II. Rhetorical storytelling

Did Classical orators tell fables in their speeches? Their surviving texts would suggest they did not. There are no fables preserved within the corpus of Classical Greek speeches, ‘neither private nor public, dicastic nor bouleutic’.Footnote ⁹ Fables are not found in the forensic or deliberative speeches transmitted (or invented) by the Classical Greek historians. Their absence from the latter is telling, given that Herodotus and Xenophon record fables in other contexts and often place them in the mouths of elite characters.Footnote ¹⁰ But it is equally clear that fables joined the repertoire of rhetorical exercises by the first century CE. Their use in education is described by Quintilian, Suetonius and the progumnasmata (‘preparatory exercises’), and is further confirmed by school papyri.Footnote ¹¹ There is no disputing, then, that the fables became rhetorical. But the evidence for rhetorical fables in the Classical period is more disparate and opaque.

One of the more ingenious responses to this discrepancy has been that of Leslie Kurke, whose analysis of Aesopic discourse in early Greek prose contends with several controversies surrounding the social register and intellectual milieu of the fable. Kurke theorizes that Classical rhetors used fables ‘all the time’ but that these orally performed narratives were removed from the written tradition. ‘When the orators themselves or later editors redacted their speeches for circulation in written form’, she argues, ‘the disreputable fable elements were ruthlessly excised … And yet the oral tradition remembered – or fabricated – a few of these moments as rhetorical points.Footnote ¹² Kurke’s hypothesis reinforces her broader arguments about the persistence of an oral Aesopic discourse whose ‘late fixations or instantiations’ in written Greek literature preserve strands of a defiant popular tradition. But her conclusions, alongside related arguments about the disparities between popular and ‘published’ versions of courtroom oratory,Footnote ¹³ cannot be proven with the evidence at hand. It seems more likely that post-classical references to the orators’ fables stem not from an untraceable oral tradition but from a rhetorical curriculum that implemented fable exercises alongside quotations and paraphrases of the canonical orators.

Another reason to remain sceptical of this premise is that Classical speeches do preserve stories whose moralizing qualities and indefinite chronology evoke aspects of the fable. In Against Timocrates, Demosthenes tells a story about Locrian law-giving as a foil for the slapdash legislation of fourth-century Athens. Demosthenes identifies this narrative about a one-eyed Locrian and his proposed law on eye-gouging as both a diēgēsis (βούλομαι δ᾿ ὑμῖν… διηγήσασθαι) and also a good paradeigma (‘example’) for the jurors (24.139). Similarly, Lycurgus in Against Leocrates narrates among his paradeigmata a ‘rather fabulous’ tale (μυθωδέστερόν, 1.95) about a dutiful son during an eruption of Mount Etna. While volcanic fires consumed those bad sons who abandoned their parents, the gods formed a ring of safety around the one youth who ‘carried his father aloft’ (ἀράμενον φέρειν). Aeschines, too, in Against Timarchus, recalls a nebulous episode in Spartan history when an elder shamed a disgraceful but silver-tongued speaker before the gerousia (1.180–81). All of these stories are presented as virtuous exempla in indefinite periods of the Greek past, encapsulating the didactic core of the parable. They are not, to be clear, fables. The definitive generic criteria in both ancient and modern theory are that fables be overtly fictitious and metaphorical. What distinguishes fables from historical exempla, as Benjamin Perry articulated, is that the former ‘must be obviously and deliberately fictitious, whether possible or not’.Footnote ¹⁴ Reinhard Dithmar further clarifies that the metaphorical quality of the fable arises from the ‘spatial juxtaposition’ between the figurative domain of the fable and the ‘real world’ domain to which the fabulist draws a comparison.Footnote ¹⁵ ‘The example narrative’, by contrast, ‘requires no transference from one domain to another because it shows what is general in a particular case, which the reader need only generalize’.Footnote ¹⁶

Each of the rhetorical narratives above exhibits this exact procedure of extrapolating a general lesson from a particular case within a shared domain of the ‘real’.Footnote ¹⁷ Immediately following the story of the Locrian lawgivers, Demosthenes juxtaposes them with the litigious rhētores of Athens and urges the jury to ‘punish’ (τιμωρήσεσθε, 24.143) those acting contrary to the Locrians. Lycurgus likewise presents the fates of the Sicilian sons not as an analogy but as a literal directive: ‘And so you [jurors], too, must take the evidence from the gods and with one mind punish this man … [who] abandoned his parents to the enemy.’Footnote ¹⁸ Aeschines even transports the virtuous old Spartan from his story directly into the Attic courtroom, musing about how ‘readily he would have permitted Timarchus or the catamite Demosthenes to meddle in politics’.Footnote ¹⁹ There is nothing metaphorical, no figuration in their application of historical examples to the present (no transference between ontological domains). It is nevertheless striking that all three orators preface their stories with deferential assurances. Demosthenes promises the jurors that they will be ‘no worse off for hearing’ the paradeigma of the Locrians (οὐδὲν γὰρ χείρους ἔσεσθε … ἀκηκοότες, 24.139). Aeschines pads the beginning of the Spartan story with the appeasement that ‘it is good to imitate the virtues even of foreigners’ (καλὸν δ᾿ ἐστὶ καὶ τὰς ξενικὰς ἀρετὰς μιμεῖσθαι, 1.180), and then follows the Spartan exemplum with one about Solon (1.182).Footnote ²⁰ Lycurgus, too, who toys with the believability of his father-son story by locating it nearer the domain of muthos (μυθωδέστερόν), insists that it ‘is suitable especially for all you younger men to hear’ (1.95). These bids for goodwill suggest that ‘on the stand’ storytelling could incur contempt from rhetorical audiences, especially towards stories whose historical indeterminacy rendered them more akin to the fictional texture of the fable.

