Dinarchus, Hyperides and Lycurgus. Series editor M. Gagarin

This is vol. 5 in the Texas series of translations of the Greek orators. W(orthington’s) Din(archus) is a lightly adapted version of the translation in his 1992 Historical Commentary on Dinarchus; C(ooper’s) Hyp(erides) and H(arris’) Lyc(urgus) are new.

Eight of the ten speeches in this volume concern Athens’ response to the challenge of Macedonian domination of Greece during the period 338-323. Three relate to the aftermath of Philip’s victory at Chaironeia in 338: Hyp. 2, Against Philippides, about disputes over the honouring of Macedonians following the battle; Hyp. 4, For Euxenippos, about the allocation of land in Oropos awarded Athens by Philip; Lyc. 1, Against Leocrates, prosecuting an Athenian for abandoning the city after the battle. All three of Din. (1, Against Demosthenes, 2, Against Aristogeiton, and 3, Against Philocles) and Hyp. 5 (Against Demosthenes), were written for the prosecution in 323 of those accused of receiving bribes from Alexander’s rebel treasurer, Harpalus. Hyp. 6, the funeral oration for the dead in the first, successful, year of the Athenian-led rebellion against Macedon that followed Alexander’s death, delivered in 322, is in effect the swan song of Athenian independence. The remaining two speeches of Hyp. fall more within the private sphere: Hyp. 1 defends Lycophron on a charge of adultery; Hyp. 3 prosecutes Athenogenes, who had allegedly duped Hyp.’s client, Epicrates, into taking off his hands a perfume shop and associated slaves without revealing the extent of their indebtedness.

The aim of the Texas series is clear and commendable: “to make available primarily for those who do not read Greek up-to-date, accurate and readable translations with introductions and explanatory notes of all the surviving works and major fragments of the Attic orators of the classical period”. This volume meets this aim in that the translations are more accurate than inaccurate; the Hyp. and Lyc. are very and the Din. tolerably readable; and the introductions and explanatory notes are mostly helpful and pitched at what I should imagine is about the right level. H.’s Lyc. is to my mind the best and contributes in a way the others do not, given the lack of a substantial up-to-date commentary on Lyc.

Within the terms of the declared aims, however, I also have reservations: the translations are not infrequently and the notes occasionally misleading; and the treatment of those speeches that survive only in small fragments is inconsistent and unsatisfactory. Fragments are especially important in the case of authors, such as these three, of whom only a small proportion of their output survives. Unaccountably, they are omitted altogether from W.’s Din., even though they amount to half (79 of 151 pages in Conomis’ Teubner edition) of that orator’s surviving output; they are included in C.’s Hyp., but with insufficient context; only H. handles them satisfactorily, supplying not only Lyc.’s words, but also, where relevant, the context in which they are embedded in the relevant later author. This is crucial if fragments are not to be misleading. I have a further reservation with the aims of the series, which is that there seems to be a rather large amount of translation work underway in relation to the orators, with a number of “orators in English” series currently in production by several publishers. Greekless students do not, one suspects, want a choice of 6 different (but indifferent) contemporary translations; they want one good one. Moreover, it is at least arguable that those employed at the university level should be encouraged to occupy what little time many of them have available for research doing original scholarship. There is plenty to do. All but a small handful of the 60+ works in the Demosthenic corpus, for example, are without (and in many cases have never had) substantial up-to-date commentaries, a state of affairs which is a hindrance to research in this period.¹ I do not know what profession was pursued by J. O. Burtt, M. A., Formerly Postmaster of Merton College, Oxford, but aside from the (admittedly not unimportant) fact that the notes are more up-to-date and the linguistic usages more contemporary, I am not sure that, overall, the new Texas version is an improvement on his workmanlike 1954 Loeb translation of these three orators.²

I append more detailed comments on the individual authors; with Hyp. I have also cast a glance at Whitehead, since his substantial and very welcome new commentary (with translation) on Hyp. 1-5 (OUP, 2000), is likely to be a standard reference work for more advanced students.

