Problem
A central idea of a text is a main point that an author makes about a topic. A central idea answers the question What is it all about? Central ideas can be directly stated, or explicit, in the text. In other cases, the central idea may be implicit, which means it is suggested but not directly stated. Authors develop central ideas by using support, such as facts, definitions, concrete details, and quotations. Readers can analyze a text's central ideas by looking at the support an author includes and how that support works together to develop one or more important ideas.
Consider this passage from the funeral oration:
"If we turn to our military policy, there also we differ from our antagonists. We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality; trusting less in system and policy than to the native spirit of our citizens; while in education, where our rivals from their very cradles by a painful discipline seek after manliness, at Athens we live exactly as we please, and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate danger. In proof of this it may be noticed that the Lacedaemonians do not invade our country alone, but bring with them all their confederates; while we Athenians advance unsupported into the territory of a neighbor, and fighting upon a foreign soil usually vanquish with ease men who are defending their homes. Our united force was never yet encountered by any enemy, because we have at once to attend to our marine and to dispatch our citizens by land upon a hundred different services; so that, wherever they engage with some such fraction of our strength, a success against a detachment is magnified into a victory over the nation, and a defeat into a reverse suffered at the hands of our entire people."
a) What is the central idea of this passage?
b) Which rhetorical appeal does Pericles use to express the central idea in this passage? Cite words or phrases from the text that indicate the rhetorical appeal he is using.