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Pericles has one arm out and his helmet pushed back off his forehead. Thucydides admits in his own history that 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 they were carried out on ten cypress coffins, one for each tribe, with 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 whose first year he was burying ran 27 years. It ended with Athens beaten and the fleet gone. The long walls came down to the sound of flute girls, and the victors called that the first day of the freedom of Greece. Philipp Foltz painted the scene in 1852. What travelled afterwards was a photograph of it, printed in grey, and that grey print is the version almost everyone has seen since. Pericles stands on a stone platform with one arm out and the helmet pushed back off his forehead. Below him the crowd is not all listening: some argue, and one has his eyes shut.