Series Introduction – Gagarin

Gagarin’s Series Introduction, reproduced in all the volumes, is generally helpful, though he is sometimes tempted, largely I think by the need for conciseness, into overly definite statements. The issue of the authenticity of speeches, though not at first sight arising in very acute form in the current volume (but see below on Din.), is an important one in relation, for example, to Lysias and Demosthenes. One question is the extent to which there may have been shared authorship between orator and litigant, a theory championed in the case of Lysias by Dover. Gagarin baldly states in a footnote (n. 12) that Dover’s “theory of shared authorship … is unconvincing (see Usher 1976³)”. Usher certainly raised serious arguments, but it is questionable whether these amounted to a demonstration that clients never contributed to the speeches they were to deliver.⁴ The explicit contemporary evidence which he cites is in fact rather slight. Plato, for example, may have recognised and admired a distinctive Lysianic style; but it does not follow that every speech into which Lysias had an input was wholly a product of his independent genius. The theory of some degree of joint authorship (whether on the basis of an outline supplied by the logographer, or e.g. of the client submitting a draft to the professional for criticism, or simply communicating points that he wished him to incorporate) has considerable intrinsic plausibility. An orator’s clients were, for the most part, educated men from the higher socio-economic strata (and “education” included, of course, a significant rhetorical element) who could be expected to have a view on the presentation of their own case; very often a great deal was at stake, and it is not uncommon for a speaker of a speech purportedly written by a logographer to venture comment or express an opinion in propria persona. Also, of course, the theory supplies a possible explanation for variation in style and “quality” of speeches. I suspect that this is a subject where, consciously or unconsciously, specialists in the orators have been unduly influenced by modern practice in relation to the independence of the advocate from his or her client. In the Athenian system it was the litigant who spoke in court, and it was, in the end, entirely his decision what he said. In the modern system, the presentation of a client’s case in court is normally entirely in the hands of the advocate. In cases where the logographer did not deliver his own speech, his role in the Athenian system was subordinate to that of his client in a way that does not apply today. The matter may not be demonstrable with certainty either way, but some version of the joint-authorship theory deserves more serious consideration than, to my knowledge, it has so far received in the case of the Demosthenic corpus. This includes at least some of the speeches attributed by Trevett to Apollodoros and others, i.e. the majority, where the speaker is from a wealthy/well-educated background and where there is a strong “client’s voice”, such as Androkles’ in Dem. 35.⁵ It should also perhaps be considered for all three speeches of Din. for the prosecution in the Harpalus affair. Whether they were delivered by Himeraios, Menesaichmos or someone else, the speakers were probably active politicians speaking in a trial of high significance in Athenian domestic politics. It is questionable whether, dummy-fashion, they simply enunciated words put into their mouth by the non-Athenian Din.. This, of course, has implications for how well we can know Din.’s work from the extant speeches and emphasises again the importance of paying close attention to the fragments.

Dinarchus – Worthington

Translation

W.’s translation more often than not reproduces the sense of the Greek reasonably well and his prose is generally fairly clear. There is an obvious slip at 1.19, where W., deceived by the Greek double negative, has the Thebans telling the Arcadians that “they had not revolted from a desire to break their friendship with the Greeks, nor did they not want to do anything in opposition to Greece.” Burtt’s “nor did they intend to do anything to the detriment of Greece” was better. This is not the only point where W.’s English is not quite right: 1.46, where “matters” are “(un)trustworthy”, and 1.55, where the Areopagos “considers … crimes committed within itself” (a plural formulation, like the Greek, παρ’ αὐτοῖς, would have been more idiomatic) are fairly typical of frequent slight clumsinesses. At 1.9 the Areopagos “guards the sacred deposits on which the safety of the city lies”; but “sacred” is ἱερ and is too weak for ἀπορρήτους θήκας, which are “unspeakable”, “not to be spoken of”. θήκας are usually things in which other things are placed, e.g. chests, cases or tombs. W. puzzled over exactly what these were in his longer commentary (where, like Burtt, he suggested oracles) and offers no explanation here. Greater sensitivity to the Greek might have given him a lead, for ἀπόρρητα belong in the same thought-world as the Semnai (W.’s “awful goddesses”), closely associated with the Areopagos and referred to several times in the speech. The abode of the Semnai was a chasm just below the top of the Areopagos hill (see R. Wallace, The Areopagos Council [London, 1989], 218), into which tomb-like place ( θήκας) they sank after losing their case against Orestes (Eur. El. 1270-72; Aeschl. Eum. 805, 838, 1007 etc.). The genos responsible for the cult of the Semnai were actually named for silence (Hesychidai).

