Diplomacy

Diplomacy  
Peter Hunt
The Oxford Handbook of Demosthenes
Edited by Gunther Martin

Print Publication Date: Nov 2018

Subject: Classical Studies, Ancient Rhetoric and Educational Culture
Online Publication Date: Jan 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198713852.013.10

Abstract and Keywords

Demosthenes’ life and works provide invaluable evidence both about the process by
which the Athenians made diplomatic decisions and about how their ambassadors were
expected to carry out these decisions. His foreign-policy speeches showed the wide vari­
ety of arguments that carried weight in the Athenian assembly: everything from cold cal­
culation to appeals to manliness, from reciprocity to the noble Athenian mission to suc­
cour the unjustly oppressed. Although the practice of diplomacy was aristocratic in sever­
al ways, Demosthenes emphasized only the most democratic and public aspects of his
own diplomatic service in contrast with Aischines’ supposed corruption, which Demos­
thenes links with an elitist preference for personal ties over loyalty to the city. Demos­
thenes’ self-representation was probably a distortion of his actual role; for example, he
may have been a proxenos for Thebes.

Keywords: Demosthenes, diplomacy, foreign policy, proxeny, Aischines, ambassadors, Athens, Thebes

Introduction
THE word diplomacy has both a restricted and a broader sense. It can denote the means
by which a state’s foreign policy is put into effect or it can include that foreign policy.
Thus, Isaac Goldberg’s ditty, ‘Diplomacy is to do and say / The nastiest things in the nicest
way,’ parodies diplomacy as the (nicest) execution of a prior (nastiest) decision, the re­
stricted sense. In contrast, the diplomacy described in Henry Kissinger’s tome, Diplomacy
(1994), encompasses not only the execution of state decisions, but also the content and
reasons for these decisions. In this chapter, when it becomes useful to distinguish the two
areas within the broad definition of diplomacy, deliberative diplomacy refers to how the
Athenians made foreign-policy decisions, mainly in the Assembly; executive diplomacy
means the communication and execution of these decisions, mainly by ambassadors.1

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The broad definition is appropriate to the life and works of Demosthenes. In his speech
On the False Embassy, Demosthenes expresses strong opinions about the proper conduct
of Athenian ambassadors, their execution of the intentions of the dêmos. Demosthenes
specifies that one of the key functions of an ambassador is expertly to inform and advise
the Athenian Council and Assembly about foreign-policy issues, an aspect of deliberative
diplomacy (e.g. 19.4; cf. 18.173). More important, in his dozen or so preserved assembly
speeches, Demosthenes proffered foreign-policy advice and exhortation to the Athenians.
On the one hand, these speeches represented one reaction to the particular situation of
Athens at one specific time. On the other hand, the Athenians’ reaction to events depend­
ed upon their ideas, sometimes longstanding and occasionally contested, about their in­
terests, about how states ought to treat each other, and about (p. 116) Athens’ special role
in the Greek world. This latter aspect of deliberative diplomacy will be the focus of the
second half of this chapter.

Demosthenes as a Diplomat
Near the start of On the False Embassy, Demosthenes outlines the four main obligations
of an ambassador: that he make accurate reports, that he give advantageous advice, that
he carry out the dêmos’ instructions, and that he do so in good time (19.4–6). He argues
that Aeschines has failed to do any of these things, because Philip bribed him (e.g. §8,
166–7, 175, 177). Naturally, Aeschines vehemently denies his guilt in his defence speech
—and neither side is trustworthy (Paulsen 1999: 420–527; MacDowell 2000: 1–22).
Nonetheless, Aeschines never objects that these criteria are inappropriate to the conduct
of an ambassador. The first key point is thus that Demosthenes combines deliberative and
executive diplomacy in a single category. Ambassadors are judged both for carrying out
Athenian policy in good time and for contributing to its formulation with their reports and
advice. Demosthenes played a role in both activities, but he places far more emphasis on
his role in guiding Athenian decisions in the Assembly and less on his role as an ambas­
sador. He gloried in the former and played down the latter. Part of the explanation for this
lies in the association of executive diplomacy with elitist sentiment and mixed loyalties.

