The Orators and Their Treatment of the Recent Past

Aggelos Kapellos

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9783111536682
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110791969
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume focuses on the representation of the recent past in classical Athenian oratory and investigates the ability of the orators to interpret it according to their interests; the inability of the Athenians to make an objective assessment of it; and the unwillingness of the citizens to hear the truth, make self-criticism and take responsibility for bad results. Twenty-eight scholars have written chapters to this end, dealing with a wide range of themes, in terms both of contents and of chronology, from the fifth to the fourth century B.C. Each contributor has written a chapter that analyzes one or more historical events mentioned or alluded in the corpus of the Attic orators and covers the three species of Attic oratory. Chapters that treat other issues collectively are also included. The common feature of each contribution is an outline of the recent events that took place and influenced the citizens and/or the city of Athens and its juxtaposition with their rhetorical treatment by the orators either by comparing the rhetorical texts with the historical sources and/or by examining the rhetorical means through which the speakers model the recent past. This book aims at advanced students and professional scholars. This volume focuses on the representation of the recent past in classical Athenian oratory and investigates: the ability of the orators to interpret it according to their interests; the inability of the Athenians to make an objective assessment of persons and events of the recent past and their unwillingness to hear the truth, make self-criticism and take responsibility for bad results.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• The Orators and their Treatment of the Recent Past: Introduction
• Methodical Remarks on the ‘Truthfulness’ of Oratorical Narrative
• Antiphon and the Recent Past
• [Lysias], 20 for Polystratus: Polystratus and the Coup of 411 B.C.
• Andocides, the Spartans, and the Thirty
• Recent Events in Assembly Speeches and [Andocides] On the Peace
• Lysias’ Against the Subversion of the Ancestral Constitution of Athens: A Past not to be Forgotten
• The Athenian Civil War according to Lysias’ Funeral Oration
• Lysias’ Speech 14 and the Use of the Recent Past for Political Purposes
• Plato’s Menexenus on the Sea Battle-trial of Arginousai and the Battle of Aegospotami
• Isocrates and the Peloponnesian War
• Back to the Future: Temporal Adjustments in Isocrates
• The Recent Past in Isaeus’ Forensic Speeches
• The Forensic Time Machine: Play on Times in Apollodorus’ Against Timotheus
• Family Portraits in Demosthenes’ Inheritance Speeches: Between Rhetoric & History
• Reusing Invective: Demosthenes on Androtion’s Past
• A Tale of Two Sea-battles: Demosthenes’ Praise of Chabrias in the Speech Against Leptines
• The Rhetoric of Deflection: Demosthenes’s Funeral Oration as Propaganda
• Demosthenes, between Fake News and Alternative Facts
• Facts, Time, and Imagination in Demosthenes and Aeschines
• Peace and War with Philip: Aeschines’ Against Ctesiphon on the Recent Past
• Lycurgus and the Past
• Remembering Chaeronea in Hyperides
• Hyperides, Diondas, and the First Ascendancy of Demades
• Hegesippus and his Treatment of the Recent Past
• Dinarchus, the ‘Recent’ and the ‘Very Recent’ Past: Lessons from Aeschines, Demosthenes and Lycurgus?
• Remembering Injustice as the Perpetrator? Athenian Orators, Cultural Memory, and the Athenian Conquest of Samos
• State Inscriptions from the Recent Past in the Attic Orators
• The Rhetoric to Alexander and its Political and Historical Context: The Mystery of a (Quasi-) Occultation
• List of Contributors
• General Index
• Index of Passages