More seriously misleading perhaps in the context of the speeches is W.’s tendency to translate in a way that concedes an undue prominence to Demosthenes. In the very first sentence of 1 the jury is told that “your popular leader [i.e. Demosthenes] ( δημαγωγός) has pronounced a sentence of death on himself”. To someone with no Greek, this will probably have the connotation “your leader who is popular” in the sense of well-liked, as well as that Demosthenes was the popular leader. Neither the positive connotation, nor the political primacy of Demosthenes is implicit in the Greek. A similar distortion arises from W.’s tendency to render words with a polis root in terms of “administration” (e.g. 1.70, 1.95). Thus, at 1.95, Dem. is “unworthy of citizenship … by his administration”, which, to an American readership, will probably suggest tenure of office comparable to the US presidency; τοῖς πεπολιτευμένοις lacks this connotation of high executive office (Burtt’s “political record” was better).⁶ At any one time, there were a number of Athenian “demagogues” (little more than “politicians”). The literary record, to an overwhelming extent consisting of, or derivative from, the works of Demosthenes, preserved primarily because of his status as archetypal orator, gives an exaggerated impression of his contemporary influence. The epigraphical evidence, almost certainly much truer in this regard, indicates that two men were in a different class from all others in terms of political influence in the 30s and 20s and neither of them was Demosthenes. They were Lycurgus and Demades. ⁷

Notes

W.’s notes will generally be helpful at the level at which the translation is aimed. His introduction clearly summarises the complicated Harpalus affair. His ring composition theory makes an appearance on p. 5, but is not unduly obtrusive. There is a worrying factual error at n. 39, where W. tells his readers that proxenoi were “appointed by another state to look after their ambassadors and important visitors when in Athens”, whereas proxenoi were, in principle, foreigners appointed by Athens to look after Athenian interests in their home state (Cooper is closer to the truth at p. 123, n. 25). A key function of explanatory notes in a work of this sort is to inform the reader about what is known about the dramatis personae from other sources. Here W.’s performance is mixed. Dem. himself is allowed to emerge (in a slightly distorted manner, as noted above) largely from W.’s translation, albeit supplemented by helpful notes (though W. is occasionally somewhat naive about our ability to detect a “truth” in Dem.’s favour behind the rhetorical allegations and counter-allegations). W. peremptorily rejects the identification of the Philocles of Din. 3 with the attested ephebic kosmetes of that name (53), where a more balanced view is needed (cf. Davies, Athenian Propertied Families, pp. 539-41). It would have been nice to know who Himeraios and Menesaichmos, the possible speakers of these speeches, were. “Puppet king” is not the most apt description of Demetrios of Phaleron (p. 3).⁸

I have already criticised above the omission of all fragments of Din. Amongst other things, as the only one of the canonical 10 Attic orators who continued to work after 321, the fragments are precious as potential evidence for early Hellenistic Athenian oratory.

