Recent scholarship on the political history of the Greek city-states has wit­nessed the emergence of two important trends: a rediscovery of formal institu­tions, and the inter-poleis perspective for the study of political and social struc­tures.

An increasing number of studies have fruitfully compared the institutions of different poleis and explored Greek international relations showing the ex­istence of institutional connections and political exchange between Classical and Hellenistic city-states.^[95] New awareness for the role of political and legal institutions in shaping individual and collective behaviour - all through a combination of formal rules, informal practices, and ideas attached to the rel­evant institutional arrangements - is reinvigorating the study of ancient poli­tics, society, and economy.^[96] The combination of these scholarly trends has

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provided us with a more nuanced view of the legal and constitutional history of the ancient Greek World.³

Benjamin Gray,Josiah Ober, Ancient Greek History and Contemporary Social Science (Edin­burgh: Edinburgh University Press 2018) 101-56; Benjamin Gray, Stasis and Stability: Exile, the Polis, and Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015); Matthew Simonton, Clas­sical Greek Oligarchy: a Political History (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2017); Edward M.

3 The strong case is made by Low for the presence of a discourse in interstate relations that was based on reciprocity: an aspiration that was expressed through written and unwritten nomoi (laws) and shared by all Greeks. Mack convincingly reveals how the institution of proxenia (the formal relationship of friendship between a polis and a foreign benefactor) was part of a sophisticated and reciprocal system of honorific practices that were embedded in a formal network of institutional connections. Liddel discusses the diffusion, influence, and the per­ception of decrees within the cities of the Athenian empire, which continued to shape Athe­nian political discourse after the empire was lost. Similarly, in his recent commentary on Demosthenes' speech Against Leptines, Canevaro underlines the close relationship between Athenian legal thought, honorific practice, and foreign affairs.

In line with these approaches, this chapter will analyse Demosthenes' speech, Against Aristocrates (Dem. 23). This speech was written in the years after the Social War (357-355 bce) for a graphe paranomδn, an institution of Athenian constitutionalism that created a public charge against an illegal de­cree. In fourth-century Athens, every decree and law passed respectively by the Assembly and by the nomothetai could be reviewed in courts obedient to par­ticular legal procedures. This particular charge was brought to repeal a decree of Aristocrates granting special honours to Charidemus, a general who had been naturalised as Athenian.

The speech Against Aristocrates therefore tackles the relevant aspects of Athenian international politics within the framework of judicial review. It pro­vides valuable insights into the means by which legal thought andjudicial practice were able to inform Athenian public debate, and shape legitimacy and hegemonic ambitions in interstate affairs. Demosthenes' legal reasoning in this speech relies on a mix of appeals to the authority of Athenian laws, and interpretation of legal principles extracted from the statutes.^[97] Such principles embedded in a Greek morality were not exclusive of the Athenians and their laws, but represented the foundation of the Greek conceptualisation of inter- poleis relations.

A central principle shared by the different Greek communities in their so­cial and inter-polity relations is the notion of time which plays a key role in the legal arguments in Demosthenes' Against Aristocrates. The term time, usually translated as �honour', �right', or �reward', encompasses a concept according to which individual claims and status are negotiated and recognised with the rights of other individuals. The underpinning mechanism of Greek time is represented by the reciprocal recognition by others of individual claims.^[99] Such a two-way concept informed social relations between individuals in private life. It also informed political relations between individuals (citizens and for­eigners alike) and the polis institutions, as well as inter-poleis relations. The latter relation was institutionalised by the conferring of civic honours (timai) to benefactors in exchange of services for the city. The honour conferred upon Charidemus by the decree of Aristocrates falls into this latter category of reci­procity. As the close reading of the speech will show, time was not understood as an extra-legal notion in opposition to the laws and the institutions of the city, but was rather to be found enshrined in the statutes, conceptualised with­in Athenian legal thought, and expressed through forensic argumentation.^[100] The mechanism of time was a legitimising force for the attempts to reinstate the Athenian political hegemony in northern Aegean in the middle of the fourth century.

