Rhetorical Responses from the Roman Period to a Military Loss in Classical Greece

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CHAPTER 14 Recycling the Classical Past: Rhetorical Responses from the Roman Period to a Military Loss in Classical Greece

Sviatoslav Dmitriev

Rhetors are permitted to make lies from history, so that they can say something more eloquent. Cicero, Brutus 11.42. ∵

The Athenian Defeat at Chaeronea in Later Rhetorical Tradition

Responses to a military loss have been the subject of several recent studies that focused on the construction of Athenian historical memory. In chronological terms, these studies deal with evidence about military events and rhetorical responses in classical Greece.1 One of the most famous such cases, Pericles’ funeral oration (431) for the Athenians who died in the early stages of the Peloponnesian war (431–404), has received extensive examination.2 Likewise, many studies have focused on how the subjects, motifs, and allusions em- ployed by Pericles were recycled in the funeral oration, generally ascribed to Demosthenes (384–322), commemorating the Athenians who fell fighting for their city, and Greece, against the Macedonian king Philip II (r. 359–336) at Chaeronea in 338.3 No attention has been paid to the use of the rhetoric of

1 See esp. Wolpert (2002); Low (2010); Arrington (2011); Steinbock (2013) 46; Arrington (2015) 104–108, 120–23. 2 Thuc. 2.34–46, with Hornblower (1991) 294–96; Tracy (2009) 68–78; Arrington (2015) 108–13. Foster (this volume) discusses Thucydides’ treatment of defeats. Unless otherwise noted, all dates are BCE. 3 Dem. 60, with, for example, Hughes (2004) 20; Worthington (2006) 21–22; MacDowell (2009) 372–77; see also Goldman (this volume). For doubts about Demosthenes’ authorship of this speech, even in antiquity, see Dion. Hal. De Dem. 23 and Lib. Hyp., intr. 20.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��8 | doi ��.��63/9789004355774_015 310 Dmitriev defeat in later centuries, however, including the Roman period, when Greek intellectuals similarly referred to famous battles from the glorious past of pre- Roman Greece, furnishing them with elaborate interpretations that catered to the tastes of their urbane audiences, who were versed in mythology, philoso- phy, Greek history, and literature. Just as Demosthenes reused Pericles’ speech for his own funerary oration after the Athenian loss at Chaeronea, later Greek authors turned to the latter defeat as material for their own works. A good example of this is the address allegedly made by the orator Demades (c. 380–318), one of the Athenian war captives at Chaeronea, to King Philip II after the battle. Arranged in chronological order, the three surviving versions of this episode, which cover a time span of six centuries, read as follows:

(i) Diodorus Siculus ( fl. first century BCE): The story is told that in the drinking after dinner (Philip) downed a large amount of unmixed wine and forming with his friends a reveling procession (komos) in celebra- tion of the victory paraded through the midst of his captives, jeering all the time at the misfortunes of the luckless men. Now Demades, the orator, who was then one of the captives, spoke with frankness and made a remark able to curb the king’s disgusting exhibition. He is said to have remarked: “O King, when Fortune has cast you in the role of Agamemnon, are you not ashamed to act the part of Thersites?” Philip was so moved by the well-aimed rebuke that he completely changed his entire dispo- sition: he cast off garlands and rejected the komos-related attributes of insolence and, being amazed that Demades used such frankness (par- rhesia), he released him from captivity and honorably brought him closer to himself.4 (ii) Sextus Empiricus (c. 160–210 CE): […] when he was taken pris- oner along with many other Athenians after the defeat at Chaeronea, [Demades] said to Philip who was pressing him to join in a banquet: “What righteous man would have the heart to partake of food and drink before freeing his comrades and seeing them with his own eyes?”5 (iii) Ioannes Stobaeus (fl. fifth century CE): Having been taken pris- oner by Philip in the battle near Chaeronea and introduced to him, the orator Demades, when Philip was priding himself at the drinking party

4 Diod. Sic. 16.87.1–2. See Alfieri Tonini (1985) 34 and Squillace (2003) 756 n. 21 on possible sources of the provenance of this story in the text of Diodorus. 5 Sext. Emp. Math. 1.295. References to Sextus Empiricus pertain to the text by Mutschmann and Mau (1954).