Assembly politics and the rhetoric of honour in Chariton, Dio of Prusa and John Chrysostom

Abstract

This article examines the assembly scenes that can be found in the writings of Chariton of Aphrodisias, Dio of Prusa and John Chrysostom, each of which contains a rich honorific vocabulary, better known to us from the epigraphic record. Whereas inscriptions generally do not provide much information on the political processes whose outcome they document, these texts enable us to catch a glimpse of real-life assembly politics. A careful analysis of the assembly scenes reveals an on-going tradition of Greek people politics, that is, a rhetorical exchange between elite and non-elite citizens in the assembly, which shows that the balance of power in the imperial Greek cities was not as heavily tilted against the demos as the current consensus would have it.