Appreciation of the intellectual context only follows from an understanding of the consequences of the Social War. Following the loss of the fifth-century empire as a consequence of the defeat against Sparta in the Peloponnesian War (434-404 bce), in 378/7 BCE the Athenians created the Second Athenian League to counterbalance the Spartan hegemony in Greece.^[101] In the 370s and 360s, the League obtained important military successes, and Athenian foreign policy resumed its traditional goal to establish a hegemonic control in the northern Aegean, an area rich in timber and grain. Yet, the successful cam­paigns led by Athenian generals encouraged a renewal of imperialistic atti­tudes, which in turn made Athenian relationships with their allies increasingly difficult. Fear among the allies of the re-establishment of a new Athenian em­pire led to a conflict labelled by ancient historians as the �Social War', which ended in 355 BCE with a military, political, and financial disaster for the Athe­nians. Even if Athens was able to keep some territories under its direct control, such as the cleruchies of Skyros, Imbros, and Lemnos, its power and influence in the Aegean region had been severely weakened for the second time in fifty years and appeared likely never to regain the strength it once commanded.

In the aftermath of this defeat, politicians and intellectuals openly debated the direction of Athenian foreign and fiscal policy into a post-imperial age, fo­cusing especially on the needs to increase state revenues and to secure the constant supply of grain from abroad (especially from the Black Sea and the northern Aegean) on which Attica was heavily dependent.^[102] A key text in this respect is Xenophon’s Ways and Means, a treatise written in 355/54 bce. In it, Xenophon identifies several proposals to recover resources for the Athenian public economy. Legislation should be passed to attract foreign traders to the Piraeus, and judicial procedures should be refined to provide for speedier reso­lutions of private disputes.

Xenophon’s latter point is especially important for understanding the im­pact of Athenian legal and judicial institutions upon its international relations in the mid-fourth century. The grant of public honours - for example, exemp­tion from taxes (ateleia), permission to address the Assembly, the grant of golden crowns, honorary seats in the theatre - was one of the most important tools used by Athens (and the Greek poleis in general) for diplomatic and eco­nomic ends, serving to reward both Athenian and foreign benefactors of the city whether they were Athenian generals - as in the case of Charidemus - other public officials, merchants, or even foreign kings. Honorific grants were instrumental to increasing Athenian domestic strength, and consequently to promoting its hegemonic and economic ambitions without the use of coercive force. Such honours, officially passed by decrees of the Council and the Assem­bly are abundantly attested in Athenian inscriptions of the second half of the fourth century.^{[104] [105] [106] For example, honours of citizenship and ateleia were con­ferred to foreign rulers from Thrace and the Black Sea, such as the Spartocids from Cimmerian Bosporus, in exchange for special access to grain purchase to Athenians merchants?2}

This chapter provides a close reading of Dem. 23, Against Aristocrates - pre­pared as a speech to repeal an honorific decree for Charidemus - in order to reveal the importance of judicial review, as an institution, for understanding how the Athenians approached honorific practice. As it will become clear, the procedures of graphe paranomon (and the parallel institution of graphe nomon me epitedeion theinai) were not used to deliberate upon domestic or foreign policy, but to stress questions pertaining to the rule of law more ap­propriate to the role of an Athenian law court. The institutional purpose of these procedures was respectively to enforce the hierarchy of legal sources (for the graphe paranomon) and to preserve the coherence within the system of the laws (graphe nomon me epitedeion theinai). The procedure of judicial re­view indirectly affected the kind of policy-decisions that were reached within the deliberative bodies of the polish The courts existed to ensure that popular enactments conformed to the written statutes as well as the ethos of the laws and the intent of the lawgiver. As a result, Athenian honorific decrees that were enacted to foster good diplomatic relationships had to conform with Atheni­an laws in order not to be rescinded by the graphe paranomδn. This chapter will first turn to the promulgation of decrees and laws in Athens in order to understand the institutional rationale of the graphe paranomδn within the fourth-century democracy. Then the chapter turns to discussing the foren­sic arguments in Demosthenes' Against Aristocrates, which were shaped by the relevant legal procedure. These arguments show that the validity of de­crees honouring benefactors was predicated on the basis of the written laws of Athens, from which litigants extracted higher juridical principles forming the general ethos of the laws. Legal arguments in court are not only key to re­constructing legal practice in fourth-century Athens, but are also relevant to understanding how special institutions of Athenian constitutionalism came to underpin diplomatic activity and the hegemonic ambitions of Athens amid the decline and recovery of this period.

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