This welcome addition to the ‘Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics’ series contains five of Demosthenes’ most famous speeches to the Athenian assembly: the three Olynthiacs and the First and Third Philippics. In the preface H. writes that his primary audience consists of ‘advanced students who may have little experience with Demosthenic Greek’ and that the notes are intended to elucidate the text for their benefit, although he goes on to add that, ‘since we lack recent commentaries intended for specialists, I have also endeavoured to address some of the concerns of scholarly readers’ (p. ix).
The introduction covers a lot of ground: the historical background, the genre of deliberative oratory at Athens, the language and style of the speeches, their ‘publication’ and later reception, and the constitution of the text. Overall, this is well done, though readers not familiar with the period may find the historical survey too compressed in places. The text is based on M.R. Dilts's OCT (M.R. Dilts, Demosthenis Orationes, vol. 1 [2002]). A list of divergences from it is not provided and would have been helpful (see below for one example at 1.19).
The commentary is consistently attentive to questions of style, word order, tone and the employment of rhetorical figures. As regards points of grammar and translation there are copious references to the relevant sections of Smyth's Greek Grammar and of LSJ. Cross-references are abundant. H. is generous in offering translations of passages that readers might find unclear, though some are a little inaccurate. For example, φανῶμεν ἐρραθυμηκότες (1.15), translated as ‘that we may appear to have been negligent’ (p. 90), should surely be ‘that we may be seen to have been negligent’ (see LSJ s.v. φαινῶ B.II). And ‘recourse’ is an odd translation for παραίτησις (p. 236 ad 9.37; LSJ s.v. III offers ‘begging off’). Such quibbles apart, H. is a notably reliable and informative guide to the elucidation of the text, and even seasoned readers of Demosthenes will learn much about his language, style and argumentation by working through the commentary.
The treatment of historical matters is generally brisk, with frequent references to the relevant pages of standard histories (N.G.L. Hammond and G.T. Griffith, A History of Macedonia, vol. 2 [1979]; R. Sealey, Demosthenes and His Time: a Study in Defeat [1993]; E.M. Harris, Aeschines and Athenian Politics [1995]), at times in place of providing the ancient evidence. On disputed points H. tends to offer his preferred interpretation, with reference to a modern authority. Such concision reflects the priority set out in the preface, to help readers understand the Greek, but in places the presentation verges on the dogmatic, and the evidence and arguments might have been set out more fully, if only to demonstrate to students that these texts raise problems that continue to be debated. A case in point is at 1.19, where H. accepts as decisive the argument of Harris to retain the manuscript στρατιωτικά after ἔστιν in ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι, χρήματα ὑμῖν, ἔστιν ὅσα οὐδενὶ τῶν ἄλλων ἀνθρώπων (‘You have money, men of Athens, more than anyone else’) against the views of many editors, including Dilts, who delete it (E.M. Harris, Democracy and the Rule of Law in Classical Athens [2006], pp. 121–39). With the deletion, Demosthenes is generally taken to be making a veiled reference to the civilian Theoric Fund. With στρατιωτικά retained, he is saying something quite different, that the Athenians already have money in their military fund but are choosing to use it for non-military purposes. In itself this makes sense, but when later in the paragraph he adopts the voice of an imaginary heckler to ask σὺ γράφεις ταῦτ’ εἶναι στρατιωτικά (‘Do you propose that these funds be military?’) and replies μὰ Δι’ οὐκ ἔγωγε (‘By Zeus, not I’), the note that ‘D. answers in the negative … because no formal motion is needed to require the Athenians to use the war fund for military purposes’ (p. 93) leaves the emphatic character of Demosthenes’ refusal unexplained. And to state that there is no reference here to the Theoric Fund because ‘When D. refers to the Theoric Fund he names it specifically’ (p. 93) is to beg the question. Even within the self-imposed limits of the commentary, disputed passages such as this would benefit from more extended treatment.
One section where I found the coverage less convincing is the famous enumeration of Philip's military advantages over the Athenians in the Third Philippic (9.47–52). H. refers to W.R. Connor's influential 1988 article to support the claim that hoplite warfare was traditionally waged according to accepted rules (p. 245 ad 9.48), but the reality of such rules is now denied by many historians of Greek warfare (W.R. Connor, ‘Early Greek Land Warfare as Symbolic Expression’, Past & Present 119 [1988], 3–29; against the existence of rules of war see, e.g., H. Van Wees, Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities [2004], p. 115 on this passage: ‘Demosthenes was peddling a nostalgic myth’). In H.'s note on the different elements of the Macedonian army he argues that ‘the Athenians would have looked down on Philip's cavalry’ (p. 245 ad 9.49) on the grounds that Demosthenes elsewhere criticises the Companions, from whose ranks the cavalry was drawn, as flatterers (2.19) and that Macedonian cavalrymen are depicted wearing ‘decadent Persian garb’ on the so-called Alexander Sarcophagus. Neither argument is persuasive: 2.19 is concerned with the disreputable character of Philip's court and has no bearing on the fighting quality of the Macedonian cavalry, which had always been good; and the sarcophagus, commissioned in the eastern Mediterranean for a non-Greek grandee, tells us nothing about opinion at Athens. The mention of Philip's light infantry and archers is also characterised as disparaging, on the grounds that such soldiers were either non-Greek or from the lower classes and ‘took part from a cowardly distance’ (p. 245). But in this period specialist light infantry, including peltasts and archers, played important roles in warfare, as Demosthenes and his audience well knew. His point is not that Philip's army is contemptible, but that his effective use of combined arms gives him a considerable advantage over the Athenians (see now G. Wrightson, Combined Arms Warfare in Ancient Greece [2019]).
The volume is generally accessible to its intended readership, although the identification of individual Athenians by their entry numbers in Persons of Ancient Athens (J. Traill [1994–2012]) and the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (vol. 2: Attica, ed. M.J. Osborne and S.G. Byrne [1994]) is unlikely to be helpful even to advanced students. The relevant entries in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, where they exist, would be of considerably more use. Somewhat surprisingly, there are no separate introductions to the individual speeches: although running summaries are supplied every few paragraphs to allow the broad argument to be followed, relatively little guidance is provided to how each speech is put together and how it functions as an instrument of persuasion. The writing is consistently clear and crisp, and the presentation is remarkably free of error. H. informs us (p. x) that he typeset the volume himself using a version of TeX; he has done an excellent job.
This volume achieves what it sets out to do very well. It does not claim to be a full historical commentary, which remains a significant desideratum, but as a guide to reading and appreciating these texts it is thoroughly recommended to students and scholars alike.
