The Center for Hellenic Studies

Genos Dikanikon: Amateur and Professional Speech in the Courtrooms of Classical Athens

  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 4: Terrors of the Courtroom

In Demosthenes 22.25, a passage made famous by Osborne’s 1985 article on the multiplicity of procedural routes available to prosecutors, we have one of the very few general references within a speech to the possibility that litigation, and specifically speaking in court, might intimidate some idiôtai:

καὶ μὴν κἀκεῖνό γε δεῖ μαθεῖν ὑμᾶς, ὅτι τοὺς νόμους ὁ τιθεὶς τούτους Σόλων καὶ τῶν ἄλλων τοὺς πολλούς, οὐδὲν ὅμοιος ὢν τούτῳ νομοθέτης, οὐχ ἑνὶ ἔδωκε τρόπῳ περὶ τῶν ἀδικημάτων ἑκάστων λαμβάνειν δίκην τοῖς βουλομένοις παρὰ τῶν ἀδικούντων, ἀλλὰ πολλαχῶς. ᾔδει γάρ, οἶμαι, τοῦθ᾽ ὅτι τοὺς ἐν τῇ πόλει γενέσθαι πάντας ὁμοίως ἢ δεινοὺς ἢ θρασεῖς ἢ μετρίους οὐκ ἂν εἴη. εἰ μὲν οὖν, ὡς τοῖς μετρίοις δίκην ἐξαρκέσει λαβεῖν, οὕτω τοὺς νόμους θήσει, μετ᾽ ἀδείας ἔσεσθαι πολλοὺς πονηροὺς ἡγεῖτο· εἰ δ᾽ ὡς τοῖς θρασέσιν καὶ δυνατοῖς λέγειν, τοὺς ἰδιώτας οὐ δυνήσεσθαι τὸν αὐτὸν τούτοις τρόπον λαμβάνειν δίκην. δεῖν δ᾽ ᾤετο μηδέν᾽ ἀποστερεῖσθαι τοῦ δίκης τυχεῖν, ὡς ἕκαστος δύναται. πῶς οὖν ἔσται τοῦτο; ἐὰν πολλὰς ὁδοὺς δῷ διὰ τῶν νόμων ἐπὶ τοὺς ἠδικηκότας οἷον τῆς κλοπῆς. ἔρρωσαι καὶ σαυτῷ πιστεύεις· ἄπαγε· ἐν χιλίαις δ᾽ ὁ κίνδυνος. ἀσθενέστερος εἶ· τοῖς ἄρχουσιν ἐφηγοῦ· τοῦτο ποιήσουσιν ἐκεῖνοι. φοβεῖ καὶ τοῦτο· γράφου. καταμέμφει σεαυτὸν καὶ πένης ὢν οὐκ ἂν ἔχοις χιλίας ἐκτεῖσαι· δικάζου κλοπῆς πρὸς διαιτητὴν καὶ οὐ κινδυνεύσεις.

Solon who made these laws, did not give those who wanted to prosecute just one way of exacting justice from the offenders for each offence, but many. For he knew, I think, that the inhabitants of the polis could not all be equally clever, or bold, or moderate, and that if he made the laws in such a way as to enable the moderate to exact justice then there would be many bad people about, but if he made it suitable for those who are bold and able to speak then private individuals [idiôtai] would not be able to exact justice in the same way. He thought that it was proper to deprive no one of obtaining justice, as each was capable. But how could this be managed? By giving many ways of legal action against offenders – for example thieves. You are strong and confident: use apagôgê: you risk a thousand-drachma fine. You are weaker: use ephêgêsis to the magistrates; they will then manage the procedure. You are afraid even of that: use a graphê. You have no confidence in yourself and are too poor to risk a 1000dr. fine: bring a dikê before the arbitrator and you will run no risk….

(Translation by Osborne 1985:42) [1]


It is worth noting that although Demosthenes speaks of nonprofessionals and of poverty, he does not say what everyone probably knew, that a poor man most likely could not afford a logographer’s fee. Roisman 2005:98 has a good statement on the ambivalences in Athenian opinions on the point:

To be sure, the orators did not criticize the poor for avoiding risky legal procedures, as they did the rich. Such criticism would probably have been considered unseemly and antagonized the jury. In addition, it is likely that the poor were not expected to take the same risks as the rich. Nonetheless, the poor, in contrast to strong, confident men of wealth, were seen as weak, fearful, and unable to defend their interests, their honor, or the public good in court.


There are also passages in which a speaker’s complaints of unjust decisions touch on the class status of the litigants. Isocrates 18.9–10 is an often cited broad criticism of jury trials:

Some of his associates approached me and advised me to settle my differences with him, not to prefer defamation and risking a great deal of money [the speaker was a member of the liturgic class: §§58–59], not even if I really had faith in my case. They said that many things come out contrary to expectation in the courts and that your verdicts were more a matter of luck than justice….


This is of course a tendentious statement as it is attributed to his opponent’s side and is meant to explain the speaker’s initial retreat from a court case. Still, it is a useful reminder that fear of court appearances was a relative thing. [2]

Another passage in Demosthenes (23.5) speaks of a widespread fear of speaking on public matters:

…πολλοῖς τοῦτο φοβουμένοις, λέγειν μὲν ἴσως οὐ δεινοῖς, βελτίοσι δ᾽ ἀνθρώποις τῶν δεινῶν, οὐδὲ σκοπεῖν ἐπέρχεται τῶν κοινῶν οὐδέν.

Many fear this: perhaps they are not adroit [deinoi] at speaking, though they are better men than those who are, and it does not occur to them to look into any matter of common concern.


Strictly speaking, the issue here is not explicitly forensic speech, but a reluctance to speak in the political realm. That might be heard as a reference to speaking in the Assembly, but the immediate context is the graphê at hand (Rubinstein 2000:192 with n18).

Too well known to need documentation here are the many passages in which a speaker asks the jury’s indulgence because he himself, a man inexperienced in public speaking, cannot match his opponent’s sharp skills in what Shakespeare’s Cordelia calls the “glib and oily art.” [3] I turn instead to indications of the specific challenges facing the unskilled speaker in an Athenian court.

“Good Attic”

Lysias’ speeches are written in that form of Greek we expect from other evidence, inscriptions and Old Comedy. But the use of pure Attic in court speech was not a long-established tradition. Antiphon, who was executed not more than seven years before the earliest preserved speeches by Lysias, still shows Ionic forms, even in those speeches he wrote for actual cases. [4] As we will see, native Athenians might have reason to worry about some specifics of their language, but foreigners had a more acute problem.

In almost its first words, Plato’s Apology has Socrates ask the jurors’ indulgence if, as a first-time speaker in court, [5] he employs the mode in which he was brought up:

ἀτεχνῶς οὖν ξένως ἔχω τῆς ἐνθάδε λέξεως. ὥσπερ οὖν ἄν, εἰ τῷ ὄντι ξένος ἐτύγχανον ὤν, συνεγιγνωσκετε δήπου ἄν μοι εἰ ἐν ἐκείνῃ τῇ φωνῇ τε καὶ τῷ τρόπῳ ἔλεγον ἐν οἷσπερ ἐτεθράμμην, καὶ δὴ καὶ νῦν τοῦτο ὑμῶν δέομαι δίκαιον, ὥς γέ μοι δοκῶ, τὸν μὲν τρόπον τῆς λέξεως ἐᾶν….

