The "Funeral Oration" was recorded by Thucydides in book two of his famous "History of the Peloponnesian War". Although Thucydides records the speech in the first person as if it were a word for word record of what Pericles said, there can be little doubt that he edited the speech at the very least. Thucydides says early in his "History" that the speeches presented are not verbatim records, but are intended to represent the main ideas of what was said and what was, according to Thucydides, "called for in the situation". We can be reasonably sure that Pericles delivered a speech at the end of the first year of the war, but there is no consensus as to what degree Thucydides's record resembles Pericles's actual speech. Another confusing factor is that Pericles is known to have delivered another funeral oration in during the Samian War. It is possible that elements of both speeches are represented in Thucydides's version. Nevertheless, Thucydides was extremely meticulous in his documentation, and records the varied certainty of his sources each time. Significantly he begins recounting the speech by saying: "", i.e. "Pericles, son of Xanthippos, spoke "like" this". Had he quoted the speech verbatim, he would have written "" ("this", or "these words") instead of "" ("like this" or "words like these"). The authorship of the "Funeral Oration" is also not certain. Plato, in his "Menexenus", ascribes authorship to Pericles's companion, Aspasia.