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Greek Political Oratory
Anthology of the most memorable Greek oratory at the time of the rise of Sophistry and decline of the Greek city-state.
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First published January 1, 1978
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October 19, 2026
In place of a review, here is a raw fact sheet I wrote reviewing the book's introduction. If you're reading this I imagine you're not reading this for a thrilling story, but know what's below here is only a bit of what I've learned from this book, which reaches far above simply the 'history of oratory'. Peloponnesian War, rise of Macedonia, fall of Athens, etc. Excellent resource.
The Growth of Attic Oratory
The great majority of Greek speeches were none other than forensic, aiming to deem its subject among the innocent or guilty.
All known Greek oratory is Attic.
Despite cultural insistence, necessity, and practice of speaking well, Greek speeches were not written until 417 B.C., the date of Antiphon’s speech On the Murder of Herodes.
No doubt Herodotus and Thucydides, who possessed the ability of dramatic illustration, were inspirations on the Attic orators. Herodotus, originally from Harnacarnassus (modern day Bodrum, Turkey) garnered his influence by traveling around Athens and reciting his Histories.
In general, the 5th-century gave rise to the Greek realization that even prose could preserve and procure ideas such as progressions in civil rights and the pursuit of knowledge. Alongside the rise in the pursuit of knowledge came the rise of sophistry, a practice pertaining to currency exchanged for wisdom and learning, especially on rhetoric and philosophy. Of course much of their teaching on philosophy came from the pre-Socratics. The sophists’ job was to ‘stimulate and teach the art of speaking’, both on cultural subjects and as a pragmatic skill. Handbooks and the occupation and trade of logography also contributed to this rise.
Sophistry was controversial. Aristophanes, in the Clouds, claims sophistic training would ‘make the weaker argument stronger’, while Gorgias in Plato’s dialogue claims it as the ‘greatest and best of human concerns.’
Some sophists wrote handbooks on speaking well, such as Antiphon. Gorgias was influential as one of the first prominent sophists along with Protagoras, Hippias, and Prodicus, but the Attic tradition is known to have begun with the teaching and writing of Antiphon.
Antiphon got his start as a leader of the oligarchic revolt of the Four Hundred in 411, the Athenian coup d’etat by aristocrats after the disastrous Sicilian Expedition ravaged aristocratic pockets. He was the first to organize a school and write a handbook on rhetoric, as well as the first logographer, or writer of speeches. He may have taught Thucydides.
But Pericles was the first to deliver a written speech in court. He was known for his ‘lightning-speed and persuasiveness’, as claimed by poets Eupolis and Aristophanes
Lysias learned from Teisias of Syracuse before coming to Athens.
Isocrates and Demosthenes
Of the Greek oratory we have the most knowledge of, there are Ten Orators who hold the most importance in the subject: Antiphon, Andocides, Lysias, Isaeus, Aeschines, Hypereides, Lycurgus, Deinarchus, Demosthenes, and Isocrates.
Isocrates was a teacher who communicated his views through written pamphlets, but he was admittedly a sophist. However, he differed from other sophists. Instead of writing speeches for imaginary and theoretical purposes, he wrote for pragmatic and real-world situations, such as the idea of Pan-Hellenism (and his false belief in its actualization by Philip) and the general ethics of the Athenians. He discouraged impractical teachers who made large claims and harmed genuine teachers by bringing down their reputability as serious information-bearers and -transmitters, such as Plato who he claimed had a philosophy which was ‘humanly unattainable’. He was, as Saunders says, ‘no narrow partisan’ when it came to Greek politics, Isocrates desiring Athens to take the lead of a united Greece against the Achaemaenid Empire. The Panegyricus was designed with this view in mind, explaining his teaching as a means to unite Greece and educate Athenians to the good side, all towards the goal of bringing Athens back to its ‘old life and vigour’ with Philip as leader.
They're the first of the Western rhetorical blindness, a precursor to how enticing writing paired with any ideology can win over the world if given enough ears.
Demosthenes was similar in terms of desire to see Athens in the lead, but he took a much more serious approach to how Athens could revive to its previous Golden Age. He described in much of his writings the urgency of how letting Macedonia run its course would lead to the new kingdom running Athens’ course, dooming the polis if his words were not taken seriously, such as the Olynthiacs where he urges Athens to help Olynthus despite the two states’ conflicting history—soon enough, Olynthus’ falling to Philip would cement his path towards the rest of Greece. Athens knew it was too late.
Style of the Attic Orators
Style is one of the most important elements of rhetoric. Cicero had a large influence on the subject, but Aristotle was the first to systematize style with his Poetics in 335.
Oratory and Politics
The rise of oratory came with a political decline.
