Rhetoric, the art of public speaking, developed out of the polis, or more precisely the democratic polis. Public speaking was fundamental to the ideology of the emerging democracies of the fifth century, of which Athens was at the fore. Here in the Assembly, the Council or the lawcourts a citizen could address his fellow citizens and try to persuade them to follow his favoured course of action. Modern scholarship may debate the point at which rhetoric became organised and systematised but this political context was essential to its initial development.
Since antiquity the study of Greek oratory has tended to focus on the classical period of the fifth and fourth centuries. The Lives of the Ten Orators, a series of biographies wrongly attributed to Plutarch, begins with Antiphon and ends almost as a postscript with a brief life of Dinarchus, thus just edging into the third century. In between come Andocides, Lysias, Isocrates, Isaeus, Aeschines, Lycurgus, Demosthenes, and Hyperides. These ten, reproduced in a number of lists with occasional variation, formed the canon of Attic orators to be read and imitated. A substantial number of their speeches survive, the majority of which were written for delivery in the lawcourts, but they also include other genres such as some of Demosthenes’ symbouleutic speeches addressed to the Assembly.1 All this is in striking contrast to the emptiness of the three Hellenistic centuries that follow.2
In the Greek imagination it is Demosthenes and his age that embody the essence of Greek oratory, and modern scholars have followed accordingly.3 Numerous images come to mind: Demosthenes’ advocacy of the Olynthian cause in the Athenian Assembly; his impassioned speeches against Philip II of Macedon; his wearing of white to celebrate Philip’s death, even though his own daughter had only recently
Died; the longstanding and often vituperative rivalry between him and Aeschines, at times acted out in the courts before the assembled jurors of Athens; finally in 322 the execution of Hyperides and the suicide of Demosthenes after the failure of the revolt against Macedon, marking the symbolic end of the great age of Classical oratory.4 Demosthenes himself has come to represent not merely Greek oratory, but the very idea of the polis, the Greek city-state. More than a failed defence of Athens against Macedon he has represented in the eyes of many the failure of the polis against monarchic rule.5
When Demosthenes began his political career in the 350s Macedon was a relatively small kingdom in northern Greece, but by the time of his death the Macedonians under the leadership of Alexander the Great had overthrown the Persian Empire and become rulers of the Eastern Mediterranean. Alexander’s vast empire subsequently fragmented into separate kingdoms, each ruled by dynasties established by leading figures in the Macedonian military - the Antigonids in the Macedonian homeland, the Seleucids in Asia, and the Ptolemies in Egypt. This new world order brought not only Greco-Macedonian kings but also an extension of Greek culture as new Greek cities were founded and developed far from Greece itself, cities such as Alexandria in Egypt, Antioch on the Orontes and Seleuceia on the Tigris. The cultural transformation that was taking place is exemplified by the presence of the world’s largest collection of Greek books not in Athens but in the new library of Alexandria. The Hellenistic age traditionally begins with the death of Alexander in 323 and closes in 30 with the suicide of the last Hellenistic monarch, the Ptolemaic queen Cleopatra, although by then the Roman rule of the Mediterranean was long established.
The polis has often been held to have died with Demosthenes, a view that recent scholarship has shown to be untenable. Advocates of this position argue that with the rise of these kings the polis was no longer the independent entity that it had once been. It is, however, only a misplaced focus on Athens that leads anyone to suppose that independence should be treated as a defining characteristic of the polis. It is true that many cities may have found their freedom constrained by these new monarchies but many too had suffered similar restrictions when faced with the power of Athens and Sparta in earlier centuries. Attention instead needs to be directed towards the thousands of inscriptions published from the cities of the Hellenistic world that together reveal the tremendous vitality of civic life in this period.6
The Hellenistic period may be much written about as a time of systematisation and theory in rhetoric,7 but the practical side of rhetoric as a fundamental of Hellenistic politics is often neglected. This is due in part to the lack of surviving speeches and in part to a general prejudice about the ineffectiveness of the Hellenistic polis. Yet it was in the Hellenistic period that rhetoric and oratory became essential elements of any satisfactory Greek education, creating a world in which the use of rhetorical technique was widespread.8 Out of this would emerge the Roman orators trained in Hellenistic rhetoric, men such as Gaius Sempronius Gracchus and Marcus Tullius Cicero.9 It is the practical application of rhetoric that is of interest here. The present chapter explores the role of oratory in the Hellenistic context, first among cities, then in the relationship between city and king, and finally in its place in the formation of Greek identity.
World History
