Parrhēsia is one ancient term that is very hard to translate into modern languages. First appearing in Euripidean tragedy as the prerogative of all citizens of the polis to speak freely and frankly in political deliberations, the term penetrated the private sphere as implying honest conversation between friends, and then under Hellenistic and Roman monarchs it came to signify the public enunciation of difficult truths, restricted to favored individuals and respected professions. In our own moment, as some democracies flirt with authoritarianism and potential censorship of political dissent, parrhēsia has found considerable resonance outside ancient Mediterranean studies.[1]
Unsurprisingly, parrhēsia has attracted renewed study lately; Dana Fields’ incisive recent study of parrhēsia in the Roman imperial period seemed like an excellent culmination of recent studies.[2] But Hartmut Leppin’s new monograph, a publication of the Tria Corda lectures delivered at Jena, constitutes a fitting consolidation of the recent wave of studies. Leppin, an extensively knowledgeable and prolific ancient historian, has written on subjects from Thucydides and Athenian democracy to ancient Christianity and late-antique Syria. Since one of Leppin’s particular skills is in synthesizing scholarly results judiciously,[3] he is an excellent scholar to undertake a study of this urgently relevant concept.
Leppin’s study is explicitly a Wortgeschichte, the study of a term across time. Guided by groundbreaking intellectual historians such as J.G.A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and Margrit Pernau, Leppin has tabulated all uses of parrhēsia in ancient literature from the fifth century BCE until the Arab conquests. One strength of this volume is its consideration of texts beyond the Greek and Latin literature well-known to most ancient Mediterranean historians. Leppin proffers Hebrew, Syriac, and Coptic texts (especially in the book’s Appendix, pp. 191-196, but see also 48, 52-53, 58, 60-61, 73, 90-91, 129, 134, 142, 143, 154, 185-186) and to a lesser extent inscriptions and papyri rather than just literary texts (38-39, 48, 82-84, 120-121).[4] This rejection of Helleno- and Romanocentrism, and expansion beyond the boundaries of high literature, considerably enrich the resonances of parrhēsia.
After his methodological introduction, Leppin follows the chronological sequence in which each common speech situation involving parrhēsia appeared across antiquity. Chapter I, “Parrhesie gegenüber Mitbürgern,” updates the standard origin story of parrhēsia. While rejecting old canard that the polis died at Chaeroneia, Leppin also emphasizes that parrhēsia never signified unlimited free speech. Sacrilege, such as the alleged crimes of Socrates, fell outside the bounds of parrhēsia, and a γραφὴ παρανόμων (“writ against unlawfulness”) could be issued against citizens who misled the assembly. In later antiquity, Leppin shows, the citizen-prerogative of parrhēsia became not simply privatized (as for example Foucault emphasized) but restricted to elites and earned by ethical reputation—which in turn could empower religious elites such as Jews or Christians who claimed ethical high ground.
Chapter II, “Parrhesie gegenüber Vertrauten,” traces the ethically- rather than rights-grounded parrhēsia first hinted at in Plato’s Laches and theorized in Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. The chapter covers some of the best-known passages about parrhēsia, summarizing Philodemus’ On Parrhēsia, Plutarch’s How to Tell a Flatterer, and several relevant Lucianic satires. But Leppin also inserts a fascinating section on “Parrhesie und Enthemmung,” usings mostly late-antique and Christian, especially monastic, texts to link parrhēsia and everyday disinhibition. Inebriation, excessive physical contact and sexual activity, and aggressive self-assertion could all be disgraceful manifestations of parrhēsia, particularly in Syriac and Coptic discourses.[5] Within the household, meanwhile, parrhēsia marked a reciprocal, harmonious relationship between father and son (or father and enslaved household member).