The Periclean age ended with the outbreak of war in 431, with Pericles himself succumbing to the Athenian plague two years later in 429. Though there were peace treaties throughout the war, it did not stop warring until the fated battle of Aegospotami in 405.
The purpose of this battle was to prevent the rise of Athenian imperialism and the adoption of Athens as the leading nation of the Greeks. Athens demonstrated its ability to expand after the victory over Persia in 479, altering the Delian League that existed solely to defeat Persia into a commercial and maritime empire aiming to expand itself as ‘leader of the Greeks’. There was a coup d’etat in 411 with Antiphon taking a leading role, but Athens did not fall until 404 with a little Persian naval assistance at Aegospotami and the installation of the Thirty Tyrants, an overwhelming taste of Sparta’s oligarchical suppression of Athenian democracy. The Thirty ended their reign after a mere eight months after leader of the exiles Thrasybulus conquered the unguarded Phylae and killed Critias in 403. Though a victory, Athens’ wealth was never to be reclaimed. That was indeed the reason Phylae was ungarrisoned in the first place.
So began Sparta’s ruling with an iron fist over all of Greece, known as the ‘liberators of Athens’ and inviting all the hatred a tyrannical oligarchy possibly could. Soon, in 395, the Corinthian War begins with the Peloponnesian League and an alliance of Athens, Argos, Corinth, Thebes, and the Achaemenid Empire amongst others. Thebes and Corinth were not paid their dues by Sparta for their assistance in the Peloponnesian War, and Athens and Argos too were extremely dissatisfied with Spartan imperial conduct over the last decade; along with this, Spartan king Agesilaus II was campaigning against the Achaemenid Empire. Although each nation had their proper disgust for the Spartan hegemony, they all tired from fighting in 387 when Persia particularly had their fill of war, agreeing to the Peace of Antalcidas which did not end Spartan hegemony.
The peace, also known as the King’s Peace, granted Athens a bit of power that it used to create the Second Athenian League in 378. It had good intentions and planned to scrub Greece of Theban hegemony, but its severe lack of funds led to its return to economic exploitation, reverting back to its imperialist ways. The subsistence on plunder spread discontent and unhappiness. A revolt came from Chios, Cos, Rhodes, and Byzantium under the tyrant Mausolus, sparking the Social War from 357-355, ending with an Athenian surrender to Persian threats. Throughout the battle, Philip took advantage of Athens’ chaotic state, and took the crucial points of Potidaea and Amphipolis. Amphipolis was excellent for its silver mines, an extremely rare metal in Greece, which funded his campaign; Potidaea gave Philip a strategic location that followed with a strategic alliance between Macedonia and Olynthus, which he later captured and kickstarted his conquest over the Aegean.
Now, in 371, Sparta holds a Greek meeting amongst poleis regarding non-aggression. Thebes signed for Boeotia to which Sparta took offense and attacked the Thebans, but under the genius of Epaminondas the Spartans were rightfully embarrassed at Leuctra. The Spartans were the liberators of Athens, but now it was Thebes’ turn to be the liberators of Sparta, which was taken on by Epaminondas for the nine years life allowed him to war against the Peloponnesian League. Out of the war came the rebuilding of the Messene and the building of Megalopolis, an important and strategic Arcadian city key to Epaminondas’ control over Spartan power.
However, Thebes fell to its own intransigence and alienated the rest of Arcadia, becoming its own tyrannical and self-serving power. Disappointed, Sparta and Athens actually teamed up against the Theban coalition along with Mantinea and Elis during the battle of Mantinea in 362. The battle was long, and both sides had much hope, but the ultimate decision was that Epaminondas’ tactical skill was too brilliant, and the Spartan alliance was once again nearly bankrupt of funds, arms, and men. Yet the same effect occurred to Thebes: exhausted of resources, Epaminondas was mortally wounded and killed in battle, robbing Thebes of the military skill necessary to maintain a quick and clever hegemony over Greece. In a twist of fate, the power vacuum left by both severely weakened alliances opened the gate to Philip II of Macedon, who saw the crumbling empires and took them for his own.
The later opponent of Thebes was Phocis. Excluding Phocis, Philip made peace with the Athenian alliance in 346 with the Peace of Philocrates, ending the Third Sacred War that began in 356. The peace began with Philip’s destruction of Phocis and ended in 340, when Demosthenes’ premonitions rose an alliance against him. Demosthenes, at this point, had begun his critique of Macedonian expansion and warnings against Philip’s imperialism since 351, when he orated his first Philippic. Two Philippics and eleven years later, sending a force against Philip was virtually unwise. Philip did indeed pass Thermopylae and overwhelm the Greek forces at Chaeronea in 338, solidifying his status as hegemon of Greece while sapping the Greek states of any real independence. For instance, Athens did not gain independence for a little over two millenniums, finally breaking free from the Ottomans in 1834. But under Philip’s rule Athens was relatively spared, Philip allowing his respect and admiration for the polis to shine through and allowing Athens to indulge in his leniency, albeit mostly as strategic leverage.