The argument of Gabriel Herman’s Ritualised Friendship and the Greek City is crucial to
understanding the Athenians’ frequent ambivalence towards ambassadors (Herman 1987;
cf. Mitchell 1997). Herman propounds the persuasive thesis that diplomacy between
cities was originally dependent on the relationships of xenia—Herman’s ‘ritualized friend­
ship’, more often translated as ‘guest-friendship’—between individual aristocrats from dif­
ferent cities. With the rise of state power and, at Athens, democracy, ambassadors were
increasingly expected to be loyal exclusively to their cities. Nevertheless, the origins of
diplomacy in aristocratic friendships and the advantages of expertise and foreign connec­
tions continued to affect the way ambassadors were selected and how they were judged.

The dêmos wanted to use the foreign connections of the elite, their relations of xenia, to
its own advantage (Herman 1987: e.g. 104–5; Mitchell 1997: 90–110). In addition, much
depended on the intelligence and skill of envoys; their ability to persuade was often cru­

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cial. Consequently, although there were no professional diplomats, ambassadors, like gen­
erals, were typically elected from among the leading men in the city— rather than being
selected by lot as were many officials.

Consequently, virtually all the leading statesmen of Athens served on embassies (Adcock
and Mosley 1975: 158) and executive diplomacy was largely the preserve of the elite. Xe­
nia, however useful for the polis, also remained a firmly aristocratic custom and suspect
for that reason alone (Herman 1987: 160; contra Mitchell 1997: 180). Even more prob­
lematic, external relationships could be construed as implying disloyalty to the city-state,
a jealous mistress. Ambassadors were particularly vulnerable to such (p. 117) accusations
when their relations with a foreign power involved the exchange of gifts, a common prac­
tice, but one that could be construed as bribery by political opponents (e.g. 19.139–40,
166–8; Perlman 1976; Wankel 1982; Harvey 1985; Herman 1987: 73–80; Chapter 13 this
volume).

Executive diplomacy was not always open to public scrutiny. The desire for transparency
that lies behind the Athenian habit of having so many records inscribed on stone and dis­
played in public places was thwarted when ambassadors as individuals or in small groups
socialized with, for example, King Philip and his barons. The speakers’ platform in the As­
sembly was the most public venue conceivable; in contrast, who knew what sort of trea­
sonable or anti-democratic talk a group of rich and prominent ambassadors might indulge
in at a late-night symposium in Pella (cf. 19.139–40, 196). Although he eventually suffered
exile for taking bribes from Harpalus, for most of his career Demosthenes avoided of­
fence by strenuously playing down his entanglements in personal foreign relationships
and by stressing his role in the Assembly, a firmly democratic and public role.

Demosthenes was openly proud of his performances in the Assembly, of his ability to dis­
cern what the future held, what was advantageous for Athens, and what was consonant
with her proud traditions. In his famous narrative of the Assembly after Philip’s capture
of Elatea, he points out that something more than wealth and patriotism was needed at
that crucial time. Demosthenes alone had been following the course of events from the
beginning and understood the true state of affairs and Philip’s intentions. In particular, he
understood the position of different parties in Thebes and that its alliance was indeed in
play—‘or else we would have heard that Philip was at our borders’ (18.174–8; cf. 5.4–12).

Demosthenes narrates his coming forward in the Assembly after the news of the capture
of Elatea almost as if it were the epiphany of a god (Slater 1988 on 18.169–73). Although
he avoids giving offence, he is far from modest. Demosthenes’ bold self-representations
provide an egregious example of a more general trend: political leaders such as Demos­
thenes and earlier Pericles were far less restrained in their pretensions in the Assembly
than elite speakers in the law courts had to be (Ober 1989: 65–91). Nevertheless, the fa­
mous crown of the trial On the Crown was not to be granted as a symbol of Demosthenes’
primacy, but officially for his subordination to the city: ‘he always does and says what is
best for the dêmos’ (Aeschin. 3.49; contrast Dem. 19.8). In the direct democracy, Demos­
thenes could not actually make decisions as a modern leader of state would. In On the

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Crown, he stresses the quality of his advice in the Athenian Assembly and that, after the
capture of Elatea, he not only served as ambassador, but also convinced the Thebans to
make an alliance (18.179).