Quite simply, I am, as it were, a foreigner when it comes to the style of speaking here. So just as if I were an actual foreigner, you would show forbearance if I spoke in the phônê [φωνή] and way in which I was brought up, this is what I am asking of you: to tolerate my way of speaking….

Apology 17d–18a


The word φωνή sometimes refers to a language other than Greek (φωνὴ βάρβαρος) or a dialect of Greek, as in the expression at Plato Cratylus 398d: κατὰ τὴν Ἀττικὴν τὴν παλαιὰν φωνήν. Dialect is most certainly the meaning here, and the whole point of the sentence is more general, that Socrates cannot speak as a rhêtor would. With the comparison, however, Plato is sarcastically rebuking the Athenian public, which he despised on intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical grounds, for their intolerance of what they took to be a dialect less suitable for use in their courts than their own. Plato’s script for Socrates is mischievous, but not unique in its oblique reference to Athenian juries’ attention to speakers’ language. One passage from real forensic speech is reasonably certain to attest to Athenians’ linguistic chauvinism: [6]

ὑμεῖς δ᾽ ἴσως αὐτὸν ὑπειλήφατε, ὅτι σολοικίζει τῇ φωνῇ, βάρβαρον καὶ εὐκαταφρόνητον εἶναι.

You have perhaps supposed that because he makes mistakes in speaking [or “speaks in the wrong dialect”] [7] he is a contemptible barbarian.

Demosthenes 45.30


“Unpacked,” this suggests that the litigant does not speak good Greek, good Attic Greek, or that he is inferior by virtue of not being truly Greek and is perhaps to be despised as a slave (cf. Demosthenes 57.18). There can be little doubt that the close proximity of the notions is meant to bring the different ideas into close association in the jurors’ minds.

On one interpretation, the defendant’s poor Greek is the specific point of the insult at the opening of Demosthenes’ For Phormio (36.1):

τὴν μὲν ἀπειρίαν τοῦ λέγειν, καὶ ὡς ἀδυνάτως ἔχει Φορμίων, αὐτοὶ πάντες ὁρᾶτ᾽, ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι·

Men of Athens, you all see for yourselves Phormio’s inexperience in speaking, that he can’t do it.


My translation is deliberately ambiguous; Sandys and Paley think this refers to Phormio’s “indifferent pronunciation,” but Blass 1887–98:3.1:463 thinks bodily weakness and illness are meant. In any case, Phormio’s undoubted ability to run a bank makes it unlikely that Athenians had great trouble understanding him.

But there is also some anecdotal evidence that the Athenians could be fastidious in matters of morphology or pitch accent. If we can believe the scholiasts’ account of Demosthenes’ deliberate mispronunciation of the word he claimed applied to Aeschines, μισθωτός̣ (“lackey working for hire”), as a proparoxytone, even those Athenian present who favored Aeschines, simply because they could not tolerate an accent wrongly placed, were tricked into shouting out a correction, making it appear that virtually everyone accepted Demosthenes’ characterization of his opponent. [8] And if we can believe an incident reported in the Suda without any indication of names or date, Athenians refused a financial beneficence for no other reason than that it was offered to them with an improperly formed future tense:

τοὺς Ἀθηναίους φασὶν ἀθρόους εἰς ἐκκλησίαν συναθροισθέντας ἐπὶ τῶν διαδόχων, ἐπειδὴ εἰς ἀπορίαν καθεστήκεσαν χρημάτων, ἔπειτά τις αὐτοῖς τῶν πλουσίων ὑπισχνεῖτο ἀργύριον, οὕτω πως λέγων, ὅτι ἐγὼ ὑμῖν δανειῶ, θορυβεῖν καὶ οὐκ ἀνέχεσθαι λέγοντος διὰ τὸν βαρβαρισμὸν καὶ οὐδὲ λαβεῖν τὸ ἀργύριον ἐθέλειν·

It is said that the Athenians were brought together at a meeting of the Ecclesia at a time of great financial difficulty. Then a rich man promised them money, saying “I will lend it [daneiô; correct Attic would be daneisô] to you.” The Athenians jeered and would not put up with him because of his barbarous language and refused to accept the money. [9]

Suda s.v. Θεριῶ


The Athenians themselves did not all speak alike. Some, for instance, used verbal forms we are accustomed to deem “subliterary” or, to be more precise (following Colvin 2000:289), a “substandard social variety.” Yet Aristophanes and other comic poets never ridicule the language of poor, uneducated Athenians who spoke that sort of Greek, though politicians whom the poet has chosen to slander, for instance Cleophon or Hyperbolus, are not immune. This might seem surprising, but it can be explained as a tactful abstention from jokes aimed at a great many of the Athenians sitting in the audience (Colvin 2000:293). There is no direct evidence for “incorrect Attic” issuing from Attic lips in Athenian courts, but Teodorsson has suggested that changes in the pronunciation of vowels – changes that educated Athenians resisted, but were soon to become became pervasive – were to be heard already in the classical period. Sommerstein 1977:62 regards it as at least possible that “the more prestigious pronunciation will have been used on all public occasions, e.g. in court and in the theatre.” [10] He notes the far-from-pellucid Aristophanic fragment that speaks of three speech styles: one “in the middle,” one “urbane and rather effeminate,” the third “not a free man’s and rather boorish.” [11] Whatever the precise features of this putative prestige language, an uneducated Athenian might have identified himself as someone who had not “been to school” as soon as he began speaking; and in the absence of a powerful class-consciousness among jurors who spoke the same way and regarded his speech as a call to solidarity, the man who spoke with an iotacist pronunciation, or whose language deviated in other ways from that of well-trained speakers, had yet another thing to worry about.

Delivery

The importance of delivery (hypokrisis) is a well-known theme. Especially famous is the anecdotal report that Demosthenes learned from an orator who had defeated him in political debate that the three most important things in rhetoric are, first, delivery, second, delivery, and third, delivery ([Plutarch] Demosthenes 845a–b). Other anecdotes are more germane to courtroom speaking. In one, a man planning to bring an action for assault goes to Demosthenes to ask for his help as a co-speaker (sunêgoros) and gives him an account of his sufferings. Demosthenes is (or more likely pretends to be) downright incredulous: “None of this happened to you.” The man shouts at him, “None of this happened to me, Demosthenes?!” Demosthenes answers, “Now I hear the voice of a victim” (Plutarch Life of Demosthenes 11). But practice might cause the opposite effect, according to an anecdote about a man rehearsing a speech written for him by Lysias. The client finds his first run-through of the script very encouraging, indeed amazing; the second and third readings seemed dull and ineffectual. When the client complains to Lysias, he laughs and asks him, “Really? Are you intending to deliver this speech to the jury more than once?” (Plutarch On Garrulity 504c.) That litigants of any degree of experience had reason to fear their delivery might somehow fall short seems a certainty, even though much of the evidence is of the Roman period. [12] (In a discussion of appeals to pity in chapter 6, I consider some passages in Aristotle’s Rhetoric that are often taken – mistakenly, I believe – to suggest that a good forensic orator was a histrionic orator.)

