Demosthenes wrote the speech Against Aristokrates (Dem. 23) for an Athenian named Euthykles, for use in his graphe paranomon (public indictment of a new decree as being contrary to existing law) against a decree proposed by one Aristokrates.[1] Aristokrates’ decree sought to protect the person of Charidemos, a mercenary commander who had earlier been granted Athenian citizenship and was now employed by the Thracian king Kersobleptes, by stipulating that anyone who killed him was liable to arrest in the territory of any of Athens’ allies. Euthykles’ speech argues three main points: that Aristokrates’ decree is illegal since it is contrary to existing homicide laws; that it is not in Athens’ interest to support Kersobleptes at the expense of other Thracian kings; and that Charidemos is undeserving of any honour or privilege. This lengthy speech is an important source of information about both Athens’ homicide law and Athenian foreign policy in the north Aegean. Its neglect by commentators — this is the first since 1845 — is hard to fathom and makes the appearance of this volume particularly welcome.
In her preface, Zajonz expresses the hope that a detailed commentary on the language and content of the speech, combined with a critical analysis of the structure of its argument, will throw some light on the deliberate obscurity (‘die absichtsvolle Obskurität’) that characterizes it (p. v). It is precisely this obfuscation that makes the speech hard to get to grips with: Demosthenes not only fundamentally misrepresents the nature of Aristokrates’ proposal but also provides a tendentious and chronologically confusing account of Charidemos’ career.
The wide-ranging introduction covers Athenian foreign policy in this period; Aristokrates’ proposal and Euthykles’ suit against it; Euthykles’ case; the structure and argumentation of the speech; its date; the question of whether it was revised for publication; and the establishment of the text. Zajonz is unconvinced by attempts to reconstruct Demosthenes’ political views from the speech, not least because, despite certain similarities with speeches of this period that he delivered in his own name, it is unclear how far he identified with the case. She observes that the legal argument, that the proposed decree conflicts with existing laws, is feeble: Demosthenes affects to believe that Aristokrates was proposing that anyone who killed Charidemos could be arrested and dealt with in whatever way the person who arrested him chose. In fact, the proposal seems to have made no stipulation about how the killer should be treated once he was arrested, and to have taken it for granted that he would be tried according to Athenian law. Zajonz suggests, plausibly, that the detailed analysis of Athens’ strategic interests and lengthy character assassination of Charidemos that constitute the second half of the speech serve to compensate for the weakness of the legal arguments in the first (p. 23). She notes Papillon’s suggestion that the three main sections of the speech can be regarded as representing a different oratorical genre (judicial, deliberative, and epideictic), but she is not persuaded and prefers to characterize them in terms of their different subject areas (‘Themenbereiche’), namely law, benefit, and merit.[2]
Zajonz accepts the view that the speech dates to the summer or autumn of 352. The terminus post quem is Philip’s victory at the battle of the Crocus Field in spring or early summer of that year, since it was only thereafter that Phayllos, who succeeded Onomarchos after the latter was killed, could be described as dynast of the Phocians (see §124). The terminus ante quem is Philip’s seizure of Hieron Teichos in November of the same year (Dem. 3.4), which would (or should) have been mentioned at §183, where Euthykles refers to Philip’s earlier and, to the Athenians, less alarming advance eastward to Maroneia. Zajonz is not convinced by Lane Fox’s argument for an earlier date for the speech, and she attributes its relative lack of concern about Philip in part to his failure to secure Thermopylae in summer 352 and in part to the rhetorical demands of the case. For, if Aristokrates argued that it was in Athens’ interest to back Kersobleptes and Charidemos as a bulwark against Philip, as he perhaps did, it was in Euthykles’ interest to downplay the threat that the latter posed to Athens.[3] This is all perfectly plausible, but the chronology of this period is notoriously difficult. It is not certain, for example, that Philip’s appearance at Hieron Teichos does not belong a year later — Demosthenes, presumably counting inclusively, says (Dem. 3.4) that this is the third or fourth year since it happened — which would undermine the presumed terminus ante quem. Zajonz sees no sign that the speech was revised after delivery and doubts (p. 34) that Demosthenes would have exposed to the critical scrutiny of a reading public a text whose legal argument is weak and whose main strategic claims — that Athens’ interest was served by a divided Thrace and that Charidemos was irredeemably untrustworthy and an enemy of Athens — were soon overtaken by events.
In editing the text Zajonz shows considerable independence. According to the list at pp. 40-42, her text differs from that of Dilts’s OCT in no fewer than 51 places.[4] In fact, the list is incomplete, since at §11 she removes the lacuna that Dilts prints before εἰ πρῶτον μέν. Of the main manuscripts she attaches most weight to S (Parisinus 2934) as being freest from interpolation. On the admission of hiatus, she expresses reservations about, but nevertheless follows, Dilts’s decision to retain hiatus wherever it appears in either S or A. The list (pp. 42-44) of almost seventy addenda and corrigenda to Dilts’s apparatus, taken from the four main manuscripts S, A, F, and Y, is very useful.
On the literary and philological side, the commentary is invariably full and helpful. Zajonz is excellent on questions of language, grammar, and nuances of meaning. Her discussion of points that might hardly seem to require comment are often enlightening. She demonstrates good knowledge of Demosthenes’ style and has been assiduous in collecting parallels from elsewhere in his works, from other orators, and more widely. Textual matters are ably handled, and editorial choices are clearly explained. Zajonz is fully at home in this material, as well as in rhetorical theory: the detailed ‘Gliederung der Rede’ (pp. 45-46) and the introductions within the commentary to the various sections and subsections of the speech are helpful in articulating the structure of its argument. Her treatment of the laws which Aristokrates’ decree allegedly contravened and of the different Athenian homicide courts (§§22-99) is admirably thorough.