As Demosthenes did in Thebes, ambassadors often took part in the public deliberations of
other city-states by speaking in their assemblies.2 Although only citizens of (p. 118) a city
could vote, the decision-making process was thus not an exclusively internal affair. At dif­
ferent times, Demosthenes and Aeschines both went on diplomatic missions to other
cities with the aim of organizing opposition to Philip (6.19–27; 19.10–11). Demosthenes
even repeats at Athens part of a speech he made at Argos and Messenia, in which he
warned those states against the strings attached to Philip’s aid: ‘Take care that while
seeking to free yourself from the war you don’t find yourself a master’ (6.25). Demos­
thenes apparently felt that the advice he gave the Messenians bore repeating to the Athe­
nians: although our evidence is Athenocentric, diplomatic discourse seems to have been
similar in many Greek cities.

Demosthenes was proud of his advice and oratory, but he expressed disdain for the am­
bivalent world of foreign aristocratic ties that might pull against loyalty to the polis. He
brags that he did not love the gifts and xenia of Philip more than what was advantageous
to all the Greeks (18.109; cf. 19.259–67 and 18.323 with Yunis 2001: 289–90). Demos­
thenes depicts those seeking friendship with Philip and Alexander as elitist snobs, ambi­
tious, and anti-democratic to boot: Aeschines, in particular, tries to impress everybody
that he’s one of the xenoi and friends of Philip; he wants to be freed from the dêmos and
considers the democratic constitution insane (19.314; cf. 225–6, 295; 18.284). Demos­
thenes mocks these pretensions and suggests that Aeschines would more appropriately
be called ‘a hireling’ rather than a ‘friend’ of the Macedonian kings (18.51–2 and 284 with
Harvey 1985: 106; contrast 19.343).

In contrast, Aeschines depicts himself as a benefactor of Athens within the more archaic
and aristocratic world of personal relations with powerful foreigners. For example, he
claims to have made the best impression on Philip with a diplomatic and reasonable
speech outlining Athenian claims and complaints, which he summarizes at length in On
the False Embassy (Aeschin. 2.25–33, 38–9 with Carey 2000: 103 n.43). Demosthenes’
case against Aeschines rests largely on the way his private ties impacted public delibera­
tions after the Peace of Philocrates: Aeschines brought up in the Assembly personal as­
surances made by Philip; these ended up unfulfilled at great cost to Athens and Phocis;
and Aeschines did not even complain of being tricked by Philip—thus, he’d been bribed
rather than duped (Dem. 19.102–10).

Demosthenes was subject to criticism for going too far in the other direction, for neglect­
ing his individual relationships. For example, Aeschines accused Demosthenes of neglect­
ing the bonds of commensal friendship with his fellow ambassadors, an argument Demos­
thenes rebuts sharply and effectively, but at length (Aeschin. 2.163, 183; Dem. 19.188–91;
cf. Aeschin. 3.77; Plut. Dem. 22.2). Demosthenes was later instrumental in having his own
guest-friend from Oreus executed on a charge of espionage, a dubious charge and an

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atrocity in Aeschines’ opinion.3 Demosthenes purportedly defended himself by saying that

he put a higher value on the city’s salt rather than the table shared with his guest-friend,
i.e. their commensal bonds (Aeschin. 3.224–5; cf. 2.22).