It was now that Isocrates’ wish for a united Greece under a Pan-Hellenistic rule was finally realized in the campaign of Philip, who established the League of Corinth from 338-338, united all the Greek states with the exception of Sparta, who refused to join. Philip intended this league to fight for him against the Achaemenid Empire soon after, initiating the campaign in 336 with a march onto Asia Minor. Unfortunately, in the October of that same year, Philip was stabbed in the ribs by one his bodyguards Pausanias, who supposedly stabbed the ruler in vengeance of when he was raped by the uncle of Philip’s daughter Cleopatra, Attalus. Both Philip and Pausanoius were at Cleopatra’s marriage to Alexander I of Epirus, where Philip was slain and Pausonius attempted to flee. When he did, he tripped on a vine and was then stabbed to death by Philip’s more loyal guards.
After that, the Greek states fell into the hands of Macedonia's forever, inherited by Philip’s son Alexander.
The Decline of Greece
Saunders offers four interpretations of the fall of Greece: 1) as a political failure of the polis, failing to efficiently unify and develop the politics of Greece like they did their economy; 2) a social failure, the middle class not allowing democracy to breathe and thrive as they sought to keep it exclusive; 3) a cultural failure, the identity and prosperity of Greece relying entirely on slaves and discouraging scientific progress; 4) a psychological failure, ‘a loss of confidence on the part of a world clinging onto its own past.
Greece fell into two dangerous instincts. One was the pursuit of narrow interests such as the exclusivity of democracy over wider, more general interests like fighting against oligarchical powers sooner and more seriously. The other the enjoyment of what already exists defeats any will to something greater, whether private or general. Clearly Athens was guilty of this when Demosthenes' pleas for Athens to do anything about Macedonia was answered eleven years later with disappointment. All of this political instability and complacency came from a drive to self-seeking, preferring narrower and narrower interests until their real goals could only be found in oblivion or in the hands of Philip.
Thucydides calls this ideological poison a disease, ‘stasis’, literally ‘standing still’, to which the positive side describes success in the acquisition of private aims, i.e. the domination of Sparta against Athens to prevent the rise of a democratic power, while the negative side describes the failure and abandonment of public aims, like the expansion of democracy or a timely opposing of the Macedonian powers. In Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae this is depicted with an Assembly begrudgingly takes on public affairs, or in the Clouds where Sophistic is shown as reversing the morals and reason of a civilization for better or for worse (in this depiction, it is for the worst).
As the Sophistic training seemed to oppose the tradition of Greece, wealthy and privileged citizens began to view it as opposition to conservatism. Antiphon, the first Attic orator, constructed his oratory as a means to serve the conservative tradition and to oppose the liberalism offered in Sophistic teachings. He stated civil rights laws as egregious and against nature and proposed laws should only be abided in the presence of others; when alone, the laws of nature should take over. The most prime example of his distaste towards any sort of liberalism was his planning of the 411 Athenian coup d’etat, attempting to install an oligarchy in Athens.
There are instances of genuine attempts by poleis against conservative traditions. The Olynthian Confederacy or Chalcidic Confederacy was created after Olynthus separated from tyrannical Athens in 432 after Athens began to rule the Confederacy of Delos to the dismay of the other members’ sovereignty. Located primarily in the Chalcidae province, the Confederacy was neighbors with then-struggling Macedonia, which was relatively aimless until Philip took the throne. The Confederacy was promising at first seemingly the only rival power against Macedonia to survive after the Peloponnesian War. However, in 379, two cities refused to join the Confederacy and called on Sparta to dismantle it, which it successfully weakened enough for Philip to conquer in 348. Demosthenes wrote three Olynthiacs warning Athens to save Olynthus, but Athens was eleven years late to Philip’s conquest.
