Turning Kairos Into Ethos

            In his own post, Jared connected his desire for others to acknowledge their inadequacy in eulogizing his deceased father to Pericles' similar admission.  In this post I will show how that rhetorical move brought ethos into the latter's speech.

            Question:  What do mourners at a funeral want?  To be comforted, certainly.  To honor those who have died, without question.  But I think there is an even deeper part of them that wants to be understood.  Grieving is very personal experience.  In many ways it separates a person from the rest of humanity.  Others try to sympathized, but they often simply don't understand what the survivors are feeling.  That creates isolation.  A eulogist can't do much to give the listeners a sense of catharsis while they feel emotionally separate from him.

            Pericles understood the importance of being close to his audience in order to influence them.  He erased the division between himself and the grievers by highlighting something he knew many of them were feeling deep down:  the idea that even his best efforts at paying tribute to the dead were going to be inadequate.  That insight into the confines of their souls naturally incurred trust, which is the core of what makes ethos effective.  Building on that feeling, he emphasized many of the things all the citizens of Athens had in common to eliminate the separation even further.

            Some of the other blog posts have hypothesized about Pericles' motivation for giving the speech.  I think it is impossible for us to know for sure what his goal was.  Solace for the mourners, unity for Athens, and capturing the attention of a wide variety of people are all valid theories, but he could have just simply been doing his job.  Maybe he wanted to prove to others he was a good orator, or maybe he just enjoyed the way eloquent rhetoric flowed off of his tongue.  Regardless of the specifics, he captured the mourners' spirit and used his comprehension of their feelings to influence them in a powerful way.  May we do the same, but with the purpose of raising those around us to a higher plane of living rather than for our own interests.

"The Parthenon," no changes made, by Doug, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/legalcode