Agon and Ethics: Competitive Discourse in 5th and 4th Century Greece

How do we model our public sphere and the discourse that takes place within it - as a space of gradually emerging consensus or of endless competition? And how can we determine what constitutes appropriate, or even beneficial, competition and what constitutes inappropriate or harmful competition? In my dissertation, I utilize both literary and philosophical sources to examine classical Greek thoughts about the ethical problems of competition in public discourse. I argue, first, that public speech was virtually always conceived of as a fundamentally competitive enterprise; and secondly, that such competitiveness was viewed as particularly problematic in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. Authors in various genres explored the utility and abuses of competitive discourse through the vehicle of debate pieces that were intended to both entertain and illuminate. The agones that I examine are thus quasi-theoretical in that each contestant seeks to define the nature and limits of productive, fair competition and to distinguish it from harmful competition; but as one might expect, the agonistic format of the debate often colors the values expressed in the arguments. I organize my dissertation according to Aristotle's three divisions of rhetoric--epideictic, forensic, and deliberative--in order to show how each genre attempts to define its own version of 'good eris' largely through differentiating itself from the other genres. I use Euripides as an example of explicitly epideictic debate. In the agons from Suppliants (399-580), Phoenician Women (446-635), Iphigenia in Aulis (317-414), and Andromache (147-273), the playwright presents competitive discourse as an ultimately irresolvable problem. At the same time, his ability to rise above the fray and offer a balanced presentation of the issue sets him apart from practitioners in the other genres (and ideally helps him to defeat his opponents in the dramatic contest). I then turn to Demosthenes and Aeschines for my example of forensic debate. In these legal agons, we see each contestant attempting to present himself as a superior competitive speaker, while each opponent is accused of a different kind of unfair epideixis. Finally, I examine three debate scenes from Thucydides' History (Cleon vs. Diodotus, Nicias vs. Alcibiades, and Hermocrates vs. Athenagoras), where we see the contestants walking a fine line between public and private interests and trying to outdo their opponents by more persuasively defining the type of competition proper to deliberative debate