This aphorism sums up Demosthenes’ self-representation. It is less clear that it

(p. 119)

does justice to the complexities of his actual conduct—or whether Demosthenes was typi­
cal or not (Mitchell 1997: 179). Through what connections was Demosthenes able to
claim inside knowledge of the Macedonian court (2.17; 4.8–9)? He was even accused of
hearing of Philip’s assassination earlier than the news reached Athens and of trying to
convince the Athenians that the gods had told him the news in a dream (Plut. Dem. 22.1;
Aeschin. 3.77). This suggests a more complicated situation beneath Demosthenes’ ten­
dency to deny such ties and to denounce them in others.

A salient example of this complexity—though, alas, no resolution—is Aeschines’ claim that

Demosthenes was proxenos, official representative, for Thebes at Athens and, by a convo­
luted and implausible argument, that his partiality for Thebes was what ruined the Peace
of Philocrates (Aeschin. 2.141, 143). Edward Harris suspects that Aeschines was lying
about Demosthenes’ proxenia, but Jeremy Trevett does not accept his arguments (Harris
1995: 199 n.15; Trevett 1999: 185 n.6). First, Aeschines provided no proof or witness for
his claim, but we wouldn’t expect him to: proxenia was not a crime and Demosthenes’ po­
sition may have been well known (cf. Aeschin. 3.42). Second, we don’t know how Demos­
thenes obtained the proxenia, but that process is not the sort of thing likely to be attested
unless for some special reason (e.g. contrast Aeschin. 2.89 with Dem. 19.155).

More troubling is that we find no other reference to this position even in passages con­
cerning Demosthenes’ relations with Thebes: Demosthenes does not refer to this honour
himself when he defends his pro-Theban record (e.g. 18.161–2) nor to explain or confirm
his knowledge of Theban politics after the capture of Elatea (§174–8). Nor do Demos­
thenes’ opponents mention it in other passages. In Against Ctesiphon, Aeschines lists the
other statesmen who really pursued a pro-Theban policy in contrast to Demosthenes’
empty boasts, as he claims. These men included Thrason, explicitly described as a prox­
enos of Thebes (3.138). Aeschines’ argument here would seem to be open to a devastat­
ing rebuttal if Demosthenes too were a proxenos of Thebes. Just as striking, Dinarchus
does not bring up proxenia, when he describes the close ties with Thebes that made
Demosthenes’ (supposed) betrayal of the city in 335 a more egregious crime (Din. 1.24).

On the one hand, Harris’ suggestion is not impossible. Perhaps, Aeschines made a false
claim to appeal to anti-Theban feeling because it would be hard to disprove: the award of
proxenia was often recorded on an inscription or even proclaimed in the theatre (Aeschin.
3.42), but the non-award of proxenia would be harder to prove—and Aeschines spoke last
in On The Embassy. Or perhaps Aeschines, denouncing Demosthenes’ foreign policy,
added a joke, since everybody knew that Demosthenes was not literally the Theban prox­
enos—much the same way one might imagine a Red-baiter in the 1950s referring to a lib­
eral United States senator as the ‘Soviet ambassador’.

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On the other hand, several considerations may explain why Demosthenes’ proxenia for
Thebes, if true, is not mentioned elsewhere. Prominent leaders such as Demosthenes may
often have received proxenia from many cities.4 If that were the case, that (p. 120) Demos­
thenes was proxenos for Thebes would have carried little weight as an accusation when
Thebes and Athens were hostile nor as something Demosthenes needed to stress when
describing his more important public actions in arranging an alliance with Thebes.
Demosthenes’ own silence is also in line with our theme in this section: his general ten­
dency to dwell on the public, unambiguously democratic aspects of his diplomacy, rather
than potentially suspect private ties. We would not expect him to stress his position as
proxenos.5

Jeremy Trevett shows that Demosthenes’ preserved public statements about Thebes are
in accord with Aeschines’ claim. On occasion, Demosthenes criticized Thebes to appeal to
Athenian resentment, sometimes strongly and seemingly gratuitously. But more telling,
Trevett argues, is that he introduces his occasional positive statements about Thebes with
an attempt to disarm the hostility he expects from his audience. These latter passages re­
veal Demosthenes’ true Theban sympathies despite his occasional crowd-pleasing expres­
sions of hostility (1999: 190–6). According to Trevett’s interpretation, Demosthenes’ great
moment of arranging the alliance with Thebes and his later attempts to convince the
Athenians to back Thebes’ revolt against Alexander (Worthington 1992: 164–8) reveal a
long-standing, but earlier concealed, political orientation.

