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.To this end, he repeatedly refers to Demosthenes as a sophist, displac-ing onto his opponent any suspicions his own philosophically tingedarguments might have elicited (125, 175, see also 119, 164, 166, 170).Tomake sure that the jurors get the point, Aeschines offers an exemplarynarrative in which Demosthenes sophistry leads to a perversion ofpederasty and politics.Demosthenes reportedly seduced the youngAristarchus, son of Moschus, for the sake of his legacy rather than love(170 72).Although Demosthenes promised to make him the foremostorator in Athens, as Aeschines tells the story he schooled Aristarchusonly in the arts of murder, convincing him to gouge out the eyes and cutout the tongue of a political enemy, one Nicodemus of Aphidna.38 Inconcluding the anecdote, Aeschines asks the jurors:  So then, men ofAthens, you put Socrates the sophist to death, because it was found thathe had taught Critias, one of the Thirty who overthrew the democracy;yet is Demosthenes to get his comrades off in your court, this manwho has exacted such terrible revenge from ordinary men loyal to thedemocracy for exercising their equal right to political speech? (173).After offering the jurors an example of precisely how Demosthenes cor-rupts the city s youth, political institutions, and most cherished princi-ples, Aeschines cites this famous precedent the conviction and execu-tion of Socrates in 399 to guide the jurors in casting their vote againstDemosthenes and his client.However the rhetorical power of the prec-edent works on another level as well.Aeschines not only likens Demos-thenes to Socrates and the jurors in the present trial to those in Socratestrial, but he also strategically evokes a precise historical milieu.Socrateswas convicted and condemned on charges of impiety and corruptingthe youth.Aeschines, however, translates these charges into their  realpolitical meaning: his Socrates was put to death because he was theteacher of one of Thirty tyrants, the corrupt oligarchic regime that ruledAthens at the close of the Peloponnesian War and committed numerousoutrages and atrocities against citizens and noncitizens alike.By refer-ring to Socrates as the teacher of one of the notorious Thirty, Aeschinesstrategically summons this historical context, reminding the jurors thatin the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War they suffered more from thebrutality of their fellow citizens than from their enemies in war.39 And, Prostitution in Aeschines Speech against Timarchus 153by addressing the jurors in Timarchus s trial as though they were thevery same jurors who convicted Socrates, Aeschines collapses the tem-poral distance between  then and now, lending the present prosecu-tion the urgency of the past.Elsewhere, Aeschines more explicitly links Demosthenes sophistryto national and international affairs.He anticipates that Demostheneswill harp on what he deems irrelevant matters, Philip of Macedon, hisson Alexander, and the Phocians, to scare the jurors and cloud the realissues at stake (166, 175).This claim is, of course, both clever and disin-genuous on Aeschines part because without Philip, there would havebeen no trial against Timarchus, no concern for the national morality,and no dire predictions about the consequences of Demosthenes soph-istry.In the year before the trial, the Athenians agreed to end their long-standing but futile war with Philip but on peace terms that excludedtheir Phocian allies.40 Although Demosthenes was one of the ambassa-dors who negotiated the peace, he immediately began to undermine itby impugning Philip s intentions in settling the Third Sacred War inwhich the Phocian cities were involved.Shortly after the Athenians ap-proved the peace, Demosthenes and Timarchus decided to prosecuteAeschines for committing treason on the fateful embassies, claimingthat he had accepted Philip s bribes.In the actual settlement, which oc-curred just after the Athenians approved the peace, Philip disbandedthe Phocian cities, destroying them as military powers.41The power and prestige Philip won by settling the Sacred War,coupled with the corresponding deterioration of Athens position, lentnew credibility to Demosthenes accusations against Philip and, moreimportant, to his allegations against Aeschines.Given these circum-stances, Aeschines decided to strike first: he launched the prosecutionagainst Timarchus specifically to eliminate one of his own prosecutors,and so to better his chances in court.Nevertheless, Aeschines needed toensure that Demosthenes would not be able to reintroduce the Macedo-nian question on his own terms or reduce the prosecution of Timarchusto a debate concerning the pro- or anti-Macedonian sentiments of theparties involved.On a rhetorical level, his preemptive banishing ofPhilip and Alexander secures precisely this end while simultaneouslysupplying him with an opportunity to defend his Macedonian policy ina way that seemed not to be defensive.Aeschines had to show that Philip was not the dangerous enemy De-mosthenes and others alleged him to be.To this end, he reframes theMacedonian question, presenting Demosthenes  foolish,  untimely, 154 susan lapeand  uneducated talk about Philip, rather than Philip himself, as thereal problem and embarrassment for Athens (166 67).To illustrate pre-cisely how Demosthenes language was harming the city s reputation,he cites the shameful sexual innuendoes Demosthenes reportedly madeabout Alexander, Philip s young son, in a meeting of the Atheniancouncil (167 68).42 By portraying Demosthenes as publicly passingon malicious gossip about Alexander Philip s eleven-year-old sonAeschines closes the gap between the Athenian jurors and the Macedo-nian king.It leads to an emphasis on Philip s status as the father of ayoung boy whose morals and reputation require guarding and protect-ing rather than his standing as a Macedonian monarch, which thus ren-ders him as rather more like than unlike Athenian citizens and fathers.Although other writers and speakers depicted Philip as a polygamousbarbarian despot with a court populated by degenerates of all types,Aeschines incorporates Philip into his vision of a moral collective inwhich adherence to shared moral norms subordinates differences ofclass, social status, and in Philip s case, of ethnic and political positionas well.43Although Aeschines strategically neutralizes the Macedonian threat,he could hardly disguise the discrepancy between recent Macedonianand Athenian military fortunes [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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