Hyperides – Cooper

Translation

C.’s translation of Hyp. flows more easily than W.’s of Din., in consequence partly of the clarity and simplicity of Hyp.’s style in Greek, but also of the good quality of C.’s English. Nevertheless, my random checks against the text revealed some flaws. In C.’s version it was alleged against Hyp.’s client Euxenippos (Hyp. 4.19) that “he did something terrible, when he allowed Olympias to dedicate the cup to the statue of Health”. This translates, δεινὰ γὰρ ἐποίησεν περὶ τὴν φιάλην, ἐάσας Ὀλυμπιάδα ἀναθεῖναι εἰς τὸ ἄγαλμα τῆς Ὑγιείας; but one did not make dedications to statues. The divine recipient of a dedication would normally be expressed by a simple dative (witness a large proportion of the thousands of surviving inscribed Attic dedications). ἀναθεῖναι εἰς τὸ ἄγαλμα τῆς Ὑγιείας means “dedicate at the statue of Health.” The mistake is so glaring that one is surprised to find it also in Whitehead’s “because of the dreadful things he did over the bowl — allowing Olympias to dedicate it to the statue of Health”, until one discovers that the root of the problem appears to be Burtt’s Loeb (“he committed a serious crime in regard to the cup which he allowed Olympias to dedicate to the statue of Health”) …. This may seem a detail, but by such details can Greekless students easily be misled into fundamental misunderstandings — in this case of Greek religious attitudes. Quite often, however, Whitehead’s translation is superior to both Burtt and Cooper. Here, his “dreadful” is a good attempt to capture (at any rate for an English English readership) Hyp.’s ironic tone, and his word order (“… over the bowl … to dedicate it”) is closer to Hyp.’s (though I wonder if “bowl” is quite right for φιάλην ? Burtt’s “cup”, while not literally correct, can, for us, have high symbolic content, but a “bowl” is nearly always mundane). Similarly, at 4.22, where Hyp. is stressing that everyone knows about who the real friends of the Macedonians are, καὶ τὰ παιδία ἐκ τῶν διδασκαλείων, and where C.’s “even the little school children” follows Burtt’s “even the schoolchildren” (though I do not understand why he has inserted “little”), Whitehead picks up a nuance missed by Burtt and C., where the Greek deftly suggests an image of children chattering as they come out of school (“even the children coming out of the schools”).

Very occasionally a weakness in C.’s translation obscures the meaning (Hyp. 3.11, “he had in his possession … business of mine”); and sometimes his choice of words imparts a quality of religio-moral connotation absent from the Greek (e.g. “evil” for πονηρόν at Hyp. 3.35, where both Burtt’s “vicious” and W.’s “wicked” get closer) or in other ways is not quite right (as where Athens is said to dispense “equality” in place of “injustice” at Hyp. 6.5. Athens did not consider itself a Leveller State in the way this implies; the juxtaposition with “injustice” requires “fairness”, as Burtt saw).

Both C. and Whitehead again implicitly overrate the contemporary significance of Dem., e.g. at 5.12, where τῶν ὅλων πραγμάτων ἐπιστάτην is rendered “you, who are in charge of our political affairs” (C.) or “the presiding genius of policy as a whole” (Whitehead), neither of which convey satisfactorily the semi-ironic tone or that the words relate to Dem.’s handling of Harpalus and specifically to his decree about guarding him, mentioned at the beginning of the same section (“in charge of the whole business” would render the sense better), and not to “policy as a whole”, of which Demosthenes could not plausibly have been alleged to be “in charge” at this or any other stage of his career (his influence was strong in the lead-up to Chaironeia, but there is a world of difference between strong influence, and “being in charge of policy as a whole”, which no Athenian politician ever was in the 4th century democracy).

