The great revenge stories of Greece are fights. Achilles kills Hector for Patroclus. Medea sends poisoned clothes after Jason. Fiona McHardy, professor of classics at the University of Roehampton, asks the duller question:
what did you do if you had no strength, no friends and no magic?
You talked.
Homer makes rumour a messenger of Zeus, running with the troops, mouth to mouth. Hesiod calls her divine and a nuisance: light, easily raised, hard to bear and harder to shake. The orator Aeschines describes private talk moving through the city as if by itself. Men and women, free and slave, young and old, all did it. That was the point. It opened a path from the bottom of the city to the top.
Aristotle allows that gossip can be idle. He also says it turns malicious when the speaker has been wronged. In Athens that mattered, because a trial was a character test. There were no professional judges. The job was to look upright and make the other man look rotten. Litigants feared what the jury had already heard, and spent time saying the story was a lie planted by the other side.
The useful rooms were shops and markets. In a speech preserved under Demosthenes, Diodorus says his enemies sent talkers into the market to swing opinion. Demosthenes accused Meidias of the same. Callimachus, another speaker says, told his sad story over and over to the crowds in the workshops. The aim was a city that had already decided the case before it reached court.
Women could not plead. A male relative had to. Their talk still got in. In Against Aristogeiton, the speaker uses a resident foreigner named Zobia. She had helped Aristogeiton when he was in trouble. When he recovered, he beat her and threatened to sell her into slavery. As a non-citizen she had no case to bring. She told her acquaintances. By the time a man stood up in court, the jury had a picture of him as abusive and not to be trusted. Her revenge arrived in someone else’s speech.
Lysias 1, on the killing of Eratosthenes, uses an old woman. Euphiletus says he lawfully killed Eratosthenes after catching him with his wife. An old woman near the house told him of the affair, and cast Eratosthenes as a serial adulterer. She had not come on her own. A jilted lover had sent her. Lysias writes that woman as angry, hostile and wronged, the vocabulary of revenge. She could not strike him. She could point a husband at him.
Athenians knew the trick. They used it. They did not much mind who had started the story. A woman, a non-citizen or a slave with no standing in court could still put a reputation in the street, and wait for a man with a case to pick it up.
Based on Fiona McHardy, “Gossip was a powerful tool for the powerless in Ancient Greece.”
