Skip to main content

The fourth–century speeches Aeschines 1 Against Timarchos and [Dem.] 59 Against Neaira share a strikingly similar vignette. As each speech nears its conclusion, its speaker poses a question to the judges: what will you tell your family when they ask you how you voted? Both Aeschines and Apollodoros, the speaker of Against Neaira, ask their auditors to imagine themselves returning home and facing their sons (Aeschin. 1.186) or their wives, daughters, and mothers ([Dem.] 59.110). These parallel scenes illustrate the normative function of legal decisions: judgments passing from the courtroom to individual households and spreading from there throughout the city (Hunter 1994: 91). Beginning from the judges’ imagined journey home, this paper argues that Aeschines and Apollodoros both formulate the threat that their opponents pose to the city as a danger to the oikos – more precisely, to the legitimate modes of reproduction upon which the oikos and the polis depended.

The charge against Neaira, graphē xenias, is specifically motivated by anxiety about metic women unlawfully presenting their children as citizens ([Dem] 59.17). To emphasize Neaira’s status as an imposter in a citizen oikos, the narrative repeatedly mentions the oikiai where Neaira spent time over the years as a way of contrasting her mobility with the static domesticity of the citizen wife and mother (e.g. 59.22, 23, 25, 33; cf. Konstantinou 2018: 3-11). Apollodoros characterizes Neaira and her daughter as explicit threats to the figure of the respectable citizen wife and therefore to the reproduction of the legitimate oikos (Patterson 1993, Kennedy 2014: 103-106).

Against Timarchos, as well, is concerned with anxiety over reproduction – not heterosexual, but homosocial. As a modern sociological term, homosocial reproduction refers to “the replacement of dominant group members with other dominant group members” in business or academia (Dressel et al. 1993: 41). I apply this terminology to the socialization of citizen men in classical Athens through the institution of pederasty (cf. Shapiro 2015). In Against Timarchos, Aeschines portrays two competing models of pederasty: his own restraint and virtuous self control, and Timarchos’ shameless submission to insatiable sexual desire (Fisher 2005). The former would have a positive role in society, educating boys into citizens, while the latter would lead to behavior unsuited to citizen men. In his peroration, Aeschines focuses his argument on the danger Timarchos poses to all citizens – not just through his own behavior, but as a model for other young men (Aeschin. 1.192-193).

Returning to the parallel scenes near the end of both speeches, I argue that the household, as the site of legitimate heterosexual reproduction and the microcosmic symbol of the well-ordered polis (cf. e.g. Dem. 25.87), is used in both Against Neaira and Against Timarchos to illustrate the threat that Neaira and Timarchos represent to the normative functioning of the city. I close by considering what the possibility that Aeschines’ speech influenced Apollodoros’ (Fisher 2001: 62-63) might suggest about the co-constitutive link between heterosexual and homosocial reproduction.