One of the great works of world literature is Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, the comprehensive account, compiled in the moment, of the twenty-seven-year “civil war” between Athens and Sparta.

The intellectual centerpiece of this work is Pericles’ Funeral Oration. Have you read it? In many ways, it’s our own⎯yours and mine⎯Magna Carta. It’s the first great statement of the ideals to which we aspire.

Pericles was the foremost figure of the Athenian Golden Age. During the second year of the war with Sparta, he was selected to give the speech at a yearly event like our Memorial Day in praise of those men of Athens who had given their lives in the military defense of the city. Everyone⎯women and children, and even slaves, as well as men—turned out for this occasion. 

Pericles took the moment to praise not just the fallen heroes of Athens, but Athens herself, the city and all her citizens. 

He contrasted the people of Athens, whose polity was free and open to the world, to their antagonists of Sparta who, great as they were and admirable as they may have been in many ways, lived by a code of exclusion, in a society closed off to the outside world and built around intensive and relentless discipline, where the individual male (and female as well, in her own way) was as much a soldier in an army as a citizen of a state.

Here’s how Pericles described the free citizens of his city:

I declare that Athens is the school of Greece. Moreover, I declare that each and every one of our citizens, in all the manifold aspects of his life, can be truly called the rightful lord of his own person and to act in this way, moreover, with unsurpassed quality and grace.

The rightful lord of his own person. 

That idea, and that phrase, had never before in history been uttered, or even thought. Not in Egypt or Persia or Babylonia or Sumeria or Assyria, or among the wild tribes or the seafaring conquerors or the great horse warriors of the steppes.

The rightful lord of his own person.

That’s what you and I need to become. Beyond whatever gift or talent we may bring to the world, our job is to school ourselves and train ourselves so that no force, other than our own genius and our own ethical sense of community and responsibility to heaven, governs our thoughts, our actions, or our works.