The Second Athenian League (378-355) appeared to be a sincere attempt. It promised to not be infamous like its predecessor: no cleuriches, no tribute, no imperialist tendencies. It was just supposed to be against the tyrannical Sparta. However, like most things with good intentions, the league quickly fell on its promises. Athens never properly recovered financially from the previous wars, and along with the growth of other nations such as Thebes and especially Sparta it was nearly impossible for Athens to tax them without force or to cover large military campaigns against multiple rising powers. The first blow, besides from the already-decrepit economy, was when Thebes left the league in 371 to pursue its own conquest against Sparta after Theban victory in the battle of Leuctra, basically meaning Thebes wanted to pursue its own hegemony over Greece, and allying with Athens would only hinder that goal. It was then in 357 when poleis Cos, Rhodes, Chios, and Byzantium among others revolted against Athens, causing the second most decisive defeat against the league’s stability by starting the two-year long Social War, which completely dismantled Athens’ military, economy, and reputation. All this because Athens overreached its promises. Yet the final nail in the coffin came from outside Greece. In 338, the battle of Chaeronea decisively defeated the Greek forces against the superior arms and leadership of Macedon, effectively enslaving all of Greece and establishing Macedonian hegemony forever.
One league in the Peloponnese, known as the Arcadian League, was intended to defy the domination of Sparta through a unified state from its same region. But that collapsed too. Internal strife collapsed unity and garnered contempt amongst the league. Members fought on opposite sides of the Theban-Spartan War, specifically the battle of Mantinea, which pitted members against one another and failed to reunite any common sentiments or objective against either hegemony.
The instincts of the Athenian people demonstrate how feckless the effort against tyranny and for unity could be and most often was. Plato can represent these tendencies well, representing two major reactions to the loss of Athenian dominance: compulsion and withdrawal. In the Republic, Plato puts together an ideal state, a Utopia, that favors the ‘arbitrary division of classes and states’ with a clear bias towards Spartan rule and tradition. The book alone represents both compulsions greatly: withdrawal into an artificial reality to escape the present disastrous state of Athens and compulsion in the arbitrary division of classes and states which would absolutely collapse and lead to even more turmoil if put into effect. The Republic was written by Plato, who grew up as an oligarch during the Peloponnesian War, meaning he felt that his privileges and livelihood were on the receiving end of the fight against democracy. So, in all seriousness, the Republic amounts to Plato’s recluse into the ‘perfect state’, where he maintains his superior status and wealth with wretched city planning and irresponsibility to anything remotely real.
The Attic orators shaped the political sphere of Greece from the early 4th-century to the Greek demise of 338. It was mostly Isocrates’ direction which was adopted, noted by Philip himself in his plan for the Pan-Hellenic and used Philip’s ideals to pursue his domination over Greece. Demosthenes was the orator who remained largely unheard and unseen when it came to what was actually good for the Greeks, more importantly the Athenians, who fell short of his many requests when it came to warfare and alliances, such as the defense of Olynthus or the Chersonese. His wish to unify Athens against the rising power of Macedon was butted by Isocrates’ Pan-Hellenism, directly justifying the brutal force by Philip to conquer Greece to which Isocrates did not intend but could not refute. To support blindly seemed to be in the greater interests of the Greek population, with the bulk of rhetorical education and action ultimately fulfilling the acquisition of narrow, private interests rather than what would benefit the poleis with time and patience.
The Growth of Attic Oratory
The great majority of Greek speeches were none other than forensic, aiming to deem its subject among the innocent or guilty.
All known Greek oratory is Attic.
Despite cultural insistence, necessity, and practice of speaking well, Greek speeches were not written until 417 B.C., the date of Antiphon’s speech On the Murder of Herodes.
No doubt Herodotus and Thucydides, who possessed the ability of dramatic illustration, were inspirations on the Attic orators. Herodotus, originally from Harnacarnassus (modern day Bodrum, Turkey) garnered his influence by traveling around Athens and reciting his Histories.
In general, the 5th-century gave rise to the Greek realization that even prose could preserve and procure ideas such as progressions in civil rights and the pursuit of knowledge. Alongside the rise in the pursuit of knowledge came the rise of sophistry, a practice pertaining to currency exchanged for wisdom and learning, especially on rhetoric and philosophy. Of course much of their teaching on philosophy came from the pre-Socratics. The sophists’ job was to ‘stimulate and teach the art of speaking’, both on cultural subjects and as a pragmatic skill. Handbooks and the occupation and trade of logography also contributed to this rise.
Sophistry was controversial. Aristophanes, in the Clouds, claims sophistic training would ‘make the weaker argument stronger’, while Gorgias in Plato’s dialogue claims it as the ‘greatest and best of human concerns.’
Some sophists wrote handbooks on speaking well, such as Antiphon. Gorgias was influential as one of the first prominent sophists along with Protagoras, Hippias, and Prodicus, but the Attic tradition is known to have begun with the teaching and writing of Antiphon.
Antiphon got his start as a leader of the oligarchic revolt of the Four Hundred in 411, the Athenian coup d’etat by aristocrats after the disastrous Sicilian Expedition ravaged aristocratic pockets. He was the first to organize a school and write a handbook on rhetoric, as well as the first logographer, or writer of speeches. He may have taught Thucydides.
