The Funeral Oration of Pericles

      Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighboring states; we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves. Its administration favors the many instead of the few; this is why it is called democracy. If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differents; if to social standing, advancement in publiclife falls to reputation for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way; if a man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition. The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary lift. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbor for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injunous looks which can not fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty. But all this case in our private relations does not make us lawless as citizens. Against this year is our chief safeguard, teaching us to obey the magistrates and the laws, particularly such as regards the protection of the injured, whether they are actually on the statute book, or belong to that code which, although unwritten, yet can not be broken without acknowledged disgrace.

      Further, we provide plenty of means for the mind to refresh itself from business. We celebrate games and sacrifices all year round, and the elegance of our private establishments forms a daily source of pleasure and helps to banish the spleen, while the magnitude of our city draws the produce of the world into our harbor, so that to the Athenian the fruits of other countries are as familiar a luxury as those of his own.

      if we turn to our military policy, there also differ from our antagonists. We throw open our city to the world, and neve by alien acts exclude of any enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality; trusting less in system and policy than to the native spirit of our citizens; while in education, where our rivals from their very cradles by a painful discipline seek after manliness, at Athens we live exactly as we please, and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate danger. In proof of this it may be noticed that the Lacedaemonians do not invade our country alone, but bring with them all their confederates; whiles we Athenians advance unsupported into the territory of a neighbor, and fighting upon a foreign soil usually into vanquish with ease men who are defending their homes. Our united force was never yet encountered by any enemy, because we have at once to attend to our marine and to dispatch our citizens by land upon a hundred different services; so that, wherever they engage with some such fraction of our strength, a success against a detachment is magnified into a victory over the nation, and adefeat into a reverse suffered at the hands of the entire people. And yet if with habits not of labor but of ease, and courage not of art but of nature, we are still willing to encounter danger, we have the double advantage of escaping the experience of hardships in anticipation and of facing them in the hour of need as fearlessly as those who are never free from them.