Homework:
Hansen: 1-85Case Assignment: Demosthenes 22, Against Androtion (27 pages)
Background on the case:
Demosthenes 22: Against Androtion, was composed in 355 BCE. It is the earliest forensic speech of Dem on public question.
During the Social War, Androtion (a politician of 30 years standing) had presided over a commisions for collecting arrears of taxes (eÞsofora¤). Among other things, he melted down golden crowns that had been given as gifts by Athenian allies in order to replenish the treasury. The case arose because the Council of the year 356-55 had failed (because one of its members had defalcated) to provide new triremes. Typically, the first thing a new Council did was propose that the Assembly pass a decree honoring the outgoing Council for its hard work. But, by law, a Council that had failed to fulfil its customary duties could not be complimented by decree. Androiton arranged to have the decree proposed directly from the floor of the Assembly (i.e., without the new Council having to put the honorific decree on the agenda). Euctemon and Diodorus, personal enemies of Androiton, immediately sued him, on a graphe paranomon. Demosthenes was the logographer for Diodorus, who spoke after Euctemon. It appears that Euctemon and Diodorus were successful because Androtion spent the years 350-340 in exile in Megara, where he took up writing the history of Attica [the region of Greece in which Athens is located] (an 8 volume work titled Atthis). His work was very influential, but much of it has been lost. His dates are 410-340.
Background on Demosthenes (384-322)
Demosthenes' father died when he was seven, leaving management of his estate to his brothers and a friend, who mismanaged the business. Demosthenes claimed his patrimony on reaching manhood at 18 (366), but his guardians shilly-shallied, trying to work out a compromise. While the parties talked, Demosthenes studied rhetoric with Isaeus and at the age of 21 (363), he sued his guardians (and won), but it took another two years for him to collect what was left of his inheritance. He employed himslef as a logographer. He did well enough that by 355/4 (29 yrs old) he was able to enter political life himself. He wrote Against Androiton (355) and Against Timocrates (353) for Diodorus to deliver. He personally delivered the speech Against Leptines in 355. It is hard in these early speeches to understand the politics which motivated them. One possibility is that Androiton, Timocrates and Leptines were associated with the politician Aristophon who was urging Athens to take up war against Persia. Demosthenes was opposed to war on the grounds that Athens was not properly prepared (and in 354 gave a speech in the Assembly to that effect), as was Eubolus, one of the leading politicians of the day.
By 353, however, Dem was attacking Eubulus. How much this was philosophical disagreement and how much this was the Athenian political system which required young turks to attack established leaders in order to draw attention to themselves is not clear. Eubolus had come to prominence because of his success as Commission of the Theoric fund. The Theoric Fund was started by Pericles to pay for the cost of poor citizens to attend theatre performances and developed into a kind of social welfare fund. During the 4th century all excess state funds had to be paid into the theoric fund (except in time of war). Thus whoever was Commissioner of the Theoric Fund controlled all discretionary spending at Athens.
Eubulus came to control all of Athenian finances, which were in a mess after the Social War (the succesful rebellion of Athenian colonies Rhodes, Cos and Chios in 357-355 BCE) and lengthy struggles in the previous generation to recover control of regions Athens had lost in battle. He was very successful and took Athens from a state of near bankruptcy to an economic vitality she had not enjoyed since the days of Pericles. In foreign policy, he wanted Athens to limit its expensive imperialst quests and devote its military to the immediate and obvious vital interests of Athens and Greece. When Eubulus said Greece he specifically excluded Philip of Macedon (ruled, 359-336). And indeed, you could describe his foreign policy as an effort to unite all Greeks in opposition to Macedon. Meidias, Aeschines and Phocion were his allies in the Assembly.
The rationale of Demosthenes own foreign policy is more difficult to determine early in his career. He was quite warlike against Philip and complained that Eubolus was too timid. However, he defended Philocrates when that politician was sued for proposing peace with Philip and Demosthenes, himself, (along with Philocrates) was a member of the Athenian embassy to the Macedonian court which negotiated the peace of 346 between Philip and the Greeks. Eubulus' ally, Aeschines, was a member of this embassy as well and the two men developed a personal loathing of each other that is difficult to fathom. For the rest of their careers Demosthenes and Aeschines would take any opportunity they could (regardless of the effort's relationship to the larger political questions at Athens) to attack each other. While the diplomats were negotiating, Philip successfully attacked another Greek city, Phocis.
