The Art of Veiled Speech: Self-Censorship from Aristophanes to Hobbes ed. by Han Baltussen and Peter J. Davis (review)

Han Baltussen and Peter J. Davis offer an informative and rich collection of essays in this selective yet comprehensive work. The Art of Veiled Speech: Self-Censorship from Aristophanes to Hobbes is a collection that explores the ways in which authors avoided political persecution by rejecting explicit statements in favor of engaging in clandestine innuendo and insinuation, which then required subtle and sophisticated decoding. This survey of self-censorship from antiquity through the early modern period examines, as editor Han Baltussen states in the foreword, “the tension between ‘frank speech,’ [or parrhêsia], typical of the ideal free citizen, and the art of ‘veiled speech,’ that is, the methods of expression adopted by the less-than-free” (1). The volume is a sweeping examination of self-censorship in textual environments in which the abilities of free and less-free citizens to say what they think fluctuate enormously, a paradigm congruent with the textual environments of the twenty-first century.

Following the introduction, which offers the conceptual framework for the volume and gives the organizing principle of having identified “flashpoints” in the classical and later periods when the “(potentially) oppressed respond to the threat of controlling authorities” (3), The Art of Veiled Speech is divided into 14 chapters. These span literary works in a variety of genres (poetic and historical texts, epistolary communication, and philosophical prose, along with oral culture and theatre) and cover a range of dates from the fifth century bce to the eighteenth century. As Baltussen and Davis readily acknowledge, the collection leans heavily toward classical and late antique/medieval times, with only two chapters touching upon the early modern period. This may disappoint scholars in early modern studies, but the close analysis of the social origin of subversion and self-censorship in the earlier texts does much to inform our understanding of self-censorship in the later periods as well, particularly concerning the iconoclasm that characterized religious upheaval during the Reformation.

The first three essays of the volume examine texts in an Athenian context. Andrew Hartwig’s “Self-Censorship in Ancient Greek Comedy” describes self-censorship as practiced by playwrights like Aristophanes and Eupolis for protection from prosecution. Hartwig discovers that certain themes were more likely to attract legal attention, and some venues were more tolerant of digressive works than others. He reveals that, “paradoxically, comedy also appears to have become more politically aggressive” even as it became “more sensitive to the sociopolitical contexts of the two major Athenian dramatic festivals” (33). In her examination of self-censorship in the public and private spheres of Athens, “Parrhêsia and Censorship in the Polis and the Symposium: An exploration of Hyperides Against Philippides 3,” Lara O’Sullivan concludes that self-censorship was a central feature of Athenian democracy, and that it was practiced both in the public domain and in the socially exclusive domain of the symposium, in order to avoid the potential for civic discord. Han Baltussen’s “A Bark Worse Than His Bite? Diogenes the Cynic and the Politics of Tolerance in Athens” moves away from examining parrhêsia in a particular genre or social context and instead offers a striking case study of Diogenes, the so-called “dog philosopher” of Athens. Central to Baltussen’s piece is the question of why Socrates, milder in speech than Diogenes, had been executed under democratic rule, while the more abrasive philosopher survived, despite living under more autocratic regimes. In his examination of contemporary response to Diogenes’s extreme anti-establishment behavior, Baltussen discovers that the philosopher was not alienated from society as much as one might expect because his contemporaries found value in the ideas he espoused.

In the section on Roman works, the contributors focus on libertas, an imprecise equivalent of the Greek concept of parrhêsia, upon which Roman writers depended in order to speak freely. The essays in this section also cover...