Two widely publicised speeches were given this week at the World Economic Forum at Davos, one by Canada’s PM Mark Carney, the other by US President Donald Trump. The former was given a standing ovation, and his polished, measured speech was hailed as an oration that stood comparison with that of the fifth-century BC Athenian statesman Pericles. Trump’s less sophisticated ruminations were similarly commended by Republican strategist Steve Bannon: ‘If you’re a nationalist, it’s the greatest speech since Pericles at Athens.’

Few will be deeply familiar with the Funeral Speech delivered by Pericles in 430 BC, as reported by his contemporary Thucydides (the citation of that historian early in Carney’s speech may have prompted the comparison). Although Carney appeared to ascribe to Thucydides himself the aphorism, ‘The strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must’, a sentiment he went on to contest, he will have known that the historian himself was not endorsing the ringing phrase. It is put into the mouth of a speaker in the so-called Melian Dialogue, an exchange of views that preceded the Athenians’ harsh decision to destroy the rebellious island of Melos.

Pericles’ speech was delivered after the first year of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC) waged by Athens against Sparta and her allies. It was, and is recognised as, a masterpiece of political oratory given by a statesman admired for his eloquence. Pericles was addressing families who had lost fathers, sons, and brothers in the first year of a conflict that was to lead to Athens’ comprehensive defeat. Pericles does not deliver a conventional oration that recounts martial glory and ancestral achievements, nor does he offer any assurance that Athenians will prevail. Instead, he focuses on the glories of the city itself and on the way of life for which those who fell in battle paid the price.

With this aim in mind, Pericles praises Athens’ democratic ethos: ‘Our laws provide equal justice to everyone in private disputes. If a man can serve the city, he is not impeded by want of wealth or status.’ The city’s openness to foreigners is commended, as well as its festivals and public life, and its cultivation of ‘beauty without extravagance, and of wisdom without softness.’ Athens is described as ‘the education of Hellas’ – a proud exemplar of freedom, versatility, and civic excellence. ‘We throw open our city to the world. We never exclude foreigners by law from opportunities to observe or learn from us, even though enemy eyes may occasionally profit from our liberality.’ He sums up Athenian exceptionalism: ‘Athens alone of her contemporaries is found when examined to be greater than her reputation. She alone gives no occasion to her enemies to feel shame when they are defeated, or to her subjects to question her right to rule.’

Near the end of the speech Pericles declares: ‘We shall not need the praises of Homer or of any other eulogist, whose poetry may give momentary pleasure though their representation of the facts does not bear scrutiny.’ Pericles chooses not to quote the poets but offers his own image: ‘We have compelled every land and sea to become the highway of our daring; and everywhere, for good or ill, we have left imperishable monuments behind.’ The city should be looked on, he says, with a lover’s passion – an image perhaps prompted by his eloquent partner Aspasia. Pericles offers no comfort or promise of better days ahead, names no external villain to blame for their suffering (the Spartans are barely mentioned), and gives no rationale for the war. Instead, he lays out what Athens has become and has chosen to be, and why his audience should proudly and unflinchingly bear that cost.

Unlike Pericles, Mark Carney opened and closed his speech with a quotation. He summarised Václav Havel’s tale of the greengrocer who places a Communist slogan in his window, not because he believes it but to avoid trouble. Because every shopkeeper does the same, the system persists through complicity in a shared fiction. Carney goes on to suggest that middle-ranking powers have long been participating in rituals they know to be false, paying lip service to the ‘rules-based order’ while acknowledging subservience to US hegemony. His audience was evidently gratified to hear someone from their own ranks describe the situation with such apparent frankness.

Rhetorically, however, the speech rests on borrowed foundations. After prefacing his argument with another writer’s words and conceptual apparatus, Carney states, ‘The power of the less powerful begins with honesty,’ and later declares, ‘Let me be direct’. These sentiments lead to prescriptions notable for their diplomatic woolliness rather than rhetorical force. Trump goes unnamed, as do the malign actions of Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China. Phrases such as ‘variable geometry’, ‘calibrated relationships’, and closer cooperation with ‘like-minded’ nations sound like academic policy documents that describe strategies rather than inspire commitment. What phrases of Carney’s will be quoted next year, let alone in twenty-four centuries?

Pericles’ refusal to quote Homer was itself a rhetorical declaration that his speech should stand on his own words. The striking images Pericles offers – the city as a beloved object, the monuments of Athens’ daring, the empire that has forced itself on land and sea – emerge from his vision of Athens, not from poetic tradition. The Funeral Oration is itself eminently quotable for its directness and its imagery. Pericles offers no policy prescriptions and proposes no alliances; he moves through a series of concrete images and antitheses – from particular laws to general character, from past deeds to present demands. When he reaches his final exhortation to the bereaved, the ground has been prepared. The speech is an organic unity, with its authority generated from the speaker’s strength of vision. Rather than hinting at uncomfortable truths that an audience knows already, Pericles demands that his listeners be worthy of what they have inherited.

Political figures today will cite studies, quote philosophers, and invoke expertise to add gravitas to their arguments. But rhetoric built on a scaffolding of quotation suggests a loss of confidence in the speaker’s own voice. If one compares these speeches to those of the past – and one may think of Winston Churchill and Barack Obama as well as the ancients – a lack of rhetorical ambition and execution is evident. A performance that is merely smooth and assured is not the same as one that generates its own authority and deploys carefully wrought language to move an audience. Political commentators who invoke Pericles to praise a contemporary oration should reread the Funeral Oration with care, since the comparison reveals more about their diminished expectations of political oratory than about any genuine kinship between ancient and modern rhetoric.