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\r\nagainst Phormisius’ proposal to restrict the rights of citizenship to landowners,\r\ndeals with various issues referring to the most recent past of Athens,\r\nrecently emerging from the civil war: the continuity between the oligarchical\r\nexperiences of 411 and 404, which is likely to recur for the third time (§ 1); the\r\ncontroversy against the amnesty and “forgetting” the evil suffered, exposing\r\ndemocracy to serious risks (§ 2); the presence of unreliable people, from the\r\ndemocratic point of view, in the so-called Peiraeus Party; the theme of soteria\r\n(§§ 6 and 8) and the tendency of the assembly to be deceived and to vote against\r\nits own interest (§ 3); the different behavior of oligarchs and democrats towards\r\nthe civic body (§§ 3, 4–5); the greed for money of antidemocratic people (§ 5);\r\nallusions to the strategy of Pericles (§ 9), to a past, remote and recent, in which\r\nthe Athenians fought for freedom and justice (§ 11), and to the case of the Argives\r\nand Mantineans, constantly anti-Spartan (§§ 7–8). All in all, Lysias tries to\r\noffer a reconstruction of the recent past in a democratic key, foreshadowing the\r\nrisks that the democracy is still running.