How Nations Honor Their Fallen: From Ancient Athens to Modern State Funerals

In the autumn of 431 BC, the entire city of Athens gathered at the Kerameikos cemetery on the western edge of the city. It was the first year of the Peloponnesian War. The bones of soldiers who had fallen fighting Sparta were carried in cypress coffins toward the burial ground. Each of the ten Attic tribes had its own coffin in the procession — and behind them all, one coffin rode empty. It was there for those whose bodies had never been found.^[1] As the crowd stood in silence, the Athenian statesman Pericles stepped forward to speak.

The oration Pericles delivered that day became a text that humanity would return to, again and again across the following 2,500 years, whenever it struggled with the question of how the fallen ought to be honored. Yet even before that speech, Athens had already spent decades building an entirely new kind of funerary institution — not individual graves, but a burial ground belonging to the entire city-state; not private grief, but public ritual. Tracing how this institution began, and how its logic persists into our own time, reveals something important: that the state’s act of honoring its war dead has never been merely a gesture of mourning. It has always been, at the same time, a political and moral declaration.

The Demosion Sema: Athens’ Public Cemetery

Kerameikos lies outside the Dipylon Gate, on the western edge of ancient Athens. The site is still being excavated today. Inside its boundaries lay the family tombs of the Athenian aristocracy and wealthy citizens — but along the road leading out from the city gate was a zone of a quite different character. This was the Demosion Sema, meaning, literally, “the public tomb.”^[2]

The Demosion Sema was a distinctive institution Athens established in the fifth century BC. Citizen soldiers who died in war were not buried privately. Their cremated remains were brought back from wherever they had fallen, transported to Athens, and interred collectively by tribe. The city paid the costs. Names were inscribed beneath tribal headings, but no father’s name, no home district. From the moment of their death, these men ceased to be individuals and became part of a collective.^[3]

This practice was grounded in what the Athenians called the patrios nomos — the “ancestral custom.” It appears to have existed at least from the early fifth century BC, and its most detailed surviving description comes from Book 2, Chapter 34 of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War.^[1] Each autumn a public funeral was held. The empty coffin for soldiers whose bodies had gone unrecovered was not an oversight or a stand-in — it was a deliberate ritual acknowledgment of absence. In its structure, it anticipates the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier by more than two millennia.

In traditional Greek society, burial was a family affair. The body was washed and dressed, the vigil was kept, the grave was dug — all by kinspeople. The Demosion Sema turned this norm on its head. The polis appropriated the role of the family. This was not simply a change in funeral practice. It was a declaration that a soldier’s death was no longer a private loss but a public event, belonging to the city as a whole.

Pericles’ Oration, or How to Turn Death into Politics

The funeral oration that Thucydides attributes to Pericles is, in its own right, a political document. Thucydides signals this himself in the preface to his history, acknowledging that it was difficult to reproduce speeches verbatim and that he aimed instead to capture “what was called for by each situation.”^[4] The oration we read, then, is less a transcript of what Pericles said than Thucydides’ reconstruction of what an ideal funeral address ought to look like.

What makes the speech remarkable is a structural choice Pericles makes — or that Thucydides imagines him making. Rather than cataloguing the courage or battlefield deeds of the fallen soldiers, Pericles turns to praise the city of Athens itself.^[5] Its democracy, its tolerance, its equality before the law, its love of beauty — these are what the dead gave their lives to defend, and it is through this logic that their deaths are elevated into something transcendent, absorbed into the glory of the polis.

The structure of this speech cast a long shadow. When Abraham Lincoln stood at Gettysburg in November 1863, he did not name the fallen or recount their valor. He spoke instead of “a new birth of freedom” and the unfinished work the living must carry forward.^[5] Both speeches perform mourning, but both are fundamentally addressed to the survivors — they assign meaning to the deaths and give those still living a reason to continue fighting. The form of the eulogy and the function of political mobilization are, in both cases, inseparable.