Jonas Grethlein has also noted the placating statements used by the Classical orators to introduce mythical and Archaic exempla in their arguments. He observes that, while stories from the distant past were appropriate for funeral orations, for forensic and deliberative speeches ‘the historicity of mythic deeds was liable to be called into question.’Footnote ²¹ The notion that an orator could discredit himself by telling long-ago tales is further bolstered by Aristophanes’ mockery of Philepsius of Lamptrai for ‘telling stories’ (ἕνεκα σοῦ μύθους λέγει, Plut. 177). The scholia on this verse elaborate that Philepsius told historiai (‘narratives’), muthoi (‘stories’) and paignia (‘jokes’) to alleviate his poverty, though not the exact setting in which he spun such yarns.Footnote ²² Grethlein does not discuss rhetorical fables, but we can deduce from his findings that rhetorical storytelling was a delicate procedure that favoured exempla from recent memory. This recency bias, as Grethlein highlights, is specified in the Rhetoric to Alexander, which instructs speakers to ‘take up examples that are appropriate to the issue and are closest to the listeners in time or place’ (λαμβάνειν δὲ δεῖ τὰ παραδείγματα <τὰ> οἰκεῖα τῷ πράγματι καὶ τὰ ἐγγύτατα τοῖς ἀκούουσι χρόνῳ ἢ τόπῳ, 32.3). When, therefore, the Attic orators reach further into the Archaic and mythical past for exempla, they should be understood to be adopting a transgressive narrative strategy that required special justification.

There are two implications of this rhetorical recency bias for the likelihood of fables in the speeches of the Classical orators. The first is that fables, by virtue of their overtly fictional and metaphorical quality, would sit at the far end of the spectrum of exemplary propriety, far from what the Rhetoric to Alexander identified as oikeia: examples ‘belonging to’ or ‘in close relation to’ the topic at hand. The normative force of the recency bias also makes Kurke’s hypothesis about the deliberate excision of rhetorical fables harder to sustain. The textualization and canonization process in fact left some ‘disreputable’ fable-like elements in the surviving works of Demosthenes, Lycurgus and others. One probable reason for their preservation was that they illustrated how seasoned orators could, on occasion, break convention and present mythic narratives as compelling paradeigmata. The three examples I have discussed modelled for later readers how to reassure one’s audience, how to balance the proportion of foreign and local exempla, and even, in Lycurgus’ case, how ‘to prove divine concern with moral standards in general’.Footnote ²³ If the orators’ speeches had included similarly strategic deployments of the fable, this would have been of great interest to later editors of their works, especially as the fable became increasingly formalized as the first exercise in the progumnasmata. In sum, the hard evidence of storytelling in Classical oratory renders more plausible the thesis that the rhetorical fable was as rare and unconventional as the surviving corpus makes it seem. What explains the fable’s absence is not editorial censorship but rhetorical restraint.

III. Comic persuasion in Aristophanes

The speeches of the fourth-century orators contain no fables but reveal their strategies for fashioning ‘long ago’ tales into exempla. Yet Philocleon, the Aristophanic juror with whom I began, still claims to hear ‘funny Aesopic bits’ in the pleas of fifth-century defendants. In this section, I pivot from the Attic orators to investigating what I propose were the rare conditions under which a speaker would deploy a fable in court or the assembly. Aristophanes is at once our most contemporary and most absurdist source for rhetorical fables in Classical Athens. Because no rhetorician provides instruction on fable-telling prior to Aristotle, Attic comedy is the closest we come to hearing ‘real’ rhetorical fables in this period. But comedy is also an art of fiction and distortion, which means that fable-telling scenes on stage are never exact reflections of rhetorical practice.Footnote ²⁴ The collection of Aristophanic fables has been the subject of significant study in recent years,Footnote ²⁵ and so I discuss only briefly the two other Aesopic episodes that, in addition to Wasps 566, evoke forensic or deliberative contexts. These are so steeped in comic exaggeration as to impede any firm conclusions about the frequency of rhetorical fables, but they do highlight two facets of the genre that recur in later reports.

One of these facets of the Aristophanic fable is familiar already from the Wasps: the ‘good-humoured’ (γέλοιον) nature of an Aesopic tale, which can cheer, soothe and win over hostile listeners. The winsome wit of a fable is what makes it so effective for apopheuxis, an ‘escape’ from charges for which a defendant is already assumed guilty. This is the way Philocleon portrays the fable early in the Wasps, and these sentiments are later repeated back to him by his son, who instructs his father to avoid lawsuits for his drunken behaviour by telling ‘a funny Aesopic or Sybaritic story, one of the ones you learned at the symposium’ (Αἰσωπικὸν γέλοιον ἢ Συβαριτικόν, | ὧν ἔμαθες ἐν τῷ συμποσίῳ, 1259–60). Philocleon acquires such an arsenal of logoi (1262) and tells no fewer than five to the accusers who confront him in verses 1401–47.Footnote ²⁶ His stories are pre-trial stratagems rather than fully forensic fables, for Philocleon has been advised that Aesopica may keep him out of court altogether. When Philocleon announces, therefore, that his ‘clever fables will resolve these matters’ (λόγοι διαλλάξουσιν ταῦτα δεξιοί, 1394), we observe how the ex-juror repurposes a pleader’s device into an Aesopic apotropaic. He will use fables at the first sign of conflict to appease victims and prevent court summonses.

