Privileging the Written Word: The Constructions of Authority in Isocrates and Xenophon

Abstract

If we believe Athenian authors of the fourth century BCE, Athens was a noisy, fractious place where certain people spoke often publicly in the law courts and in the Assembly (cf. e. g. Isocrates On the Peace 129–30; Antidosis 38). It was populated by troublemakers, such as Lysimachus, Teisias, Callimachus, and Cleon, in addition to other orators and sophists too numerous to name. These individuals would argue minor court cases on matters of finance and of wrongs against their opponents, offering specious teachings; and making speeches on political topics and topical concerns, and their often rambunctious audiences, misled by pleasure (cf. Thucydides 3.38.7 and 3.40.2–3), jostling one another, would cheer on their favourites or shout down those they did not like.1 Athens was a chaotic and disorderly place where business was conducted through the spoken word, and where the mob’s favour decided policy and legal outcomes. But not all public discourse was spoken from the orator’s platform. The two authors I consider in this paper, Isocrates and Xenophon, resisted the popular mode of public address in the city. As elitists, members of a minority privileged by wealth, status and education, they were “quiet Athenians”.2 They sought ways of expressing themselves as such apart from public speech. Accordingly, Isocrates and Xenophon along with other fourth-century authors such as Plato and Thucydides turned to the written word, which was the medium of the privileged few as public literacy was, according to William Harris, at only ten to fifteen per cent of the population.3 Even literary documents inscribed on stele or placed in the Mêtrôon might not have been intended to be read by the many so much as to signify that the document was a public one, that is, potentially available to