Description
- Abstract:
- Athens in the fourth century BCE faced many economic and military pressures, to which the Athenians responded with a multitude of political experiments. This dissertation argues that praise became in this period a focal point of political thought, as the benefits of bestowing praise on individual citizens began to outweigh the risks of elevating individuals above the rest of the community. Athenian authors tested the waters of enshrining praise of individuals in literary texts, particularly in prose, and by the 340s the Athenians were regularly inscribing for public display decrees that honored their own citizens. Though praise poetry, prose encomia, historiography, Socratic dialogues, law-court speeches, and honorific inscriptions are often considered separately, this dissertation examines these cultural phenomena collectively to demonstrate not only that praise was important to the Athenians for ordering their social world, but that it was being promoted as a means of both mending ethical deficits and attaining practical goals. The first chapter distills from the works of Xenophon, particularly the Hieron and Poroi, that author’s general theory of the role of praise in government. The second chapter then applies that theory to Xenophon’s own practice of praise for contemporary figures, chief among them Agesilaus. In these works, Xenophon emphasizes the value of rhetorical display (epideixis) of praise, which enables the replication of the original praiseworthy deeds; this usage of epideixis predates and must be distinguished from Aristotle’s delimiting of the epideictic genre, which has dominated previous analyses of oratory. The third chapter examines the Evagoras of Isocrates, which is exemplary of that author’s thought on praise and, with Xenophon’s Agesilaus, is one of only two standalone prose encomia surviving from the fourth century. Finally, the fourth chapter, contextualized by a brief review of civic honorific practices, demonstrates how the praise theories of Xenophon and Isocrates are reflected in five landmark speeches of the third quarter of the fourth century: Demosthenes’ Against Leptines and On the Crown, Lycurgus’ Against Leocrates, Aeschines’ Against Ctesiphon, and Hypereides’ funeral oration.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2014)
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Citation
Parks, Mitchell H.,
"City of Praise: The Politics of Encomium in Classical Athens"
(2014).
Classics Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0X34VSN