Leppin’s long Chapter III, “Parrhesie gegenüber Mächtigen,” begins by introducing a performative script, the “parrhesiastic dialogue”: “The parrhesiast enunciates his critique courageously, publicly, and guided by good intentions; the powerful person listens patiently; and his conduct changes for the better” (96). While such an expectation of parrhēsia set a stage and primed an audience for criticism of monarchs, in one of the many paradoxes underscored by Leppin’s title this meta-script ossified into a dialogic ritual that rulers could use to legitimize and entrench their power. There were prerequisites to the exercise of parrhēsia toward rulers: the frank speech had to neither fawn nor insult, had to be moderate in tone and appropriately timed, and had to advocate public and not private interest. The possibility of violating any of these norms made parrhēsia a risk for potential critics of the powerful. In this chapter Leppin helpfully enumerates different “Träger der Parrhesie,” including philosophers, experts, emperors’ friends, ambassadors, soldiers, sometimes crowds such as the Greens and Blues of late-antique Constantinople and, eventually (see below), religious authorities—who could in turn themselves become the targets of parrhēsia from their subordinates.
The shortest and final Chapter IV, “Die Parrhesie gegenüber Gott,” opens with Jewish authors articulating an internalized parrhēsia. Philo, Josephus, and some others invite worshipers of any background, status, or ability to truthful, and courageous, and humble introspection. Christian texts pick this up and develop what we might call a psychology of frankness: with this parrhēsia the worshiper can be confident, joyful, guiltless, and above all humble as well as ritually pure. But this parrhēsia, as Leppin points out, raises another paradox that John Chrysostom enunciates (PG 51 370-371): whoever does not believe themselves to deserve to speak freely toward God, may. A nuanced “Fazit” rounds the book out.
This summary thinly encapsulates Leppin’s main points, not all the keen observations and contingencies included in the book. To his credit, Leppin is conscious of the limits of his Wortgeschichte and notes surprising absences as well as invocations of parrhēsia, such as in Plato’s Apology (p. 30; see also pp. 2-10, 35, 57, 129, 154, 188).[6] His regular reminders that parrhēsia really only served to reinforce rather than critique ancient social norms (e.g. p. 93) impress us with one particular paradox—that free and frank speech in itself is not sufficient to change the power relations in a social system.
I would like to suggest one future direction for scholarship through some reflection on the anecdote from Leppin’s opening paragraph. On p. 1 Leppin retells Homer’s famous vituperation of Thersites against the Trojan War (Iliad 2.211-278), greeted by Odysseus’ beating and the troops’ mocking him. (Although, as Leppin acknowledges, Homer never uses the word parrhēsia, some later authors such as Julian and Libanius identified Thersites as a paradigmatic parrhesiast.) Famous and paradigmatic as this episode is, Thersites is not even the first instance of dissent toward power in the Iliad. In the first hundred lines of the poem, when the Achaeans are suffering from a plague and Achilles summons an assembly, Achilles invites the seer Calchas to explain the plague. Under Achilles’ protection Calchas informs Agamemnon that his retention of Chryseis has unleashed Apollo’s wrath. Albeit grudgingly and temperamentally, and with perhaps equally destructive results due to his seizure of Achilles’ enslaved captive Briseis, Agamemnon returns Chryseis, appeases Apollo, and ends the plague (Iliad 1.51-304, 430-487).
Unlike Thersites’ outburst, then, the unintended consequence of Achilles’ withdrawal notwithstanding, for its immediate purpose of ending Apollo’s plague Achilles’ and Calchas’ objections are (to use J.L. Austin’s term) felicitous: Achilles returns Chryseis to her father and the plague ends. Moreover, compared to Thersites, Achilles and Calchas express their dissent in conformity with later Greek norms: Achilles was a near-equal to Agamemnon in status, intervened at an appropriate moment, and through Calchas’ voice kept his message as tactful as was possible. Yet later ancient Greek-speakers seem to have associated parrhēsia with Thersites and not with Achilles and Calchas.[7]
Perhaps the silence on parrhēsia in relation to Calchas is because the seer spoke a message from the gods, and, as Leppin (pp. 129, 149, following Erik Peterson) notes, non-Jews and non-Christians did not invoke parrhēsia to characterize utterances of divine origins; it can hardly be coincidence that the divinely-inspired utterances of prophets such as Tiresias or Amphiaraus are also never characterized as parrhēsia, nor does Philostratus emphasize the holy man Apollonius of Tyana’s parrhēsia (p. 107).[8] And perhaps comparably venerable dissenters, such as Herodotus’ Solon or Plato’s Socrates, provoked similar, heroic awe as superhuman (and tragic?) figures and so were not seen merely as human dissenters.[9] Before Jewish and Christian discourse, then, dissent from religious authorities does not seem to have been classified as parrhēsia. But it surely qualifies as dissent.