From then on, Demosthenes was an opponent of peace with the Macedonians, but it took several years for him to earn the support of the Athenian Assembly. By 342, however, Demosthenes was the leader of a war party, and had replaced Eubulus as the leading figure in Athenian politics. Philip meanwhile, was busy trying to peel Greek cities away from the alliances that Athens had forged in opposition to him. Demosthenes actively resisted his efforts, visiting the Greek cities as an ambassador, and delivering speeches against Philip in the Assembly (the Philipics). Philip decided on direct intervention in Greek affairs. Demosthenes responsed by backing alliances with Thebes, and Persia and Byzantium. Greek and Macedonian forces fought at Chaeronea in 338 and Philip won, establishing a permanent presence on the Greek mainland. [Philip, it should be noted, was a military genius who really developed the art of siegecraft and invented the phalanx.] Demades, an Athenian politican in the pay of the Macedonians, and hence a proponent of a much more conciliatory foreign policy than Demosthenes, was instrumental in working out the terms of the peace between Athens and Macedon.
Demosthenes continued to lead Athens after the defeat at Chaeronea, successfully defending himself against numerous lawsuits, spearhead by Aeschines. Upon Philip's death in 336, Demosthenes and the Athenians hoped that foreign affairs would calm down (especially since Alexander [356-323] was so young). Instead, Philip's son proved an even greater general than Philip (perhaps because his tutor was Aristotle?) and foreign affairs heated up. Alexander wanted to defeat Persia and looked upon Athens and the Greeks as a minor irritant that had to be resolved to ensure that his rear flank would not be troubled when he went overseas. Demosthenes conversely put all his hopes in Persia, which subjected him to frequent charges of taking bribes from the Persians. By 334, the Greeks having been cowed into accepting Alexander's position as the dominant power in Greece, Alexander left for the east. By 330 he had crushed Persia. Aeschines immediately sued Demosthenes, but lost badly and was force into exile. Under Demosthenes, the Athenians, like most Greeks, adopted a policy which consisted of deferring to Alexander in all foreign policy questions, and running their own city-states as they pleased. This worked until 324 when Alexander ordered Greek cities to accept the return of their exiles.
Greek opposition to this order resulted in the Lamian War, which in 322 resulted in Macedonia's absolute defeat of the Greeks. Before that happened, however, Alexander's childhood friend, Harpalus, to whom Alexander had entrusted the treasury of Babylon despite his record of defalcation and extravagance, appeared in Athens with a fair amount of loot. Demosthenes proposed that Harpalus be kept a prison and that his money be stored in the Athenian Acropolis. When a sizeable portion of it was found to have gone missing, Demosthenes invited the Areopagus investigate the matter. The Areopagus decided that Demosthenes had appropriated 20 talents and fined him 50 talents. Harpalus skipped town for Crete (but was killed there by one of his own men). Demosthenes went into exile, lending behind the scenes support to Hyperides, who became the leading statesman of the Assembly in Demosthenes' absence, and who took a pro-Lamian war position.
Alexandar died in 323 and for a brief moment things looked bright. His generals, however, cheerfully divided the empire he had created between themselves and Antipater drew Greece. Demosthenes had been summoned back to Athens and then driven out again by Demades. Antipater successfully defended the rebellion of Greece cities against Macedonian rule in the Lamian war and afer his success, imposed oligarchic forms of government on the cities that had rebelled. He also sent agents out to hunt down Demosthenes who committed suicide in exile.
The charge of prostitution against Androtion
There is a lot of evidence that at least some Athenians not merely tolerated, but in fact, actually encouraged male homosexual relationships. Determining what Athenians thought about these relationships is very difficult for several reasons. First, our own culture enjoys a variety of attitudes toward homosexual relations that range from tolerance to violent supression. Second, it is not at all clear that the Athenians would have understood what moderns meant by homosexuality. Third, the Athenians themselves, appear depending on class, to have held different attitudes.
There are a number of observations we can make. First, our evidence for homosexual relationships playing a critical role within Athenian culture is strongest for the aristocracy (which not coincidently, most strongly segregated the sexes). Second, while Athenians (or at least aristocratic Athenians) encouraged young men to welcome the attention of older men, these relationships were not necessarily sexually active. The most important function of these relationships was to educate young men into the demands of their identities as aristocratic members of a democratic community. More specifically, some have argued that these relationships taught young aristocrats to negotiate difficult issues of power.
