The Rhetoric of the Past in Demosthenes and Aeschines

This work examines how politicians in late classical Athens made persuasive use of the city’s past when addressing mass citizen audiences, especially in the law courts and Assembly. It focuses on Demosthenes and Aeschines—both prominent statesmen, and bitter rivals—as its case-study orators. Recent scholarly treatments of how the Athenians remembered their past tend to concentrate on collective processes; to complement these, this work looks at the rhetorical strategies devised by individual orators, examining what it meant for Demosthenes or Aeschines to present particular ‘historical’ examples (or paradigms/paradeigmata), arguments, and illustrations in particular contexts. It argues that discussing the Athenian past—and therefore a core aspect of Athenian identity itself—offered Demosthenes and Aeschines (and 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 where Athens first confronted the enterprising Philip II of Macedon and then coped with Macedonian hegemony. The work, which covers all of Demosthenes’ and Aeschines’ surviving public oratory, is constructed round a series of detailed readings of individual speeches and sets of speeches (Chapters 2 to 6), while Chapter 1 offers a series of synoptic surveys of individual topics which inform the main discussion.