Kirjahaku

In this volume, Mirko Canevaro studies the 'state' documents (laws and decrees) preserved in the public speeches of the Demosthenic corpus. These documents purport to be Athenian statutes and, if authentic, provide invaluable information about Athenian history, law, and institutions. Offering a comprehensive account of the presence of the documents in the corpora of the orators and in the manuscript tradition, this volume summarizes previous scholarship and delineates a new methodology for analyzing the documents. Examining the documents found in Demosthenes' On the Crown, Against Meidias, Against Aristocrates, Against Timocrates, and Apollodorus' Against Neaera, the core of the volume, which includes a chapter by Edward M. Harris, provides a guide for the reliability of the individual documents, and advances new interpretations of important Athenian laws, such as homicide regulations, legislative procedures, laws on theft, seduction, naturalization, and outlawry. Canevaro argues that some of the documents have been inserted into the speeches in an Athenian environment at the beginning of the third century BC and are therefore reliable, while many others are later forgeries. These forgeries are early products of the tradition of historical declamations and progymnasmata, and could be used as evidence of Hellenistic oratory and rhetorical education.

The book provides a comprehensive study of Demosthenes’ Against Leptines as a document for the reconstruction of Athenian fourth-century politics, law and public economy. The importance of the speech has been increasingly recognized in recent years, with research on Athenian lawmaking highlighting its centrality and the inadequacy of previous accounts, and work on honours for benefactors and on the liturgical system stressing its importance for understanding the development and conceptualization of euergetism. The speech is the earliest and only extensive ancient account of the ideological, theoretical and moral underpinnings of these institutions and developments. The introduction and commentary offer a comprehensive treatment of these aspects, providing historians with key insights into Athenians conceptions of public service, public honour and reciprocity. Other work has stressed the importance of the speech for the study of the Greek public economy, and the introduction and commentary make these aspects central. The Against Leptines stands at the crossroads of some of the liveliest and most important current discussions in Greek history, and this commentary aims to advance our historical understanding in these areas.