Of course, Philocleon’s rhetorical fable-telling at the end of the Wasps goes terribly awry and only convinces his plaintiffs to pursue legal restitution more ardently. Part of his failure, as others have noted, is that Philocleon does not tell soothing fables so much as demeaning anecdotes about Aesop and Sybarites silencing their adversaries.Footnote ²⁷ That Philocleon sees himself as a strident Aesopic figure becomes clear in his final fable, where he implicitly compares his plight to that of Aesop being executed at Delphi (1446–48). But the more critical mistake he makes is forgetting that the core criterion of the rhetorical fable is to be humorous and to charm the audience. By improvising ‘clever’ stories (dexioi) to analogize his accusers (Myrtia as a barking dog, the wounded man as an injured Sybarite), Philocleon has invented inflammatory fables that further alienate his listeners.

The Wasps provides a comic window into how litigants should (not) deploy fables in forensic scenarios. The second Aristophanic example reinforces the soothing, even preventative perception of the rhetorical fable, but this time in a deliberative context. In Birds 472–75, Peisetaerus tells an avian assembly an aetiological fable about the lark’s crest. The ending is incongruous, for it does not explain the moral but only asserts the birds’ antiquity (477–78).Footnote ²⁸ This episode confirms that fables are effective at swaying hostile audiences but also spells out a facet that Wasps only hinted at: rhetorical fables are suitable for speakers in mortal peril. The life-or-death stakes of Peisetaerus’ logos become manifest as the birds convene. At first, the hoopoe Tereus had promised a literal ekklēsia, evident from συγκαλέσειας (201) and καλοῦμεν (204), but the birds soon materialize as a military line poised to attack. Peisetaerus observes the ominous size of the crowd, noting ‘how great an evil of birds has been gathered together’ (ὅσον συνείλεκται κακὸν ὀρνέων, 294). In short order, the bird chorus calls for a ‘hostile, deadly charge’ (πολέμιον | ὁρμὰν φονίαν, 344–45) to dismember their Athenian visitors.

While the chorus leader eventually stands down, this ‘assembly’ remains a perilous speaker space for Peisetaerus, who is assured only that the birds will ‘not break their truce before’ he has made his address (ὡς τὰς σπονδὰς οὐ μὴ πρότερον παραβῶμεν, 461). For this reason, Peisetaerus’ rhetorical fable should be understood as a desperate response to a scenario in which his life hangs in the balance. His framing of his speech as ‘some big, juicy epos that will shatter their spirit (θραύσει ψυχήν)’ (465–66) alludes to the mortal test he faces: it is either Peisetaerus’ psuchē or the birds’.Footnote ²⁹ The initial belligerence of the bird chorus is intrinsic to the conventions of the comic agōn in which Peisetaerus’ speech is set (451–626). But what is unusual about this agōn is how swiftly the hostility between participants fades after the recitation of the fable, resulting in ‘not two opposing speakers … but a single speaker expounding to the Chorus’ with Tereus serving as a ‘mediator’ rather than an adversary.Footnote ³⁰ This is the only Aristophanic agōn, Nan Dunbar notes, that features ‘this phenomenon of chorus as interlocutor’.Footnote ³¹ One possible reading of this anomaly is that Peisetaerus, by beginning his oration with a fable, has subdued the customary combat of the debate scene. The fable defuses the agōn.

Another reason that Peisetaerus begins with a rhetorical fable is the avian nature of his audience, making them an unusual assembly indeed. One detail delivered early in the play is that human speech is new to the birds. Tereus claims that his visitors can address the birds directly because he has transformed them from barbaroi by teaching them phōnē (199–200). The birds are now capable communicators but their speech patterns in the summoning scene suggest that there is much learning left to go and that hearing full-length logoi will be a novel experience.Footnote ³² The intervening verses generate a great deal of anticipation about exactly what kind of logos will unfold in this inaugural assembly. Tereus summons the birds ‘to the logoi’ (258), and they in turn wonder ‘what kind of logos’ they will hear at the meeting (313–14, 415, 431). While logos can of course be neutral ‘speech’, Tereus’ response that these logoi are ‘unbelievable and unheard of’ (ἄπιστα καὶ πέρα κλύειν, 416) points in the direction of fable fictions, and Aristophanic fantasies, as the substance of their convention. When Peisetaerus offers his audience a chance to remedy their ignorance of Aesop (471), he tailors his logos to both reflect the birds’ self-interest and ease them into the rhetorical experience. He must begin with the logos of last resort because the lark fable is more accessible to an audience for whom conventional rhētorikē is yet ‘unheard of’.Footnote ³³

Aristophanes’ Wasps and Birds afford classicists a caricatured glimpse of, but not a definitive answer on, the rhetorical fable in fifth-century Athens. From a poet who revels in crafting plots from the animal kingdom, it is not surprising to find in his plays clever characters who participate in Aesopic discourse. While these comedies cannot tell us which speakers told rhetorical fables or how often,Footnote ³⁴ affinities between the Wasps and the Birds do sketch, as the preliminary features of forensic and deliberative logoi, their lighthearted and conciliatory power, especially over listeners with the authority to condemn a speaker to death.