Abusive Language

Those accustomed to the strict decorum imposed on speech in most British and American courts, even at the lowest levels of the judiciary system, will probably be astonished on first encountering the pungent insults contained in many Athenian court speeches. [13] Particularly well known, in large part because it occurs in the most famous speech of the genre, is Demosthenes’ description of Aeschines’ mother as a notorious whore (18.129). To a surprising degree, however, the apparent ferocity exhibited by the genos dikanikon is, like the appeal to pity, something of an optical illusion arising from several causes. To be sure, we meet many allegations and innuendoes that a modern judge would instantly declare irrelevant, which is what one might expect of a legal system that operated without professional jurists empowered and qualified (for the most part) to suppress such material. [14] That situation would, on its own, reduce the “shock value” of some of the more lurid insults by lowering the threshold of permissible speech. Still, Antiphon and Lysias were remarkably restrained. Antiphon had his client refer to his adversary in Against the Stepmother as a “Clytemnestra” (1.17), evidently hoping to stir up in the jury the sort of visceral reaction they experienced in the theater (see my discussion of this speech in chapter 3), but his description of his father’s death (1.20), an opportunity for lurid details and apposite vituperation of the defendant, is confined to stating the length of his illness. For a speaker to call the prosecution “most impious” (Antiphon 6.51) might look extreme to moderns, but the religious component of homicide procedure makes that sort of talk nearly inevitable. [15] Joannes Schmid’s survey of Lysias (1894/95:8–12) concludes that he is not much more given to invective than Antiphon. It is not surprising that Lysias 12 Against Eratosthenes, written for himself to deliver, holds a large number of abusive words (only Lysias 14, Against Alcibiades, is richer in this respect). [16] Andocides goes much further than either. His condemnation of Epichares, one of his prosecutors, alleges prostitution and – a nice extra kick – a physical ugliness that presumably explains why his prices were low: “You were not just one man’s boyfriend …you let anyone pay you a small sum, as the jury knows, and made a living in spite of your ugly looks.” But it must be remembered that in the first generation of canonical orators Andocides is the odd man out, both because his speeches are less numerous and because he did not write for others (see the section on Andocides in chapter 3).

For frequent and ferociously expressed insults we must wait for Demosthenes and Aeschines. All of the surviving speeches by the latter and many of those by the former, even when part of the genos dikanikon in the strict sense, were an extension of their political struggle, and the hottest insults were directed against each other and their respective political associates, as in Aeschines’ prosecution of Timarchus. Similarly, Apollodorus’ attacks on Neaera in [Demosthenes] 59 are connected to his feud with Stephanus, and both men were heavily involved in Athenian politics. This is not to say that political vituperation was a joke, a game, or a sort of harmless shadowboxing in the “zero-sum” extended feud that some scholars have seen as the essence of the Athenian courts; my point is rather that men with no political ambitions, appearing in court involuntarily or in connection with some strictly private matter, could not adopt the same level of verbal aggression without a risk disproportionate to what was at stake. The jury might fear words of ill omen: “In a society where words have the power of omens, it is necessary to avoid utterances which may be interpreted as ill omened, as having the potential to precipitate an undesirable result” (Carey 1999:372). Some name-calling was proscribed by law and vulnerable to prosecution as kakêgoria (slander), but it was probably hard for an Athenian to predict how that law might come into play in any specific instance (see Todd 1993:258–262; Carey 1999:374–378). The professionals presented imputations of sexual wrongdoing very gingerly indeed (Carey 1999:379–386). [17]

We have a phenomenon that has long been explained as an imitation by the earliest preserved Attic oratory of the formality of Greek public speech as it appears in historians (see Appendix), [18] but we can go further. Professional speechwriters were playing a dangerous game, which they sometimes lost, when their accusations became strident or they missed an opportunity to capitalize on the jury’s emotions. The historical Cleon (not, that is, the figure we know from Thucydides and Aristophanes) might have lost such a gamble in the Mytilene debate by working himself into a rant a few degrees too fervent. [19] It follows that amateurs more often lurched into the kind of abuse that would alienate the jury as a violation of good taste, as slanderous under the terms of the law, or perhaps even as inviting the invidious attention of a malignant supernatural power. Miscalculation would explain some of these failures, but I imagine that more often the fault lay in the amateur speaker’s inability to control his anger or panic. The professionals watched the floundering idiôtai and learned to do better. [20]

Once a technical detail was introduced in a speech or group of speeches known to have succeeded in court, it might be imitated by other logographoi, or to a lesser extent, unaided idiôtai, with no further consideration of its rationale; that is, it might be perpetuated simply as a cachet. This process might explain some stylistic features that do not hold any very clear advantage in respect to manifesting self-control. A possible example is the syntagma εἰς τοῦτό/τόδέ/τοσοῦτον + a verb of motion + the genitive of an abstract noun usually denoting something reprehensible [21] + the supposed consequence. The construction occurs some 107 times in the Canon. Early examples occur at Antiphon Tetralogy 2.3.5.1 and Tetralogy 3.3.6.3: εἰς τοῦτο γὰρ τόλμης καὶ ἀναιδείας ἥκει, ὥστε …, which we might translate more or less literally: “He has reached this level of audacity and shamelessness that….” Its appearances in tragedy are limited to Euripides: Mastronarde (ad Phoenician Women 963) lists four Euripidean examples that take precisely this form, and four others with some semantic equivalent variant in place of the ὥστε component. Thucydidean speeches, by contrast, have only two instances to show. In Plato I count ten, and it is worth mentioning that three are from imitations of oratory (the Apology and the epideictic Menexenus) and three from the Gorgias, all in Socrates’ mouth. [22] Xenophon has only one example. Paul Dessoulavy, savant of this construction, calls the phraseology “specifically rhetorical” (1881:3n1). This is probably correct, although it must be admitted that the earliest attested tragic example (Euripides Hippolytus 1332) dates from 428, perhaps contemporaneous with the example from Antiphon given above. Given the orators’ general abstention from poeticizing turns, it does seem more likely that the tragedian is following the orators than vice versa. I agree with Collard 2005:378 (contra W. Schmid 1940:794n4) that the construction is not colloquial. To my knowledge, there is only one only comic example of the phrase with τοσοῦτο (Aristophanes Clouds 832–833), despite the genre’s many opportunities to use it.

