City of Praise: The Politics of Encomium in Classical Athens By Mitchell H. Parks B.A., Grinnell College, 2008 Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Classics at Brown University PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAY 2014 © Copyright 2014 by Mitchell H. Parks This dissertation by Mitchell H. Parks is accepted in its present form by the Department of Classics as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date Adele Scafuro, Adviser Recommended to the Graduate Council Date Johanna Hanink, Reader Date Joseph D. Reed, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School iii Curriculum Vitae Mitchell H. Parks was born on February 16, 1987, in Kearney, NE, and spent his childhood and adolescence in Selma, CA, Glenside, PA, and Kearney, MO (sic). In 2004 he began studying at Grinnell College in Grinnell, IA, and in 2007 he spent a semester in Greece through the College Year in Athens program. He received his B.A. in Classics with honors in 2008, at which time he was also inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and was awarded the Grinnell Classics Department’s Seneca Prize. During his graduate work at Brown University in Providence, RI, he delivered papers at the annual meetings of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South (2012) and the American Philological Association (2014), and in the summer of 2011 he taught ancient Greek for the Hellenic Education & Research Center program in Thouria, Greece, in addition to attending the British School at Athens epigraphy course. In the fall of 2014, he will be a Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at Bucknell University. iv Acknowledgements I am not unaware that, having set out to write a book on the delivery of praise, I am now faced with the danger of disproving my professed expertise already on page v, but nonetheless I must make an attempt, however inadequate. First and foremost I am grateful to my adviser, Adele Scafuro, who took on the ambitious project of an inexperienced graduate student and molded it into a far more manageable and better organized form before I began writing in earnest; while I worked, she honed its thought and language with unparalleled acumen; as I have drawn this stage of the project to a close, she has helped me overcome my resistance to change and thereby mature as a scholar. I owe another substantial debt to the tireless energy of my readers: to Johanna Hanink, whose knowledge of fourth-century cultural history has impelled and inspired me; and to Jay Reed, who has always been ready with good-natured advice and whose seminars on Hellenistic and Roman poetry convinced me that praise would be an intellectually fulfilling area of research. I have also benefitted greatly from conversations with Pura Nieto Hernandez, Deborah Boedeker, Graham Oliver, and Stephen Kidd, among others, and from the inestimable administrative aid of Susan Furtado. My graduate colleagues and friends, especially my cohort and our (somewhat coterminous) dissertation writing group, have given me more encouragement than I could have imagined over the last six years, for which I am grateful to you all. With reluctance, I single out those to whom my debt is even greater: Robin McGill, Lauren Ginsberg, Timothy Haase, Leo Landrey, Scott DiGiulio, and Courtney Thompson, each of whom has unstintingly propped up my scholarly and emotional well-being. v To my parents, grandparents, and siblings, both native and acquired, in short to my family of all stripes, I offer the utmost gratitude for your constant patience, concern, and support. From lakeside chats in the hills of Arkansas to chicken-raising in the wilds of suburban Philadelphia, you all have brought me countless hours of joy and helped me keep sight of what is truly important in life. My siblings in particular—Meg (the original), Drew, Emily, Aaron M., Carrie, and Aaron F.—are my role models, and this project could not have reached its present state without the strength you have helped me acquire. Finally, I dedicate this dissertation to my wife, Wendy. To give as an example only the least of her contributions to its production, during the many hours I have been fortunate to share with her in our home office she has time and again come to my aid as instant usage barometer and mobile thesaurus. Now I need a word that means all the ways you have supported me, and I am coming up short. Your love eludes description, and for that you will always have my praise. vi Table of Contents Introduction 1 Genus: terms and tensions 3 Speeches of praise: ἔπαινος, ἐγκώµιον, ἐπίδειξις 4 Fourth-century Athens 9 The individual citizen 12 Laudator, laudandus, and audience 15 Educatio: a brief history of praise 17 Virtutes et facta: political encomium in the fourth century 26 Chapter one: Xenophon and the utility of praise 