IV. Rhetorical fables in Aristotle

After the speeches of the Classical orators and the comic high-jinks of Aristophanes, the next most obvious place to look for evidence of rhetorical fables is in early rhetorical treatises. Fables are not discussed in the Rhetoric to Alexander, but Aristotle does identify them in his Rhetoric as a subcategory of ‘common proofs’ (αἱ κοιναὶ πίστεις, 1393a24). Here Aristotle characterizes fable as a species of probative paradeigma, one that relies not on historical analogy but has been ‘made up’ (ποιεῖν) by the orator. He outlines several of its advantages: fables are logoi dēmēgorikoi, stories well-suited for the general public (1394a2). Fables are easier to invent on the spot than historical examples. But this ease of invention also diminishes the fable’s efficacy in deliberative oratory because examples ‘derived from events are more useful’ for giving political counsel on the future.Footnote ³⁵ Several aspects of Aristotle’s theorization of the rhetorical fable are worth explicating, beginning with his depiction of fable as a genre with broad appeal across the dēmos. We need not wade into debates about either the ‘popular’ or ‘low’ status of the fable to recognize that the Rhetoric characterizes ‘Aesopic stories’ as a shared cultural resource for listeners from diverse backgrounds.Footnote ³⁶ Another significant feature of Aristotle’s rhetorical fable is its improvisational quality. The Rhetoric does not instruct readers to draft or memorize fables in preparation for their speeches. Instead, orators should be able to conjure fables on the spot, and to meet the moment.Footnote ³⁷ Also crucial is Aristotle’s concession that the probative force of fables is inferior to other forms of pistis. His chapters surrounding the discussion of fable evince a hierarchy of evidence:Footnote ³⁸ an orator who has enthymemes will use a paradeigma only as an addendum (epilogos) to his argument (1394a11). An orator who does not have enthymemes will deploy factual, historical paradeigmata. An orator who does not have a factual paradeigma will use a fable. The fable therefore represents an accessible but suboptimal underpinning for the orator’s apodeixis.

The fable in Aristotle’s Rhetoric thus occupies a paradoxical position in the embryonic curriculum of rhetorical training, as a tool that appears within but comes from without the repertoire of forensic and deliberative argumentation.Footnote ³⁹ That the fable is both a part of and apart from the established elements of rhetoric is evident in other treatises prior to the first century CE. The earliest manuals of the Roman Republic paint an exclusively playful picture of fables in formal oratory, suggesting that Aesopic bits can revive audiences who have become w(e)ary of speeches. The Rhetoric to Herennius advises that, ‘If they have become tired of listening, we may open with something that moves them to laughter: with a fable, a credible fiction, a caricature (ab apologo, fabula ueri simili, imitatione deprauata)’ (1.10).Footnote ⁴⁰ The inclusion of the fable in lists of comic devices indicates that Aesop here is employed not so much as a building block of rhetoric as a break from it. And while fables do appear as copying exercises on school papyri from as early as the Hellenistic period,Footnote ⁴¹ no papyrus fable is set in an explicitly rhetorical context until the third century CE.Footnote ⁴²

These stipulations surrounding the use of fable in forensic and deliberative speeches should give us pause about interpreting their mere mention in pre-Imperial treatises as proof of their integration into rhetorical practice. That some people told fables in early Greek trials and assemblies seems undeniable, else Aristophanes and Aristotle would have no reason to mention them. But that fable-telling was a standard feature of rhetorical arguments is far from evident and in fact I draw the opposite inference from early depictions of fable as a technique for when better evidence is lacking or when audiences are ‘tired of listening’.

It is also noteworthy that Aristotle’s own examples of rhetorical fables are attributed not to contemporary orators but to Archaic storytellers: Stesichorus and Aesop. The Rhetoric demonstrates the rhetorical fable by retelling the logoi of these semi-legendary figures from the sixth century: Stesichorus’ fable of the horse and stag to the Himerians and Aesop’s fable of the fox and the hedgehog to the Samians. Aristotle may cite these examples because he had none from the Attic orators. Elsewhere in the Rhetoric, he quotes Isocrates, Demosthenes and Aeschines on subjects like the preamble and argumentative fallacies. Another phenomenon probably underway in the Rhetoric is the appropriation of Stesichorus’ and Aesop’s biographical traditions to lend canonical authority to the pedagogies starting to crystallize as a rhetorical curriculum in the late Classical period. Aristotle’s prose retelling of the two fables does not appear to quote directly from any source (would the Stesichorean ‘original’ be in verse?),Footnote ⁴³ and so his back-to-back narratives comprise two exemplars that are Aristotelian in construction but attached to Archaic names. My contention is not that Aristotle invented these episodes wholesale; the practice of adapting Aesopica is evident already in Plato’s Phaedo (61b–c). But Aristotle’s integration of these fabulous episodes anticipates what would become a post-classical proclivity to show canonical figures using rhetorical techniques more firmly rooted in later curricula.