On more general historical issues, however, I have some concerns. Epigraphic citations are not always up to date, and, surprisingly, no use is made of P. Rhodes and R. Osborne, Greek Historical Inscriptions 404-323 BC (Oxford, 2003), which largely supersedes M. N. Tod’s earlier collection, which is used.[5] Thus, the inscription identified (p. 184) as IG ii2 127 = Tod 157 is now R-O 53.[6] Again, Zajonz seems to print (pp. 549-550) the Packard Humanities Institute text of IG ii2 126, Athens’ alliance with three Thracian kings, which is essentially the same as those of Kirchner in IG ii2 and of Tod 151, but misses both Rhodes and Osborne’s discussion of it (R-O 47) and — though it may have appeared too late to be considered — the recent re-editing of the inscription, including a new fragment, by Matthaiou.[7]
The ethnicity of the city of Ainos at the mouth of the Hebros causes problems. At §169 Euthykles makes the implausible claim that the Thracians do not regard it as lawful (νομίμου) to kill each other. Zajonz writes that this is controverted by the case of Python und Herakleides of Ainos who, being Thracian (‘als Thraker’), assassinated the Thracian king Kotys (p. 537). This episode is mentioned earlier in the speech (§119), on which Zajonz cites Aristotle as saying (Pol. 1311b20-22) that Python and Herakleides from Thracian Ainos (‘aus dem thrakischen Ainos’) avenged their father by the murder of Kotys (p. 441). This is inaccurate: Aristotle simply describes the two men as from Ainos (οἱ Αἴνιοι) and makes no mention of Thrace. The killers’ names are Greek, and Ainos was a Greek colony, identified as such by both Herodotus (7.58.3) and Thucydides (7.57.4). There is no discussion of why the two men should be identified as Thracian. Here, and elsewhere, Zajonz could usefully have cited Hansen and Nielsen’s Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis, for which Loukopoulou contributes a substantial entry (pp. 875-877) on Ainos, and which is absent from the bibliography.[8]
In other places, too, the commentary is not as full or exact on historical matters as one might expect, especially given its length and the thoroughness of its philological coverage. For example, the founding of Megalopolis is dated without discussion to 371 (p. 414). This may be right, but the evidence is unclear.[9] On p. 435 we are told that Thucydides dates the founding of Amphipolis to 437/6 (‘Nach Thuk. 4,102 wurde Amphipolis im Jahr 437/36 … besiedelt.’). This too is inaccurate. What Thucydides says is that the city was founded (in total) 61 years after Aristagoras’ attempt to settle the site, which he does not date. The exact year, in the archonship of Euthymenes, comes from the scholiast to Aesch. 2.31. The note on the Athenian general Chares (p. 548) mentions some of the relevant ancient evidence but no secondary scholarship. This is not an isolated example. In a modern full-scale commentary, one might expect, for individual Athenians, references to Traill’s Persons of Ancient Athens rather than, or as well as, to the (often rather dated) entries in RE.[10] The extent to which Schaefer’s Demosthenes und seine Zeit, whose second edition was published in the 1880s, is used as a go-to secondary source is surprising. More generally, linguistic and textual matters are consistently pursued further, and in more detail, than historical ones. It is perhaps symptomatic that the partial (‘in Auswahl’) index of passages cited runs to more than thirty pages, that of people and things, which is arguably more useful, to barely one. Absentees from the latter include Perdikkas (§200), Menon of Pharsalos (§199), and the Athenian generals Ergophilos and Autokles (§104). The principle by which place names are or are not included is unclear.
In many respects this substantial volume is a very impressive achievement. Anyone interested in Demosthenes as an orator and prose stylist will learn a lot from it. Ancient historians will find it useful too but will also want to have at their elbow the recent translation of the speech by Edward Harris, whose notes on historical matters are, despite that volume’s more limited scope, often more up to date and, to my mind, more penetrating.[11]
The volume has been very well produced: the binding, paper quality, and printing are all excellent, and the text is well-edited and a pleasure to read.
Notes
[1] That the speech was written for Euthykles, who is otherwise unknown, is stated by Libanius in his Hypothesis.
[2] Cf. T. L. Papillon, Rhetorical Studies in the Aristocratea of Demosthenes (New York, 1998).
[3] R. Lane Fox, ‘Demosthenes, Dionysius and the dating of six early speeches’ Class. et Med. 48 (1997) 167-203, at 183-187.
[4] M. R. Dilts, Demosthenis Orationes vol. 2 (Oxford, 2005).
[5] M. N. Tod, A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions vol. II: From 403 to 323 B.C. (Oxford, 1948).
[6] See most recently www.atticinscriptions.com/inscription/AIO/816, with some adjustments to R-O.
[7] A. P. Matthaiou, Ἔξι Ἀττικὲς ἐπιγραφὲς τοῦ 4ου αι. π.Χ. (Athens, 2019) 97-116. His text can be accessed online at www.atticinscriptions.com/inscription/IGII2/126.
[8] M. H. Hansen and T. H. Nielsen (ed.), An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis (Oxford, 2004).
[9] See S. Hornblower, ‘When was Megalopolis founded?’ ABSA 85 (1990) 71-77.
[10] J. Traill, Persons of Ancient Athens. 21 vols. (Toronto, 1994-2012); atheniansproject.com.
[11] E. M. Harris (tr.), Demosthenes: Speeches 23-26. The Oratory of Classical Greece 15. (Austin, 2018).