The Roman Way: Honor for the Living, Records for the Dead

Where ancient Greece honored the fallen through collective burial and public ceremony, Rome took a different path. The Roman system of honor was, above all, designed for the survivors.

The Roman military maintained an elaborate, tiered system of awards. At its apex was the triumphus — the triumph. A general who had defeated a foreign enemy or suppressed a major rebellion could be granted permission to lead a formal procession through the streets of Rome: riding a four-horse chariot, his face painted red, clad in a purple toga, his prisoners and plunder displayed before the crowd. This ceremony represented, in effect, the highest honor the state could bestow on a living individual.^[6]

Below the triumph was a range of military crowns (coronae). The soldier who was first to scale an enemy’s walls in a siege received the golden corona muralis, shaped like battlements. A soldier who saved the life of a fellow Roman citizen in battle received the corona civica, woven from oak leaves.^[7] These awards outlasted their recipients, becoming part of family honor, recorded in sculpture and inscriptions, preserved in the collective memory of the city’s public life.

Rome differed from Athens, however, in the systematic recovery and repatriation of the dead. As the empire expanded and its frontiers stretched across continents, it became simply impossible to transport the remains of fallen soldiers back to their home cities. The common practice was collective cremation near the battlefield, or the erection of commemorative monuments at the site.^[8] It was more typical to record “here a legion fought” than to inscribe individual names. The structure in which the deaths of ordinary soldiers disappeared into anonymity continued for a long time — until, much later, the concept of the unknown soldier finally gave those nameless deaths a form of official recognition.

The Medieval Gap: Death Without a State

When the Roman Empire adopted Christianity and then fragmented, the institutional commemoration of the war dead entered a long interregnum. Ritual mourning for soldiers was absorbed into the domain of religion. Masses for the dead, prayers aligned with the doctrine of purgatory, communal observances on saints’ days — these were not ways of honoring the fallen in the name of the state, but forms of petitioning divine mercy.^[9]

Under feudalism, the very concept of dying “for the nation” lost much of its meaning. Soldiers were not citizens of a state but subjects of a lord; wars were often not the defense of a community but private conflicts between nobles. What survived in the historical record were the deaths of knights and aristocrats. The names of common soldiers were rarely carved anywhere.

Before the modern nation-state took shape, most of those who died in large battles were buried in mass graves near the field, or left where they fell. Of the many thousands killed at Crécy in 1346 or Agincourt in 1415, only a handful of names survived. The rest dissolved into figures — numbers absorbed into the landscape of the battlefield.

The First World War and the Birth of the Unknown Soldier

Through the nineteenth century, as the nation-state system consolidated across Europe and conscription became widespread, the idea that the state owed formal recognition to those who died in its wars grew stronger. But nothing transformed that idea more radically than the First World War of 1914 to 1918.

On the Western Front alone, approximately ten million soldiers were killed. A significant number of them were obliterated by artillery, mines, and gas attacks, leaving little or nothing to identify. According to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC), hundreds of thousands of soldiers on the Western Front alone have no known grave.^[10] Confronted with deaths that had left no legible trace, nations found themselves needing a new kind of symbol.

On November 11, 1920 — the second anniversary of the Armistice — France and Britain interred their respective Unknown Warriors simultaneously. France’s was placed beneath the Arc de Triomphe in Paris; Britain’s was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey in London.^[11] The British idea had originated with David Railton, an army chaplain who had served on the Western Front. He had seen a grave marked only “An Unknown British Soldier” and understood that this anonymous death could stand for all of them.^[11]

The following year, on November 11, 1921, the United States dedicated its own Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.^[12] A single soldier was asked to choose from four identical coffins, and laid a white rose on the one to be interred. A state funeral followed, presided over by President Warren G. Harding.

There is a detail worth pausing on here. Since 1923, an eternal flame has burned continuously above the Unknown Soldier’s tomb beneath the Arc de Triomphe. And 2,300 years earlier, at the Demosion Sema in Athens, an empty coffin was carried in the funeral procession for soldiers whose bodies had never been recovered. There is no direct line of descent connecting these two rituals. Yet the human answer to the same question — how do you officially acknowledge a death that left no body? — took strikingly similar forms across the centuries.