But Pericles was the first to deliver a written speech in court. He was known for his ‘lightning-speed and persuasiveness’, as claimed by poets Eupolis and Aristophanes
Lysias learned from Teisias of Syracuse before coming to Athens.
Isocrates and Demosthenes
Of the Greek oratory we have the most knowledge of, there are Ten Orators who hold the most importance in the subject: Antiphon, Andocides, Lysias, Isaeus, Aeschines, Hypereides, Lycurgus, Deinarchus, Demosthenes, and Isocrates.
Isocrates was a teacher who communicated his views through written pamphlets, but he was admittedly a sophist. However, he differed from other sophists. Instead of writing speeches for imaginary and theoretical purposes, he wrote for pragmatic and real-world situations, such as the idea of Pan-Hellenism (and his false belief in its actualization by Philip) and the general ethics of the Athenians. He discouraged impractical teachers who made large claims and harmed genuine teachers by bringing down their reputability as serious information-bearers and -transmitters, such as Plato who he claimed had a philosophy which was ‘humanly unattainable’. He was, as Saunders says, ‘no narrow partisan’ when it came to Greek politics, Isocrates desiring Athens to take the lead of a united Greece against the Achaemaenid Empire. The Panegyricus was designed with this view in mind, explaining his teaching as a means to unite Greece and educate Athenians to the good side, all towards the goal of bringing Athens back to its ‘old life and vigour’ with Philip as leader.
They're the first of the Western rhetorical blindness, a precursor to how enticing writing paired with any ideology can win over the world if given enough ears.
Demosthenes was similar in terms of desire to see Athens in the lead, but he took a much more serious approach to how Athens could revive to its previous Golden Age. He described in much of his writings the urgency of how letting Macedonia run its course would lead to the new kingdom running Athens’ course, dooming the polis if his words were not taken seriously, such as the Olynthiacs where he urges Athens to help Olynthus despite the two states’ conflicting history—soon enough, Olynthus’ falling to Philip would cement his path towards the rest of Greece. Athens knew it was too late.
Style of the Attic Orators
Style is one of the most important elements of rhetoric. Cicero had a large influence on the subject, but Aristotle was the first to systematize style with his Poetics in 335.
Oratory and Politics
The rise of oratory came with a political decline.
The Periclean age ended with the outbreak of war in 431, with Pericles himself succumbing to the Athenian plague two years later in 429. Though there were peace treaties throughout the war, it did not stop warring until the fated battle of Aegospotami in 405.
The purpose of this battle was to prevent the rise of Athenian imperialism and the adoption of Athens as the leading nation of the Greeks. Athens demonstrated its ability to expand after the victory over Persia in 479, altering the Delian League that existed solely to defeat Persia into a commercial and maritime empire aiming to expand itself as ‘leader of the Greeks’. There was a coup d’etat in 411 with Antiphon taking a leading role, but Athens did not fall until 404 with a little Persian naval assistance at Aegospotami and the installation of the Thirty Tyrants, an overwhelming taste of Sparta’s oligarchical suppression of Athenian democracy. The Thirty ended their reign after a mere eight months after leader of the exiles Thrasybulus conquered the unguarded Phylae and killed Critias in 403. Though a victory, Athens’ wealth was never to be reclaimed. That was indeed the reason Phylae was ungarrisoned in the first place.
So began Sparta’s ruling with an iron fist over all of Greece, known as the ‘liberators of Athens’ and inviting all the hatred a tyrannical oligarchy possibly could. Soon, in 395, the Corinthian War begins with the Peloponnesian League and an alliance of Athens, Argos, Corinth, Thebes, and the Achaemenid Empire amongst others. Thebes and Corinth were not paid their dues by Sparta for their assistance in the Peloponnesian War, and Athens and Argos too were extremely dissatisfied with Spartan imperial conduct over the last decade; along with this, Spartan king Agesilaus II was campaigning against the Achaemenid Empire. Although each nation had their proper disgust for the Spartan hegemony, they all tired from fighting in 387 when Persia particularly had their fill of war, agreeing to the Peace of Antalcidas which did not end Spartan hegemony.
The peace, also known as the King’s Peace, granted Athens a bit of power that it used to create the Second Athenian League in 378. It had good intentions and planned to scrub Greece of Theban hegemony, but its severe lack of funds led to its return to economic exploitation, reverting back to its imperialist ways. The subsistence on plunder spread discontent and unhappiness. A revolt came from Chios, Cos, Rhodes, and Byzantium under the tyrant Mausolus, sparking the Social War from 357-355, ending with an Athenian surrender to Persian threats. Throughout the battle, Philip took advantage of Athens’ chaotic state, and took the crucial points of Potidaea and Amphipolis. Amphipolis was excellent for its silver mines, an extremely rare metal in Greece, which funded his campaign; Potidaea gave Philip a strategic location that followed with a strategic alliance between Macedonia and Olynthus, which he later captured and kickstarted his conquest over the Aegean.
