Against Meidias and Against Timarchus

Chapter 4 juxtaposes two law-court speeches from the mid-340s: Demosthenes’ Against Meidias and Aeschines’ Against Timarchus. In both speeches, Demosthenes and Aeschines are applying the city’s past to cases where the defendant in question had to be judged as a moral as well as a political actor. Chapter 4.1 offers an introduction and overview of the two speeches and trials. Chapter 4.2 shows how Demosthenes concentrates attention on an extended historical illustration involving Alcibiades to make the point that the jurors must judge Meidias on his own peculiar combination of bad and undemocratic qualities (above all his hybris); no paradigm will really do. Chapter 4.3 shows that Aeschines is similarly keen to particularize the behaviour of Timarchus, and to talk about his personal past. Like Demosthenes, he is interested in recommending himself as a trustworthy paradigm citizen; but unlike Demosthenes (in Against Meidias, anyway) Aeschines co-opts numerous aspects of the cityscape, real and imagined, to help him construct the parameters within which Timarchus should be judged. This overtly political prosecution introduces the issue of contestation of models in law-court contexts in earnest, and illustrates Aeschines’ appetite for creative envisioning of the past, developing his material in immersive and theatrical ways (e.g. via recalling a statue of Solon at Salamis). Chapter 4.4 offers a synoptic conclusion.