31 Hieron the Athenian tyrant 34 The setting of the dialogue 35 Hieron’s speech: the problems of praise 38 Simonides’ speech: the exploitation of praise 44 Xenophon’s speech: public euergetism in the Poroi 52 The Athenian’s speech: praise in Plato’s Laws 59 Cyrus the Athenian king, Xenophon the Athenian hipparch 65 Persia, Sparta, Athens 65 The technical treatises 74 Conclusion 81 Chapter two: Xenophon’s encomiastic performances 86 Cyrus and his epigones 88 Anabasis 88 Hellenica 96 In praise of Socrates 107 Apology 108 Memorabilia 112 Symposium 119 The encomium of Agesilaus 123 Genre: praise, or the absence of blame 127 Agesilaus on parade 137 Conclusion 147 vii Chapter three: Isocrates and the contexts of praise 153 The Evagoras and the Agesilaus 154 The question of priority 154 The question of risk 160 The value of statues 173 Isocrates and Xenophon 187 Conclusion 191 Chapter four: Public praise of Athenian citizens, 355/4–323/2 BCE 195 Honors for individual citizens from Conon to Phanodemus 197 Against Leptines: praise in defense of praise 207 Against Leocrates: the blame game 219 Demosthenes and Aeschines: the zero-sum game? 225 Conclusion: epitaphios as epilogos 239 Conclusion 247 Bibliography 257 viii INTRODUCTION In the beginning of his Achilleid, the Roman poet Statius conjures up an image of Thetis as a worried mother pondering where she could best conceal Achilles from the gathering of the Greek forces. As in the mythic tradition, she eventually chooses the court of Lycomedes on Scyros, but before this the poet allows his audience a glimpse at her thought process as she discards other cities and nations that would prove too threatening to her son’s life. Among these is Athens, inhabited by “the sons of Cecrops, who would goad him on with praises.”1 The Athenians would be dangerous to Achilles through feeding his desire for heroic action, prompting him to set out of his own accord for his prophesied death at Troy. From these lines it is clear that Athens had, by the Flavian period, gained a special reputation for bestowing praise.2 Furthermore, this praise is not an unalloyed good, as it involves certain tensions: Thetis imagines that Achilles would seek praise as something to be desired, while she herself fears it for this same quality. Statius was steeped in the Greek literary tradition, and particularly in the literature of fifth- and fourth-century Athens.3 While his view of Athens may have been influenced 1 Achilleid 1.202–3: laudumque daturi / Cecropidae stimulos. 2 Cf. Punica 13.484–5, where the Athenian funeral oration is included in a catalogue of exotic mortuary customs—a sentiment perhaps suggested by Demosthenes 20.141. 3 Aside from the erudition displayed by his poetry in general, Statius will have been familiar with the authors taught by his own father, whose “syllabus” is given at Silvae 5.3.146–58. Statius’ predilection for classical Athenian literature is evident particularly from the Thebaid’s use of Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles; see, e.g., Smolenaars 2008, Hulls 2014. 1 by his personal experience and the city’s historical dealings with foreign potentates in the third century BCE and later, it is chiefly from the literary material of the classical period, and especially from drama and oratory, that his impressions will have been derived.4 Nonetheless, it is striking how foreign the typical modes of praise in Statius’ own milieu would have seemed to the Athenians of the classical period: compare, for instance, Statius’ Silvae, or the proems of the Thebaid and Achilleid, or for that matter Pliny’s Panegyricus, with any of the surviving Athenian funeral orations.5 The Athenian reputation for praise stems from a tradition that predates that of the Hellenistic and Roman-period encomia for powerful rulers, and yet it also forms the foundation for these later literary manifestations of praise. Furthermore, owing to great differences in social structures across these eras, the tensions navigated by both the giver and the recipient of praise—that is, the intricate system of social risks and rewards posed by an act of laudation—were vastly different in kind. This dissertation explores the social tensions aroused by the praise of individuals prominent in the Athenian state during the decades from the end of the Peloponnesian War down to the Lamian War (404/3–323/2), and in particular the difficulty of reconciling praise of the individual with the concerns of the conceptually united Athenian 4 For Statius’ reception of Athenian oratory, see especially Thebaid 12.510, where the city of Olynthus occurs in a list of otherwise mythological characters who receive asylum at Athens, though one should note that several editors have daggered this line because of the seeming incongruity of an exemplum from history occurring in mythological epic.