In his speech On the Crown (330 b.c.e.), the orator Demosthenes twice refers to his opponent Aeschines as a kinados (‘fox’), both times in the context of accusing him of flattery and slandering in the service of Philip of Macedon (18.162, 242). Although a number of scholars have studied the use of invective in the speeches of Demosthenes and Aeschines,Footnote ¹ very little attention has been paid to the significance of this peculiar epithet.Footnote ² In this note, I investigate why Demosthenes calls Aeschines a kinados, suggesting that, in addition to painting Aeschines as devious, the word may also have served as a pun.

According to lexicographers and scholiasts, kinados was the Sicilian word for fox,Footnote ³ as well as being a synonym for thêrion (‘wild animal’), since wild animals move (kinein) a lot.Footnote ⁴ Used metaphorically, it could connote the perceived attributes of the fox, namely shrewdness and deceitfulness.Footnote ⁵ So, for example, the Hoopoe in Aristophanes’ Birds describes Pisthetaerus, the Athenian visiting Cloudcuckooland, as ‘the craftiest of foxes’ (πυκνότατον κίναδος; Ar. Av. 430). In the Clouds, the foolish Strepsiades rattles off a long list of things he'd like to be called after his training in sophistry, including kinados (Ar. Nub. 448). And Ajax, in Sophocles’ play of the same name, alludes to his enemy Odysseus as a ‘damned fox’ (ἐπίτριπτον κίναδος; Soph. Aj. 103).Footnote ⁶

Bolstering his portrayal of Aeschines as a sneaky scoundrel, Demosthenes clearly uses kinados in a similar way. But I think it's worth asking why Demosthenes chooses this particular word, rather than one of many other Greek words for ‘cunning’. One motivating factor might be the fact that kinados calls to mind animal imagery, perhaps to particular rhetorical effect. Many years ago, Galen Rowe pointed out the pervasive animal language in On the Crown, arguing that its evocation of the comic stage was part of a broader strategy of painting Aeschines as a comic braggart figure, the alazôn.Footnote ⁷ If we accept this plausible (if rather fanciful) interpretation, it might shed some light on Demosthenes’ word choice.

More relevant, I think, are two other factors: 1) the fact that Aeschines had just addressed Demosthenes as kinados in Against Ctesiphon (3.167), the speech to which Demosthenes’ On the Crown responds (a point to which I will return); and especially 2) kinados’ potential for punning.Footnote ⁸ In addition to meaning ‘fox’, the word kinados sounds remarkably similar to kinaidos, a word often translated as ‘catamite’ or ‘passive homosexual’, but which properly refers to a man characterized by a non-conformance to gender norms and an inability to control his sexual appetites – often leading to, among other things, a desire to be penetrated.Footnote ⁹ The perceived similarity between these two words can be seen in the fact that later scholiasts on two codices (F², Y) gloss Demosthenes’ second kinados (18.242) with μαλακός, ἀνδρόγυνος (‘soft’, ‘hermaphrodite’), that is, common synonyms of kinaidos. These scholiasts either recognized (and were explaining) a pun, or they mistook kinados for the more common word kinaidos.Footnote ¹⁰

The notion that kinados might have called to mind kinaidos for contemporary audiences as well is substantiated by other Attic orators’ use of the same pun.Footnote ¹¹ In his speech On the Mysteries (399 b.c.e.), Andocides quotes the line of Sophocles’ Ajax mentioned above, addressing Epichares, a man who has informed falsely against him, as ‘damned fox’ (ἐπίτριπτον κίναδος; Andoc. 1.99).Footnote ¹² Then, in the very next paragraph (1.100), Andocides responds to Epichares’ accusation that he (Andocides) was part of an oligarchic association (ἑταιρείας) by claiming that Epichares had sexual relations (ἡταιρήσας) with many men.Footnote ¹³ This verbal play on ἑταιρεία/ἑταιρέω, as well as the implication that Epichares was a prostitute, reinforces in turn the punning nature of the earlier kinados.

