Key Arguments

• The polis’s first function was to make extraordinary, fame-winning deeds a common possibility in daily life, explaining Athens’s explosion of genius and swift decline.
• Its second function was to remedy the forgettability of action and speech by ensuring remembrance, rather than relying solely on poets like Homer.
• Pericles’s Funeral Oration expresses confidence that those who dared will ‘not remain without witness’ and will ‘need neither Homer’ for their praise.

Source Quotes

In any event, work, such as the activity of the legislator in Greek understanding, can become the content of action only on condition that further action is not desirable or possible; and action can result in an end product only on condition that its own authentic, non-tangible, and always utterly fragile meaning is destroyed. The original, prephilosophic Greek remedy for this frailty had been the foundation of the The , as it grew out of and remained rooted in the Greek pre- experience and estimate of what makes it worthwhile for men to live together ( ), namely, the “sharing of words and deeds,” had a twofold function. First, it was intended to enable men to do permanently, albeit under certain restrictions, what otherwise had been possible only as an extraordinary and infrequent enterprise for which they had to leave their households.

First, it was intended to enable men to do permanently, albeit under certain restrictions, what otherwise had been possible only as an extraordinary and infrequent enterprise for which they had to leave their households. The was supposed to multiply the occasions to win “immortal fame,” that is, to multiply the chances for everybody to distinguish himself, to show in deed and word who he was in his unique distinctness. One, if not the chief, reason for the incredible development of gift and genius in Athens, as well as for the hardly less surprising swift decline of the city-state, was precisely that from beginning to end its foremost aim was to make the extraordinary an ordinary occurrence of everyday life.

The was supposed to multiply the occasions to win “immortal fame,” that is, to multiply the chances for everybody to distinguish himself, to show in deed and word who he was in his unique distinctness. One, if not the chief, reason for the incredible development of gift and genius in Athens, as well as for the hardly less surprising swift decline of the city-state, was precisely that from beginning to end its foremost aim was to make the extraordinary an ordinary occurrence of everyday life. The second function of the , again closely connected with the hazards of action as experienced before its coming into being, was to offer a remedy for the futility of action and speech; for the chances that a deed deserving fame would not be forgotten, that it actually would become “immortal,” were not very good.

One, if not the chief, reason for the incredible development of gift and genius in Athens, as well as for the hardly less surprising swift decline of the city-state, was precisely that from beginning to end its foremost aim was to make the extraordinary an ordinary occurrence of everyday life. The second function of the , again closely connected with the hazards of action as experienced before its coming into being, was to offer a remedy for the futility of action and speech; for the chances that a deed deserving fame would not be forgotten, that it actually would become “immortal,” were not very good. Homer was not only a shining example of the poet’s political function, and therefore the “educator of all Hellas”; the very fact that so great an enterprise as the Trojan War could have been forgotten without a poet to immortalize it several hundred years later offered only too good an example of what could happen to human greatness if it had nothing but poets to rely on for its permanence.

We are not concerned here with the historical causes for the rise of the Greek city-state; what the Greeks themselves thought of it and its , they have made unmistakably clear. The —if we trust the famous words of Pericles in the Funeral Oration—gives a guaranty that those who forced every sea and land to become the scene of their daring will not remain without witness and will need neither Homer nor anyone else who knows how to turn words to praise them; without assistance from others, those who acted will be able to establish together the everlasting remembrance of their good and bad deeds, to inspire admiration in the present and in future ages. In other words, men’s life together in the form of the seemed to assure that the most futile of human activities, action and speech, and the least tangible and most ephemeral of man-made “products,” the deeds and stories which are their outcome, would become imperishable.

Key Concepts

• the “sharing of words and deeds,” had a twofold function.
• was supposed to multiply the occasions to win “immortal fame,”
• to make the extraordinary an ordinary occurrence of everyday life.
• to offer a remedy for the futility of action and speech;
• will not remain without witness and will need neither Homer nor anyone else who knows how to turn words to praise them

Context

Chapter V, 27 THE GREEK SOLUTION (lines 3768–3903); Arendt’s reconstruction of the polis as institutionalizing distinction and remembrance.