Chapter 1 Summary

At this time in American and European history, ancient Greece was in style. Keats, Shelley, Byron and other writers were working with Greek themes in their plays and poems. There was a Greek revival movement in architecture. Edward Everett, holding a chair in Greek studies at Harvard University, was very much in keeping with this fashion. He was famous as a teacher, having taught people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, and famous as a speaker, being called the new "Pericles" of his time because his speeches imitated the oratory of ancient Greece. Just like Pericles and other ancients, Everett often spoke at the dedication of war memorials and war cemeteries.

Ancient Greece had ideals for speakers. The speech should be short, balanced, and almost musical. For funerals it should not be about an individual's sorrow and grief, but a general "lament." In this way...