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The Ostensible Author of PS.-Aeschines Letter 10 Reconsidered

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 September 2019

Zilong Guo*
Affiliation:
Northeast Normal University*

Abstract

This article examines the alleged author, or first-person narrator, of the tenth pseudonymous letter in the Corpus Aeschineum. It argues that the forger, in a short epistolary novel that describes the seduction of a certain Callirhoe in Troy, uses puns (αἰσχύνειν, ἀναισχυντία, etc.) on the name of the fourth-century BC orator Aeschines. It notes that αἰσχρός-words recur in ancient works and, as a rhetorical device, are attested in Demosthenes. The forger’s aims are, first, to serialize the ‘Aeschinean’ letters as a whole by relating them to the same author and, second, to create an ‘aischrologic’ counterpart of the Callirhoe, which is attributed to Chariton (Χαρίτων/‘The Graceful’). Thus there is less likelihood of suggesting other figures such as the eponymous Aeschines Socraticus.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 2019 

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Footnotes

*

guozl144@nenu.edu.cn. I am grateful to the two anonymous JHS readers for their excellent suggestions. Thanks are also due to Mirko Canevaro, Sven Günther and Qiang Zhang, as well as the Editor of JHS and my colleagues at the Institute for the History of Ancient Civilizations at Northeast Normal University for their generous help and advice on this article.