Now, in 371, Sparta holds a Greek meeting amongst poleis regarding non-aggression. Thebes signed for Boeotia to which Sparta took offense and attacked the Thebans, but under the genius of Epaminondas the Spartans were rightfully embarrassed at Leuctra. The Spartans were the liberators of Athens, but now it was Thebes’ turn to be the liberators of Sparta, which was taken on by Epaminondas for the nine years life allowed him to war against the Peloponnesian League. Out of the war came the rebuilding of the Messene and the building of Megalopolis, an important and strategic Arcadian city key to Epaminondas’ control over Spartan power.
However, Thebes fell to its own intransigence and alienated the rest of Arcadia, becoming its own tyrannical and self-serving power. Disappointed, Sparta and Athens actually teamed up against the Theban coalition along with Mantinea and Elis during the battle of Mantinea in 362. The battle was long, and both sides had much hope, but the ultimate decision was that Epaminondas’ tactical skill was too brilliant, and the Spartan alliance was once again nearly bankrupt of funds, arms, and men. Yet the same effect occurred to Thebes: exhausted of resources, Epaminondas was mortally wounded and killed in battle, robbing Thebes of the military skill necessary to maintain a quick and clever hegemony over Greece. In a twist of fate, the power vacuum left by both severely weakened alliances opened the gate to Philip II of Macedon, who saw the crumbling empires and took them for his own.
The later opponent of Thebes was Phocis. Excluding Phocis, Philip made peace with the Athenian alliance in 346 with the Peace of Philocrates, ending the Third Sacred War that began in 356. The peace began with Philip’s destruction of Phocis and ended in 340, when Demosthenes’ premonitions rose an alliance against him. Demosthenes, at this point, had begun his critique of Macedonian expansion and warnings against Philip’s imperialism since 351, when he orated his first Philippic. Two Philippics and eleven years later, sending a force against Philip was virtually unwise. Philip did indeed pass Thermopylae and overwhelm the Greek forces at Chaeronea in 338, solidifying his status as hegemon of Greece while sapping the Greek states of any real independence. For instance, Athens did not gain independence for a little over two millenniums, finally breaking free from the Ottomans in 1834. But under Philip’s rule Athens was relatively spared, Philip allowing his respect and admiration for the polis to shine through and allowing Athens to indulge in his leniency, albeit mostly as strategic leverage.
It was now that Isocrates’ wish for a united Greece under a Pan-Hellenistic rule was finally realized in the campaign of Philip, who established the League of Corinth from 338-338, united all the Greek states with the exception of Sparta, who refused to join. Philip intended this league to fight for him against the Achaemenid Empire soon after, initiating the campaign in 336 with a march onto Asia Minor. Unfortunately, in the October of that same year, Philip was stabbed in the ribs by one his bodyguards Pausanias, who supposedly stabbed the ruler in vengeance of when he was raped by the uncle of Philip’s daughter Cleopatra, Attalus. Both Philip and Pausanoius were at Cleopatra’s marriage to Alexander I of Epirus, where Philip was slain and Pausonius attempted to flee. When he did, he tripped on a vine and was then stabbed to death by Philip’s more loyal guards.
After that, the Greek states fell into the hands of Macedonia's forever, inherited by Philip’s son Alexander.
The Decline of Greece
Saunders offers four interpretations of the fall of Greece: 1) as a political failure of the polis, failing to efficiently unify and develop the politics of Greece like they did their economy; 2) a social failure, the middle class not allowing democracy to breathe and thrive as they sought to keep it exclusive; 3) a cultural failure, the identity and prosperity of Greece relying entirely on slaves and discouraging scientific progress; 4) a psychological failure, ‘a loss of confidence on the part of a world clinging onto its own past.
Greece fell into two dangerous instincts. One was the pursuit of narrow interests such as the exclusivity of democracy over wider, more general interests like fighting against oligarchical powers sooner and more seriously. The other the enjoyment of what already exists defeats any will to something greater, whether private or general. Clearly Athens was guilty of this when Demosthenes' pleas for Athens to do anything about Macedonia was answered eleven years later with disappointment. All of this political instability and complacency came from a drive to self-seeking, preferring narrower and narrower interests until their real goals could only be found in oblivion or in the hands of Philip.
