The Ambassadors: From Ancient Greece to the Nation State. Jonathan Wright

Athenian juries were gloriously powerful. In an attempt to check bribery, they were made up of hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of members, drawn by lot. Even the wealthiest citizen, so it was supposed, lacked the resources to corrupt that many individuals. At trial, a water-clock was set in motion, and defendants and plaintiffs – who habitually represented themselves – would both make lengthy speeches, cite the relevant laws, and call their witnesses. There was no judge (as we would understand the term) to coordinate proceedings, monitor objections, or offer summations. Success rested solely on whether or not a speaker had been persuasive; eloquence was everything.

      A jury’s verdict was final and there was no room for appeal. Jurors, who had to be over thirty years of age and free from any outstanding financial debt to the state, were chosen from a list of 6,000 candidates, drawn up at the beginning of each year. They received a small daily stipend for their service and they knew, and revelled in, their own power. As the trial of Timarchus would demonstrate, the linchpins of any competent legal strategy were to flatter a jury, to appeal to its patriotism, and to avoid the heckling in which jurors regularly indulged.

      ‘Fellow citizens,’ the embattled ambassador Aeschines began, ‘I have never brought indictment against any Athenian.’ However, ‘when I saw that the city was being seriously injured by the defendant, Timarchus, who, though disqualified by law, was speaking in your assemblies, and when I myself was made a victim of his blackmailing attack’, he had been compelled to act. ‘I decided that it would be a most shameful thing if I failed to come to the defence of the whole city and its laws, and to your defence and my own.’ It was an irresistible opening salvo.

      The city’s lawgivers, Aeschines explained, had been unflinching when they had established who might engage in public debate and hold civic office. There had been no attempts to ‘exclude from the platform the man whose ancestors have not held a general’s office, nor even the man who earns his daily bread by working at a trade’. Such citizens were welcome to participate. Nevertheless, the same privilege did not extend to the man who ‘beats his father or mother, or fails to support them or to provide a home for them’, nor to the man who had failed to perform military service and ‘thrown away his shield’.

      Nor did Athens tolerate the individual who ‘because of his shameful private life the laws forbids from speaking before the people’. The city’s constitution was clear. ‘If any Athenian…shall have prostituted his person, he shall not be permitted to become one of the nine archons [chief magistrates of Athens]…nor to discharge the office of priest…nor shall he act as an advocate for the state…nor shall ever hold any office whatsoever…nor shall he be a herald or an ambassador.’ Aeschines intended to prove that Timarchus was just such a man, unworthy of holding office, and entirely disqualified from directing a legal proceeding.

      Timarchus’s profligacy had apparently begun early in life. ‘As soon as he was past boyhood he settled down in Piraeus [the port of Athens] at the establishment of Euthydicus the physician, pretending to be a student of medicine, but in fact deliberately offering himself for sale.’ Aeschines next turned his attention to Misgolas, ‘a man otherwise honourable, and beyond reproach’, aside for his penchant for male prostitutes. He had always been ‘accustomed to have about him singers or cithara-players’ and, learning that Timarchus was ‘well-developed, young and lewd’, he paid him a handsome sum of money to come and live with him. He was ‘just the person for the thing that Misgolas wanted to do, and Timarchus wanted to have done’.

      The most damning proof of Timarchus’s guilt had been his unwavering ability to live far beyond his means. Certainly, he had once had wealth, but this had quickly vanished. He had sold his house, south of the Acropolis, to the comic poet Nausicrates, and had disposed of his country estates and slaves. Yet he had still been able to enjoy ‘costly suppers’ and maintain ‘the most expensive flute-girls and harlots’. ‘Does it take a wizard to explain all that?’ Aeschines asked. Other men were obviously paying for Timarchus’ excesses, and it was ‘perfectly plain that the man who makes such demands must himself be furnishing in return certain pleasures to the men who are spending their money on him’.

      Aeschines insisted that he was not launching an assault on the beauty of young men. All fathers hoped for sons who were ‘fair and beautiful in person, and worthy of the city’. To be a pretty young boy was not the same thing as being a whore. Nor was Aeschines a stranger to love. As he warned the jury, his opposing counsel would doubtless remind them that Aeschines himself had sometimes ‘made a nuisance of myself in the gymnasia and…been many times a lover’. He might even offer extracts from all ‘the erotic poems I have ever addressed to one person or another’.

      Such a strategy would, Aeschines concluded, be foolish: ‘as for me, I neither find fault with love that is honourable, nor do I say that those who surpass in beauty are prostitutes. I do not deny that I myself have been a lover and am a lover to this day.’ Love was one thing; love between men was another; but sex offered in return for monetary reward was altogether different, and it did not befit the leaders of Athens.

      Each juror placed his pebble in the appropriate urn (one to condemn, the other to acquit). Timarchus was found guilty, reducing his career to tatters. The defence, mounted by Demosthenes, is lost to us. So too is any possibility of deciphering which of the charges levelled by Aeschines were justified. Nonetheless, the spectacle of an ambassador fighting for his political life still resonates down the ages. More poignantly, and not least by virtue of its grubbiness, the trial of Timarchus also seems to encapsulate the decline of Athenian grandeur and influence. A mighty power had entered its dotage.⁶

      Three years later, in 343 BC, Demosthenes would finally bring his original case against Aeschines, charging him with corruption during the embassy to Macedonia. Demosthenes realized just how sensational the trial had become. ‘I do not doubt,’ he told the jurors, ‘that you are all pretty well aware that this trial has been the centre of keen partisanship and active canvassing, for you saw the people who were accosting and annoying you just now at the casting of lots.’

      They must not be swayed by such distractions, however. Aeschines was ‘trying to introduce into politics a most dangerous and deplorable practice’. He had been criticized and so he had turned his fire on Timarchus. This was a horrendous precedent, ‘for if a man who has undertaken and administered any public function can get rid of accusers not by his honesty but by the fear he inspires, the people will soon lose all control of public affairs’.

      There could be little doubt about Aeschines’ guilt, Demosthenes suggested, and all the jurors had to do was call to mind the duties that any ambassador was expected to fulfil. ‘He is responsible, in the first place, for the reports he has made; secondly, for the advice he has offered; thirdly, for his observance of your instructions; and, to crown all, whether he has done his business corruptly or with integrity.’ Measured against this standard, Aeschines had been an abject failure.

      There had been a time, Demosthenes reminded the jury, when Aeschines had been among Philip’s harshest critics, making speeches against him and organizing conferences where the Greek states could formulate a united response to the Macedonian threat. But, in an instant, that had all changed. After an earlier mission to Philip’s court, Aeschines had suddenly lent his support to a peace treaty with Macedon that was patently injurious to Athenian interests. After his earlier patriotism he began using language ‘for which, as heaven is my witness, he deserves to die many times over. He told you that you ought to forget the achievements of your forefathers; that you should not tolerate all that talk about old trophies and sea-fights.’ The only possible explanation for such a volte-face was that Aeschines had been bribed by the Macedonian regime, and as an Athenian jury was well aware bribery was one of the heartbeats of Greek political life.

      A second embassy – the embassy that had provoked the trial of Timarchus – had been despatched to Philip with the aim of ratifying that peace treaty but it had failed to secure all of the conditions and provisos that the Athenian assembly had insisted upon. A deeply unsatisfactory treaty had been agreed and Aeschines was solely to blame. This is what Demosthenes had told the assembly upon his return to Athens, but he added that it had been hoodwinked by Aeschines’s eloquence. The ambassador had