2 February 1983

Abstract

I WILL START BY taking up some of the things I told you in the previous lectures concerning Ion and the notion of parrēsia, because several of you have asked me questions and remarked that, in the end, what was brought out in this reading of Ion, with regard to the structure and meaning of this term parrēsia, was not entirely clear. In actual fact, I have spoken at such length about this text by Euripides so as to answer a question raised by a text by Polybius that I quoted, I believe, right at the start of the lectures, and which is a well-known, famous, and almost statutory text with regard to parrēsia. This is the text (in Book II, chapter 38)¹ in which, speaking of the nature and form of Achaean government, he says that among the Greeks the Achaeans are defined by the fact that their constitution involved isēgoria (let’s say, equality of speech, equal right to speech), parrēsia, and in short, alēthine dēmokratia generally. That is to say, you see that Polybius made use of two notions whose meaning we will have to examine, and he related them to democracy in general. This definition or characterization of democracy is interesting. First of all because, as you can see, democracy in general is characterized or specified only by these two elements or notions (isēgoria and parrēsia); and then we must try to find out, on the one hand, what the relationship is between these two notions and the working of the whole democratic system, and, on the other, what the difference is between isēgoria (equality of speech, equal right to speech) and this parrēsia that we are trying to study.

Reminder of the Polybius text.∽ Return to Ion: divine and human veridictions.∽ The three forms of parrēsia: statutory-political; judicial; moral.∽ Political parrēsia: its connection with democracy; its basis in an agonistic structure.∽ Return to the Polybius text: the isēgoria/parrēsia relationship.∽ Politeia and dunasteia: thinking of politics as experience.∽ Parrēsia in Euripides: The Phoenician Women; Hippolytus; The Bacchae; Orestes.∽ The Trial of Orestes.