Thucydides calls this ideological poison a disease, ‘stasis’, literally ‘standing still’, to which the positive side describes success in the acquisition of private aims, i.e. the domination of Sparta against Athens to prevent the rise of a democratic power, while the negative side describes the failure and abandonment of public aims, like the expansion of democracy or a timely opposing of the Macedonian powers. In Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae this is depicted with an Assembly begrudgingly takes on public affairs, or in the Clouds where Sophistic is shown as reversing the morals and reason of a civilization for better or for worse (in this depiction, it is for the worst).
As the Sophistic training seemed to oppose the tradition of Greece, wealthy and privileged citizens began to view it as opposition to conservatism. Antiphon, the first Attic orator, constructed his oratory as a means to serve the conservative tradition and to oppose the liberalism offered in Sophistic teachings. He stated civil rights laws as egregious and against nature and proposed laws should only be abided in the presence of others; when alone, the laws of nature should take over. The most prime example of his distaste towards any sort of liberalism was his planning of the 411 Athenian coup d’etat, attempting to install an oligarchy in Athens.
There are instances of genuine attempts by poleis against conservative traditions. The Olynthian Confederacy or Chalcidic Confederacy was created after Olynthus separated from tyrannical Athens in 432 after Athens began to rule the Confederacy of Delos to the dismay of the other members’ sovereignty. Located primarily in the Chalcidae province, the Confederacy was neighbors with then-struggling Macedonia, which was relatively aimless until Philip took the throne. The Confederacy was promising at first seemingly the only rival power against Macedonia to survive after the Peloponnesian War. However, in 379, two cities refused to join the Confederacy and called on Sparta to dismantle it, which it successfully weakened enough for Philip to conquer in 348. Demosthenes wrote three Olynthiacs warning Athens to save Olynthus, but Athens was eleven years late to Philip’s conquest.
The Second Athenian League (378-355) appeared to be a sincere attempt. It promised to not be infamous like its predecessor: no cleuriches, no tribute, no imperialist tendencies. It was just supposed to be against the tyrannical Sparta. However, like most things with good intentions, the league quickly fell on its promises. Athens never properly recovered financially from the previous wars, and along with the growth of other nations such as Thebes and especially Sparta it was nearly impossible for Athens to tax them without force or to cover large military campaigns against multiple rising powers. The first blow, besides from the already-decrepit economy, was when Thebes left the league in 371 to pursue its own conquest against Sparta after Theban victory in the battle of Leuctra, basically meaning Thebes wanted to pursue its own hegemony over Greece, and allying with Athens would only hinder that goal. It was then in 357 when poleis Cos, Rhodes, Chios, and Byzantium among others revolted against Athens, causing the second most decisive defeat against the league’s stability by starting the two-year long Social War, which completely dismantled Athens’ military, economy, and reputation. All this because Athens overreached its promises. Yet the final nail in the coffin came from outside Greece. In 338, the battle of Chaeronea decisively defeated the Greek forces against the superior arms and leadership of Macedon, effectively enslaving all of Greece and establishing Macedonian hegemony forever.
One league in the Peloponnese, known as the Arcadian League, was intended to defy the domination of Sparta through a unified state from its same region. But that collapsed too. Internal strife collapsed unity and garnered contempt amongst the league. Members fought on opposite sides of the Theban-Spartan War, specifically the battle of Mantinea, which pitted members against one another and failed to reunite any common sentiments or objective against either hegemony.
The instincts of the Athenian people demonstrate how feckless the effort against tyranny and for unity could be and most often was. Plato can represent these tendencies well, representing two major reactions to the loss of Athenian dominance: compulsion and withdrawal. In the Republic, Plato puts together an ideal state, a Utopia, that favors the ‘arbitrary division of classes and states’ with a clear bias towards Spartan rule and tradition. The book alone represents both compulsions greatly: withdrawal into an artificial reality to escape the present disastrous state of Athens and compulsion in the arbitrary division of classes and states which would absolutely collapse and lead to even more turmoil if put into effect. The Republic was written by Plato, who grew up as an oligarch during the Peloponnesian War, meaning he felt that his privileges and livelihood were on the receiving end of the fight against democracy. So, in all seriousness, the Republic amounts to Plato’s recluse into the ‘perfect state’, where he maintains his superior status and wealth with wretched city planning and irresponsibility to anything remotely real.