Timing

A speaker had to observe the time limits set for various private cases (Aristotle Constitution of the Athenians 67.2; see Wille 2001:1020–1021 for a collection of relevant passages). Within the speeches themselves we see a few acknowledgements of distress that the water level was dropping in the klepsydra and forcing the speaker to condense his plea or leave some points unspoken. There are complaints of time restrictions in real speeches (e.g. Demosthenes 45.47), but also some in a few that are probably (Andocides 4.10) or certainly (Isocrates 15.54) fictional, and even in epideictic oratory (Lysias 2.54). A number of speeches conclude with a formula expressing satisfaction, as it were, with the time allotted, e.g. Demosthenes 54.44:

οὐκ οἶδ᾽ ὅ τι δεῖ πλείω λέγειν· οἶμαι γὰρ ὑμᾶς οὐδὲν ἀγνοεῖν τῶν εἰρημένων.

I don’t know what more I should tell you, since I think you understand everything that has been said. [23]


But even those words in the speech Against Conon are preceded with a claim often made, that only time prevents him from expatiating at great length on the merits of his case and the depravity of his opponent (54.44):

πόλλ᾽ ἂν εἰπεῖν ἔχοιμ᾽, ὦ ἄνδρες δικασταί, καὶ ὡς ἡμεῖς χρήσιμοι, καὶ αὐτοὶ καὶ ὁ πατήρ, ἕως ἔζη, καὶ τριηραρχοῦντες καὶ στρατευόμενοι καὶ τὸ προσταττόμενον ποιοῦντες, καὶ ὡς οὐδὲν οὔθ᾽ οὗτος οὔτε τῶν τούτου οὐδείς·

There is much I could say, gentlemen of the jury, about how we have been useful to the city, ourselves and my father, as long as he was alive, serving as trierarchs and as soldiers and doing what was assigned, and useful as neither Conon nor his sons have been.


Isaeus has his client concede that the jury might be getting bored (7.43), and the Demosthenic Funeral Oration expresses similar a similar worry (60.6). Three times in the Demosthenic corpus (18.139, 19.57, 50.2) the speaker (twice it is Demosthenes himself) displays his confidence by offering to cede time to the other side with the words ἐν τῷ ἐμῷ ὕδατι εἰπάτω (“Let him speak in my time allotment”). [24] But commonsense suggests that it was never easy to fill up all, or nearly all, the allotted time and still not get cut off. Not surprisingly, Alcidamas claims that the speaker trained in ex tempore technique – not, of course a man who can be counted as an idiôtês – will be best able to adjust the length of his speech to suit his audience “in real time” (Concerning Written Speeches 11.22–23). The careful planning and memorization of speeches look like countermeasures intended, in part, to cope with the challenge posed by time limits. [25] An amateur speaker, especially one with no accurate means to time his speech, no great ability to write out, read, and revise his speech – or perhaps no such ability whatever – and limited leisure to prepare, probably saw the klepsydra as a serious threat.

Professional Delivery

To avoid some widely held misconceptions about the general character of rhetorical delivery and the scope of the Greek word hypokrisis, conventionally translated ‘delivery’, it will be best to move now to a discussion of the subject as it appears in the third book of Aristotle’s Rhetoric.

Aristotle starts off by acknowledging (1403b15–16) that the way things are said has a large effect on the perceived quality of the speech, and that this matter requires attention not just in poetry, but in rhetoric as well (1403b24–25). [26] He continues:

[Hypokrisis] is a matter of how the voice should be used in expressing each emotion, sometimes loud and sometimes soft and [sometimes] intermediate, and how the pitch accents should be entoned, [27] whether as acute, grave, or circumflex, and what rhythms should be expressed in each case; for [those who study delivery] consider three things, and these are volume, change of pitch, and rhythm. Those [performers who gives careful attention to these] are generally the ones who win poetic contests; and just as actors are more important than poets now in the poetic contests, so it is in political contests because of the sad state [28] of governments. An Art concerned with [the delivery of oratory] has not yet been composed, since even consideration of lexis [diction] was late in developing, and delivery seems a vulgar matter when rightly understood.

Rhetoric 1403b26–1404a1 (translation by Kennedy 1991)


Aristotle soon repeats his complaint that the depravity of the audience is the reason for needing to attend to hypokrisis (1404a7) and then remarks, “Whenever delivery comes to be considered, it will function in the same way as acting, [29] and some have tried to say a little about it, for example Thrasymachus in his [account of] emotional appeals” (1404a12–15, trans. Kennedy 1991; see chapter 6 below).

For Aristotle, then, delivery (hypokrisis) is in large measure a matter of the speaking voice with no special connection to its use in drama. Others have, he reports, discussed the relation of rhetorical delivery to stage performance, but Aristotle refers to the matter only cursorily. I think it significant that in the Rhetoric he never uses mimêsis (imitation) or related words to describe a speaker striving to portray himself as a different person or to suggest that speakers should do so, even though many of his examples are drawn from tragedy.

Whatever the overlap in technique between orators and stage actors, Aristotle is far from recommending a histrionic style in court speeches. The Rhetoric cannot serve as evidence that those with the leisure and means to employ or work as logographoi routinely looked to the theater for instruction, even though by Aristotle’s time the more restrained oratory of the first few decades of preserved speechmaking had in some measure given way to a decidedly more dramatic style, especially in the political oratory of the ex-actor Aeschines and Demosthenes. [30] In any period, idiôtai might have been drawn into conscious or unconscious imitation of tragic style, but for that I see no evidence.

Volume

Two stories about ancient speechmaking, famous enough to have reached many who know nothing else about classical rhetoric, are the accounts of Demosthenes’ vocal training: shouting against the sea and rehearsing with pebbles on his mouth. [31] The anecdotes might be entirely fabricated or based on misunderstandings, but the importance of delivery cannot be overestimated, [32] and the most elementary component of rhetorical delivery is volume. The most obvious concern would be speaking loudly enough to be understood in a large space before a boisterous audience, a challenge that fits the story of Demosthenes on the beach. There is, oddly enough, very little direct evidence for a speaker speaking too softly to be heard. [33] In a passage already cited in reference to speakers undone by audience reaction, Alcidamas uses the word ἰσχνόφωνος̣ (weak of voice); best known, certainly, are Isocrates’ own confessions of an insufficient voice. We can say more on the limiting case, as it were: a speaker who turns mute, an affliction I discuss in the next section. Simply speaking at length must have challenged the vocal instrument, as can perhaps be seen from a small bit of evidence for how a Greek might prepare his voice. At the moment in the Thesmophoriazusae when Mica is about to speak, the Coryphaeus hushes the group, explaining that she is clearing her throat “as the rhêtores do, for she’ll be speaking at length” (381–382). Lysias opens Against Eratosthenes (12.1) by saying that starting his speech will not be difficult, but given the number and character of the respondent’s crimes, bringing it to an end will be – something of a commonplace in forensic and other forms of rhetoric [34] – but at §61 he gives as a reason for the recitation of witness statements his need for a respite: ἐγώ …δέομαι ἀναπαύσασθαι (“I need to rest”). My guess is that although the admission is rare, and perhaps untrue in this particular instance, the need to rest the voice was familiar enough.

