Peri tou zeugous (De bigis, Isoc. 16) belongs to the group of six speeches of Isocrates (16–21) traditionally classified as “forensic” and often distinguished, in stylistic, generic, and thematic terms, from the politikoi logoi written after the foundation of the Isocratean school in the late 390s. In this speech the younger Alcibiades defends himself against a certain Teisias, who claimed that the defendant’s father, the famous Alcibiades, had “appropriated” one of the chariot teams with which he achieved his celebrated victories at the Olympic Games of 416—and in defending himself the son delivers an extended praise of his father.
Readers familiar with David Whitehead’s recent magisterial commentary on all six “forensic” speeches of Isocrates, running to well over 1,100 pages, may reasonably ask what is left to say for a commentary on one of these texts.[1] The present book shows that there is a great deal. Evangelos Alexiou’s work follows the plan standard for a commentary of this kind: preface; a useful genealogical tree of Alcibiades’ family; an introduction on Isocrates and on the speech, its context, and its transmission; the Greek text with a working apparatus of the most significant variants; the commentary itself, at over two hundred pages the substance of the book; a bibliography; and two indices, one general and the other of passages cited.
The reader will want to keep in mind that the book rests on a hypothesis first advanced in an article of 2011, where Alexiou sees in Peri tou zeugous an important step in the development of the prose encomium.[2] He traces in it concepts central to the genre, together with key Isocratean political ideas such as eunoia, together with a manner of praise characteristic of the later Euagoras (Isoc. 9), to which he draws the closest parallels throughout.[3] When reading Isoc. 16, the two commentaries are best consulted in parallel: Whitehead offers more on the forensic context, Alexiou more on the speech’s connections with encomium.
The most informative part of an accessible introduction is the section on the development of the rhetorical encomium (pp. 8–19). Alexiou dates the speech to 398–395, most probably 396 (p. 22), and rightly insists that not every detail of the trial can be recovered. His decision not to re-examine the manuscripts is understandable in view of the forthcoming critical edition of Isocrates’ opera omnia by Stefano Martinelli Tempesta. The absence of an English translation weighs more heavily — not because translations are lacking,[4] but because it would have shown at a glance how Alexiou understands the ambiguous passages he comments on, and where he differs from Whitehead and others.
The commentary itself is a model of its kind. Alexiou is equally at home in the stylistic analysis of Isocratean prose, in Athenian legal procedure, and in the historical controversies of the late fifth and early fourth centuries, and he draws for each on parallels from the rest of the corpus Isocraticum and from contemporary prose, on the later rhetorical handbooks, and on secondary literature extending back into the nineteenth century, with frequent and welcome citation of the latest scholarship in languages other than English. On disputed passages he sets out the options, weighs them, and reaches a considered judgment. At §34, for example, κατέλυσε δὲ τὴν θεωρίαν may mean either that Alcibiades brought his mission at Olympia to a successful close or that he abolished the institution of the theōria as such; Alexiou presents arguments for both alternatives and then “reluctantly” adopts the former (pp. 195–196). At times his judgment is preferable to Whitehead’s: Alexiou is right that the section on the elder Alcibiades’ devotion to democracy (§§36–38) is an integral part of the main encomium (p. 202, against Whitehead 2022, 453–456), and his account of the two confiscations mentioned by the younger Alcibiades at §46—the family property lost in 415 and the speaker’s own under the Thirty (p. 247)—is more plausible than the alternative, which places the first under the Thirty and the second at the hands of private opponents after the restoration of democracy (Whitehead 2022, 606). One minor reservation concerns the layout: footnotes, as used in the introduction, would have made the commentary easier to navigate, keeping strings of parallels and bibliography off the main line of the discussion.
The most consequential proposal is the hypothesis that there is no lacuna at the beginning of the speech: “the transmitted text is the one that Isocrates himself deemed worthy of publication” (p. 23; see also pp. 52–54), functioning as a self-sufficient encomium. One would gladly have read a bit more on why, for whom, and when in Isocrates’ career such a publication—and possible revision of an earlier forensic speech—took place. If it belongs to Isocrates’ early years as a logographer, why publish an encomium at all, and why strip out the case-related material that would most interest prospective clients? If it belongs to the years after the foundation of his school, why return to a speech several years old, and why leave the trial so plainly visible in the proem (§§1–3) of a work by an author distancing himself from the logographoi? Or does Peri tou zeugous itself call this dichotomous picture of Isocrates’ career into question? And how far does the portrait of a twice-exiled elder Alcibiades as the democratic citizen par excellence, indeed as the only Athenian worthy of the accusation of striving for tyranny (§38), criticize a democracy unable to accommodate its best men, and so qualify Alexiou’s rejection of the view that Isocrates was antidemocratic (p. 3)?
It is the merit of Alexiou’s book that it enables us to ask these questions, and that the place of Peri tou zeugous within the encomiastic tradition can now be properly assessed. Alexiou delivers what many publications only promise, a genuinely new perspective on a text that has attracted growing scholarly attention in recent years. His commentary will be the indispensable foundation of all future work on the speech.
Notes
[1] Whitehead, David, ed. Isokrates: The Forensic Speeches (Nos. 16–21): Introduction, Text, Translation and Commentary. Cambridge University Press, 2022; on Isoc. 16 see 427–614.
[2] Evangelos Alexiou, “Isokrates De bigis und die Entwicklung des Prosa-Enkomions,” Hermes 139.3 (2011): 316–336.
[3] Cf. Evangelos Alexiou, Der Euagoras des Isokrates: Ein Kommentar. Trends in Classics – Supplementary Volumes 101. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2010.
[4] Apart from Whitehead 2022, see Mirhady, David, and Yun Lee Too, trans. Isocrates I. The Oratory of Classical Greece 4. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000, 67–79.