The Attic orators shaped the political sphere of Greece from the early 4th-century to the Greek demise of 338. It was mostly Isocrates’ direction which was adopted, noted by Philip himself in his plan for the Pan-Hellenic and used Philip’s ideals to pursue his domination over Greece. Demosthenes was the orator who remained largely unheard and unseen when it came to what was actually good for the Greeks, more importantly the Athenians, who fell short of his many requests when it came to warfare and alliances, such as the defense of Olynthus or the Chersonese. His wish to unify Athens against the rising power of Macedon was butted by Isocrates’ Pan-Hellenism, directly justifying the brutal force by Philip to conquer Greece to which Isocrates did not intend but could not refute. To support blindly seemed to be in the greater interests of the Greek population, with the bulk of rhetorical education and action ultimately fulfilling the acquisition of narrow, private interests rather than what would benefit the poleis with time and patience.
September 29, 2021
This volume could round out a trilogy with similar Pre-Socratic and Sophist anthologies; we would see both an intellectual and historical progression there, from metaphysical ritual society to a very intelligible political society. Any reader primed with Thucydides' or Plato's skepticism about the genuineness of Athenian politics will take these writers for what they are, falling variously between demagoguery and ignorance. Included are Pericles' funeral oration (ie Thucydides), legal speeches by Andocides and Lysias, a few written pamphlets by Isocrates, and a lengthy collection of Demosthenes speeches on the topic of Philip and the Macedonian threat.
The Pericles oration is always good but naturally is quite misleading taken out of the context of Thucydides' history, where the exact tension between the Athenian liberalism and the harsher realities is made much more clear. Andocides and Lysias give speeches more interesting for their exposition of historical situations (Alcibiades and the Thirty, respectively) than for their generally vacant logical content, being essentially easy legal defenses against fairly conspicuous prosecutors; they are also interesting for expanding on Platonic nuances, illustrating political situations that Plato riffs on, especially with Lysias who is mentioned often in Phaedrus and who also is brother to Cephalus of Republic. Isocrates, Plato's great rival, appears here as if to confirm all the stereotypes about the generation trained by Gorgias and Protagoras: His speeches abound with fluffy assertions about Athens' greatness, dubious invocation of mythology, and misaligned arguments that provide no actual logical impetus.
Demosthenes is a more interesting figure; he appears the generation after Plato/Xenophon/Isocrates, and is perhaps the last notable Athenian figure before the rise of Alexander the Great. His speeches are much more hard-minded and direct than any of his predecessors, and he perhaps seems right in comparing himself to Nicias and Pericles- each of his speeches present, essentially, what we would now call a 'Realist' approach to international relations, and in speech after speech he very sensibly begins by outlining the reality of the situation, combined with evidence both external and logical, and then concretely demands practical action. Apparently the nervous and pusillanimous epoch in Athens refused mostly to listen to his imperatives, despite his very typical liberal-savior Athens rhetoric, and put very few of his suggestions into action; hence leading to the downfall of Athens & indeed all Greece. Given that his voice and oratorical strategies are a very perennial form of political sensibility in times of urgency, he comes off like a Cassandra figure, which, like Thucydides' depictions of sensible voices being ignored, makes for entertaining and semi-upsetting political reading
The Pericles oration is always good but naturally is quite misleading taken out of the context of Thucydides' history, where the exact tension between the Athenian liberalism and the harsher realities is made much more clear. Andocides and Lysias give speeches more interesting for their exposition of historical situations (Alcibiades and the Thirty, respectively) than for their generally vacant logical content, being essentially easy legal defenses against fairly conspicuous prosecutors; they are also interesting for expanding on Platonic nuances, illustrating political situations that Plato riffs on, especially with Lysias who is mentioned often in Phaedrus and who also is brother to Cephalus of Republic. Isocrates, Plato's great rival, appears here as if to confirm all the stereotypes about the generation trained by Gorgias and Protagoras: His speeches abound with fluffy assertions about Athens' greatness, dubious invocation of mythology, and misaligned arguments that provide no actual logical impetus.
Demosthenes is a more interesting figure; he appears the generation after Plato/Xenophon/Isocrates, and is perhaps the last notable Athenian figure before the rise of Alexander the Great. His speeches are much more hard-minded and direct than any of his predecessors, and he perhaps seems right in comparing himself to Nicias and Pericles- each of his speeches present, essentially, what we would now call a 'Realist' approach to international relations, and in speech after speech he very sensibly begins by outlining the reality of the situation, combined with evidence both external and logical, and then concretely demands practical action. Apparently the nervous and pusillanimous epoch in Athens refused mostly to listen to his imperatives, despite his very typical liberal-savior Athens rhetoric, and put very few of his suggestions into action; hence leading to the downfall of Athens & indeed all Greece. Given that his voice and oratorical strategies are a very perennial form of political sensibility in times of urgency, he comes off like a Cassandra figure, which, like Thucydides' depictions of sensible voices being ignored, makes for entertaining and semi-upsetting political reading
January 23, 2008
had me at ho
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