If Demosthenes actually was a Theban proxenos, his speeches also illustrate the delica­
cies of this position given the changing hostilities and alliances of Greek city-states and
the general expectation that proxenoi favour politically the states they represented (e.g.
15.15 with parallels in Radicke 1995: 107; Perlman 1958). Demosthenes took a moderate
position between loyalty to his own state, hostile to Thebes, and his duty as proxenos to
represent and, in some sense, to befriend the Thebans. The proxenos of Thebes in Tene­
dus felt more keenly his foreign ties—or was braver: he made or organized a contribution
to Thebes’ military effort in the Sacred War even though his island was a loyal ally of
Athens, on the other side of that conflict (RO 57.14–15, 270–1). Thucydides briefly alludes
to Pericles’ similarly awkward position and his resolution of it, one more in line with
Demosthenes’ pronouncements at least of unalloyed loyalty to the polis: although he was
xenos of King Archidamus of Sparta, Pericles consistently took a hard line against Sparta
and offered to deliver up his estate if the Spartans didn’t devastate it, either on account
of this bond or to raise ill will against him (Thuc. 2.13.1; cf. Herman 1987: 143–5 on Thuc.
2.18).

Deliberative Diplomacy at Athens

The preserved assembly speeches of the fourth century, most of them by Demosthenes, in
some cases respond directly to a diplomatic initiative from another state. In all cases
(p. 121) they provide excellent evidence for how the Athenians made foreign-policy deci­

sions. In contrast to the speeches in Thucydides, some of which may reflect his own intel­

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lectual predilections and may have shocked rather than convinced his contemporaries,
Demosthenes’ deliberative speeches are most plausibly interpreted as drafts worked up
in preparation for an actual speech.6 They represent the arguments that Demosthenes,
who would know, thought would be most effective and planned to use to persuade the
Athenians.

A crude yet popular and sometimes accurate model of modern diplomacy encompasses a
strict dichotomy: hard-headed diplomats, advisors, and heads of states confer in secret
and make a decision based entirely on state interests; they publically reveal this decision
clothed in whatever specious justifications are necessary to make it palatable to their own
citizens and to the international community. In classical Athens, we do not find this sharp
distinction between two arenas of debate. No head of state existed to make and then jus­
tify a decision, but rather the Assembly alone was sovereign. One result is that various
factors ranging from cold calculations of interest to the crudest emotional appeals to the
loftiest notions of Athens’ traditional mission in the Greek World played a role in diplo­
matic decisions. As a general rule, whatever arguments we find in the speeches of an ex­
pert orator such as Demosthenes had some persuasive force and need to be included
within our picture of Athenian diplomacy. This makes for a large and sometimes unwieldy
collection of arguments, which I cannot discuss systematically here—but see Hunt 2010.
A few salient examples illustrate the variety and complexity of Athenian diplomatic dis­
course.

