Legacy of the Attic Orators in Early Hellenistic Athens

The Legacy of the Attic Orators in Early Hellenistic Athens: Rhetoric, Democracy, and the Politics of Memory offers the first comprehensive study of how the speeches of the Attic Orators were collected, published, and politically instrumentalized in early Hellenistic Athens (ca. 322-262 BCE), one of the most complex periods of Athenian history. Challenging the assumption that Demosthenes' corpus was first compiled in third-century Alexandria, the book argues that this collection, along with those of Lycurgus, Hyperides, and Dinarchus, was created in early Hellenistic Athens as part of a strategy of the politics of memory, in order to preserve and entrench Athenian democratic identity during a period of Macedonian influence. The study demonstrates that Demosthenes' speeches were likely published posthumously around the early third century BCE, possibly at the initiative of his nephew Demochares of Leuconoe, a prominent politician and historian. Through a philological analysis of the manuscript evidence, Iacoviello establishes that this Athenian edition formed the basis of the textual tradition we possess today. Crucially, the book examines this editorial project alongside other memorial and civic acts, chiefly the honorary decrees for Demosthenes (281/80 BCE) and Lycurgus (307/6 BCE), revealing how these posthumous honours and the published corpora functioned together as complementary instruments of memory-building and democratic self-representation.

Antonio Iacoviello is Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Mannheim. After completing a PhD in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Edinburgh (2022), he held a Leverhulme Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship at the EHESS Paris (2022-2024) and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Trento (2024-2025). His research and publications focus on the political and cultural history of Athens, with particular attention to democratic institutions, civic honours, and the politics of memory, especially as shaped through material and epigraphic evidence.