The documents in the public speeches of Demosthenes: authenticity and tradition

Abstract

The thesis is concerned with the official documents (laws and decrees) preserved in the public speeches of the Demosthenic corpus (18, 21, 23, 24, 59). These documents purport to be Athenian statutes and, if authentic, would provide invaluable information about fourth-century Athenian history and institutions.
The introduction gives an account of the presence of the documents in the corpora of the orators and in the manuscript tradition, summarizes previous scholarship and delineates a new methodology for analyzing the documents. A specific section within the introduction analyzes the stichometric marks found in the medieval manuscripts of the Demosthenic corpus. Through those marks we can calculate whether a section of text was or was not present in the Urexemplar of the corpus: the documents in Dem. 23 and some of those in Dem. 24 were, but the others have been inserted later.
The following 4 chapters analyze in detail the documents found in Dem. 18, 19, 23, 24 and 59, also providing the text of each document as it appears in the paradosis, with an apparatus criticus. This survey reveals that those documents that were part of the stichometric edition are in general more reliable than those inserted later. By contrast, many features of these last documents, such as anachronistic expressions, formulas never attested in Attic inscriptions, inconsistencies between the documents and the orator's summaries, betray forgery.
The conclusion argues that the stichometric documents have been inserted in the speeches in an Athenian environment at the beginning of the 3rd century BCE, presumably by Demochares of Leuconoe, the nephew of Demosthenes and an active politician himself. The non-stichometric documents are instead a very early product of the tradition of historical declamations and progymnasmata, witnesses of the development, side-by-side, of rhetorical education and antiquarianism.