Notes

C.’s introduction is generally lucid and his notes are good; slightly fuller and more ambitious perhaps than W.’s, but not, I think, at the expense of clarity. He makes occasional good use of transliterated Greek words, which he explains in the notes. I liked e.g. p. 95, n. 25 explaining a play with the word logos; 104, n. 4 on the term rhetor; 131 n. 1 on sophrosyne in Hyp. 6. Only occasionally did I think a note needed was not provided. Again C. does not tell us enough about what is known from outside the speeches about the protagonists, e.g. in 4 in relation to Euxenippos (there is important epigraphical evidence to link with his “allowing” — and what this might mean needs explaining — Olympias to dedicate to Health, see IOrop no. 347 and Whitehead, 154) and his opponent, Polyeuktos. I should like to have seen a note on the important reference to a claque sitting together in the Assembly at Hyp. 2.2, where there are questions about the extent to which this can be read as evidence for an anti-Macedonian political grouping. Curiously, I also found no comment in Whitehead’s note on this passage (his comments here, rich in literary and rhetorical parallels, are perhaps symptomatic of a tendency among specialists in the orators to focus on such “inward” matters, somewhat to the neglect of the historical context external to the genre).

One does not always find oneself in agreement with Whitehead’s linguistic judgement. One point where C.’s instinct seemed to me superior was in the interpretation of the phrase, crucial to the dating of the speech, at Hyp. 2.7, ἓν μὲν σῶμα ἀθάνατον ὑπείληφας ἔσεσθαι. C. translates well, “you assumed one person would be immortal” and comments, n. 11, “i.e. Philip, who was still alive at the time of the trial or had just been killed” (though this is inconsistent with his comment in the introduction on p. 81, “… still alive at the time of the trial”). Whitehead, on the other hand (p. 30), thinks that the Greek means “you believe that one person will be immortal”, that Philip therefore can not be dead at the time of the trial, which must accordingly be dated before summer 336. But there is a misunderstanding here of how the perfect is used in Greek. It designates a present state arising from a past action, i.e. “you are in a state of having assumed”. This is strictly ambiguous as to whether the assumption has turned out to be correct or not; but in context Hyp.’s comment gains considerably in point if news, or more likely still only rumour, of Philip’s death, had recently reached Athens, and this was, in my view, very probably the case.

Fragments

In principle the inclusion of fragments is very welcome; C. includes a selection from 21 of those lost speeches of which something of interest can be said (including the famous defence of Phryne (60) and several important speeches for political history, e.g. those for Lyc.’s children (31) and against Demades (14)); and although Burtt’s selection is generally bigger, C. adds some value in that he translates some which Burtt did not, and provides somewhat fuller contextual notes. However, there are pitfalls in handling fragments at this level when, as in the case of Hyp., there is no underlying up-to-date scholarly treatment (a need not fulfilled by Whitehead). I give one example. Jensen prints 9 fragments of Hyp. 10 Against Archestratides, of which Burtt included only one and a very short explanatory note. C. includes two and a slightly fuller note. The additional fragment, however, is 10 fr. 49 ἱερά, which C. translates “the sacred victims”, but in omitting the context in which the fragment is preserved, C. has crucially also omitted to note that Hyp.’s use of ἱερά in this speech was cited because he had used it in a special sense, “the bones of the dead”. C. infers from this fragment and the reference to Ithyphalloi in fr. 50 that the speech was about sacrilege; but these two fragments will no more bear this inference than fr. 47, in which Hyp. “made clear … that it was not possible for those absent from home to claim the theorikon” and fr. 51, about state payments to the crew of the sacred ship, Paralos, will bear the inference that the dispute was about payment of public subsidies.

Lycurgus – E. M. Harris (all chapter references relate to Lyc. 1)

