A Grammar of Democracy: Antilogy, Politics, and Literature in Classical Greece

Abstract

This dissertation offers the first full-scale study of the classical Greek practice of antilogy—the uninterrupted delivery of two opposed speeches in front of an audience. Ranging from debates in historiography and tragedy to opposed speeches in the assembly and the lawcourts to Plato’s and Xenophon’s engagements with democracy, antilogy constituted the most pervasive form of democratic discourse in classical Greece, as well as a prominent engine of intellectual innovation. Part 1 (chapters 1–3) outlines a theory of antilogic politics by identifying and analyzing its key discursive mechanisms: polarized dissent, cooperative antagonism, and role-playing. Part 2 (chapters 4–6) argues that Socrates’ dialogic form emerges as a response to and reversal of the mechanisms of antilogic politics, thereby offering a counter-theory of antilogy—a dialogic politics. Part 3 (chapters 7–9) complicates the model of antilogic politics by showing how a variety of cultural fields including tragedy, forensic oratory, and historiography subtly or overtly push antilogy to its formal and conceptual limits. Engaging with contemporary debates in political theory, this dissertation argues that, in antilogic politics, polarized dissent was required for the legitimacy of public decision-making; dissenters could be thus understood by the audience to be acting as devil’s advocates. The antilogic dēmos was polarized yet undivided, antagonistic yet cooperative. In pursuing this overarching argument, this study also makes several interventions on individual topics, arguing for example that sophistic epideixeis and forensic speeches challenge common sense by reversing widespread topoi, that Thucydides extensively deploys the antilogic form to orchestrate the arc of the war’s narrative, and that the assemblies dramatized by Aeschylus and Euripides display the same anxiety towards a fractured community that Demosthenes’ Prologues repeatedly try to assuage. Building on these and other case studies, this dissertation contends that antilogy offers a rich lens for reimagining the intellectual history of classical Greece by breaking open the current disciplinary boundaries of politics, literature, and philosophy.