The common, if not nearly universal, fault appears to be just the contrary of speaking too softly – shouting. In the Rhetoric (1408a23–25), Aristotle says πολλοὶ καταπλήττουσι τοὺς ἀκροατὰς θορυβοῦντες (“many men blast their audience with their shouting”). One might say that these speakers turn the jurors’ thorubos (heckling) back on them. Aristotle explains shouting as potentially enhancing a speaker’s credibility: συνομοπαθεῖ ὁ ἀκούων ἀεὶ τῷ παθητικῶς λέγοντι, κἂν μηθὲν λέγῃ(“the hearer always shares the emotion with the man who speaks emotionally, even if he says nothing true”). The last phrase suggests manipulative cunning, as the speaker alleges of a putatively shouting opponent at Isaeus 6.59, [35] but I think it certain that men often shouted, or even screamed, out of genuine emotion or out of the simple fear of not being heard, and that they harmed their case thereby. If Plutarch can be trusted, Cicero was contemptuous of shouters:

…καὶ τούς γε τῷ μέγα βοᾶν χρωμένους ῥήτορας ἐπισκώπτων, ἔλεγε δι᾽ ἀσθένειαν ἐπὶ τὴν κραυγὴν ὥσπερ χωλοὺς ἐφ᾽ ἵππον πηδᾶν.

In mockery of speakers who shouted, he used to say that they screamed out of weakness, like cripples who jump on a horse [to disguise their inability to walk].

Plutarch Life of Cicero 5.6


The author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium likens a man’s shouting to a woman’s screaming (3.12.22; I know of no precise Greek parallel to this statement). Perhaps shouting tended to raise some speakers’ pitch (see the next section of this chapter). Finally, some men might be carrying into court an ingrained habit of speaking too loudly. Nicobulus, who has brought a paragraphê (countercharge), claims that his opponent, Pantaenetus, is counting on a cluster of prejudices:

ἐπειδὰν τοίνυν τις αὐτὸν ἔρηται “καὶ τί δίκαιον ἕξεις λέγειν πρὸς Νικόβουλον;” μισοῦσι, φησίν, Ἀθηναῖοι τοὺς δανείζοντας· Νικόβουλος δ᾽ ἐπίφθονός ἐστι, καὶ ταχέως βαδίζει, καὶ μέγα φθέγγεται, καὶ βακτηρίαν φορεῖ·

Now when someone asks him, “Actually, what claim will you be able to able to bring against Nicobulus,” his answer is that the Athenians hate moneylenders, and Nicobulus is hateful, and walks fasts and talks loudly, and uses a walking stick.

Demosthenes 37.52


In context, the speaker’s point is that Pantaenetus is elevating trivial mannerisms to the level of chargeable offenses, but there is evidence that those mannerisms were widely disliked and seen as symptomatic of a detestable personality (cf. §55, and see Carey and Reid 1985 ad loc.). Perhaps Demosthenes was aware that his client was likely to exhibit the common court speaker’s fault of fortissimo delivery; or perhaps Nicobulus was alluding to a general habit of shouting, which he was curbing in his court speech as a mark of respect for the occasion.Literal aphasia is attested in a few places; more important, there is a probable connection to a phenomenon for which the evidence is abundant. [36] The opening of Demosthenes 36 For Phormio, discussed earlier in this chapter, might mean that Phormio tried to speak, but failed to make a sound. In the middle of his speech prosecuting Ctesiphon, Aeschines makes out that Demosthenes is speechless when offered the floor (3.166); just possibly he was flummoxed into silence, but Aeschines’ ostensibly magnanimous offer at §165 to yield the bêma was probably not serious, hence Demosthenes had reason to refuse. If these bits of evidence from forensic speeches were our only evidence, skepticism would be in order, but plentiful corroboration comes from other sources, including comedy and tragedy. [37] A Euripidean fragment (fragment 88 Kannicht) describes the dread that overcomes a man on trial for homicide: [38]

ὁ φόβος, ὅταν τις αἵματος μέλλῃ πέριλέγειν καταστὰς εἰς ἀγῶν᾽ ἐναντίον,
τό τε στόμ᾽ εἰς ἔκπληξιν ἀνθρώπων ἄγει
τὸν νοῦν τ᾽ ἀπείργει μὴ λέγειν ἃ βούλεται.
τῷ μὲν γὰρ ἔνι κίνδυνος, ὃ δ᾽ ἀθῷος μένει.
ὅμως δ᾽ ἀγῶνα τόνδε δεῖ μ᾽ ὑπεκδραμεῖν·
ψυχὴν γὰρ ἆθλα κειμένην ἐμὴν ὁρῶ.

When someone comes to speak at his trial for homicide, fear stuns his tongue and mind and keeps him from saying what he wants. For the one man [the defendant] there is danger, while the other [the prosecutor] is invulnerable. After all, I must elude this trial, since I see my life is the prize.


A scene from Aristophanes’ Wasps (946–948) presents a dog afflicted by a canine form of aphasia: he cannot bark in his own defense. His misfortune reminds Bdelycleon of what befell Thucydides son of Melesias:

ἐκεῖνό μοι δοκεῖ πεπονθέναι,
ὅπερ ποτὲ φεύγων ἔπαθε καὶ Θουκυδίδης·
ἀπόπληκτος ἐξαίφνης ἐγένετο τὰς γνάθους.

I think he is undergoing what happened to Thucydides when he was on trial: he suddenly got paralysis of the jaws.


Citing a scholium on this passage together with the piteous tale of Thucydides at Aristophanes Acharnians 703–718, Faraone (1989:150–151) very plausibly suggests that the venerable politician, once fully capable of defending himself, was understood as the victim of two forces: a magical spell and the powerful rhetoric of younger men. He adduces several other instances of stymied court speech variously explained by ancient sources as brought on by panic (often augmented by courtroom thorubos) or a magic spell. Significantly, the mind and the voice – precisely the organs we expect a psychosomatic panic reaction to affect – are prominent among the body parts the judicial curse tablets target. [39] (For a tendentious claim, put in a sophist’s mouth, that those addicted to philosophy will be at a loss if arrested and taken to trial on a capital charge, see Plato Gorgias 486a–b.)