Many scholars have attended to these Aristotelian anecdotes as testimonia on Stesichorus and Aesop, or to the contents of the fables themselves.Footnote ⁴⁴ But I would like to consider more carefully the conditions under which the Rhetoric claims that these characters told fables (Arist. Rh. 1393b10–13, 22–24):

At first glance, both episodes paint a recognizable picture of public oratory in the early polis. The citizens of Himera and Samos have elected courses of action until their respective advisors, Stesichorus and Aesop, counter popular sentiment. The Stesichorus example provides some clues about when the poet intervenes with a fable. First, the syntax of the episode suggests that he delivers the fable of the horse between two votes: the Himerians have already taken one election vote (ἑλομένων) and are poised to hold another (μελλόντων) about Phalaris’ bodyguard. There is no indication whether these votes took place over a single or multiple assemblies, but neither is there any suggestion that Stesichorus was not present for both. He has presumably opposed, but failed to block, the election of Phalaris and now attempts to mitigate the disaster by denying the tyrant a bodyguard. That Stesichorus had been orating unsuccessfully prior to the fable is also suggested by τἆλλα διαλεχθείς: only ‘after making all the other arguments’ does he tell the story of the horse and stag. In this light, the logos of Stesichorus appears not to be a refined strategy or even a ‘supplement to reasoned argument’,Footnote ⁴⁵ but rather a last-ditch effort to save the polis from itself.

Aristotle provides less context for the episode in which Aesop uses a fable to halt the execution of the demagogue. This may well be the fable that, according to the Aristophanic scholia, ‘Aristotle says in the Constitution of the Samians won him [Aesop] great esteem’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Or it may belong to a broader tradition of Aesopic stories about the fabulist’s time in Samos, as preserved in the Imperial Life of Aesop (chs 20–100). While there are no other versions with which to compare that of the Rhetoric, the passage provides some clues that Aesop’s fable of the fox and hedgehog responds to dire circumstances. First, Aesop serves as a sunēgoros, a fellow advocate in the trial.Footnote ⁴⁷ The demagogue has likely made his own defence and now relies on another speaker to avoid the death penalty. But even though Aesop serves the defence, he does not assert the demagogue’s innocence. Aesop instead analogizes the demagogue, charged with embezzlement, to the dog ticks (κυνοραϊστάς) that have attached themselves to the fox and drunk their fill of her blood. Aesop does not try to persuade the jury of the demagogue’s virtue but only to mitigate the sentence. Indeed, Aesop’s epimythium (‘closing moral’) makes it plain that his advocacy contests not the charges but the wisdom of the death penalty: ‘Men of Samos, this man will do you no further harm (οὐδὲν ἔτι βλάψει), for he is rich. But if you execute this man, others will come who are poor, and they will consume your public funds (ἀναλώσουσι τὰ κοινά) with their thievery’ (Arist. Rh. 1393b31–1394a1). Like Stesichorus, Aesop attempts to avert the citizens’ self-destruction. The Samians are already convinced that the demagogue is guilty, much as the Himerians have already made Phalaris their dictator. The only recourse now is to advise the public on how best to manage bad men. In Aesop’s fable, the jury is represented by the character of the passing hedgehog (ἐχῖνον δὲ πλανώμενον, 1393b26), who offers to remove the ticks from the fox, presumably by eating them. The figure of the hungry hedgehog plays on the patterns of consumption in this wealthy Ionian polis: who’s eating whom?Footnote ⁴⁸ But the Greek word for hedgehog, echinos, was also a term to describe the vessel into which litigants deposited all their evidentiary documentation when arbitration had failed and a contentious trial was coming.Footnote ⁴⁹ If the jury is an Aesopic hedgehog, ‘digesting’ all the evidence of the demagogue’s wrongdoing and empowered to pluck him from the Samian body politic, they might do better to vote in such a way as to leave no need for an echinos at all.

The evidence for fables in early rhetorical treatises is sparse, ambivalent and yet surprisingly consistent. Fables can serve as examples in speeches, but not as convincingly as the hard logic of enthymemes or historical parallels. Fables are crowd-pleasers and furnish flexible improvisation for orators who can ‘read the room’. They do not belong, before the Roman Empire, to the standard toolkit of rhētorikē but capture attention because they deviate from the usual persuasive manoeuvres. Finally, while Aristophanes and Aristotle portray rhetorical fables in different contexts, they evoke similar scenes of the fable as final recourse when (1) listeners are hostile or nearly decided on a course of action, (2) the stakes of the vote are high (a death sentence, tyranny) and (3) other arguments have failed. And these are precisely the same conditions that colour the post-classical testimonia on the rhetorical fables of Classical orators.

V. The fabulous Attic orators

Post-classical sources attribute fables to two Attic orators: Demosthenes and Demades.Footnote ⁵⁰ In this section, I re-evaluate their rhetorical fables, less to adjudicate their historical accuracy than to compare their settings to the conditions for the rhetorical fable that I have elucidated above. I show that attestations of the orators’ fables cannot be firmly dated earlier than the Imperial period and that these episodes likewise present the fables as desperate techniques of persuasion.