In all, on the road to a comprehensive conceptual history of debate and dissent in Mediterranean antiquity, Leppin’s study is clearly a momentous milestone. It is written both succinctly and in a lively style that sometimes presses the limits of formal German syntax and vocabulary—readers accustomed to academic German will need dictionaries handy, but the payoff is worth it. The book also has solid indices of sources, people, and subjects to empower readers to find the information they seek.
Notes
[1] See e.g. Michael A. Peters, “Education in a post-truth world,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 49 (2017); Jennifer Mercieca, Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump (Lubbock, TX: Texas A&M Press, 2020); Joon-Beom Chu, “Parrhesia, orthodoxy, and irony: A Foucauldian discourse analysis of the verbal politics of truth in the US Republican Party’s 2015–2016 presidential debates,” Journal of Language and Politics 20 (2021).
[2] Dana Fields, Frankness, Greek Culture, and the Roman Empire (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020). Classic studies include Giuseppe Scarpat, Parrhesia; storia del termine e delle sue traduzione in Latino (Brescia: Paideia, 1964) and Scarpat, Parrhesia greca, parrhesia Cristiana (Brescia: Paideia, 2001); and the posthumous Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001). Often overlooked (though centered by Leppin) is the perceptive Erik Peterson, “Zur Bedeutungsgeschichte von Παρρησία,” in Reinhold Seeberg Festschrift, ed. Wilhelm Koepp (Leipzig: Scholl, 1929), and see more recently Ineke Sluiter and Ralph Mark Rosen (eds.), Free speech in classical antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Alene Saxonhouse, Free Speech and Democracy in Ancient Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 85-126; and Peter-Ben Smit and Eva van Urk (eds.), Parrhesia. Ancient and Modern Perspectives on Freedom of Speech (Leiden: Brill, 2018).
[3] Leppin’s excellent survey of ancient Christianity, Die frühen Christen (Munich: Beck, 2018), will appear soon in English translation from Cambridge University Press.
[4] Leppin’s acknowledgments (p. V) indicate an all-star cast of representatives of the subdisciplines needed to cover the subjects noted in the next paragraph. For nonliterary texts’ use of parrhēsia, see also the brief but incisive Kyriakoula Papademetriou, “The Performative Meaning of the Word παρρησία in Ancient Greek and in the Greek Bible,” in Smit and van Urk, Parrhēsia, 25-26.
[5] Leppin, Die frühen Christen, 245-344 similarly showed a sharp eye for the ancient Christian Alltag.
[6] Some minor criticisms are due for the first chapter, where some sections (pp. 38-41, 53-54) read like laundry lists of instances of parrhēsia that add little semantic nuance, and the excursus on parrhēsia and the Roman Republic (pp. 41-45) flirts with anachronism in a Wortgeschichte as it cites only Greek authors from the Roman imperial period.
[7] Cf. e.g. Elton Barker, Entering the Agon. Dissent and Authority in Homer, Historiography and Tragedy (Oxford, 2011), 40-47, 53-61. The only publication I know of to connect Achilles’ and Calchas’ speeches with parrhēsia is Victoria Rodulson, Robert Marshall, and Alan Bleakley, “Whistleblowing in medicine and in Homer’s Iliad,” Medical Humanities 41 (2015).
[8] Peterson, “Bedeutungsgeschichte,” 289-292. Leppin also notes (p. 129) that the Hebrew prophets are not called “parrhesiasts” in the Septuagint or Josephus, though some are in Christian commentaries. Other dissent in ancient Mediterranean texts also comes from religious authority: along with Leppin’s examples of John the Baptist, Elijah, and Daniel (p. 129), one thinks of the prophet Nathan’s famous parable to David about his murder of Uriah the Hittite to take Uriah’s wife Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11.27-12.15). On Apollonius of Tyana: cf. Fields, Frankness, 68-77.
[9] Cf. now Emma Lunbeck and Robert Stone, “The Wise Adviser Trap: Catastrophic Decision-Making in Herodotus and Thucydides,” Journal of the History of Ideas 84 (2023).