the public cemetery outside the Dipylon gate, and then a man chosen by the city spoke. In the winter of 431 BC, after the first season of the war against Sparta, the man chosen was Pericles. The speech we have is Thucydides', who says openly in his own history that he wrote what the occasion required rather than a transcript. It is still the founding statement of what a democracy thinks it is. Our constitution is called a democracy, Pericles says, because power rests with the whole people and not a minority; poverty is no bar to public service; we do not get angry at a neighbor for doing as he likes. Then the harder line, the one that gives the passage its edge: we regard the man who takes no part in public affairs not as harmless but as useless. To the widows he offered exactly one sentence, that a woman's greatest glory is to be least talked about among men, which is also a fair record of what that democracy was. The timing turned the speech into something its author never intended. Within months plague arrived in the crowded city, killed perhaps a third of the population, and took Pericles himself in 429. The war he was burying the first year of ran 27, ended with Athenian defeat, the fleet gone, and the long walls pulled down to the sound of flute girls while the victors called it the first day of the freedom of Greece. Philipp Foltz painted the scene in the middle of the nineteenth century for a Munich patron building a hall of world history, and the reproduction that carried it around the world was this one, in photographic grey. Pericles stands on a stone platform with one arm out, the helmet pushed back off his forehead, and the crowd below him is doing what audiences do: some rapt, some arguing, one man asleep against the step.