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"Please join the Grad Student Political Theory Workshop for a discussion on
 PhD Candidate Sam McChesney's dissertation chapter draft "Heard Like a Man: Lysistrata and the Politics of Listening."

Discussions of public speech in fifth- and fourth-century Athens have been dominated by the practice of parrhēsia, or courageous truth-telling. Etymologically, parrhēsia comes from panrhēsia, “saying everything.” It particularly relates to candid, often harsh criticisms directed toward the ēthos of the democratic audience. This was an important principle of public culture in classical Athens, and it has long been of interest to political theorists and classicists who have compared it to modern ideas of free speech and critique.  Modern authors have drawn attention in particular to two features of parrhēsia. First is its necessary element of sincerity: the parrhēsiast may “say everything” he thinks, but he does not “say anything” he wants. Parrhēsiastic speech “was taken to express—even to expose—something of who one was, what one cared about, how one had chosen to live.”  Unlike a modern “edgy” speaker, the parrhēsiast cannot turn weasel, disavowing his speech as devil’s-advocacy, “satire,” and so on, when it turns out the audience is against him. Second, and relatedly, is its aspect of risk. Frank speech was officially valued and celebrated at Athens,  and citizens had an equal right to it (this equal right was called isēgoria),  but it was not protected: parrhēsiasts could be retaliated against in a variety of ways. Thus parrhēsia was closely associated with courage, a willingness to run these risks.  
Despite the wide-ranging interest in parrhēsia over the past forty-plus years, the question of listening to parrhēsia has often been ignored.  In his lectures on parrhēsia, Michel Foucault emphasized that because parrhēsia is often harsh and disturbing, listening to it requires courage: “parrhēsia is the courage of the truth in the person who speaks … but it is also the interlocutor’s courage in agreeing to accept the hurtful truth that he hears.”  However, this question of the listener’s courage has not been taken up in depth in any subsequent classical scholarship. In this chapter, I discuss Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata as a dynamic exploration of the limits of parrhēsia, listening, and courage at Athens."

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