Against Meidias and Against Timarchus

Chapter 4 juxtaposes two law-court speeches from the mid-340s: Demosthenes’ Against Meidias and Aeschines’ Against Timarchus. In both speeches, Demosthenes and Aeschines are applying the city’s past to cases where the defendant in question had to be judged as a moral as well as a political actor. Chapter 4.1 offers an introduction and overview of the two speeches and trials. Chapter 4.2 shows how Demosthenes concentrates attention on an extended historical illustration involving Alcibiades to make the point that the jurors must judge Meidias on his own peculiar combination of bad and undemocratic qualities (above all his hybris); no paradigm will really do. Chapter 4.3 shows that Aeschines is similarly keen to particularize the behaviour of Timarchus, and to talk about his personal past. Like Demosthenes, he is interested in recommending himself as a trustworthy paradigm citizen; but unlike Demosthenes (in Against Meidias, anyway) Aeschines co-opts numerous aspects of the cityscape, real and imagined, to help him construct the parameters within which Timarchus should be judged. This overtly political prosecution introduces the issue of contestation of models in law-court contexts in earnest, and illustrates Aeschines’ appetite for creative envisioning of the past, developing his material in immersive and theatrical ways (e.g. via recalling a statue of Solon at Salamis). Chapter 4.4 offers a synoptic conclusion.

The Crown Trial

Chapter 6 discusses the ‘Crown trial’ of 330 BC, the other major court clash between Aeschines (prosecutor) and Demosthenes (defending his associate Ctesiphon) for which we have extant speech texts from each side. The chapter shows that part of the success of On the Crown lies in Demosthenes’ ability to find ways to capitalize on the strategic error Aeschines had made in assuming that reviving the modes of accusation used in the Embassy trial could work in a context where the direction Demosthenes helped take Athens in nearly a decade earlier still apparently commanded broad popular approval, despite the fact that it had led to Macedonian hegemony. Demosthenes builds on this in On the Crown with an optimistic strategy—in which historical material plays a crucial role—which gives his audience much better versions of their past, present, and future to believe in than those assumed by Aeschines. After an introduction and overview in Chapter 6.1, which includes an assessment of the nature of our speech texts and some contextualization of Demosthenes’ strategies within those of his political group (especially Hyperides), Chapters 6.2, 6.3, and 6.4 show Demosthenes confronting Aeschines’ historically related set pieces with a series of set pieces of his own which cover the same thematic ground and act as persuasive usurpations of the originals, seeking to upstage them. Chapter 6.5 offers a succinct conclusion.

Conclusion

The Conclusion falls into two halves. First, it briefly surveys the immediate historical context of Demosthenes’ Letters from self-imposed exile in or near Troezen, the subsequent Lamian War against the Macedonians, and Demosthenes’ death. It then concisely examines a key passage from the Second Letter as part of a brief exploration of the possibility that Demosthenes was (or became, later in life) genuinely invested in the historical models he used for strategic purposes in his speeches. The Conclusion then turns to look succinctly at the place of Demosthenes’ deployment of the past in his overall oratorical profile and subsequent legacy. A key aspect of the legacy formation is probably his nephew Demochares’ political imitation of his famous uncle. The second half of the Conclusion summarizes the content of each chapter and draws together the themes of the work as a whole, re-emphasizing the strategic possibilities and rewards—and potential pitfalls—which awaited orators in presenting the Athenian past to their audiences.

The Embassy Trial

Chapter 5 discusses the ‘Embassy trial’ of 343 BC, where we have extant speech texts by Demosthenes (On the False Embassy) and Aeschines (On the Embassy), prosecutor and defendant respectively. It shows how each orator crafts his historical material to respond at the level of technique and/or content to his opponent’s figurations of the past at the previous stage of the encounter. Chapter 5.1 offers an introduction and overview which assesses the character of the speech texts we possess and exposes problems with the conventional view of the duration of major Athenian political trials. Chapter 5.2 explores how Demosthenes’ On the False Embassy capitalizes on a climate unfavourable to the Peace made with Philip of Macedon in 346 to make the right, responsible use of the past a critical stake in the dispute, demolishing a key illustration involving Solon that Aeschines had fashioned in the trial of Timarchus and setting up a long-range comparison between Aeschines and the 360s envoy Timagoras. Chapter 5.3 shows how Demosthenes’ decision to dwell on the terms of the Timarchus trial and to adopt an uncritically broad—and predictably inclusive—approach to the past (and one geared partly towards reinventing himself as an opponent of the Peace) left him vulnerable to a deft, multiform defence strategy from Aeschines which involved careful projection of his own discernment in the use of history along with the creation of lively and overtly continuum-based scenarios of a type probably more immediately associable with Demosthenes. Chapter 5.4 offers a conclusion.