In his two long speeches that arose from trials pitting him against Aeschines, Demosthenes ridicules his opponent’s vocal qualities. His mockery, which centers on Aeschines’ theatrical background, is two-pronged: Aeschines vaunts himself on a stage skill he cannot claim, and a great voice, at its best useful for the city when an honest man exploits it, does not excuse treachery. He gives these points considerable space in the peroration of On the Dishonest Embassy (19.337–339):

καίτοι καὶ περὶ τῆς φωνῆς ἴσως εἰπεῖν ἀνάγκη· πάνυ γὰρ μέγα καὶ ἐπὶ ταύτῃ φρονεῖν αὐτὸν ἀκούω, ὡς καθυποκρινούμενον ὑμᾶς. ἐμοὶ δὲ δοκεῖτ᾽ ἀτοπώτατον ἁπάντων ἂν ποιῆσαι, εἰ, ὅτε μὲν τὰ Θυέστου καὶ τῶν ἐπὶ Τροίᾳ κάκ᾽ ἠγωνίζετο, ἐξεβάλλετ᾽ αὐτὸν καὶ ἐξεσυρίττετ᾽ ἐκ τῶν θεάτρων καὶ μόνον οὐ κατελεύεθ᾽ οὕτως ὥστε τελευτῶντα τοῦ τριταγωνιστεῖν ἀποστῆναι, ἐπειδὴ δ᾽ οὐκ ἐπὶ τῆς σκηνῆς, ἀλλ᾽ ἐν τοῖς κοινοῖς καὶ μεγίστοις τῆς πόλεως πράγμασι μυρί᾽ εἴργασται κακά, τηνικαῦθ᾽ ὡς καλὸν φθεγγομένῳ προσέχοιτε. μηδαμῶς· μηδὲν ὑμεῖς ἀβέλτερον πάθητε, ἀλλὰ λογίζεσθ᾽ ὅτι δεῖ κήρυκα μὲν ἂν δοκιμάζητε, εὔφωνον σκοπεῖν, πρεσβευτὴν δὲ καὶ τῶν κοινῶν ἀξιοῦντά τι πράττειν δίκαιον καὶ φρόνημ᾽ ἔχονθ᾽ ὑπὲρ μὲν ὑμῶν μέγα, πρὸς δ᾽ ὑμᾶς ἴσον, ὥσπερ ἐγὼ Φίλιππον μὲν οὐκ ἐθαύμασα, τοὺς δ᾽ αἰχμαλώτους ἐθαύμασα, ἔσωσα, οὐδὲν ὑπεστειλάμην. οὗτος δ᾽ ἐκείνου μὲν προὐκαλινδεῖτο, τοὺς παιᾶνας ᾖδεν, ὑμῶν δ᾽ ὑπερορᾷ. ἔτι τοίνυν ὅταν μὲν ἴδητε δεινότητ᾽ ἢ εὐφωνίαν ἤ τι τῶν ἄλλων τῶν τοιούτων ἀγαθῶν ἐπὶ χρηστοῦ καὶ φιλοτίμου γεγενημένον ἀνθρώπου, συγχαίρειν καὶ συνασκεῖν πάντας δεῖ· κοινὸν γὰρ ὑμῖν πᾶσι τοῖς ἄλλοις τοῦτ᾽ ἀγαθὸν γίγνεται· ὅταν δ᾽ ἐπὶ δωροδόκου καὶ πονηροῦ καὶ παντὸς ἥττονος λήμματος, ἀποκλείειν καὶ πικρῶς καὶ ἐναντίως ἀκούειν, ὡς πονηρία δυνάμεως δόξαν εὑρομένη παρ᾽ ὑμῶν ἐπὶ τὴν πόλιν ἐστίν.

In fact perhaps I need to add a word about his voice. I hear he takes considerable pride in it and expects to overwhelm you with his delivery. In my view, it would be the most peculiar behavior on your part if, when he portrayed the sufferings of Thyestes and the heroes of Troy, you stopped him by driving him noisily from the theater and practically stoning him to the point where he gave up his career playing bit parts, yet when he has wreaked such disaster not on stage but upon the city’s most important, communal interests, you pay him heed because of his beautiful voice. Do not do it. Do not be so foolish. Rather, consider this: when you examine candidates for the office of herald, you must look for someone with a good voice, but when you examine candidates to serve as envoy and to promote the city’s interests, you must look for someone who is honest, who is really proud to represent your interests but is content to be your equal – as indeed I did not respect Philip, but I did respect the prisoners of war and saved them, sparing no effort. But this man groveled before Philip, sang paeans, and scorns you. In addition, when you find cleverness or vocal brilliance or some similar distinction in an honest and magnanimous person, you should all share in the satisfaction and training, for it will be a common benefit to all the rest of you, But when you find this quality in a corrupt and wicked person, one who cannot resist any chance at gain, you should all shut him out and listen to him with rancor and animosity, because wickedness that has acquired in your eyes the status of authority is destructive to the city.


Aeschines’ specific vocal characteristic, according to Demosthenes (18.127), was shouting, a delivery style inappropriate to forensic speech, and even, by implication, to the theater:

εἰ γὰρ Αἰακὸς ἢ Ῥαδάμανθυς ἢ Μίνως ἦν ὁ κατηγορῶν, ἀλλὰ μὴ σπερμολόγος, περίτριμμ᾽ ἀγορᾶς, ὄλεθρος γραμματεύς, οὐκ ἂν αὐτὸν οἶμαι ταῦτ᾽ εἰπεῖν οὐδ᾽ ἂν οὕτως ἐπαχθεῖς λόγους πορίσασθαι, ὥσπερ ἐν τραγῳδίᾳ βοῶντα “ὦ γῆ καὶ ἥλιε καὶ ἀρετὴ” καὶ τὰ τοιαῦτα, καὶ πάλιν “σύνεσιν καὶ παιδείαν” ἐπικαλούμενον, “ᾗ τὰ καλὰ καὶ τὰ αἰσχρα διαγιγνώσκεται·” ταῦτα γὰρ δήπουθεν ἠκούετ᾽ αὐτοῦ λέγοντος.

If the prosecutor were Aeacus or Rhadamanthys or Minos and not a sponger, a common scoundrel, or a damned clerk, I don’t believe he would have spoken that way or produced such repulsive expressions, bellowing as if on the tragic stage, “O earth and sun and virtue,” and such like, or appealing to “understanding and education, through which we distinguish noble from base.”


Perhaps many in the audience agreed with Demosthenes’ description of Aeschines’ speech style, but Carey (2000:10) is probably right to remark that

the fact that Demosthenes feels the need to make the attack is revealing. The skills and qualities that had served Aeschines in the theater were of equal value in the Assembly. There is abundant evidence that Aeschines had an impressive speaking voice . . ., a fact that must have particularly unnerved Demosthenes, whose own vocal powers seem to have been limited. [40]


Demosthenes’ attacks on Aeschines for transferring a (supposedly) poor dramatic style to the Assembly and courts might be seen as a special case; more likely it is an opportunistic exploitation of a general prejudice against a speech style both out of place in the courtroom and reminiscent of the idiôtai who resorted to shouting.

Singing

To illustrate an Attic idiom, the use of ‘sing’ to mean “speak in vain,” Photius (alpha 551) records a fragment from Aristophanes’ Farmers (Georgoi fragment 101a K-A), a comic interchange that depends on the audience’s recognizing a juror’s taunt, “You’re singing!” (Bers 1985:3):

{Α} καὶ τὰς δίκας οὖν ἔλεγον ᾄδοντες τότε;
{Β} νὴ Δία· φράσω δ᾽ ἐγὼ μέγα σοι τεκμήριον·
ἔτι γὰρ λέγουσ᾽ οἱ πρεσβύτεροι καθημένοι,
ὅταν κακῶς <τις> ἀπολογῆται τὴν δίκην,
“ᾄδεις”.
A: They used to sing their pleas then?
B: Yes, by Zeus. I’ll give you powerful evidence: Sitting in judgment the older men still say, whenever a man does a poor job of defending himself, “You’re singing!”