Modern Military Funeral Rites: A Language of Honor, Not of Goods

Today, across much of the world, military funerals are conducted according to protocols that set them apart from civilian burial. These rituals can appear to be mere formalities, but tracing each one back to its origins reveals centuries of accumulated meaning.

The twenty-one-gun salute traces to a sixteenth-century naval custom. When a warship entered port, it would fire its cannons until its powder was exhausted — signaling that it was now defenseless, posing no threat. This “declaration of harmlessness” was eventually formalized as the highest expression of respect.^[13] The tradition of draping a coffin in a national flag dates to the Napoleonic Wars (1796–1815). On the battlefield, flags were used to cover the fallen so that the dead could be identified and distinguished from the enemy — a practical measure that hardened into ceremony.^[13]

In the United States, “Taps” — the bugle call played at the close of military funerals — has its origins in the Civil War. In 1862, a brigade commander revised the existing lights-out call into the melody that became the army’s most elegiac sound. It was formally adopted as a component of military funerals in 1891.^[13]

Britain’s Cenotaph, standing on Whitehall in London, is a memorial to all those killed in war. The word cenotaph comes from the Greek for “empty tomb.” First erected in timber for the victory parade of 1919, it was rebuilt in permanent stone in 1920. Each year on Remembrance Sunday in November, the monarch and representatives of allied nations gather to lay wreaths.^[14]

South Korea’s Hyeonchungil (현충일, Memorial Day) is this tradition’s East Asian expression. Designated a national public holiday in April 1956, it was formally inaugurated on June 6 of that year with the first official ceremony at the National Cemetery in Seoul (now Seoul National Cemetery).^[15] June 6 honors primarily those who died in the Korean War, but also recognizes those who gave their lives during the independence movement against Japanese colonial rule. Each year, at 10 a.m., a siren sounds across the country and the nation pauses.

A Ritual That Never Pauses

Few examples illustrate the depth of this commitment more starkly than the sentinels at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. Since April 6, 1948, soldiers from the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment — known as “The Old Guard” — have stood watch at the Tomb without a single interruption: through blizzards, through Hurricane Isabel in 2003, and through every holiday including Christmas and New Year’s Day.^[16] The sentinel paces exactly twenty-one steps across the mat, turns, and waits twenty-one seconds before retracing the walk — a number chosen to echo the twenty-one-gun salute. Each year on the Thursday before Memorial Day, the regiment carries out “Flags In”: soldiers place a small American flag before every one of the roughly 260,000 headstones in the cemetery, a task that takes several hours and is completed before dawn. For many Americans, this quiet, pre-dawn labor — never broadcast live, rarely photographed — is the most honest expression of what the country understands by honoring the fallen: not spectacle, but continuity.

Conclusion

When Pericles finished his speech at the Kerameikos that autumn in 431 BC, the crowd did not applaud. Thucydides writes that they “dispersed quietly.”^[5] There are moments when silence becomes a more profound form of mourning than any eloquence could be.

In the 2,500 years since, states have developed their languages of commemoration into something remarkably intricate. Athens’ public funeral transformed death into a civic event. Rome’s system of honors preserved acts of courage as permanent public record. The Unknown Soldier tradition that emerged from the First World War gave official existence to deaths that had left no name. The twenty-one-gun salute, the folded flag, the eternal flame — each of these is a kind of symbolic vocabulary through which states attempt to acknowledge what cannot be repaid in any material form.

None of this language arrived complete. Every time the nature of war changed, every time the shape of the state changed, every time the boundaries of who counted as “us” were redrawn, the language of commemoration was revised. If there is one constant across all of it, it may be this: the human impulse to give death a name, and to draw that death inside the shared memory of a community. Where that impulse comes from, we still do not entirely know.