Demosthenes’ Assembly Speeches

Chapter 3 examines Demosthenes’ use of the past in his Assembly speeches (including, for example, the Philippics and Olynthiacs), spanning the period from 355/4 to 341 BC. The chapter plots Demosthenes’ increasing agility in handling the past and his increasing investment in its persuasive potential over that period, as he builds a consistent self-characterization as a farsighted, optimistic, and impeccably democratic and well-intentioned symboulos figure via frequent reference to a wide range of past models, distant and recent. Chapter 3.1 offers an introduction and overview, addressing among other things how far (and in what senses) the practical emulation of past politicians might have been possible for Demosthenes. Chapter 3.2 looks at Demosthenes’ valorization of the correct application of the correct models for each set of circumstances (e.g. for the rise of Philip of Macedon), and of himself as the best adviser because of his superior control of those models. Chapter 3.3 examines three notable techniques that Demosthenes uses to impress the endless relevance of the past on his audience and to ground his expertise and authority as its interpreter: (1) imagining possible rupture in the continuum of Athenian excellence; (2) imagining non-Athenians reflecting on the Athenian past; and (3) contrasting Athenian uniqueness with the vicissitudes of other states. Chapter 3.4 studies an outstanding deployment of the figure of the dead general Timotheus as model for Demosthenes himself in speech 8, On the Chersonese. Chapter 3.5 offers a conclusion.

Demosthenes’ Early Career

Chapter 2 begins the case studies by examining Demosthenes’ four speeches from the 350s BC: one for personal delivery (Against Leptines) and three for delivery by others (Against Androtion, Against Timocrates, and Against Aristocrates). The chapter argues that Demosthenes’ use of historical material in Against Leptines is part of a wide-ranging assault on what the orator constructs as an atrophied political consensus, whose members’ defective understanding of the Athenian past Demosthenes fashions as a cogent reason for the jurors to reject Leptines’ law. The project demonstrates that the young Demosthenes already had a sophisticated grasp of what the past could achieve when mobilized in a major public trial, and this is reflected in the other three speeches. Chapter 2.1 offers an introduction and an overview. Chapter 2.2 shows how Demosthenes deploys imagery of hypothetical takeover by tyrants or oligarchs (and the example of the Athenian tyrannicides) to expose the problems inherent in the opposition’s arguments and actions. Chapter 2.3 explores how Demosthenes’ arguments exploit the symbolic, rather than material significance of the aspects of the past under discussion. By the time of the Assembly speeches, this has become typical of his strategic conception of the world of the city’s past. Chapter 2.4 offers a conclusion.

The Orators and the Athenian Past

Chapter 1 is divided into seven sections which address different topics of guiding importance for the content and argument of the work as a whole; some can also be read as free-standing discussions of the topics they cover. Chapter 1.1 examines the mnemonic function of public statuary in classical Athens and situates it within a civic memorial landscape which helped shape how ordinary Athenians thought about their past. Chapter 1.2 looks at some ‘fictions’ in Athenian public discourse which enable orators to engage audiences when discussing the past and to create community among audience members with different experiences of that past. Chapters 1.3 and 1.4 discuss why Athenian orators make use of the past for persuasive purposes in the first place, and where and how they do so, cover the treatment of the historical example in contemporary rhetorical theory (Aristotle and the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum), and identify some patterns in the usage of Demosthenes and Aeschines to prepare the reader for the case-study chapters (2–6). Chapter 1.5 outlines key recent scholarly approaches to the topic and situates this work within the field. Chapter 1.6 sketches the historical context of Aeschines’ and Demosthenes’ careers, with particular emphasis on Athens’s responses to the growth and eventual hegemony of Macedon from the 350s onwards. Chapter 1.7 comes to some working views about how we can use the speech texts we have, looking at issues first of revision and dissemination and then of authenticity and authorship.

Introduction

The Introduction uses the example of a major trial concerning public honours for the politician Demades in the mid-330s BC—but not one from which we have any extant speeches—to outline the stakes involved in the contestation of the past by Athenian orators. The main focus here is on visible signs of memorialization of great civic figures in the form of portrait statues in the Athenian Agora, a focus carried over into Chapter 1. The argument of the whole work is also sketched. The structure of the extended Chapter 1 is explained. Emphasis is laid on the importance of context—historical, cultural, and more narrowly situational—for the interpretation of the orators’ uses of historical examples, arguments, and illustrations—a key concern of the work as a whole.