Demosthenes, the most important Attic orator in the Imperial period as both a stylistic model and historical persona, is credited with telling two fables. Each episode is related by multiple sources, but the Plutarchan corpus is the earliest and most reliable witness for both.Footnote ⁵¹ The setting for the first is 335 BCE, when Alexander has acceded to the throne of Macedon and destroyed Thebes. Demosthenes, selected for an embassy to Alexander, ‘grew fearful of his anger’ (δείσας δὲ τὴν ὀργήν, Plut. Dem. 23.3) and turned back early. Alexander now demands the surrender of Athens’ outspoken dēmagōgoi, chief among them Demosthenes. It is then that Demosthenes delivers his fable about ‘the sheep who handed over their dogs to the wolves, and he compared himself and his circle to dogs fighting on behalf of the people (αὑτὸν μὲν εἴκασε καὶ τοὺς σὺν αὑτῷ κυσὶν ὑπὲρ τοῦ δήμου μαχομένοις) but called Alexander “the lone wolf of Macedon”’ (23.5).Footnote ⁵² There is good evidence that the historical Alexander made such a demand of Athens and that Demosthenes delivered a speech of self-defence. Plutarch is the only Greek author to identify a fable as part of Demosthenes’ apologia, but his citation of Aristobulus as a source in this chapter may mean that the report had roots in Classical historiography.Footnote ⁵³ Whether or not the real Demosthenes narrated this fable, I would draw attention to the exceptional circumstances under which the Imperial version makes his case. First, this episode unfolds at a moment of great personal peril; the famously defiant orator feels, as Plutarch describes, overwhelming ‘dread’ about what Alexander may do in his anger. Though Plutarch does not comment on the mood of the dēmos, other Imperial authors depict the Athenians experiencing ‘great anguish and perplexity’ over their safety and whether to obey Macedon (πολλὴν ἀγωνίαν καὶ ἀπορίαν, Diod. Sic. 17.15.1). As with the pleaders in previous examples, the stakes of this assembly are deadly: for Demosthenes, if the citizens vote ‘yes’, or for Athens, if they vote ‘no’.

Another, more rhetorical rationale for Demosthenes to tell a fable in this moment is that Alexander’s demand for his surrender is predicated on Demosthenes’ status as a dēmagōgos. The king targets not just the most prestigious citizens but specifically those who use politikos logos to rouse opposition to Macedon. This connection between political rhetoric and Alexander’s rage is clearer in other versions of the story: in Diodorus Siculus, Alexander demands ‘the ten of the orators who were governing (πεπολιτευμένους) the citizenry against him’ (17.15.1). Diodorus probably conflates the king’s actual command with the Imperial popularization of the Attic rhetorical canon; in post-classical memory, Macedon tries but fails to quash the ‘canonical ten’.Footnote ⁵⁴ If Demosthenes has put his polis in danger by using rhetorical firepower to ‘abuse Alexander’ (λοιδοροῦντος τὸν Ἀλέξανδρον, Plut. Phoc. 17.1), to ‘aid’ the Thebans (συνήργησε, [Plut.] X Orat. 847b–c) and to ‘encourage’ the Greeks against Macedon (ἐπέρρωσεν, [Plut.] X Orat. 847c), these same tactics of traditional persuasion may work against him in an assembly concerning his culpability as dēmagōgos. Rather than his usual firebrand oratory, then, Demosthenes deploys an unusual device in the form of a fable.

The fable of the sheep, dogs and wolves is an apt choice. It draws upon an ancient tradition of the Greek statesman as a canine, one at play even in the Demosthenic speeches Against Aristogeiton (25.40–41 and 26.22).Footnote ⁵⁵ Classical Athenian audiences were accustomed to hearing politicians branded as ‘dogs’ or ‘wolves’, depending on their purported treatment of the dēmos. Demosthenes’ fable in the Plutarchan Life also champions the orators for their actions rather than speech, deliberately avoiding a defence of rhētorikē. Demosthenes portrays himself and his followers as fighters, ‘dogs engaged in battle’ (κυσὶν … μαχομένοις) for their fellow citizens. The use of machomenos may be quite calculated, given that other versions of this ‘Macedon versus the orators’ episode also include a demand to surrender Athenian generals.Footnote ⁵⁶ In some tellings, Alexander orders Athens to hand over its best commanders alongside its best speakers. Plutarch is too concise to permit an elaborate interpretation of ‘Demosthenes machomenos’, but I find it plausible that the participle signals either an attempt to unify the causes of the orators and generals, or, conversely, to propose that the orators are the superior guardians of Athens. In both Plutarch and Arrian, Alexander specifically commands the surrender of Charidemus, a stratēgos whom Demosthenes once repudiated as ‘an enemy of the state’ (τῆς πόλεως ἐχθρός, Dem. 23.175). Perhaps Demosthenes’ fable was intended to protect ‘his own circle’ (τοὺς σὺν αὑτῷ, Plut. Dem. 23.4) as Athens’ true defenders, at the expense of certain generals. While Plutarch’s Alexander ultimately grants universal reprieve, Arrian claims that ‘Charidemus was the only man of those demanded (μόνον τῶν ἐξαιτηθέντων) … whom he condemned to exile’ (Anab. 1.10.6).Footnote ⁵⁷ Justin’s Epitome makes the outcome starker still, reporting that Alexander’s demands resulted in ‘the generals being driven into exile while the orators were retained (retentis oratoribus)’ (11.4.11–12). In this desperate attempt to save their lives and their leaders, the Athenians keep their orators at all costs.

