«La speranza di avere altri figli»: bios e democrazia nel logos epitaphios di Pericle

This paper examines the consolatio ad parentes closing the logos epitaphios, where Pericles proposes to overcome the mourning that struck some fathers in the first year of Peloponnesian war, first of all by inviting them to beget other sons. This should allow those fathers to overcome the potential aporia between acting in the strictly individual interest and acting in the interest of the greatness of the polis, cancelling private grief through the procreation of other sons and with the honour guaranteed by public memory: in this way the necessary equilibrium between democratic participation, condition of shared risk and adequacy of the deliberative process would be restored. In the consolatio itself the tangled synergy between logos and erga substantiating the deliberative process is seen at play, from the debate to the enforcement of the decisions taken. From this point of view, the complex network of references between the consolatio, the funeral speech and the whole Thucydidean narrative offers an axiology of Periclean democracy in which the 'biological' dimension is subsumed into the political one and individual interests are subordinate to the interest of the polis, with which the citizen is invited to establish a relationship of reciprocal eros.