<P> Ioannis Kakridis and Arnold Gomme were two scholars who debated the originality of Pericles' oratory and last speech . Kakridis believes that Thucydides altered Pericles words . Some of his strongest arguments included in the Introduction of the speech, (Thuc. 11.35). Kakridis proposes that it is impossible to imagine Pericles deviating away from the expected funeral orator addressing the mourning audience of 430 after the Peloponnesian war . The two groups addressed were the ones who were prepared to believe him when he praised the dead, and the ones who did not . Gomme rejects Kakridis position, defending the fact that "Nobody of men has ever been so conscious of envy and its workings as the Greeks, and that the Greeks and Thucydides in particular had a passion for covering all ground in their generalizations, not always relevantly .". </P> <P> Kagan states that Pericles adopted "an elevated mode of speech, free from the vulgar and knavish tricks of mob - orators" and, according to Diodorus Siculus, he "excelled all his fellow citizens in skill of oratory". According to Plutarch, he avoided using gimmicks in his speeches, unlike the passionate Demosthenes, and always spoke in a calm and tranquil manner . The biographer points out, however, that the poet Ion reported that Pericles' speaking style was "a presumptuous and somewhat arrogant manner of address, and that into his haughtiness there entered a good deal of disdain and contempt for others". </P> <P> Gorgias, in Plato's homonymous dialogue, uses Pericles as an example of powerful oratory . In Menexenus, however, Socrates (through Plato) casts aspersions on Pericles' rhetorical fame, claiming ironically that, since Pericles was educated by Aspasia, a trainer of many orators, he would be superior in rhetoric to someone educated by Antiphon . He also attributes authorship of the Funeral Oration to Aspasia and attacks his contemporaries' veneration of Pericles . </P> <P> Sir Richard C. Jebb concludes that "unique as an Athenian statesman, Pericles must have been in two respects unique also as an Athenian orator; first, because he occupied such a position of personal ascendancy as no man before or after him attained; secondly, because his thoughts and his moral force won him such renown for eloquence as no one else ever got from Athenians". </P>

Conflict that brought the end of athenian greatness