War & Peace Quote by Edward Everett

A law about funerals doesn’t sound like a political weapon until you notice what Everett is really doing with Athens: he’s building a moral architecture for the state. By pointing to public, “most honorable” burial rites for fallen citizens, he frames sacrifice not as private grief but as civic capital - something the republic must publicly recognize, pay for, and ritualize. The detail about “appointed by law” matters. This isn’t charity or sentiment; it’s obligation. The polis writes gratitude into statute.

Everett, a nineteenth-century American statesman steeped in classical education, uses Athens as a legitimizing mirror for a young nation anxious about its own democratic seriousness. The subtext is a gentle but pointed prescription: a republic can’t ask for bodies in wartime and then treat death like a family’s problem. Public expenditure becomes a kind of proof-of-membership. If you can be summoned to die for the city, the city must claim you in death.

There’s also an implicit hierarchy being smuggled in under the banner of honor. “Citizens who fell in battle” draws a boundary around whose lives count as politically meaningful. In Everett’s America, that boundary was contested - by class, by race, by who was permitted full civic standing. Invoking Athens lets him speak the language of equality while leaving those exclusions conveniently offstage.

Rhetorically, the sentence is ceremonially restrained, almost bureaucratic, and that’s the point: solemnity comes from the state acting with calm inevitability, as if honor itself were part of the budget.