Athenians typically used the language of eroticism to describe this relationship. The older partner was the erastes, the "lover" and perhaps sexually dominant partner. The young man was the eromenos, the "beloved" and perhaps sexually submissive partner. It was appropriate when the boys had grown old enough and learned what their lovers had to teach that these relationships lose their erotic focus, that the young men take wives and produce sons of their own, and when they were old enough, take the role of "lover," themselves. Men of either age group who didn't grow out the relationships were frowned upon. Men who did not marry and produce children were looked down upon. Men who when they had ceased to young continued to enjoy being sexually submissive, were despised. Middle aged men who had homosexual relationships with each other were despised. Conversely, men who enjoyed being sexually dominant with younger men, suffered no social sanctions, if they conducted these relationships properly. If the object of the dominent Athenian's affection was a slave or foreigner, Athenians didn't give a damn. If the object of affection was an Athenian boy who could grow up to be citizen and soldier of Athens, Athenians cared very much. Proper conduct of these relationships required that very young boys be free from any such eroticization, and that even with age-appropriate (just before the age when boys start to get their first facial hair) boys, a boy's father approves of the relationship. Young men, moreover, were supposed to behave modestly, and if they "led their lovers on," insisting on gifts, etc., they risked being accused of prostituting themselves (with consequences for their civic rights).
It is important to note that this is how some Athenian men described these relationships, not how they lived them. We have little evidence of what the affective content of these relationships were. It is entirely possible that a number of Athenian men had homosexual relationships that would seem "romantic" to us. They just knew better than to say so [Cf. the old-fashioned kind of husband who likes to joke, "my wife I think I'll keep her," but actually defers to his wife's judgment in important matters].
It is equally important to note that different Athenians held different views on the topic and that these views could and did conflict considerably. This kind of conflict in views, moreover, is probably absolutely normal within any culture on any important question. The Athenians, moreover, explicitly recognized the conlicts within their own society, even within their own laws on the issue, and the conflict between their norms (how they said things should be) and practice (how things were).
In fact Athenian notions about honor were inextricably linked with Athenian notions about sexuality. You will not be suprised when I tell you that these notions were gendered. Men were on top, women were submissive. For a man to be submissive was to act like a woman and to lose his honor. In many cultures, men compete to acquire and demonstrate their honor by pursuing women. On the one hand, a father demonstrates his own honor by keeping his daughter sexually pure until marriage. On the other hand, a man demonstrates his virility by overcoming a father's precautions and taking the girl. It is a zero-sum game, in the words of David Cohen (Law, Sexuality and Society: The Enforcement of Morals in Classical Athens).
The zero-sum game of honor that men in Athens played was particularly complicated because a) there was no tradition of courtship between men and women (marriages were arranged; b) girls were married at very young ages and lived under extraordinary supervision until married; c) at least in aristocratic circles, married women were supposed to live lives of virtual seclusion. Hence the thing for boys. But the game boys and their lovers played was very complicated as well. Boys knew that submission entailed characterization as feminine. Lovers, however, could only gain sexual honor within their own peer group by victory over the boys.
Boys in Athens, played the part of girls. In fact, the Athenians seemed to have regarded boys as not quite sexually determined. If they were educated properly, they would grow up to be manly men who defended the city. If the education process failed, they would grow up to be femine, corruptible, and a disaster for the city. A young boy coming of age in Athens, accordingly, faced the same dilemas that young girls face in ours (i.e., if you're not cute, i.e. sexually appreciated, your socially dead. If you're too cute, i.e., sexy, you're a slut). A young, handsome man who was widely appreciated (and perhaps came to know and meet men who would help him in his public life as an adult) could easily be shunned, and his father's reputation destroyed, if he did not behave modestly and moreover, be perceived to behave modestly.
The honor issues raised by this kind of courtship would follow a man throughout his life. No one knew if a boy "gave in." Instead, Athenians formed an opinion based on their observations of the partners' behavior towards each other, the reputation of lover and beloved, and gossip within the community. When the boy grew to manhood, if he pursued a career in politics, his enemies would be quick to use the charge that he had been a prostitute. Before you quickly dismiss this possibility, think of it in non-sexual terms, in terms of American politics. What sort of analysis did you engage in when the news was released that George W. Bush had pled guilty to a drunk driving charge when he was in his 30s? [If you want to think about American politics in terms of sexual honor, at least heterosexual honor, the Clinto-Lewinsky scandal is a good parallel to Athenian charges of homosexual misconduct by politicians].