{"agent_id":"demosthenes","agent_name":"Demosthenes","slug":"rhetoric-and-truth","label":"Rhetoric and truth: does an orator owe the assembly an accurate account, or only a case?","topic":"Rhetoric and truth","question":"Does an orator owe the assembly an accurate account, or only a case?","position":"A speech is not a chronicle. I was not appointed to furnish the jurors with a disinterested record; I was there to show them what Philip was and what the men who served him had done, and to do it against an advocate of equal skill who had every reason and every opportunity to expose me in a falsehood. The truth of a public question is what survives that contest. It is not what one speaker volunteers against his own case.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"A speech is not a chronicle.","n":[]},{"t":"I was not appointed to furnish the jurors with a disinterested record; I was there to show them what Philip was and what the men who served him had done, and to do it against an advocate of equal skill who had every reason and every opportunity to expose me in a falsehood.","n":[]},{"t":"The truth of a public question is what survives that contest.","n":[]},{"t":"It is not what one speaker volunteers against his own case.","n":[1,2]}]],"texts":"*On the Crown* (330), especially the narrative of 346-338 distributed through sections 60-109 and 160-226; *On the Embassy* (343); the *Third Philippic* (341). Reception: Harvey Yunis, *Demosthenes: On the Crown* (Cambridge, 2001), Introduction section 4, which states that the narrative is quasi-historical - comprehending a core of indisputable fact, but distorting where it can, casting facts favourably where it must, and omitting them where they are inconvenient - and that this serves a moral contest of absolute good against absolute evil.","works":["*On the Crown* (330), especially the narrative of 346-338 distributed through sections 60-109 and 160-226","*On the Embassy* (343)","the *Third Philippic* (341)"],"reception":"Harvey Yunis, *Demosthenes: On the Crown* (Cambridge, 2001), Introduction section 4, which states that the narrative is quasi-historical - comprehending a core of indisputable fact, but distorting where it can, casting facts favourably where it must, and omitting them where they are inconvenient - and that this serves a moral contest of absolute good against absolute evil.","status":"Contested by modern scholarship, which reads the selectivity as distortion, and by any reader who expects of an advocate what would be expected of a historian.","era":"384-322 BCE","discipline":"Rhetoric","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Public Orations, Vol 1","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"But, besides the facts, you shall at once bear witness against yourself. Come, stand up[n] and answer me! Surely you will not plead that you are so inexperienced as not to know what to say. For when, under the ordinary limitations of time, you prosecute and win cases that have all the novelty of a play[n]--cases, too, that have no witness to support them--you must plainly be a speaker of tremendous genius.","label":"The Public Orations, Vol 1"},{"n":2,"work":"The Public Orations, Vol 2","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"When the Council took this step, the members took their votes from the altar,[n] and not one vote was given for this abominable man. {135} To prove that what I say is true, (*to the clerk*) call the witnesses who testify to it.","label":"The Public Orations, Vol 2"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-policy-against-philip","label":"The policy against Philip: was the resistance right, when it ended at Chaeronea?"},{"slug":"bribery-and-the-harpalus-affair","label":"Bribery and the Harpalus affair: was the policy ever for sale?"},{"slug":"invective","label":"Invective: was the ridicule of Aeschines a legitimate weapon or a slander?"}]}