Translation

At many places H.’s Lyc. is an improvement on Burtt’s. E.g. his “divine providence” (94) captures more idiomatically the sense of τὴν τῶν θεῶν ἐπιμέλειαν than Burtt’s “the guidance of the gods”; his “rather fantastic” is better for the ” μυθωδέστερον” (95) moral tale about the son helping his father out of the path of an eruption of Etna than Burtt’s, “half a legend”. The tale delivers, however, a lesson about how τὸ θεῖον favours the good — “the divine”, perhaps even “the gods” but not, I think, H.’s “the god” (which one?). Burtt’s “God”, though also not quite satisfactory, is closer. The place where the heroic act took place was still called τῶν εὐσεβῶν χῶρον, “Place of the Holy” in H.’s rendition; but this does not, like the Greek, pick up the earlier reference to the son’s εὐσεβεία (“reverence”, H.) towards his parents. (Burtt’s “Place of the Pious” would only work for those — more numerous among Burtt’s readership in the 1950s, I suspect, than among the likely users of the Texas series — who will recall the pietas of Vergil’s Aeneas towards Anchises.) H.’s “bunch of nobodies” (62), of new Messenian settlers, would have been offensive to Messenians to an extent that the Greek, ἐκ τῶν τυχόντων ἀνθρώπων would not; and his “racial purity”, with no explanatory note, is misleading for αὐτόχθων (41), which is “indigenous” (Burtt, correctly), or indeed “autochthonous”. The meanings are significantly different. Autochthony was to do with the myth that the original Athenian(s) were born from the Earth, not, as “racial purity” suggests, with myths or realities in relation to subsequent breeding and immigration (and in fact a rather liberal law on naturalisation was ascribed to Solon), or in any very strong sense with “racial identity”, in which respect Athenians conceived of themselves generally as Ionian Greeks. Connotations of modern racism and eugenics can also seriously mislead. With ethnicity a matter of current interest, especially, I suspect, among the target readership for this series, it is important that translators handle potentially charged concepts with circumspection. If in doubt, it seems best to transliterate and supply an explanatory note rather than risk misleading the reader.

Notes

H.’s notes will generally be very helpful. A few examples of quibbles:

at n. 10 H. describes the Areopagos as the “most respected court in Athens”, but this is inconsistent with the controversial status of that body apparent from Lyc.’s later remarks (“please do not jeer when I mention its name”, 52);

n. 14 might helpfully have pointed out not simply that there were temples of Zeus the Saviour and Athena the Saviour in Piraeus, but also that these cults were extremely popular in classical Athens;

n. 29, on Hyp.’s famous proposal to free slaves etc. after Chaironeia could have been helpfully cross-referenced to the relevant passage/note in C.’s Hyp.;

n. 31 I do not think that 40 implies that respectable women would not be seen alone in public;

n. 55 — the Peace of Kallias is presented as a fact.

