The Orators and their Treatment of the Recent Past: Introduction

The late Peter Rhodes had read a previous draft of my introduction. I heartily thank G. Martin, B. Cook, N. Crick, N. Siron, J. Roisman and the anonymous readers for their comments. For possible omissions or mistakes I am solely responsible.

The Athenian orators emphasized the importance of time (χρόνος) in their speeches.1 However, it was not possible for all men to make an objective assessment of it appropriately. Gorgias explains this in his Encomium of Helen by saying that if all men in all matters had both memory of the past and awareness of the present, speech would not be equally deceptive; but now neither remembering a past event nor investigating a present one nor prophesying a future one is easy (εἰ μὲν γὰρ πάντες περὶ πάντων εἶχον τῶν <τε> παροιχομένων μνήμην τῶν τε παρόντων <ἔννοιαν> … οὐκ ἂν ὁμοίως ὅμοιος ὢν ὁ λόγος ἠ<πά>τα· νῦν δὲ οὔτε μνησθῆναι τὸ παροιχόμενον οὔτε σκέψασθαι τὸ παρὸν οὔτε μαντεύσασθαι τὸ μέλλον εὐπόρως ἔχει) (11.3 (ed. Schollmeyer).2 This means that perfect knowledge of every subject is not easy, for one has to possess knowledge of the past, understanding of the present and foreknowledge of the future. If this happened, then speech would not be as powerful.3 Thus, human incapacities make the capacities of logos even stronger, since it becomes a way of fabricating things out of the flux of past and present appearances, capable of regulating collective practices in the name of a desired good. Therefore, logos became a powerful means in political life through which men acquired opinions which granted them solace from the past, security for the present, and hope for the future.4 About the past in particular, men gave in to logos because they do not remember it.5

Enquiry into the past and how this fitted to the present was not easy too. Reading the rhetorical corpus, we realize that there seems to be a trichotomy in the way the orators treated the past. There is:

(a) Τhe distant past. In this ‘category’ the speakers say that none of the listeners can remember old events but they know them through hearing. The Athenian envoys at Sparta say just before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War that the best source of information for the very distant past is the stories that men hear (τὰ μὲν πάνυ παλαιὰ … ἀκοαὶ) and not the listeners’ autopsy (Thuc. 1.73).6 In 415 B.C., when Alcibiades’ opponents claimed that both the affair of the Mysteries and the mutilation of the Herms had been done in order to subvert the people, and that neither of these things had been done without his connivance, alleging as evidence all of his other undemocratic habits (Thuc. 6.28.2), the people took everything suspiciously because they knew from what they heard (ἀκοῇ) how oppressive the tyranny of Peisistratus and his sons had been in its later stages, and, further, that it was not because of themselves and Harmodius that it had come to an end, but because of the Spartans (Thuc. 6.53.3). The people’s opinion derived from oral tradition.7 In 325/24 B.C. the speaker of Dem. 26 refers to Miltiades and Pericles and how the Athenians had punished them, calling these stories as περὶ τῶν παλαιῶν and mentioning as his sources ‘some men’ who φασιν (26.6–7), obviously what they have heard.8

(b) Τhe middling past, about which an orator can say ‘the older ones will remember and they can tell the younger’. In 355/54 B.C. Demosthenes remembers in his speech Against Leptines how some brave Corinthians helped the Athenians, following their defeat against the Spartans near the Nemea river in 394, forty years earlier, and says that he is describing these events, relying on what he has heard from the older men among them (παρ’ ὑμῶν τῶν πρεσβυτέρων αὐτὸς ἀκήκοα) (20.52).9 In 343 B.C. Demosthenes said about the Phocians, whose towns had been demolished at the end of the Third Sacred War (356–346 B.C.), that they had once voted against the Thebans when they made a proposal for our enslavement, I hear from you all [ὑμῶν ἔγωγ’ ἀκούω πάντων] (19.65). Demosthenes is alluding to an event that took place in 404, sixty-one years earlier.10 In 330 B.C. Lycurgus says that there is none among the elders or the younger who does not remember or has not heard respectively that Callistratus was condemned to death by the city (μέμνηται τῶν πρεσβυτέρων … τῶν νεωτέρων οὐκ ἀκήκοε) (1.93). This man was executed in 361 B.C., thirty one years earlier than Lycurgus’ speech, at a time when the youngest of the jurors would have been infants or too young to remember this event themselves.11

And (c) the recent past, about which a speaker say that ‘we/you all know’. In 386 B.C. Plato’s Socrates says in his funeral speech in the Menexenus, supposedly delivered for those who had died in the Corinthian War, that he should not prolong the story of this war, because it is not a tale of ancient history about men of long ago (οὐ γὰρ πάλαι οὐδὲ παλαιῶν ἀνθρώπων γεγονότα λέγοιμ’ ἂν τὰ μετὰ ταῦτα· αὐτοὶ γὰρ ἴσμεν) (244d1–3).12 In 330 B.C., in his speech On the Crown, Demosthenes referred to his involvement in the war against Philip before Chaeronea and called these events νέα καὶ γνώριμα πᾶσι (Dem. 18.85), since they took place eleven years earlier.13

This temporal distinction is artificial. Even though the orators usually acknowledge the division of the past into a mythical and historical period and distinguish between examples from the distant and the recent past, this distinction is never clear-cut, and the border between myth and history is rather fluid.14 This happens because arguments related to the past constitute a part of the arsenal of each orator. In fact, a speaker could lump the distant, middling and recent past together. We can see this by reading the funeral speeches of Lysias, Demosthenes and Plato, Isocrates’ pamphlets, who used the mythological past in order to enlighten his students about the recent past,15 and Lycurgus’ speech Against Leocrates.16

Nevertheless, the treatment of the three rhetorical periods of the past is not of equal weight in the orators. The distant past and myths loom large in the funeral speeches and in Isocrates’ oeuvre, but they are rarely referred to in symbouleutic and forensic speeches. In the latter the orators show a marked predilection for recent events, because they were considered more familiar, more relevant to the present and provided stronger proofs about the importance of an argument.17 For instance, Aeschines explicitly privileges recent historical time above mythical time by providing evidence not from ancient myths but from events of their own time (οὐκ ἐν τοῖς ἀρχαίοις μύθοις, ἀλλ’ ἐφ’ ἡμῶν γεγενημένα) (2.31).18

Taking into consideration the Greeks’ difficulty of conceiving the past, the orators’ trichotomy of time and their predilection for the recent past, this volume focuses on it and investigates the following issues: a) the time span of the recent past; b) the ability of the orators to interpret the recent past according to their interests; c) the inability of the Athenians to make an objective assessment of persons and events of the recent past; d) the unwillingness of the citizens to hear the truth, make self-criticism and take responsibility for bad results; and e) the superiority of the historical sources over the orators regarding the reliability of their historical precision. On the basis of these issues, in what follows: a) I try to explain the methodology that the contributors follow in approaching the recent past in the orators; b) I pinpoint the historical events and persons the orators are referring to in the speeches under investigation and c) I make a short presentation of the arguments of each chapter.

First, what needs further clarification is the time span that we could define as recent. Nouhaud distinguishes current events from historical ones19 and believes that it took twenty years for an event to pass from current politics to the realm of history; a time limit of thirty one years is excessive, because it would give a false impression of reality.20 He does this after a short discussion of the appeal to “what the older ones will remember” in the speech Against Leptines; so this twenty-year distinction is perhaps prompted by Demosthenes’ remarks. I agree with him. We saw above that Lycurgus mentioned the execution of Callistratus, not a recent event for the younger jurors,...