School Politics and the Monarch’s Court:
Speusippus’ Letter to Philip

Tarik Wareh (Union College)

This presentation uses Speusippus’ fascinating but neglected Letter to Philip to develop a picture of the lives, values, strategies, alliances, and aspirations of two competing circles of Greek writers circa 342 b.c.  In this letter (whose authenticity, while not uncontroversial, has been endorsed by the balance of scholarly opinion), Speusippus, Plato’s nephew and successor as the Academy’s scholarch, promotes the Academics’ proven services to the Macedonian court against the rival pursuit of influence by Isocrates (in his discourse Philip) and the Isocratean school (including the historian Theopompus, who Speusippus alleges is busy slandering Plato at Philip’s court).

Several questions emerge from this text that challenge and complicate our understanding of the literary and intellectual culture of this period.  Perhaps the most remarkable insight afforded by the letter is just how purely scholastic (if not necessarily reasonable) are the terms in which school-adherents fought in the political arena of the Macedonian court.  Intellectuals act politically to the extent of promising a pro-Macedonian bias in their own works, and viciously rereading their opponents’ works to paint them as anti-Macedonian.  Yet the terms of debate, even when addressed to the monarch directly, are often astonishingly intellectual—questions of style, genre, and even philosophical doctrine are often at the root of the contest that Philip is asked to arbitrate.  These writers not only offer Philip the products of the study—historiography, oratory, didaxis and epideixis—customized to serve his interest; they insert the scholastic terms of their own difference into what would otherwise appear to be political maneuvering.  Indeed, closer study of these squabbles shows that, whereas the writers’ school allegiances are relatively deep and stable, political labels such as “pro-Macedonian” and “anti-Macedonian” lose any deep defining significance that holds through the twists and turns of scholastic polemics.

A major focus of my presentation is on the re-reading of literary, philosophical, and political discourses by different readers, in different contexts, for different audiences.  Speusippus’ Letter to Philip does not merely provide evidence for how a literary work composed for one purpose (e.g. Isocrates’ Philip) can be read out of context (e.g. when the political landscape has fundamentally shifted since its composition) to persuade a royal patron.  The text also offers evidence for how the works composed in one school were interestedly read in a rival school.  I bring together related evidence that illustrates both the schools’ reading practices and the authors’ anxiety about the loss of control as their work travels and is subject to hostile misreading (for example, Isocrates’ complaint of his rival educators “abusing my discourses, reading them in the worst possible manner side by side with their own, dividing them at the wrong places, mutilating them, and in every way spoiling their effect,” Panathenaicus 16f.).

The surprising connections discovered in Speusippus’ letter can thus give us a vivid perspective from which to understand otherwise obscure texts, practices, and connections among writers (many of them fragmentary and traditionally classified into disparate genres) and among their careers.