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BIOGRAPHICAL SOURCES ON THE ATTIC ORATORS

This finely produced volume is a welcome addition to the well-established Clarendon Ancient History series of translations of key ancient historical texts. For the first time in the English language, a translation the Lives of the Ten Orators and the entries on the Attic Orators from Photius’ Bibliotheca and Suda’s Lexicon, accompanied by learned yet useable commentaries and notes, are made available to a wider scholarly public. Whilst scholarship on Attic oratory has witnessed a rapid expansion in the last 30 years, the biographical sources covered in this volume have not attracted the attention they merit. This is evident from this volume’s extensive bibliography that includes no more than a dozen scholarly works published between the mid nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries but only a handful of works since then (many of them unpublished Ph.D. dissertations). The relative neglect of the sources in question might be attributed to the fact that one of them is considered spurious (ps.-Plutarch), while the others belong to works of an encyclopaedic character. The sources presented are intriguing texts providing valuable evidence for a range of biographical, rhetorical, cultural and historical issues. For instance, from ps.-Plutarch’s Lives of the Ten Orators we learn a great deal not only about the ways in which Attic Oratory was received in the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods but also about the importance of Classical Athenian history in contemporary, advanced literate education. We gain insights into the meandering journeys that different types of sources took over time and the processes of selectivity and canonisation that lay behind the works that have come down to us. Finally, we garner valuable information about speeches of the Orators which are now lost and aspects of their rhetorical production on which there is no extant evidence. We learn, for example, that both Lysias and Isaeus wrote deliberative speeches (ps.-Plutarch 836b, 839f). A remarkable type of source included in the Lives of the Ten Orators are inscriptions and monuments that reflect the antiquarian interests of the author. Ps.-Plutarch provides quotations from seven inscriptions, which were included in an earlier biographical work by Caecilius of Calacte. Four of them relate to Antiphon’s trial (410 B.C.) and three (appended to the end of the Lives) record honours for Demosthenes, his nephew Demochares and the orator and politician Lycurgus. According to Roisman and Worthington (p. 23) all seven seem to be genuine and thus represent valuable historical evidence. Their mode of presentation (the inscriptions relating to Antiphon are quoted in the text of his Life, whereas the other three appear separately after the Life of Dinarchus) is also revealing in terms of the handling of the sources and the methods of composition. Different monuments (usually bearing inscriptions) are also mentioned (the Life dedicated to Isocrates quotes two dedicatory inscriptions on statues of the orator located in Eleusis and Olympia, also accepted as genuine by Roisman and Worthington). As Roisman and Worthington explain in their introduction, the Lives of the Ten Orators survived antiquity piggy-backing on the Plutarchan corpus as part of the Moralia, although THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 380