What might a contemporary American audience make of their president on Memorial Day complimenting the people on their cultivation of “refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy”—with an added up-from-the-bootstraps flourish that “wealth, we employ more for use than for show, and place the real disgrace of poverty not in owning to the fact but in declining the struggle against it”?

And would they be further aghast if our Commander-in-Chief turned to foreign affairs in the same self-assured vein: “We have forced every sea and land to be the highway of our daring, and everywhere, whether for evil or for good, have left imperishable monuments behind us”? Would such a president be judged unhinged—either homophobic in applying stereotyped constructs of masculinity, or cold and uncaring in demanding responsibility from the impoverished? Or perhaps triumphalist in assessing military achievement abroad on a material scale rather than an ethical one?

Or would a modern Pericles be hailed for his honesty in touching upon universal human truths that erudition without physicality can soften us, that we are responsible for our own wealth or poverty, and that America should be proud on its confident role abroad?

In truth, it would be hard to imagine an oration more disturbing to the modern American elite’s sensibilities than Pericles’ majestic funeral oration delivered in the winter of 431/30 B.C. at the end of the first campaigning season of the Peloponnesian War—a masterful summary some 2,500 years old of what once made imperial democratic