Plato's Menexenus and Athenian ideology ca. 479-380 B.C.

Athenian funeral oratory of the fourth century preserves what were in the fifth century competing oral traditions about the city's past that would have been promoted by different politicians, including Cimon and Pericles. Herodotus and Thucydides give evidence as to the content of the distinct traditions. Sometime between 430 and 392, all the claims were unified. In the Menexenus, Plato exhorts Athens' literate aristocracy to transform the unified tradition into a considered ideology.