Banish the Spleen - AnnaKate Burleson
There were several parts of Pericles' speech that piqued my interest. Firstly, in the explanation of how this funeral would take place, it states "and the female relatives are there to wail at the burial." This mostly stood out to me as comical for whatever reason. I'm not really sure why the mental image I got of just lines of women wailing while Pericles is trying to speak was so funny to me.
I also felt that Pericles' analysis of the audience was spot on when he observed that envy and skepticism would be the only available responses if he were to go into great detail about the dead's great feats. We still see this today when people are honored. The majority of people will seek to write off the accomplishments of others as mediocre, or simply doubt that the said accomplishments even happened at all. To me, this speaks volumes about how we as humans are so self-centered. We all have a really hard time allowing others to receive recognition, whether we are willing to admit it or not, especially if we know we couldn't do any better.
Pericles went into great detail about life in Athens that we can't really be sure is accurate or not, so I don't want to spend too much time analyzing this portion of his speech. However, I have to address this one sentence. He says, "...the elegance of our private establishments forms a daily source of pleasure and helps to banish the spleen." What does that mean?? Banish the spleen? I am leaving this speech with a lot more questions than I had going into it.
What did you all think? Did you notice the part where he urged the mothers of the dead to make more babies to forget the sons they lost? How do you feel about the amount of time he spent detailing how awesome Athens is? I'm interested to hear your thoughts on all this!
P.S. I commented on Will's and Eliza's
I also felt that Pericles' analysis of the audience was spot on when he observed that envy and skepticism would be the only available responses if he were to go into great detail about the dead's great feats. We still see this today when people are honored. The majority of people will seek to write off the accomplishments of others as mediocre, or simply doubt that the said accomplishments even happened at all. To me, this speaks volumes about how we as humans are so self-centered. We all have a really hard time allowing others to receive recognition, whether we are willing to admit it or not, especially if we know we couldn't do any better.
Pericles went into great detail about life in Athens that we can't really be sure is accurate or not, so I don't want to spend too much time analyzing this portion of his speech. However, I have to address this one sentence. He says, "...the elegance of our private establishments forms a daily source of pleasure and helps to banish the spleen." What does that mean?? Banish the spleen? I am leaving this speech with a lot more questions than I had going into it.
What did you all think? Did you notice the part where he urged the mothers of the dead to make more babies to forget the sons they lost? How do you feel about the amount of time he spent detailing how awesome Athens is? I'm interested to hear your thoughts on all this!
P.S. I commented on Will's and Eliza's
I agree, his speech is a tad bit confusing. Overall this speech is more about how amazing Athens is instead of something a ruler would say at a funeral of their dead men. Pericles also states some other pretty odd things to the women throughout the entire speech too. He tells them at one point that basically they should not be that sad and that the best kind of women is never talked about or heard from. Ah, don't you just love women's rights in the age of ancient Greece?
ReplyDeleteI think your comments on how self-centered humans are is spot on. This can be seen in the passage as you mentioned -- given how Pericles is listing off Athens over the deaths -- but also in a modern context, often in tragedy humans look to think how this impacts them over the lives of the men and woman that are the victims of said tragedy.
ReplyDeleteI love how you talk about humanity's tendency to not give credit where credit is due. People hate to honor someone other than themselves, yet people are always scrambling to be honored. Envy is definitely present. We often look at the person standing on the pedestal and want to shove them off and stand there instead. Little do we know that, as soon as we step onto that pedestal, someone else is going to push us off too.
ReplyDeleteAs to banishing the spleen, this has to do with ancient ideas of where emotions come from. Now, I haven't really done any research on this and what I'm saying is based mostly on stuff I remember from 10th grade. Basically, ancient medicine believed in four humors that needed to be balanced in order for someone to be healthy. The spleen was where you could find one of these four humors. This specific humor was called black bile and was thought to make someone melancholy, or sad and unhappy. When Pericles says that Athens' elegance and recreation banishes the spleen, he means that Athenian people are happy and not melancholic.
First off, I must say that I love the quote about the spleen. It left me perplexed and attempting to remember its significance. However strange, I was more surprised by the accuracy in which Pericles made observations that could literally be applied to today's society. People as a whole are self centered and it leads to a strong correlation of misdirected credit of other men, and more importantly, misdirected credit of good works that belongs to God. I would hope the women simply did not take his advice on children. His view of how replaceable a human may be is not something I would prefer to look further into.
ReplyDeleteThis speech definitely wasn't what I expected in a eulogy, but it was really interesting and sometimes comical. It was a really cool peek into what the Athenians thought of themselves and how they viewed the rest of the world. I think they saw their culture as one of the superior cultures of their time and thus praised their accomplishments because they're clearly the most important matter.
ReplyDelete