H.’s bibliography is fairly up-to-date. I agree with him that Faraguna’s 1992 Atene nell’età di Alessandro is probably “the best modern account of Lyc.”, though it deals only with some aspects, and I doubt most of the readers of this translation will cope with Italian. A reference to the papers in English by Mitchel⁹ or Humphreys¹⁰ might have been helpful. On the other hand, H. does not cite the bibliography on the oath of Plateia (mainly in German). Familiarity with the epigraphical material is indispensable for anyone commenting on this speech. H. is fairly well informed, pointing the reader sensibly to C. J. Schwenk’s useful collection of the dated laws and decrees of the period; but he does not quite convey a sense of the depth and the breadth of Lyc.’s impact on the epigraphical record, not only in the extant laws and decrees, but in other types of document, especially those with a financial aspect, and of the tremendous impression of administrative vigour which that record conveys. H. is rightly doubtful about whether this speech represents an attack on pro-Macedonian politicians, co-ordinated with Dem.’s de Corona of the same year; but when Lyc. lets drop the apparently unexciting information that Leocrates had previously been attacked (it seems unsuccessfully) for mismanagement of the 2 per cent tax (19), it would have been helpful to link this in with Lyc.’s obsessive (but, it seems, for Athens very effective) attention to financial detail, as witnessed par excellence by the inscriptions (cf. also Lyc.’s pedantic detailing of Leocrates’ financial arrangements while in Megara, 22-23). Lyc.’s mind could transform what might seem a fairly minor financial misdemeanour into a capital crime; and one suspects that this old tax case rankled and was a significant underlying factor motivating the prosecution of Lyc. 1. If financial misdemeanours were unforgivable, religious ones were more so, and again there is a great deal more to be said about the link between the religious sentiments expressed in the speech and the epigraphical record of Lyc’s vigorous activities in the religious sphere. His background as Eteoboutad, i.e. member of the genos responsible for the major cults of the Acropolis, is also a vital factor here. Membership of gene, those ancient institutions untouched by Cleisthenes’ reforms that played such a crucial role in Athenian religion, could cast a powerful spell. Lyc’s deep convictions are a not very distant cousin of the fanaticism of the Eumolpid speaker of Lys. 6, the feisty behaviour of several holders of gentilician priestess-ships, real and fictional, Eteoboutad priestesses of Athena among them (priestesses are among the very few Athenian women who emerge as personalities in their own right — one of them was the subject of Lyc. 6), and indeed the curious dress-sense and overdriven personality of the Salaminian Hegesippos, nicknamed “Krobylos” for his archaic habit of wearing his hair in a bun. Lyc.’s intellectual and moral seriousness are not only a product of his religious background, however; they are locatable in the mainstream of philosophical and intellectual currents of the 4th century. His frequent citations of poetry in the speech need to be connected with his reconstruction of the theatre of Dionysos and his establishment of official texts of the canonical tragic poets; his antiquarian interests, again frequently in evidence in the speech need to be connected with the emergence, for the first time acutely in Lyc. and his policies, of the sense of the shadow cast by Athens’ fifth century “golden age”, a shadow that was to overawe Athens for the rest of antiquity and was to become part of the cultural heritage of the West. And it is not a coincidence that the man who made a greater impact perhaps than any other in history on Athens’ epigraphical record displays in the speech an unusually high level of interest in old inscriptions (in my view, incidentally, this can not be divorced from Lyc.’s Eteoboutad background on the Acropolis, the major location for state inscriptions in Athens and already by this time chock full of the epigraphical output of 200 years). But that H. does not bring out all this is not so much criticism; a prior requisite of a wholly satisfactory secondary edition of this speech is a full primary commentary of high quality. That, in turn, will only be written by someone who has immersed himself or herself deeply in the rich epigraphical record of the 40s, 30s and 20s.

As already mentioned, H.s treatment of the fragments of Lyc. is the most satisfactory in this volume, supplying context as well as quotes. (Unlike Din. and Hyp. H. has a reasonably up-to-date and scholarly treatment of the fragments of Lyc. to draw on, Conomis’ 1961 article in Klio). The notes supply the most important information, while maintaining a light touch.

There is a useful index.

Notes

1. For example, when a new reading of IG ii ² 417 recently enabled the apparent speaker of Dem. 35, Against Lacritus, to be identified as brother of the distinguished Xenokles of Sphettos, a finding of some interest for the interpretation of the speech (see ZPE 135 (2001), 57-58), it seemed to me surprising and unsatisfactory that the only half-way substantial modern commentary available was Gernet’s 1954 Budé. Inter alia the speaker’s name is preserved only in a document cited in the speech and an up-to-date commentary on the authenticity of the document would have been helpful. (In the next volume of Horos, incidentally, I shall show that the same man, Androkles of Sphettos, and not, as believed hitherto, his brother Xenokles, was probably the agonothetes on IG ii ² 3073, of 307/6, the earliest reasonably firmly dated holder of that office.) Another colourful personality from the pages of the Demosthenic Corpus, Polykles son of Polykrates of Anagyrous, in dispute with Apollodoros over a trierarchy in Dem. 50, may, as an elderly man, have been proposer of the decree honouring Apollonides of Sidon, if my tentative new reading from autopsy of ll. 6-7 of IG ii ² 343 (= C. J. Schwenk, Athens in the Age of Alexander [Chicago, 1985], no. 84, datable probably to the fifth prytany of 323/2, i.e. the early stages of the Lamian War) Πολυκ ? ]λῆς Πο[λυκράτους ? ] Ἀναγυράσιο[ς] (all letters dotted except the sigma of the name and the letters of the demotic), is correct. Again this will be of interest for the interpretation of the speech from several points of view (e.g., both speech and decree have a strong maritime flavour). And again, although there is helpful discussion in J. Trevett’s Apollodoros the Son of Pasion (OUP, 1992) (his discussion of Polykles, p. 129, will require adjustment), there is no full commentary on the speech.