Several elements of Demosthenes’ guard-dog fable, such as the canine analogies, make it appear historically plausible. But in the abundance of post-classical writing about Demosthenes, only Plutarch records a fable at this moment of danger for the Attic orator (until the Latin version of Isidore). I find it perfectly conceivable that Plutarch, himself a capable fabulist and Aesopic ventriloquist in other essays,Footnote ⁵⁸ would craft in his characterization of Demosthenes an orator who (like Plutarch) knows the precise moment to tell his audience a fable. What we can discern more concretely, however, is the extreme circumstance that might have compelled Demosthenes to use fable instead of politikos logos. Alexander’s ultimatum forces a dire decision for Athens, and his rage rattles Demosthenes personally. The king has targeted the orators as figures whose rhetoric endows them with civic influence and, under these conditions, Demosthenes must make a persuasive case for his life without defending rhētorikē. And so, he deploys the fable as an unconventional proof point (pistis) that advances his cause obliquely and recasts the Attic orators as ‘fighting dogs’. Once again, the fable evinces the rhetoric of desperation in a deliberative setting with the forensic objective of determining life or death for Demosthenes.

The second fable of Demosthenes and the single fable attributed to Demades occur in similarly desperate settings, though both might be identified more appropriately with the rhetoric of ‘exasperation’. These are different fables from separate textual traditions, but they share such strong affinities as to suggest some relationship between the two.Footnote ⁵⁹ Both fables are told in settings where the listeners have forbidden or have lost interest in formal speeches. Both are aborted early in the telling, containing neither an ‘end’ to the story nor a traditional epimythium. And both are cited as proof that ancient audiences value trivial stories over serious matters of state. I begin with the Demades fable, which has only a single ancient attestation and exemplifies the basic pattern that the multiple versions of the Demosthenes fable elaborate.

The fable of Demades is an unusual narrative preserved in the Augustana collection, a corpus from between the first and second centuries CE. Though the anonymous fabulist provides little context, Demades appears to orate in a deliberative setting (Augustana Fab. 63, ed. Hausrath (Reference Hausrath1970)):

This passage contains two fables: one about and one by Demades. The orator begins his muthos for a reason that resembles the advice in the Rhetoric to Herennius, that fables can recapture an uncooperative audience. Indeed, the sequence indicates how abruptly Demades shifts out of and back into conventional rhetoric in calibration with listener response. At first, he delivers a standard public speech (δημηγορῶν). But because his dēmēgoria has failed to convince, Demades begs his listeners’ permission to tell a fable (ἐδεήθη … ἐπιτρέψωσιν). The verb deomai does important work in setting up the punchline, for it positions the orator as deferential to his listeners. In his (pretence of?) pleading, Demades acknowledges that he may speak only at the behest of the dēmos. This concession also suggests that an Aesopic muthos is something for which an orator requires special dispensation; will the audience even deign (συγχωρησάντων) to hear a fable in the first place?Footnote ⁶⁰ When at last his fable achieves the desired effect and his listeners wait with bated breath, Demades bursts the spell of narrative enchantment. Fables have no place in dēmēgoria, when there are grave matters to deliberate (πόλεως πράγματα). In a surprising verdict on the fable’s meta-literary merit, the epimythium further locates Aesopica in the realm of guilty pleasures (τὰ δὲ πρὸς ἡδονήν) in contrast to the topics that men of real logos should consider.

When read in context, Demades’ muthos of Demeter, the swallow and the eel is revealed to be nothing so much as a fable against rhetorical fables.Footnote ⁶¹ Demades only teases at telling us something Aesopic, for while he launches a fabulous storyline, he neither concludes the muthos nor explains how the lesson applies to his listeners. In the place of a moral, he substitutes a reprimand and even has Demeter break out of the narrative frame to ‘become angry’ (κεχόλωται) with the listeners. That Demades enlists Demeter to give divine embodiment to his own frustration is suggested by the similarity between their names; angry Demeter is a thinly veiled proxy for the angry Demades.Footnote ⁶² Had he wished to strike greater fear into the Athenians, the orator might have chosen their patron goddess. The Augustana fable does not, therefore, indicate the regularity of fables in Classical oratory but the opposite. Its final sentences underscore that no citizen should tolerate Aesopic muthoi in the assembly or the courts. Nor is there any suggestion in this passage that Demades is co-opting the fable to repudiate a low-class practice of rhetorical fables.Footnote ⁶³ His half-finished fable re-engages the Athenian audience precisely because it is unexpected and belongs to the realm of pleasurable stories rather than rhētorikē.

