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Ancient and modern

Who could persuade you to fight for Britain today?

10 May 2025

9:00 AM

10 May 2025

9:00 AM

This week we celebrated VE Day. When Pericles remembered the dead from the war against Sparta in his famous Funeral Speech of 431 bc, he was not celebrating victory – the war would end in 404 bc with Athens’s surrender – but doing something quite new: he was reflecting on what Athens stood for and why it was worth dying for.

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