2. Minor Attic Orators II. On Burtt cf. Whitehead, Hypereides, 23.

3. S. Usher, “Lysias and his Clients”, GRBS 17 (1976), 31-40, arguing against K. J. Dover, Lysias and the Corpus Lysiacum (Berkeley, 1968).

4. S. Todd, e.g. in “The Use and Abuse of the Attic Orators”, Greece and Rome 37 (1990), 165-66 (see also his notes on the Lysias vol. in the Texas series), is also convinced by Usher in the case of Lysias. Todd’s assertion, “as far as the historian is concerned, this question [of authorship] is normally irrelevant”, is correct in relation to many issues, but there are important exceptions; e.g. the historian may have an interest in how far opinions and attitudes expressed in the speech are, or may reflect, those of the speaker, his family, socio-economic background etc. (e.g. Androkles’ “racist” comments about Phaselites and his remarks about Isocrates at Dem. 35.40).

5. As Usher himself comments, Greek Oratory (OUP, 1999), 244, “Demosthenic authenticity studies” are still at an “early stage”; too early, I venture to suggest, to rule out joint authorship. Usher is inclined to regard as genuine a number of speeches in the Demosthenic corpus previously generally thought to be spurious (including Dem. 35, on which he has a brief but helpful note, pp. 253-55). An attractive corollary of a joint-authorship theory in the case of Dem. would be that there was posthumous publication of his Nachlass by pupils or family, perhaps in the third century when his reputation as supreme orator was in the making (Dem.’s nephew Demochares might plausibly have been involved, see recently C. Cooper, in I. Worthington ed., Demosthenes [London, 2000], 234-37; for posthumous publication in this period cf. e.g. the case of Aristotle) and that this Nachlass included both speeches in which Dem. had had a hand, and other items, such as the letter of Philip, [Dem.] 12.

6. Here, as elsewhere, W. makes little attempt to render Din.’s rhetorical effects, in this case an impressive sequence of denigrating p’s. Difficult in this case perhaps; but other kinds of effect can be attempted. More could have been done e.g. at 31-32 to render the contrast between the talker Demosthenes and the effective man of action Charidemus: (a) the man who really loved his city would do something ( τι πρᾶξαι) (31, picked up by πρᾶξιν later in the sentence); (b) Dem. will say how useful, χρήσιμος, he has been (32); (c) but Charidemus was useful, χρήσιμος, with actions not words. W. misses the stress on “do” in (a) and unnecessarily uses different words to translate χρήσιμος in (b) and (c).

7. On this point in relation to Demosthenes see most recently ZPE 137 (2001), 55-68, esp. 67-68 (new edition, with new fragment, of Demosthenes’ only extant decree on stone). For a persuasive new assessment of Demades, giving due weight to the epigraphical evidence, see P. Brun, L’orateur Démade (Bordeaux, 2000).

8. On a more minor point, in n. 34 W. tells the reader that Pamphilus “contributed 100 dr. to the eutaxia liturgy”. W. has obtained this alleged datum, directly or indirectly, from J. K. Davies, Athenian Propertied Families, 567, which unfortunately, though published in 1971 (the new edition that has been announced, updated in light of the last generation of progress in epigraphy, will be very welcome), was unable to take into account Lewis’ work, published in Hesp. 1968, which showed that the relevant inscription, IG ii ² 417, listed not contributions to the liturgy, but weight of dedications made by performers of it. See now ZPE 135 (2001), 52-60.

9. F. W. Mitchel, “Lykourgan Athens”, in Lectures in Memory of Louis Taft Semple (Cincinnati, 1973).

10. S. C. Humphreys, “Lycurgus of Butadae”, in J. W. Eadie and J. Ober eds., The Craft of the Ancient Historian: Essays …. C. G. Starr (1985), 199-252.