Demosthenes sometimes mentions the specific interests of the Athenians: he had

arranged alliances in Euboea, the Isthmus, and Boeotia to protect Attica by sea and land;
he had taken measures to assure Athenian control of the grain route from the Bosporus
all the way to the Piraeus (18.301–2; cf. 237). Demosthenes also deploys general state­
ments to the effect that interest overwhelms justice in foreign policy: for example, he
agrees that ‘by natural right the property of the absent belongs to those who are on the
spot, and the property of the careless to those who can face toil and danger’ (4.5). Occa­
sionally these Realist arguments take a fuller form similar to those so famous from Thucy­
dides: state policy is determined by interest, so moral considerations provide a mere
smokescreen for these (15.28–9 with Radicke 1995: 149–55). Demosthenes also stated ex­
plicitly a key tenet that makes Realism more palatable than a thoroughgoing amorality
would be: it is not within a state but only among states that justice has no teeth and is
and should be ignored (Usher 1999: 214; Hunt 2010: 163–6). Even these Realist argu­
ments, confined mainly to earlier speeches, sometimes serve mainly to endow Demos­
thenes with an aura of hard-headed calculation, especially useful when he is advocating a
risky plan—as in Demosthenes’ On the Liberty of the Rhodians where he advocated inter­
vening in support of democracy in Rhodes even at risk of war with (p. 122) Persia (15.5–13
with Radicke 1995: 56–8). Overall, a systematic Realism is not at all characteristic of
Demosthenes’ thinking. Rather than a sharp contrast between specious claims of justice
and the real interests that determine policy, we often find a complex entanglement of the
two (Low 2007: 164–73) or the simpler view that the two are separate and valid consider­
ations (Hunt 2010: 155–9).

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One calculating strategy common in fourth-century Greek diplomacy and attested in

Demosthenes was ‘balancing’, allying with the enemies of a growing power to prevent it
from attaining dominance (Hunt 2010: 168–80; cf. Wolpert 2001: 78–9). The modern no­
tion of the ‘balance of power’ resembles ancient balancing in the tactics it recommends:
alliance against growing and threatening powers. The modern notion originally also car­
ried the moral connotation that there was something natural and stable about a balanced
system (Haslam 2002: 89–127, esp. 90–2). The Athenian tactic of balancing was also im­
bued with moral connotations but for a different reason. We find a heroic version of
Athenian history in Demosthenes’ thinking—most obviously in On the Crown (Harding
1995: 124; Yunis 2007)—according to which Athens has a traditional and almost divine
mission to vindicate the rights of the weak against their powerful oppressors. In a typical
entanglement of morality and advantage, this moral mission often coincides with the cal­
culated policy of balancing, allying against the powerful and with their typical victims, the
weak.

As was typical in classical Greece, Demosthenes applied the code of individual reciprocity
to the sphere of diplomacy among states (Hunt 2010: 185–214; cf. Gehrke 1987: 130 and
Lendon 2000). For example, Athens needed to repay the evils that Philip had done her
(e.g. 3.1–2; 4.43). Conversely, it was particularly disgraceful that Athens had abandoned
its ally Phocis, especially given that Phocis had argued against the extirpation of Athens
after the Peloponnesian War and deserved immense gratitude even a half century later
(19.66). Reciprocity did not, however, by itself determine Athenian policy: in a number of
important cases, interest required that Athens assist those who had (supposedly) hurt
Athens in the past: alliances with Olynthus and Byzantium, for example, required Athens
to overlook past injuries for the sake of the struggle against Macedonia (8.16; cf. 18.94).

Some of the arguments Demosthenes employs are far cruder and more emotional than
this: for example, he represents an unwillingness to go to war as either slavish or effemi­
nate (Hunt 2010: 113–23; cf. Roisman 2005: 113–16). In other cases, Demosthenes tries
to harness the basic emotions associated with self-defence to justify what would other­
wise seem aggressive policies. For example, he repeatedly argues that unless Athens
fights Philip in the North, it will have to fight for the possession of its own territory. It is a
sign of the developed state of Greek diplomatic discourse that this ploy was already well
known and might be countered or dismissed by wary Greeks (Hunt 2010: 152–3).