This joke might have been reinforced by the audience’s recognition of a variance from normal speech intonations brought about by a speaker’s high emotion. At its extreme, strong feelings could overwhelm the usual tonal ups and downs of Greek into what sounded like singing. Evidence for this phenomenon comes from Aristoxenus, whose fourth-century floruit makes him roughly contemporary with some of the later orators of the Canon. In his Elements of Harmony(14.12–15 da Rios) he speaks of singing as the sustaining of a pitch:

τὴν μὲν οὖν συνεχῆ λογικὴν εἶναί φαμεν, διαλεγομένων γὰρ ἡμῶν οὕτως ἡ φωνὴ κινεῖται κατὰ τόπον ὥστε μηδαμοῦ δοκεῖν ἵστασθαι. κατὰ δὲ τὴν ἑτέραν ἣν ὀνομάζομεν διαστηματικὴν ἐναντίως πέφυκε γίγνεσθαι· ἀλλὰ γὰρ ἵστασθαι τε δοκεῖ καὶ πάντες τὸν τοῦτο φαινόμενον ποιεῖν οὐκέτι λέγειν φασὶν ἀλλ᾽ ᾄδειν. διόπερ ἐν τῷ διαλέγεσθαι φεύγομεν τὸ ἱστάναι τὴν φωνήν, ἂν μὴ διὰ πάθος ποτὲ εἰς τοιαύτην κίνησιν ἀναγκασθῶμεν ἐλθεῖν, ἐν δὲ τῷ μελῳδεῖν τοὐναντίον ποιοῦμεν, τὸ μὲν γὰρ συνεχὲς φευγομεν, τὸ δ᾽ ἑστάναι τὴν φωνὴν ὡς μάλιστα διώκομεν.

We say that the continuous [movement of the voice] is conversational [logikên], since when we are conversing, the voice changes position, with the result that it never seems to stay in one place. In the second sort of [movement], which we call moving by intervals, the opposite is the case; as the voice seems to stay in place, and everyone says that the person who seems to do this is no longer speaking, but singing. For this reason, in conversation we avoid the holding of a pitch, unless we are forced on occasion by emotion [διὰ πάθος] into this sort of motion, whereas in singing we do the opposite, that is, we avoid continuous changes of pitch and seek to maximize the holding of the voice, that is, at a constant pitch.


It seems probable to me that the effect Aristoxenus attributes to πάθος could easily overwhelm a speaker under stress and lead to a ludicrous effect, namely singing a plea. In one of the passages in Aristophanes’ Birds that joke about Athenian litigiousness (39–41, cited in chapter 2), the Athenians are said to sing their whole lives “upon their dikôn,” their law cases, on boughs of litigation, as it were. [41] The notion of their singing may not be only an invention appropriate to this play, with all its birds. It seems to me quite likely that it was easy for a speaker’s voice to slip into something incongruously musical, not from a poorly suppressed desire to exhibit the beauty of his voice, but from emotion.

Stanford (1967:28) must be right in calling Aristoxenus’ distinction “too rigid.” Besides variation in routine speech, the practice of forensic delivery, whether amateur or professional, probably ranged over a spectrum, from the monotonous to the ludicrously songlike. Direct testimony on the point is scanty and mostly late. Theophrastus, roughly contemporary with Aristoxenus and also a student of Aristotle, is quoted by Plutarch as remarking that both orators and actors “subtly approach singing” when delivering, respectively, their epilogues and lamentations. [42] Aside from songlike pitch modulation, a speaker with a natural tenor speaking voice and uneven articulation had reason to fear the jurors’ disdain, since a high and/or wavering voice was among a suite of traits identified as effeminate, at least in discussions of rhetoric in later antiquity. [43]

In Aristophanes’ Knights, the Paphlagonian (i.e. Cleon, himself a highly successful symbouleutic speaker) insults the Sausage Seller by giving what looks like a generic description of how a near-idiôtês, swollen by a minor dicanic success, prepares a speech:

εἴ που δικίδιον εἶπας εὖ κατὰ ξένου μετοίκου,
τὴν νύκτα θρυλῶν καὶ λαλῶν ἐν ταῖς ὁδοῖς σεαυτῷ,
ὕδωρ τε πίνων κἀπιδεικνὺς τοὺς φίλους τ᾽ ἀνιῶν,
ᾤου δυνατὸς εἶναι λέγειν.

If, on some occasion, you succeeded in pleading a piddling lawsuit against a metic, talking away to yourself, on and on, in the streets at night, and drinking (sc. only) water …and boring your friends by trying your speech on them, you thought you were a real orator!

Knights 347–350 (translation by Dover 1968b:151)


This suggests a rehearsal that probably aimed at an exact or approximate memorization of the text.

Now, having a prepared text, whether in one’s hand or memorized, did not guarantee smooth sailing in court. Alcidamas, despiser of written texts, describes what happens when a man accustomed to writing out his speeches needs to improvise: [44]

ὅταν γάρ τις ἐθισθῇ κατὰ μικρὸν ἐξεργάζεσθαι τοὺς λόγους καὶ μετ᾽ ἀκριβείας καὶ ῥυθμοῦ τὰ ῥήματα συντιθέναι, καὶ βραδείᾳ τῇ τῆς διανοίας κινήσει χρώμενος ἐπιτελεῖν τὴν ἑρμηνείαν, ἀναγκαῖόν ἐστι τοῦτον, ὅταν εἰς τοὺς αὐτοσχεδιαστοὺς ἔλθῃ λόγους, ἐναντία πράσσοντα ταῖς συνηθείαις ἀπορίας καὶ θορύβου πλήρη τὴν γνώμην ἔχειν, καὶ πρὸς ἅπαντα μὲν δυσχεραίνειν, μηδὲν δὲ διαφέρειν τῶν ἰσχνοφώνων, οὐδέποτε δ᾽ εὐλύτῳ τῇ τῆς ψυχῆς ἀγχινοίᾳ χρώμενον ὑγρῶς καὶ φιλανθρώπως μεταχειρίζεσθαι τοὺς λόγους.

For when someone has been accustomed to work out speeches in detail and to construct sentences paying attention to both precise wording and rhythm and put over his interpretation making use of a slow mental process, it is inevitable that whenever this man comes to extempore speeches, doing the opposite of what he is used to, he should have a mind full of helplessness and panic and should be ill-at-ease with everything, in no way different from those with speech impediments, never using a free readiness of wit to execute his speeches with flexibility and in a way that people like.

