Inscribed Athenian Laws And Decrees In The Age Of Demosthenes

This volume collects twelve historical papers, some published here for the first time, in which Stephen Lambert explores the implications of the inscribed Athenian laws and decrees for the history of Athens in the age of Demosthenes.

This volume collects twelve historical papers, some published here for the first time, in which Stephen Lambert explores the implications of the inscribed Athenian laws and decrees for the history of Athens in the age of Demosthenes.

This book collects eighteen papers which make original contributions to the study of the inscribed laws and decrees of the city of Athens, 352/1-322/1 BC, the most richly documented period of the city's history. Originally published in academic journals, conference proceedings and Festschriften between 2000 and 2010, they lay groundwork for the author’s new edition of these inscriptions, IG II3 Part 1, fascicule 2. The papers, which are based on fresh comprehensive autopsy of the stones and study of squeezes, photographs and early transcripts, report important epigraphical findings (e.g. new readings, restorations, joins and datings), and include studies of onomastics and of the chronology and the history of the period.

Despite the significance of its contents, the so-called Demades papyrus (P.Berol. inv. 13045) has received scarce scholarly attention since the 1923 editio princeps by Karl Kunst. This unique late second-century BCE document of almost 430 lines was found in the Egyptian chora, but it is supposed to have been written in Alexandria, where it probably served as a textbook for the highest level of rhetorical education. Besides shedding new light on its find circumstances and physical aspects, the volume offers a full re-edition and commentary of the two adespota texts contained in it, namely a eulogy of the Lagid monarchy and a historical work consisting of a dialogue between Demades and his prosecutor in the trial of 319 BCE at the court of Pella. The aim of the accompanying introduction is to address the question of the origin, nature and purpose of such fragments and of the collection itself, as well as to show to what extent the papyrus contributes to a better understanding of some of the main historical events of the early Hellenistic period. This book is thus meant to fill a significant gap in Classical scholarship, all the more so as a close investigation of most of the topics dealt with therein has hitherto been lacking.

The political system of Athens experienced a rebalancing in the period between 404 and 307, which cannot be adequately captured with the keywords “decline” or “crisis”. The comprehensive analysis of Athens' public finances opens up a new approach to this hinge period between classical and Hellenism and explains the evident change in the political order through the gradual and consensual transformation of the broad-based deliberative democracy into one led from above, but through the attribution of competencies and moral-political trust Consent democracy carried into the ruling elite. Thus an adaptable mechanism had been created, as it was then to prevail in many places in Hellenism and which was constitutive for it.

In democratic Athens, mass citizen audiences - whether in the lawcourts, or in the political Assembly and Council, or when gathered for formal civic occasions - frequently heard politicians and litigants discussing the city's past, and manipulating it for persuasive ends. The Rhetoric of the Past in Demosthenes and Aeschines explores how these dynamics worked in practice, taking two prominent mid-fourth-century politicians (and bitter adversaries) as focal points. While most recent scholarly treatments of how the Athenians recalled their past concentrate on collective processes, this work looks instead at the rhetorical strategies devised by individual orators, examining what it meant for Demosthenes or Aeschines to present particular 'historical' examples, arguments, and illustrations in particular contexts. It argues that discussing the Athenian past - and therefore discussing a core aspect of Athenian identity itself - offered Demosthenes and Aeschines, among others, an effective and versatile means both of building and highlighting their own credibility, authority, and commitment to the democracy and its values, and of competing with their rivals, whose own versions and handling of the past they could challenge and undermine as a symbolic attack on those rivals' wider competence. Recourse to versions of the past also offered orators a way of reflecting on a troubled contemporary geopolitical landscape in which Athens first confronted the enterprising Philip II of Macedon and then coped with Macedonian hegemony. The work covers the full range of Demosthenes' and Aeschines' surviving public speeches, and the extended opening chapter includes synoptic surveys of key individual topics which feed into the main discussion.

This book is a comprehensive introduction to ancient Athens, its topography, monuments, inhabitants, cultural institutions, religious rituals, and politics. Drawing from the newest scholarship on the city, this volume examines how the city was planned, how it functioned, and how it was transformed from a democratic polis into a Roman urbs.

Focusing on extant speeches from the Athenian Assembly, law, and Council in the fifth–fourth centuries BCE, these essays explore how speakers constructed or deconstructed identities for themselves and their opponents as part of a rhetorical strategy designed to persuade or manipulate the audience. According to the needs of the occasion, speakers could identify the Athenian people either as a unified demos or as a collection of sub-groups, and they could exploit either differences or similarities between Athenians and other Greeks, and between Greeks and ‘barbarians’. Names and naming strategies were an essential tool in the (de)construction of individuals’ identities, while the Athenians’ civic identity could be constructed in terms of honour(s), ethnicity, socio-economic status, or religion. Within the forensic setting, the physical location and procedural conventions of an Athenian trial could shape the identities of its participants in a unique if transient way. The Making of Identities in Athenian Oratory is an insightful look at this understudied aspect of Athenian oratory and will be of interest to anyone working on the speeches themselves, identity in ancient Greece, or ancient oratory and rhetoric more broadly.