The State of Blame: Politics, Competition, and the Courts in Democratic Athens

Abstract

Politics in democratic Athens routinely spilled over into the courts. From an Athenian perspective, this process was fundamentally democratic; it allowed the courts to provide a check on the power of individual political leaders and contributed to the view that the courts were the most democratic branch of Athenian government. That said, there were some downsides to transferring the scene of politics to the courts. When political issues and rivalries were brought into the courts, there was a tendency to render them into the court’s adversarial rhetoric. This translation of political issues into the polarizing language of judicial rhetoric in turn impoverished political reasoning and the political process. This study examines this broad process by first reviewing the culture of competitive honor that informed Athenian political and judicial practice, and then by examining how it operates in one famous and exceptionally competitive political trial in which politics and policy-making are center stage: Demosthenes’s prosecution of Aeschines for misconduct on the embassies leading to the Peace of Philocrates between Athens and Philip II of Macedon. The arguments and emotion strategies in this case indicate that intra-Athenian competition, both in and out of the courts, inflected the way foreign policy issues were conceptualized and understood, and was a factor in Athens’s inability to formulate a coherent policy and response to Philip of Macedon in the context of the Peace of Philocrates.