Bers, Victor. 2009. Genos Dikanikon: Amateur and Professional Speech in the Courtrooms of Classical Athens. Hellenic Studies Series 33. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Bers.Genos_Dikanikon.2009.
Chapter 3: Natural and Artificial Speech from Homer to Hyperides; A Brief Sketch
From Homer to the Mid-Fifth Century
ἡ γὰρ καὶ βασιλεῦσιν ἅμ᾽ αἰδοίοισιν ὀπηδεῖ.
ὅντινα τιμήσουσι Διὸς κοῦραι μεγάλοιο
γεινόμενόν τε ἴδωσι διοτρεφέων βασιλήων,
τῷ μὲν ἐπὶ γλώσσῃ γλυκερὴν χείουσιν ἐέρσην,
τοῦ δ᾽ ἔπε᾽ ἐκ στόματος ῥεῖ μείλιχα· οἱ δέ νυ λαοὶ
πάντες ἐς αὐτὸν ὁρῶσι διακρίνοντα θέμιστας
ἰθείῃσι δίκῃσιν·
On this account, beauty of speech is a divine gift, selectively bestowed on certain well-born men. [3] The people appreciate such speech for its aesthetic qualities, which are in fact employed for just ends.
μύθων τε ῥητῆρ᾽ ἔμεναι πρηκτῆρά τε ἔργων.
For this reason [your father] sent me to teach you all things, to be both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds.
These words might, just possibly, refer exclusively to content, perhaps matters of strategy.
στάσκεν, ὑπαὶ δὲ ἴδεσκε κατὰ χθονὸς ὄμματα πήξας,
σκῆπτρον δ᾽ οὔτ᾽ ὀπίσω οὔτε προπρηνὲς ἐνώμα,
ἀλλ᾽ ἀστεμφὲς ἔχεσκεν ἀΐδρεϊ φωτὶ ἐοικώς·
φαίης κε ζάκοτόν τέ τιν᾽ ἔμμεναι ἄφρονά τ᾽ αὔτως.
ἀλλ᾽ ὅτε δὴ ὄπα τε μεγάλην ἐκ στήθεος εἵη
καὶ ἔπεα νιφάδεσσιν ἐοικότα χειμερίῃσιν,
οὐκ ἂν ἔπειτ᾽ Ὀδυσῆΐ γ᾽ ἐρίσσειε βροτὸς ἄλλος·
There was, then, a way one was expected to speak, or at least to wield the scepter, the physical object that, as it were, gave one the floor. Odysseus succeeds in part by playing off against an established mode to trick his audience into taking him for a dolt, or at least an amateur in the grip of embarrassment and fear. [4]
κόσμον ἐπ<έω>ν †ὠιδὴν ἀντ᾽ ἀγορῆς θέμενος.
I think it just possible that the word κόσμον was meant not only as a way of denoting verse, in this instance elegiac couplets, but for its suggestion of an orderliness in expression that comported with the orderliness of the speaker and his political agenda.
σύμπασιν δ᾽ ὑμῖν χαῦνος ἔνεστι νόος·
ἐς γὰρ γλῶσσαν ὁρᾶτε καὶ εἰς ἔπη αἱμύλου ἀνδρός,
εἰς ἔργον δ᾽ οὐδὲν γιγνόμενον βλέπετε.
This fragment has a certain historical value as an early reference to synaesthesia, here the sense of sight yielding its place to the sense of hearing (cf. Cleon’s complaint at Thucydides 3.38.4). A curious irony is that Pisistratus is likely to have make a pitiable display of his wounds, falsely attributed to his enemies – a visual datum (see Plutarch Life of Solon 30). If so, Pisistratus would have exploited the Athenians’ sense of sight, and the ergon to which Solon would direct their gaze would have to be something else. It also speaks, though not with any specificity, of an effect attributed to a large audience.
Not a story to be taken seriously, except perhaps as showing what later generations would consider a plausible event in the life of this particular boy. Only a little less easy to dismiss is Plutarch’s account toward the end of the same chapter of instruction in oratory Themistocles took from Mnesiphilus:
Thucydides, whose information on Themistocles’ youth may not have been vastly better than Plutarch’s, despite being some five hundred years closer in time, attributes Themistocles’ expository success, presumably in symbouleutic oratory, to inborn talent, not instruction:
This remark is likely to be an implicit rejoinder to those who preferred to portray Themistocles as reliant on others.
“Tragic” Oratory from Antiphon to Hyperides
The quoted words themselves, though metonymic in their function, are not proper to the tragic lexicon and they are not metrical, or even recognizably iambic in rhythm. [9] Presumably Demosthenes expressed his sarcasm by mimicking Aeschines’ delivery in a style appropriate to the stage, but not an Athenian courtroom (see below n27).
Antiphon
Just before ending his speech (§§29–30), he refers again to the prosecution of his stepmother as undertaken in obedience to his father, but now adding two pathetic details: his father was dying when he gave his son the order to seek vengeance, and he himself was still a boy (πᾶις) at the time. My contention is that Antiphon witnessed, and probably experienced himself, the strong emotional effects tragedians worked on their audience; because his client was a novice, and the young man’s case was weak, he elected to raise the rhetorical temperature. The narrative is especially rich in such features, among them:
Against the Stepmother is not unique among the speeches attributed to Antiphon for the occurrence of poeticisms: see especially Cucuel 1886:22–23. [12] And there is a degree of emotionalism in all of them, even in the Tetralogies, which have no direct connection to actual persons and events. Nevertheless, the concentration of affective features found in Against the Stepmother cannot be paralleled in any other logographic text. [13] Perhaps if we had his complete oeuvre we would be less startled by blanket descriptions of Antiphon’s style as eschewing emotion, e.g. Caecilius as quoted in [Plutarch] Lives of the Ten Orators 832 E5, assuming this text is correct in supplying the negating word οὐ, which is underlined in the Greek and in the translation: [14]
But the crucial difference between what Caecilius saw in the generality of Antiphon’s style and what we see in Antiphon 1 lies in the immediate context, which provides a clear rationale for an affective usage, and thereby a link affording a very useful control for moderns, who must work by conjecture from scanty evidence. Contrast, for example, ὀπτήρ (‘witness’) at 5.27.3. The word is, as commentators say, of almost exclusively poetic provenance; but Antiphon’s narrative at that point is objective and logical, hence not an appropriate location for an attempt at poignancy. We may conclude that the word was not chosen for its pathos – in the normal sense of the English word.
Andocides
Excursus: Other Opinions on Tragedy and Forensic Oratory
I see the cake, but not Hyperides eating that cake. The allusion to tragedy, or more properly mockery of an opponent for injecting melodrama on an inappropriate occasion, is clear enough, indeed explicit, in Hyperides and other fourth-century orators, [34] but Whitehead has not made it clear how in this passage or elsewhere the orator is exhibiting his own taste for tragic flavor.
At the level of syntax, Pohle (86) observes that the imprecise designation of subject or object reflects the usage of everyday language.
Footnotes