How does the funeral oration relate to democracy in ancient Greece? How did the death of an individual citizen-soldier become an occasion to praise the city of Athens? In The Invention of Athens, Nicole Loraux traces the different rhetoric, politics, and ideology of funeral orations from Thucidydes, Gorgias, Lysias, and Demosthenes to Plato.

This new edition of The Invention of Athens includes Loraux’s significant revisions undertaken in 1993 to render this groundbreaking work accessible to nonspecialists. Loraux’s introduction to this revised volume, as well as important revisions to the existent 1986 English translation, make this publication an important addition to scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences.