Lysias’ Against the Subversion of the Ancestral Constitution of Athens: A Past not to be Forgotten

This chapter shows how this speech, written for a democratic politician against Phormisius’ proposal to restrict the rights of citizenship to landowners, deals with various issues referring to the most recent past of Athens, recently emerging from the civil war: the continuity between the oligarchical experiences of 411 and 404, which is likely to recur for the third time (§ 1); the controversy against the amnesty and “forgetting” the evil suffered, exposing democracy to serious risks (§ 2); the presence of unreliable people, from the democratic point of view, in the so-called Peiraeus Party; the theme of soteria (§§ 6 and 8) and the tendency of the assembly to be deceived and to vote against its own interest (§ 3); the different behavior of oligarchs and democrats towards the civic body (§§ 3, 4–5); the greed for money of antidemocratic people (§ 5); allusions to the strategy of Pericles (§ 9), to a past, remote and recent, in which the Athenians fought for freedom and justice (§ 11), and to the case of the Argives and Mantineans, constantly anti-Spartan (§§ 7–8). All in all, Lysias tries to offer a reconstruction of the recent past in a democratic key, foreshadowing the risks that the democracy is still running.