Edward M. Harris and Alberto Esu, eds., Keeping to the Point in Athenian Forensic Oratory: Law, Character and Rhetoric (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025). 9781399523899.
Reviewed by Sidney Kochman, Independent Scholar, sidneykochman@gmail.com
This edited volume is one of the newest additions to Edinburgh University Press’s series New Approaches to Ancient Greek Institutional History. With this book, the editors set out to contribute to a growing body of work that “reconcile the alleged opposition between rhetoric in court and the central role of law, institutions, and written documents in defining relevance in Athenian litigation” (p. 3). They contrast this reconciliation with the more common approach to the Athenian forensic corpus that identifies a tension between rhetoric and legal analysis. They seek to prove that this tension does not exist by showing that many of the arguments and narratives that have been broadly considered extralegal—that is, irrelevant to the legal argument being made, but not the rhetorical one—are, in fact, legally relevant. In effect, this goal entails two projects: the first is to prove that treating all arguments as if they are legally relevant accurately describes Athenian legal practice, and the second is to demonstrate that doing so produces novel, informative readings of the corpus. Although I do not believe that the book succeeds at the former, I think that it does enough of the latter to constitute a worthwhile contribution to the field of Athenian forensic scholarship.
The methodological approach that is used to demonstrate legal relevance throughout this book rests on two connected bases. The first is the New Institutionalist framework of the series as a whole, which views the actions of individuals— litigants—to be shaped by the formal restrictions of the institutions in which they are acting—the Athenian courtroom. In the context of this volume, this framework means that relevance is not an intrinsic quality, but rather one that can only be defined by institutional norms. These institutional norms are defined by the second theoretical basis of this book—Edward Harris’s understanding of the role that the complaint plays in shaping the Athenian trial, which he first laid out in 2013. He takes the position that the plaint, which had to be filed with the magistrate before a trial could proceed, played the defining role in determining the nature of the arguments that a litigant could present and ultimately the legal framework behind the verdict. An argument or narrative is relevant, within this framework, if it supports or responds to the legal claim contained in the plaint. This definition differs from the more common understanding that only arguments that concern the law governing the trial are relevant, while all other arguments (e.g. character evidence), regardless of how persuasive they may have been to the jury, were extralegal.
I do not find Harris’s understanding of the role that the plaint plays in Athenian courts to be convincing for reasons that can be found in Adriaan Lanni’s 2018 article on the topic. Despite my skepticism of this key component of the methodological basis of this book, I believe that the true test of any approach to literature is whether it generates novel and informative readings of the corpus. Regardless of whether all (or even the majority) of arguments in the forensic corpus are strictly relevant, some of them definitely are, and approaching a speech from a position of assuming that its contents are closely connected to the legal issue can be informative. Eight of the ten articles in this book demonstrate this approach by applying it to individual speeches to see what new insights assuming relevance can generate. The remaining two papers each cover a group of speeches by a single ancient author that all share a topic–public scrutinies by Lysias and inheritance disputes by Isaeus. While all of the contributions showcase the methodology the editors espouse, they do not, on the whole, present a strong case that this approach to relevance should supersede all others. To avoid merely presenting a cursory summary of all the articles in the book, I will show the types of questions that I believe this approach is best suited to answering by highlighting four papers that provide the best examples of its productivity.
In his chapter, “Institutions, Character and Relevance: Keeping to the Point in Dokimasiai,” Peter A. O’Connell addresses the question of what it means to “keep to the point” in a case where there is no charge per se. Dokimasiai were scrutinies that public officials had to undergo in order to demonstrate their eligibility to hold office. O’Connell examines four speeches written by Lysias for dokimasiai, and by treating all of the elements in them as relevant to the legal issue, he builds a compelling argument that the primary concern for all dokimasiai is suitability. With this understanding of the procedure, the narratives, character portraits, and moralizing contained in these speeches can all be seen to work towards the goal of demonstrating that the candidate’s character was one that was well (or ill) fit for the job for which they were being considered.
Matteo Barbato’s contribution, “Gossip, Morals and Poetry: Legal Relevance in Aeschines’ Against Timarchus,” argues that the narratives contained in this speech should be considered legally relevant to the charges. This speech comes from a dokimasia rhētorōn—scrutiny for public speakers—and is known for its long, gossip-filled narrative about Timarchus’s early life allegedly spent squandering his inheritance and prostituting himself to various men. Barbato’s argument addresses two problems that face the reader of the speech. The first is that it is unclear whether the dokimasia rhētorōn, a procedure for examining the qualifications of someone to address the assembly, even existed distinct from the more general dokimasia. The second problem is that the narrative, with its lengthy digressions about Timarchus’s sexual history, has often been read as a prime example of the loose standards of relevance in Athenian courts. Starting from the presumption that the narratives contained in the speech should be relevant to the legal issue under dispute, Barbato constructs a very convincing case for both the existence of and reason for the dokimasia rhētorōn. Having established the logic under which this procedure was probably instituted, he uses that logic to demonstrate the legal relevance of the character assassination that constitutes the bulk of the speech.
