ABSTRACT
This speech is our only surviving text which deals in detail with the law of slander (kakegoria). Under British law, which defines defamation, including
slander, as utterances likely to lower the esteem in which the victim is held by right-thinking people, slander is a fairly nebulous concept and accordingly subject to misuse. Athenian law however is more narrow; it is not interested in
defamation in general but in certain types of utterance, contexts and categories of victim. We have evidence for a number of laws dealing with kakegoria; these laws forbade the utterance of slander in certain places, the slandering of the dead and (according to a cryptic passage in Dem. 57.30) people working
in the market-place; they also designated a number of specific allegations as forbidden (aporrbeta) and therefore subject to action by the individual maligned. We know from this speech that accusations of homicide, throwing
away one’s shield, and beating one’s father or mother were covered. How many other serious allegations were forbidden it is difficult to say. What does seem clear however from the present speech is that the law did not exempt statements
before public bodies. The case arises out of an allegation made in a previous trial; there Theomnestos, on trial for addressing the Assembly despite having allegedly thrown away his shield in battle (an act which barred him from the
exercise of citizen rights), had stated that the speaker killed his father (§1). The date can be fixed from §4, where the speaker states that the trial took place in the twentieth year (i.e. nineteen years) after the restoration of the
democracy (403 BC) following the brief and brutal regime of the oligarchy of the Thirty. The speech was therefore delivered in 384/3.