It is tempting to interpret Aeschines’ use of kinados in 3.167 (mentioned above) as another pun on kinaidos, especially in light of the sexual invective Aeschines employs elsewhere against his opponent. In addition to frequently using kinaidos and kinaidia to describe Demosthenes (1.131, 181; 2.88, 99, 151), Aeschines repeatedly calls attention to his opponent's childhood nickname Bat(t)alos (Aeschin. 1.126, 131, 164; 2.99).Footnote ¹⁴ This nickname, with two taus, could refer to Demosthenes’ stammering problem,Footnote ¹⁵ or, with one tau, to his effeminacy and fondness for being anally penetrated.Footnote ¹⁶ The latter spelling – the one Aeschines uses – derives its meaning either from a certain effeminate aulos-player named BatalosFootnote ¹⁷ or from a slang term for anus.Footnote ¹⁸

In similar attacks, Aeschines describes Demosthenes as a ‘hermaphrodite’ (ἀνδρόγυνος; 2.127); as possessing ‘a lack of courage or manliness’ (ἀνδανδρία; 1.131; 2.139, 148; 3.155, 160, 209, 247; cf. 2.179); as ‘womanly in spirit’ (γυναικείῳ τὴν ὀργήν; 2.179); and as someone who ‘will never do a man's work’ (πρᾶξιν δὲ ἀνδρὸς οὐ πράξεις; 3.167). Aeschines also declares that he will not deign to describe the sexual acts that a young man named Aristion of Plataea ‘endured or performed’ with Demosthenes (πάσχων ἢ πράττων; 3.162), nor the ways in which Demosthenes ‘has (mis-)used both his own body and his procreative ability’ (κέχρηται καὶ τῷ ἑαυτοῦ σώματι καὶ παιδοποιίᾳ; 3.174).

Given all of Aeschines’ jabs at Demosthenes for his alleged effeminacy, it is perhaps not surprising to discover that some scholiasts changed the kinados in Aeschin. 3.167 to kinaidos.Footnote ¹⁹ The manuscript tradition, however, strongly suggests that Aeschines did say kinados. In using this double entendre, he presumably elicited laughterFootnote ²⁰ both from the jurors and from the numerous bystanders in the courtroom,Footnote ²¹ who were expecting yet another attack on Demosthenes’ masculinity. The fact that Aeschines immediately follows this word with a description of Demosthenes whirling around on the speaker's platform (how kinaidos-like!) serves to bolster the pun.Footnote ²²

Whether or not the kinados of Aeschin. 3.167 was a deliberate pun – and I imagine it was – it likely inspired Demosthenes to make use of the same ambiguous word (twice!) in his defence speech, inserting it either off-the-cuff in the courtroom or in his revision of the speech.Footnote ²³ This type of ‘borrowing’ of tropes and language (intentionally or otherwise) was common in Attic oratory: in fact, Dinarchus, in his own speech against Demosthenes seven years later, cribs from Aeschines’ description of the man, alluding to Demosthenes and his ilk as kinadê (Din. 1.40).Footnote ²⁴

That Demothenes too is using this pun is suggested by the words he chooses to pair with kinados. Thus in 18.242, Demosthenes places the word φύσει (‘by nature’) immediately before kinados. Given contemporary debates about the ‘naturalness’ of kinaidia, many in the audience would have expected, after phusei, a word along the lines of kinaidos (cf. φύσει θηλυδρίαι, ‘effeminate by nature’; [Arist.] Pr. 879b20–21); when Demosthenes says kinados instead, it would have been difficult not to (also) hear kinaidos.Footnote ²⁵ In 18.162, Demosthenes addresses Aeschines directly as kinados (ὦ κίναδος) – admittedly straining the pun a bit more than in 242, since the vocative of kinaidos is kinaide – and immediately follows this vocative with the participle kolakeuôn, ‘flattering’ (that is, Aeschines flattered statesmen like Aristophon and Eubulus when they were alive, but denounces them now that they are dead). Because flatterers (kolakes) are often portrayed as effeminate and submissive in Greek literature (see e.g. Theophr. Char. 2), the possibility is at least raised that the preceding vocative might have been a pun on the ultimate effeminate figure, the kinaidos.Footnote ²⁶

One appeal of kinados for Demosthenes, then, was that it allowed him to underscore his broader argument that Aeschines was a sneaky scoundrel, while also (surreptitiously) taunting Aeschines in the same way that Aeschines always taunted him, perhaps even implying that Aeschines was ‘prostituting’ himself to Philip. It is true that Demosthenes was capable of using more overt sexual (or least gendered) invective against Aeschines – e.g. calling attention to his participation in feminine religious rites with his mother as a boy (e.g. 18.260) – but it was also the case that he had little grounds on which to assert that Aeschines was actually a kinaidos. That is, although character denigration was acceptable in the Athenian courtroom, there were limits to what one could say in terms of credibility. By using a pun, then, Demosthenes could hint at this insult, one so often levelled against him, without saying it outright. He could always claim, after the fact, that he had called Aeschines a ‘fox’, not a ‘fag’.Footnote ²⁷