TWO CONCLUSIONS

1. (1) References to military service to the state were as common as those to financial contributions in Athenian law-court speeches: with remarkable consistency over time, approximately the same fraction of speeches discuss financial contributions and military service. Both could show character or establish a debt of gratitude – although the latter claim was always a prickly subject and there were standard rebuttals to such claims.

2. (2) Neither claim was de rigueur: more than half of our extant speeches contain no such reference. Such claims play little role in deliberative or epideictic speeches. If we subtract these speeches (approximately 25) from our total, we still find that claims of service are mentioned in 58/120 law-court speeches, that is, less than 50 percent of them.

METHODOLOGY

The largest group of passages comprises those in which a litigant talks about his own services, but derogatory remarks about an opponent are also common. I have counted such references even when they may be merely informational, for example “I happened to be out of the country serving as a trierarch when he died,” on the assumption that skillful speechwriters reveal why somebody was out of the country or not depending on the impression the reason will make. I have also included sundry other passages where claims of service are discussed, but not with direct application to either the plaintiff or defendant or their families. These references indicate the relative prominence of financial and military service in the Athenian consciousness.