The last decades have seen a spate of publications on Athenian law, including a host of monographs, commentaries of various lengths and levels, often with freshly edited texts, and even new journals. Though a cynic might argue that the field has been glutted, one particular category – anthologies, in translation, of the most important or interesting forensic speeches from the corpus of ancient Athenian oratory – has seen relatively little development (a notable exception is C. Carey's Trials from Classical Athens, originally published in 1997 and updated in 2011). This corpus of approximately 150 speeches constitutes not only our principal source of information about Athenian law of the fifth and fourth centuries b.c. but also, as has been observed many times, a veritable goldmine of details about the social and economic life of the period. Now these two volumes have appeared to fill this niche, each in its own way.
G. has been the series editor of the University of Texas Press' ‘The Oratory of Classical Greece’ since its inception in 1998. The aim of the series is to provide new translations by classical scholars of all the surviving speeches of the fourth and fifth centuries, an aim that it has fulfilled admirably. Published according to author (with some of the minor authors grouped together in single volumes), virtually the entire series is now in print (only one volume of Demosthenes remains outstanding), and the present volume is the kind of fruit that a series like this can yield, namely, a thoughtful and useful collection of speeches selected from the series as a whole to illustrate various themes of enduring interest. There are no new translations in this volume; they are taken wholesale from the volumes in which they have previously appeared, with only ‘minor corrections and stylistic changes’ (p. vii). Because the translations were originally the work of disparate scholars upon whom no one stylistic standard was imposed, there are a number of inconsistencies, for example ‘the dikastai who comprised Athenian juries are translated “judges” or “jurors”, or transliterated as “dicasts”, according to the preference of the translator’ (ibid.). Although G. has mostly left the translations alone, he has ‘edited the introductions and notes to each speech more extensively, primarily to provide a sharper focus on law by reducing or eliminating material that is purely historical or otherwise nonlegal’ (ibid.). This focus on law helps tailor the book for a more specific audience, viz., one interested in the legal culture of fourth- and fifth-century Athens, though G. holds out that since the ‘speeches also present a kaleidoscope of life in classical Athens … the volume can also serve as a resource for those with other interests’ (ibid.).
The volume's 22 speeches are arranged under four themes or chapters: homicide and assault (eight speeches), status and citizenship (four speeches), family and property (five speeches), and commerce and the economy (five speeches). The speeches all have something to recommend them, from the very famous Antiphon 2 (the First Tetralogy), [Demosthenes] 59 (Against Neaera), Lysias 1 (On the Death of Eratosthenes), to the possibly not so familiar Isaeus 1 (On the Estate of Cleonymus), Demosthenes 27 (Against Aphobus I – a famous speech, perhaps, but little studied). All the speeches are forensic speeches, i.e. were written for delivery in the courts or before a body acting as a court (e.g. the Boule hearing the welfare challenge in Lysias 24) – there are no deliberative or epideictic speeches, though one can imagine collections of those being published later.
G. has written a serviceable introduction, which is the only material original to the volume. In about ten pages it provides a fairly compact overview of law and oratory in Athens that will be quite useful for undergraduates as well as scholars without any Greek or prior experience in the field. The book has a bibliography and index, and a preview of the volume is available on Google Books.
W. & K.'s anthology, though of a character essentially similar to that of G.'s, stands apart from it in a number of key ways. Virtually all of the translations, which are of very high quality, are new for this volume, with only that of Against Neaera being based on a prior work (K.'s own 1999 translation). W. & K. do acknowledge their indebtedness to previous translations, including those of ‘the University of Texas Press series on the Oratory of Classical Greece’ (p. viii), so that to some degree their translations of, for example, the six speeches the two volumes have in common were influenced by the translations in G. Since W. & K. are the only contributors, the stylistic inconsistencies that mark G.'s volume are absent (e.g. andres dikastai is consistently translated as ‘men of the jury’). The introduction to the volume as whole and the introductions to the individual speeches are generally longer and denser. Each of the introductions to the individual speeches is accompanied by a convenient outline, entitled ‘Key Information’, of the important details about the dispute; this feature will be particularly welcome to undergraduates and other beginners, for whom Athenian forensic speeches often present at first glance a welter of soap opera-like complexity. In the summary that precedes Against Neaera, for example, the subheadings include ‘Speaker’, ‘Supporting Speaker’, ‘Defendant’, ‘Other Individuals’ (particularly helpful), ‘Action’, ‘Penalty’ and ‘Date’. Having this information collected in one handy location is very useful indeed.
W. & K.'s compilation is somewhat shorter than G.'s, with some fourteen speeches as against the latter's twenty-two, nor are they arranged according to category; rather, they are arranged first by orator (mostly in chronological order, the only exception being that Aeschines, though the older man, is placed after Demosthenes) and second by oration number. The volumes have six speeches in common (before the slashes are W. & K's renderings of the titles, after are G.'s): Antiphon 6 (On the Chorister/Chorus Boy), Lysias 1 (On the Murder/Death of Eratosthenes), Lysias 23 (Against Pancleon), Lysias 24 (On the Suspension of the Benefit of the Disabled Man/For the Disabled Man), Demosthenes 54 (Against Conon) and [Demosthenes] 59 (Against Neaera).
One minor yet remarkably useful feature is that W. & K. have placed all cross-references to speeches included in the collection in bold typeface. This allows the reader to know immediately whether he need only flip the pages to see the passage in question or must reach for another volume. It is hoped that this will encourage busy undergraduates to take the trouble to follow up a cross-reference.
The introduction truly shines. Without getting bogged down in debatable minutiae, it provides a remarkably detailed and clear account of the law and oratory of ancient Athens. Divided into five sections, it begins with an account of Athenian legal development from the Draconian and Solonian periods to the fourth century. It then tackles Athenian politics and society, the court system (a particularly helpful section), the Attic orators (with a substantial biographical sketch of each orator whose speeches appear in the volume), and rhetorical technique and style. The introduction could even be used in a course where no speeches are read but students need to be given a quick, solid initiation into the legal culture of the classical period.
A couple of quibbles: W. & K. claim there was a story that Demosthenes ‘decided … to become an orator after he had heard Isaeus speak’ (p. xxiii). According to Plutarch's Life of Demosthenes and the biography of the orator in Pseudo-Plutarch's Lives of the Ten Orators, it was Callistratus of Aphidna whose oratory inspired Demosthenes to pursue the work for which he would become so famous. Also, W. and K. write that, after losing the crown litigation, Aeschines ‘left Athens and went to Samos, where he taught rhetoric’ (p. xxv). The ancient lives give Rhodes as the location of Aeschines' rhetorical school; Pseudo-Plutarch adds that, after having taught there, he sailed to Samos and died shortly after arriving.
The book has a bibliography and index and a useful glossary of various legal and political terms. As with G.'s volume, there is a preview version available on Google Books.
Both these collections are useful and well crafted, with G. providing greater breadth of coverage and W. & K. providing greater depth. This difference in approach, as well as the relatively few speeches they have in common, means that the books complement each other fairly well, and both should find homes on the syllabi of courses on Athenian law as well as classical Athenian history more generally.