The archetypical ethnic argument in Greek diplomacy was that of panHellenism: Greeks
should not fight each other but rather unite against the Persians. The frequent use of this
argument shows that it carried some rhetorical weight, but at the same time Greek con­
duct in the fourth century could hardly have been more contrary to panHellenism, as
leading Greek states sought Persian support to help them fight other (p. 123) Greek states
(Laforse 1998). Demosthenes gives lip service to panHellenism early in his career but is
generally restrained (e.g. 14.3–14, 36–7). Rather his main and most famous use of ethnici­
ty is directed against Macedonia. He presents Macedonia as the new Persia, a foreign
threat to the freedom of all Greece. Somewhat paradoxically, he advocates alliance with
Persia itself to counter the Macedonian threat (10.31–4 with Hajdú 2002: 254–84; bribery

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alleged in Aeschin. 3.173, 239, 258–9). Rather than the kinship diplomacy that Greek and
non-Greek states often invoked—for example inventing a common mythic forebear to jus­
tify an alliance (Jones 1999: 36–49)—Demosthenes explicitly excludes Philip from any
claim to Greekness: ‘He is neither a Greek, nor related at all to the Greeks, nor even a
barbarian from a place respectable enough to name’ (9.31).

Conclusion
Demosthenes thus provides rich, if distorted, evidence for the full gamut of diplomacy in
fourth-century Athens, both the conduct and expected conduct of ambassadors in carry­
ing out Athenian decisions and the considerations that determined their foreign-policy de­
cisions. His speeches do not merely depict but demonstrate the latter.

Several diplomatic arrangements, attested elsewhere, are not prominent in Demosthenes.

Unwritten laws—for example, treaties should be obeyed, temples and ambassadors
should be inviolate—and the terms of treaties arguably constituted an international law
among the Greeks (Low 2007: 77–128; Alonzo 2007). Demosthenes occasionally refers to
treaty obligations, but he places less emphasis on this than was usual, to judge from our
limited evidence (Hunt 2010: 222–6). Two speeches, falsely attributed to Demosthenes
but nonetheless contemporary, On Halonnesus and On the Peace with Alexander ([Dem.]
7, 17), are far more legalistic in their argumentation, with constant references to treaty
terms—as is Andocides’ On the Peace from 392/1. The author of On Halonnesus (c.342)
even imagines that Philip might be subject to lawsuits from Athenians who lost their prop­
erty when he took Potidaea in 356 (7.9–13)! Demosthenes more often looked at the big
picture, and although he certainly claimed justice was on his side, only occasionally did
he descend to specific treaty terms.

For Demosthenes, as for many of his contemporaries, the main purpose of diplomacy was
to protect Athenian interests. He does not conceive of diplomacy as an alternative, non-vi­
olent way of resolving conflicts, an ideal attested in treaties that specify that the parties
are to resolve any differences by arbitration, ‘oaths and justice’, rather than arms (e.g.
Thuc. 4.118.8; cf. Aeschin. 2.80 on the contributions of ambassadors and generals). We
may explain Demosthenes’ attitude by the need to counter Macedonian aggression, by the
dangers inherent in interstate anarchy, by Athenian militarism, or by his personal ambi­
tion—or, likely enough, some combination of these factors. For all his eloquence, Demos­
thenes never applied the advice Phocion gave to the Athenians on another occasion: to
fight with words at which they were superior rather than with arms in which they were
inferior (Plut. Phoc. 9.4).

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Notes:

(1) H. D. Westlake (1970) makes a similar distinction within the diplomacy in Thucydides
but uses the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ diplomacy.

(2) This constituted executive diplomacy with respect to the Athenians’ instructions to
their ambassador and deliberative diplomacy for the Thebans.

(3) Aeschin. 3.223–5 with Herman 1987: 66, 124 and Wankel 1976: 996–7 on this as an or­
atorical topos cf. Dem. 18.137.

(4) A number of passages are consistent with such a view, although they do not prove it:
Dem. 18.120 with Wankel 1976: 638; Aeschin. 2.89; 3.42; Hyp. Dem. 25.

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(5) Compare Trevett 1995 on Nicias as proxenos of Syracuse, only mentioned in Diodorus
Siculus and not in Thucydides or Plutarch.

(6) Trevett 1996 and Chapter 32 this volume; Yunis 1996: 246–7. On Thucydides and
Demosthenes see Low 2007: 222–33.

Peter Hunt

Peter Hunt is Professor of Classics at the University of Southern California.

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