Chapter 3 analyzes freedom as doing “whatever one wishes” in fourth-century oratory. As several scholars have noted, doing “whatever one wishes” appears ambivalent in forensic speeches. They argue that, since Athens was not an anarchic state, extreme freedom could be glossed as a threat to sociopolitical stability. In contrast to prevailing scholarship, however, I argue that the most dominant principle, even in these texts, is the preservation of positive freedom as justification for the litigant’s position. While acting “however one wishes” may be presented as objectionable, the rhetoric of that assessment emphasizes who is doing “whatever they wish” and whom they affect by doing so. Bad characters, whether a criminals, oligarchs, or metics, can be rebuked as undeserving of positive freedom and abusing the power that attends it. The limitation of another citizen’s ability to do what he wishes can also condemn the action. Doing “what one wishes” is not a byword for antidemocratic action, but can have such a connotation because of the particular actors or victims of the actions. It is the misuse of the natural qualities of a citizen that leads to censure.

Nicole Loraux saw the genre of the funeral oration as ‘the spokesman of official ideology’ and even as ‘the only developed discourse that the Athenian city officially had on democracy’. Nevertheless, the funeral oration was not the only public treatment of democracy. Indeed, Athens was the only ancient Greek state in which citizens produced representations of their own regime and did so in a variety of literary genres. This chapter begins by considering the place that the funeral oration generally accorded democracy, as well as the specific democratic practices and principles that the surviving speeches mentioned. It then refutes what is, probably, the most famous argument in The Invention of Athens, namely that the funeral oration represented democracy only in aristocratic terms. Thirdly, the chapter clarifies the uniqueness of the epitaphic genre’s treatment of democracy by bringing in as comparison-points two tragedies and a famous legal speech. It concludes by drawing attention to the multiplicity of the self-portraits that Athenian democracy produced and to the ways in which the clear military function of the funeral oration constrained its portrait of the regime.

Lysias’s funeral speech is a paradoxical work. In theory a funeral speech by a foreign speech-writer should not exist. At first glance, this oration seems to point to a failure of process. What does it say about Athenian democracy that it had carefully selected a man to deliver a speech who needed to employ a speech-writer because, presumably, he was not up to the task of writing the speech himself? Moreover, how could it be that the best person to write an encomium of Athens is not an Athenian, but a metic? Lysias, what is more, was not just any metic, but one to whom Athenian democracy had repudiated a grant of citizenship. Lysias’ funeral speech thus potentially disrupts any straightforward story that we might want to tell about the relationship between the funeral oration, citizenship and civic ideology. His speech highlights the constructed nature of the genre’s statements about normative values. This chapter explores the implications of this speech for our understanding of the epitaphic tradition. It reviews the evidence for the authorship and authenticity of Lysias’ funeral speech. It canvasses the various possibilities for the construction and dissemination of his text.

Xenophon’s interest in the role of elite Athenians in the democratic city is evident not only in his manifestly Athenian works where this is an explicit concern but also elsewhere in his corpus, most notably in his Anabasis, the focus of this chapter. Although this work tells the story of how a band of Greek mercenaries marched with Cyrus into the heart of the Persian Empire in 401 BC, Xenophon’s account is profoundly affected by his Athenian experience and interest in elite political behavior within the Athenian democracy. The Anabasis broadly evokes the political situation in Athens and the complex interactions of mass and elite as Xenophon depicts the importance of and challenges for elite leadership in the quasi-democratic setting of the Cyrean army. In setting forth how a versatile elite Athenian – Xenophon himself – succeeds as a leader of the Cyreans, it confirms in action the principles that Xenophon lays down elsewhere for effective elite leadership within the Athenian democracy. It portrays Xenophon not just as a talented general but as a capable democratic orator who wins over the Cyrean masses in deliberative and forensic contexts that recall their Athenian analogs.