Publication of Political Oratory As an Instrument of Historical Revisionism

CHAPTER NINE

GETTING THE LAST WORD: PUBLICATION OF POLITICAL ORATORY AS AN INSTRUMENT OF HISTORICAL REVISIONISM

THOMAS HUBBARD

Most students of Attic oratory make the automatic assumption that the 150-odd speeches we have extant accurately preserve the techniques and actual words used by the orators in oral delivery before the original audience. Of course, everyone acknowledges a few exceptions, such as the Tetralogies of Antiphon and the epideictic speeches of Isocrates, but even these speeches carefully maintain a fiction of actual delivery, in some cases before a very specific audience. Antiphon’s Tetralogies and perhaps even his other speeches were mainly intended to provide text- book models.1 Epideictic speeches like the Erotikoi logoi attributed to Lysias and Demosthenes were clearly literary exercises, and even more serious works like the longer epideictic orations of Isocrates were published to serve as political pamphlets advancing the author’s views to all of Greece.2 Neither Isocrates’ weak voice nor the elaborate Kunstprosa of these orations was well suited to oral delivery. Wilamowitz, Eduard Meyer, and more recently Mogens Herman Hansen have suggested that even Demosthenes’ symbouleutic speeches should perhaps also be considered political pamphlets: out of the many thousands of symbouleutic speeches delivered in fourth-century Athens, and even among the dozens of such speeches that Demosthenes himself doubtless delivered, only a handful were ever published, judging from those extant as well as the fragments and testimonia.3 One can well

————— 1 On the intended audience of the Tetralogies, see Gagarin (2002: 103-6). 2 For the political and educational functions of Isocrates’ published work, see Mathieu (1925), Bringmann (1965), Masaracchia (1995: 81-149), and Poulakos (1997). 3 Wilamowitz (1907: 75-76), Meyer (1909: 770-72), Hahn (1910), Hansen (1984: 68). Against the idea, see Adams (1912), Canfora (1988), and Trevett (1996), the last of whom argues that Demosthenes’ symbouleutic speeches were never in-

186 THOMAS HUBBARD imagine that the subsequent course of events would dictate Demosthe- nes’ choice which speeches to publish: those in which an orator had predicted something that did not happen would hardly be to his credit, but those in which he warned of ill consequences that did in fact tran- spire would make him appear visionary and prophetic, in the eyes both of his contemporaries and of posterity. Such is the case with Demosthe- nes’ speeches against Philip. The even more interesting question is to what extent these speeches may have been rewritten prior to publication to conform with events. In discussing Lysias’ speech against the pro- posal of Phormisios, Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Lys. 49.11-13) raises the possibility that it may never have been actually delivered at all, sug- gesting that the rhetorician held the view that some published symbouleutic speeches may have been just as fictional in their setting as epideictic speeches. This was certainly the case with Andocides’ On the Peace with Sparta, as with Isocrates’ Plataicus, On the Peace, and Are- opagiticus.4 Evidence also suggests that some published speeches, such as Demosthenes’ On the Chersonesus, actually combined elements from more than one orally delivered oration.5 For symbouleutic speeches, the extent of post-delivery revision is largely unknowable, but I would argue that we are in a somewhat stronger position in respect of forensic oratory. When forensic trials in- volved politically prominent personalities, the publication of these speeches could also serve the function of a political pamphlet, making the author’s views known both to posterity and to those of his contemporaries who could not be at the original trial, but had perhaps heard enough gossip about it to be interested. Even in cases where a litigant may not have been successful, indeed especially in those cases, he had an interest in both besmirching the reputation of his opponent and de- fending his own. Certainly by the time of Demosthenes, orators were aware that their published speeches might be read by future students of rhetoric, even as they had the models of Antiphon, Andocides, Lysias, and Isocrates in front of them. The temptation to control public memory ————— tended for publication by the author himself, but were found among his papers after his death. 4 See the discussion of Kennedy (1963: 204-6), who believes that the publication of fictitious symbouleutic speeches began with Thrasymachοs of Chalcedon and other metics who wished to influence Athenian policy. 5 See the arguments of Adams (1938) and Daitz (1957). Schwartz (1894: 40- 44) suggested that such synthesis was the norm for most of Demosthenes’ published symbouleutic speeches.