This premise of an orator telling fables to chide fable-hungry listeners also forms the kernel of the second Demosthenes fable. This muthos is an elaboration of the idiomatic reference to the ‘shadow of an ass’ (ὄνου σκιά) to indicate triviality and the sorts of people who dispute trivial matters.Footnote ⁶⁴ In all versions, Demosthenes begins but does not finish a fable about two men in the midday heat who fight over the right to take refuge in a donkey’s shadow. Like Demades, Demosthenes ends with a cliffhanger, leaving audiences in the lurch about which man won. Most attestations are interested in this episode in relation to the proverb and its literary-historical origins, but they also inform us about the desperate context in which it supposedly took place. In the earliest, pseudo-Plutarchan version, Demosthenes conjures the fable when he is ‘prevented by the Athenians from speaking in the assembly’ (λέγειν δέ ποτε κωλυόμενος ὑπ᾿ Ἀθηναίων ἐν ἐκκλησίᾳ, X. Orat. 848a). That Demosthenes is not denied the right to attend, only logos, is made plain by the orator’s bid to address them only ‘briefly’ (βραχύ), a deferential manoeuvre that, like Demades’ pleading, smacks of pretence. The orator does fulfil his promise to speak ‘in brief’, cutting short the fable with the criticism that the Athenians ‘are willing to hear a man speaking about the shadow of an ass but not about serious matters (σπουδαίων πραγμάτων)’ (848b). This account of Demosthenes’ last-ditch effort to regain his logos is near-identical to the one in Photius’ Bibliotheca (265, 495a15–44). Neither source identifies why the Athenians had barred Demosthenes from the speaker’s platform. But the promise of brevity suggests that the citizens had become averse to Demosthenes’ notorious harangues.

This notion of Demosthenes’ fable as an ironic antidote to Demosthenic rhetoric is supported by the other versions of the story, which present ‘the shadow of an ass’ in a forensic setting. The accounts of Zenobius, two scholiasts and the Suda all ascribe this fable to Demosthenes’ courtroom defence for ‘someone on trial for serious charges’ (ὑπέρ τινος ἐπὶ μεγάλαις αἰτίαις κρινομένου, Suda ο 400). In three of the forensic versions, the jurors forbid his prepared remarks (the Suda’s are merely thorubountes). The jury’s refusal in the scholiastic versions is explicitly linked to the rhētorikē of Demosthenes (schol. in Luc. Herm. 71):

The prosecutor in this passage unleashes a brilliant strategy to reorient the terms of the trial away from the case itself to the uneven playing field of Demosthenic deinotēs. Marshalling the same rhetorical intensity (δεινῶς εἰρηκότος), he implicates both the culprit (who but a guilty man would need Demosthenes?) and also the jurors, deemed more likely to judge on the basis of rhetorical flourish than justice. This tactic proves paradoxically effective, persuading the jury with Demosthenes’ hallmark style to beware the same. Demosthenes must therefore improvise and, like Demades, request the jurors’ permission to say something unusual: a logos of things not long past. The unexpected nature of this fable is underscored by the sentence preceding it, that the jury assents with no anticipation (τὸ μὴ ὑπολαβεῖν) of the story to come. And while their uncertainty may stem from the fact that Demosthenes is going ‘off script’, there is no indication that they understand λόγον οὐ πάλαι γεγονότα to signal a fable. Once again, rhetorical fables work specifically because they do not derive from the routine repertoire.

Demosthenes concludes his fable of the ass’ shadow with the same sophistic sabotage that Demades used to remonstrate the assembly. After luring his listeners with an Aesopic tale, the orator douses their curiosity about ‘what happens next’ with a stern scolding. While the deliberative versions merely remark on the Athenians’ neglect of ‘serious matters’, the forensic versions all articulate the impact of jury negligence. ‘You all wish to hear about the shadow of an ass,’ remarks the scholiastic Demosthenes, ‘but about a man in danger for his life you prevent speaking?’ (ὑπὲρ ἀνθρώπου δὲ κινδυνεύοντος τῷ βίῳ κωλύετε λέγειν;). My stilted translation of his question is meant to emphasize the marked absence of a pronoun with legein; the jurors are willing to hear any old logos but no legein by anybody about a man in mortal danger. This final detail that the defendant’s life is in peril, shared by all the forensic versions, clarifies that Demosthenes’ fable fits a familiar formula of the rhetoric of last resort in death penalty trials. We can easily picture Philocleon as the sort of juror Demosthenes condemns for seeking entertainment over justice in the adjudication of capital crimes.

Scholarship on the ‘fabulous’ Attic orators has long debated whether Demosthenes and Demades truly told these stories.Footnote ⁶⁵ That the Augustana and Plutarchan corpora are their earliest witnesses leaves centuries of uncertainty between the fables’ dramatic dates and first textual instantiations. But a more important consideration for these attestations is how they fundamentally undermine the perception of fables as either omnipresent or commonplace in Classical oratory. The orators’ fable-telling episodes exhibit remarkable coherence with rhetorical treatises’ instructions on fables as improvisational techniques for engaging disinterested listeners. This alignment, rather than proving a continuous tradition of rhetorical fable-telling from Stesichorus to the Suda, more likely reflects a post-classical agenda to portray the Attic orators as models of the rhetoric taught and practised in Imperial circles. These episodes also strengthen the association between rhetorical fables and death penalty cases specifically. The coherence between the ancient theory and purported practice of the rhetorical fable, which Rothwell Jr. rightly recognized, in fact tells the opposite story of what is often assumed: far from a popular tool of persuasion, the fable unfolds only in the rhetoric of desperation.