Harris’s own contribution to this book, “The Legal Charge in Demosthenes’ Against Meidias,” provides an example of an entirely different sort of question that this approach is well suited to answer. In this article, he addresses the question of what charge Demosthenes brought against Meidias in his speech by that name. With this chapter, Harris is trying to end a long-standing debate about whether this speech was delivered in a trial resulting from a probolē (a preliminary accusation delivered before the council instead of a court room) or from a graphē hybreōs (A public prosecution for outrage). By treating the case that Demosthenes presents as if all its elements are related to proving the charge, Harris shows that, not only is a graphē hybreōs the more likely procedure, but also that this speech is a notably informative source for the elements that define the charge of hybris. The argument that Demosthenes’ speech contains more relevant argumentation when viewed as advancing a charge of hybris stands alone as a strong example of the book’s methodology in action. This example is not purely a positive one given that the twelve pages that Harris spends relitigating 35 years of disagreements with D. M. MacDowell about this speech could only be deemed necessary under an overly expansive and idiosyncratic definition of relevance.
Rebecca Van Hove also uses the relevance-first approach to great effect in her paper “Trial and Error: Impiety and Legal Relevance in Andocides’ On the Mysteries.” Much like Harris, she is applying the approach in order to clarify the procedure under which Andocides had been charged. A great deal of uncertainty about this question exists due, in no small part, to the substantial role that discourse about impiety plays in the speech. In her article, Van Hove defines the procedure employed—endeixis—as one that is used to charge anyone who is currently “enjoying a right they were not entitled to” (p. 189). The prosecution claimed that Andocides enjoyed a right he was not entitled to because people who had been convicted of impiety were banned from the Mysteries by the decree of Isotimides. Impiety is at issue in the trial not because the charge was impiety, but rather because if Andocides could prove that he had never been impious, then he would not be subject to the decree. This shows how a discussion of an unrelated law can still be legally relevant in a trial.
As should be clear from these four papers, the approach advocated in this book can be productive. As can be seen from Harris’s and Van Hove’s papers, when there is ambiguity about the procedure employed in a particular case, this approach provides an excellent heuristic for assessing the evidence contained in the speech. It is also apparent from Barbato’s and O’Connell’s contributions that this approach is also invaluable when it comes to interrogating the nature and limits of a particular procedure. Where this book falters is not in the approach that it presents, but rather in how far the editors of this volume and series suggest it ought to be taken. In series editor Mirko Canevaro’s conclusion, “Some Rules of Thumb in the Study of Athenian Forensic Oratory,” he makes it clear that he does not want this book to be seen as presenting a productive approach to the Athenian forensic oratorical corpus, but rather the approach for all future work. In doing so, he overstates the case made by this book. As an example of just how much he overstates the case, in regards to two different types of irrelevant arguments, he claims that “this volume shows that such arguments are never found in Attic oratory” (pp. 253, 255). Such a demonstration of absence is outside the scope of this volume, however, whose editors claim in the introduction to be presenting a discussion of relevance in court “without aiming to be a comprehensive discussion of all legal evidence and arguments in Athenian forensic oratory” (p. 12).
This book will not persuade any skeptics to adopt Harris’s understanding of the role of the plaint in limiting the scope of a forensic oration. Nor does it provide the rules of thumb that should govern all future scholarship on the corpus. Despite my skepticism of the theoretical grounding for the approach and my misgivings about how broadly the editors think their conclusions ought to be applied, the approach advocated in the book is manifestly productive of illuminating readings of Athenian forensic speeches. It provides a useful heuristic for determining the procedure employed where that is unclear, and a productive way to interrogate the limits of a procedure where it is obscure. This book may not represent the final word on how to analyse the relevance of an argument or narrative in a forensic oration, but it does constitute a substantial contribution to the conversation.
Table of Contents
Introduction / Alberto Esu and Edward M. Harris (1–23)
Part I. Keeping to the Point in Major Public Procedures
1. The Rhetoric of the Graphē Paranomōn in the Trial on the Crown / Guy Westwood (27–53)
2. Law, Office and Honour: Legal Relevance and Forensic Arguments in Demosthenes’ Against Androtion / Alberto Esu (54–79)
3. Gossip, Morals and Poetry: Legal Relevance in Aeschines’ Against Timarchus / Matteo Barbato (80–100)
4. How Does Lycurgus Keep to His Point? Legal and Rhetorical Relevance in Against Leocrates / Jakub Filonik (101–19)
5. Institutions, Character and Relevance: Keeping to the Point in Dokimasiai / Peter A. O’Connell (120–45)
Part II. Keeping to the Point on Hybris, Violence and Disenfranchisement
6. The Legal Charge in Demosthenes’ Against Meidias / Edward M. Harris (149–70)
7. Did Ariston Keep to the Point? Dikē Aikeias and Graphē Hybreōs in Demosthenes’ Against Conon / Linda Rocchi (171–83)
8. Trial and Error: Impiety and Legal Relevance in Andocides’ On the Mysteries / Rebecca Van Hove (184–206)
Part III. Keeping to the Point on Inheritance and Damages
9. Character Evidence in Isaeus’ Speeches from Inheritance Disputes / Brenda Griffith-Williams (209–31)
10. Against Timotheus: Keeping to the Point in a Suit for Damage / Giacinto Falco (232–51)
Conclusion: Some Rules of Thumb in the Study of Athenian Forensic Oratory / Mirko Canevaro (252–58)
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