The Rhetoric of the Past in Demosthenes and Aeschines: Oratory, History, and Politics in Classical Athens

by Guy Westwood

Overview

In democratic Athens, mass citizen audiences - whether in the lawcourts, or in the political Assembly and Council, or when gathered for formal civic occasions - frequently heard politicians and litigants discussing the city's past, and manipulating it for persuasive ends. The Rhetoric of the Past in Demosthenes and Aeschines explores how these dynamics worked in practice, taking two prominent mid-fourth-century politicians (and bitter adversaries) as focal points. While most recent scholarly treatments of how the Athenians recalled their past concentrate on collective processes, this work looks instead at the rhetorical strategies devised by individual orators, examining what it meant for Demosthenes or Aeschines to present particular 'historical' examples, arguments, and illustrations in particular contexts. It argues that discussing the Athenian past - and therefore discussing a core aspect of Athenian identity itself - offered Demosthenes and Aeschines, among others, an effective and versatile means both of building and highlighting their own credibility, authority, and commitment to the democracy and its values, and of competing with their rivals, whose own versions and handling of the past they could challenge and undermine as a symbolic attack on those rivals' wider competence. Recourse to versions of the past also offered orators a way of reflecting on a troubled contemporary geopolitical landscape in which Athens first confronted the enterprising Philip II of Macedon and then coped with Macedonian hegemony. The work covers the full range of Demosthenes' and Aeschines' surviving public speeches, and the extended opening chapter includes synoptic surveys of key individual topics which feed into the main discussion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780192599124
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	04/09/2020
Series:	Oxford Classical Monographs
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	400
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Guy Westwood is a Departmental Lecturer in Greek Literature at the University of Oxford, and Lecturer in Classics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. He was previously a Departmental Lecturer in Classical Literature at St Hugh's College, Oxford; prior to that he held a Teaching Fellowship in Greek History and Language at the University of Birmingham and the Leventis Research Fellowship in Ancient Greek at Merton College, Oxford.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
List of Editions, Translations, and Abbreviations
0. Introduction: Polyeuctus Imagines a Statue
1. The Orators and the Athenian Past
1.1. The Past in the Physical City
1.2. Fictions
1.3. Why the Past?
1.4. Using the Past
1.5. Approaches
1.6. An Outline of the Historical Context
1.7. Texts
1.7.1. Revision and Dissemination
1.7.2. Authenticity and Authorship
2. Demosthenes' Early Career: Against Leptines and Other Speeches
2.1. Introduction and Overview
2.2. Democracy in Danger?
2.3. Symbolic History
2.4. Conclusion
3. Demosthenes' Assembly Speeches
3.1. Introduction and Overview
3.2. Applying the Past
3.2.1. The Past, Rightly Applied
3.2.2. Applying the Right Past
3.3. Three Key Techniques
3.3.1. The Continuum in Peril?
3.3.2. Athens by Others
3.3.3. The Uniqueness of Athens
3.4. Modelling Demosthenes
3.5. Conclusion
4. Against Meidias and Against Timarchus
4.1. Introduction and Overview
4.2. Demosthenes: Against Meidias
4.2.1. Demosthenes' Approach
4.2.2. Meidias and Alcibiades
4.2.3. Summary
4.3. Aeschines: Against Timarchus
4.3.1. Aeschines' Parallel Athens
4.3.2. Casting, Ethos, and Anticipation
4.4. Conclusion
5. The Embassy Trial
5.1. Introduction, Overview, and Text
5.2. Demosthenes and the Prosecution
5.2.1. Aeschines and Solon
5.2.2. Aeschines as Envoy: the Timagoras Parallel
5.3. Aeschines and the Defence
5.3.1. Confronting Demosthenes
5.3.2. Aeschines at Pella (2.25-33 and 113-18)
5.3.3. Aeschines' Fifth Century (2.172-7)
5.4. Conclusion
6. The Crown Trial
6.1. Introduction, Overview, and Text
6.2. Darkest Hours, Finest Hours: Aeschines, Solon, Demosthenes
6.3. Aeschines Transfigured: the Epilogos of Against Ctesiphon and the Climax of On the Crown
6.4. Aeschines' Monuments and Demosthenes' Epilogos
6.5. Conclusion
7. Conclusion: Athens Transfigured
Endmatter.
Bibliography
Index Locorum
General Index

Editorial Reviews

"The book is well researched and extremely learned, as shown not only by the comprehensiveness of the analysis of Aeschinean and Demosthenic speeches and their broader context(s), but also by the rich bibliography and the impressive number of passages examined, both in the main body of the work and in the accurate and detailed footnotes. The prose is elegant and refined (sometimes to a fault), with very few typos." — LINDA ROCCHI, The Classical Review

"This book offers a fresh and thorough reading of how Athenian history was used in fourth-century Attic oratory, revealing the creative way in which it was exploited as an element of persuasion ... scholars of all fields interested in rhetoric, history and politics will certainly benefit from the wealth of Westwood's observations and his thorough analysis." — Konstantinos Apostolakis, Journal of Indo-European Studies

"Westwood's monograph (based on a 2013 D.Phil Thesis) is a welcome and important addition to the increasingly rich bibliography on the theme of the use of history and exemplarity in the Attic Orators... The specialist tone of the book means that, perhaps, it will represent a precious tool for the experienced scholar rather than for the student approaching the subject for the first time... the reader is left with a far more comprehensive portrait of how fourth-century Athenians looked at their past more generally. Westwood's monograph will represent a fundamental tool for anyone approaching the theory and practice of paradeigmata in Athenian political oratory." — Antonio Iacoviello, University of Edinburgh, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

From the Publisher