Alcidamas Concerning Written Speeches 16 (translation by J. V. Muir 2001)

Rhythm and Hiatus

Prose rhythm and the avoidance of hiatus were much discussed by the ancients, [45] but I know of no evidence that faults in these two technical areas of composition were ever explicitly attributed to amateur speakers. Some cautious inferences bearing on the speech of idiôtai are, nevertheless, possible.

First a general point. Most Athenians who listened to public speech probably noticed the cultivation by professionals (or at least some of them) of a style with perceptible qualities of rhythm and a relative rarity of hiatus (an acoustic phenomenon the Greeks usually referred to as a σύγκρουσις φωνηέτων, “collision of vowels”), even if they were not capable of or interested in analyzing and discussing rhetorical technique. Aristophanes expected his audience to recognize Thrasymachus as a crafty speaker (fragment 198.8 K-A), perhaps even as a speaker fond of a certain rhythm (see Aristotle Rhetoric 1409a). By the middle of the fourth century, if not before, Athenians who in their own routine speech were accustomed to eliminate a potential hiatus by saying, for instance, οὐ τότε, but οὐκ ἐγώ, were probably aware that some professional, or professionally assisted, speakers took pains to buffer vowels that would otherwise complete a word to prevent a collision with a word-initial vowel. [46] An amateur needing to speak in court might perhaps try to follow logographic practice, but my guess is that he would more likely think of these professional elegancies as lying well beyond his reach.

A specific characteristic of Demosthenes’ speech style might be an ad hoc and ad hominem solution to a severe case of a general problem, the avoidance of tribrachs, or three successive short syllables, normally – and misleadingly – referred to as Blass’s Law. [47] Blass (1887–98:3.1:105) makes a categorical statement as to Demosthenes’ motive:

Der Grund dieser Meidung ist derselbe, welcher auch in der älteren Tragödie die Auflösung der Hebung im Trimeter möglichst beschränken liess: der Vers und die Rede bewahren so eine straffere und männlichere Haltung.

The motive for this avoidance [of tribrachs] is the same as that which causes the greatest possible restriction on the resolution [of long syllables] in the trimeters of older tragedy: by this means verse and oratory maintain a stricter and more manly bearing.


Blass does not explain why no other Attic orator observed this stricture. I conjecture that Demosthenes experienced tribrachs as exacerbating the vocal and psychological difficulties that impeded his speechmaking (discussed earlier in this chapter), perhaps without being able to explain just why the enunciation of a series of short syllables worsened his anxiety and reduced his volume. [48] In principle, he might have allowed the usual frequency of tribrachs when writing for clients, but it would be natural for the habit of avoiding them to persist, especially if he was not himself aware of it. [49] It seems very unlikely that a hapless idiôtês who suffered the same vocal difficulties as challenged the young Demosthenes would think of and successfully implement the strategy that I am suggesting motivated the application of “Blass’s law.”

Footnotes

[ back ] 1. Osborne makes several important observations (1985:43): “there is no reason why the gratuitous information about social implications should be forced or false,” that “strength, confidence, wealth and the lack of them are relative,” and that Demosthenes’ statement adopts the potential prosecutors’ point of view, though there are “consequences for the defendant as well.” For some important qualifications, see Carey 1998, esp. 98–109.

[ back ] 2. From fear of punishment or material loss, defendants would, quite naturally, be less able to “do themselves justice.” Speechwriters sometimes make the point explicit, whether for themselves (Andocides 1.6) or their clients: see Whitehead ad Hyperides In Defense of Lycophron 8.

[ back ] 3. Cordelia is, of course, speaking straight, but within the ranks of professional speakers at Athens there was much use of rhetoric complaining of the rhetoric of the opposition: see Hesk 2000, chap. 4, esp. 227–231.

[ back ] 4. Meillet 1975:241 speaks of “the difficulty with which Athenians’ prose became Attic.”

[ back ] 5. The claim of forensic inexperience is itself a topos a logographos could insert for his client. For an extreme example see Isaeus 1.1, where the speaker starts off by claiming he has never even heard a lawcourt speech.

[ back ] 6. Colvin 1997:306–307 does not see evidence in Attic comedy that the Athenians, or Greeks in general, supposed “their own [regional] dialect to be more correct than others,” whereas “[t]here seem to have been (social) varieties of Attic which were regarded as less correct than others.” Pace Colvin, I imagine that in an Athenian courtroom a litigant could try to provoke hostility to an opponent by blurring the distinction between regional and social variations.

[ back ] 7. A glance at compounds of σολοικ- in LSJ shows the ambiguity: these words can refer to non-Greek-speaking foreigners (as at Hipponax 27 West), to “barbarous language” (Anacreon 213 Page Supplementum Lyricis Graecis), to a faulty construction in Greek, or more generally to poor manners or behavior. I wonder whether one element implied in the complaint reported by Thucydides (1.77.1) that citizens of cities in the Athenian League were compelled to litigate in Athenian courts was linguistic, that as speakers of non-Attic dialects they were at a disadvantage.

[ back ] 8. Demosthenes 18.52. See Bers 1985:6n21; Yunis ad loc.

[ back ] 9. Bonner 1927:164 refers to the speaker as a “banker of foreign origin,” an unreliable inference from the word barbarismos; moreover, we cannot be sure that “one of the rich men” has to be a banker.

[ back ] 10. Sommerstein is by no means sure this is the case: “[I]f this kind of diglossia existed, would we not expect to hear more about it in comedy, which extracts so much fun from the dialects of non-Athenians and the half-Greek, half-gibberish of barbarians?” Dover’s notion of tactful abstention from insulting the typical customer of Attic comedy would answer that question in the negative (Dover 1981).

[ back ] 11. Fragment 706 K-A: διάλεκτον ἔχοντα μέσην πόλεως | οὔτ᾽ ἀστείαν ὑποθηλυτέραν <τ᾽> | οὔτ᾽ ἀνελεύθερον ὑπαγροικοτέραν <τ᾽>. But Sommerstein acknowledges that phonology might not be the issue. The notion of an “effeminate” speech style might be relevant to my general argument, but I dare not adduce in its support a fragment this obscure. Teodorsson never mentions court speech, but does present evidence for consciousness of variations in synchronic pronunciation and training in the “better” pronunciation as early as the fourth century (1974:263–280). For other theories see Cassio 1981:92 (the “soft Ionic” in cultivated urban speech) and Willi 2003:160–162 (women as the “linguistic avant-garde,” but cf. Colvin 1997:286: “what seems clear is that there was no recognized distinct women’s language in Greece”).

[ back ] 12. Lavency (1964) introduces the second anecdote on the first page of his book to illustrate the lateness of the evidence.

[ back ] 13. There are compilations of abusive language in the orators (J. Schmid 1894/95, Opelt 1993). The latter has dragged a net so fine that it catches some very dubious fish, e.g. Andocides 1.47, ἀνέψιος. Carey 1999 is an excellent treatment, and its influence on this section will be obvious. Also frequent in court speeches, and irrelevant by our standards, are statements of praise and self-praise.

[ back ] 14. Lanni 2005:113 argues that the homicide and maritime courts imposed “a narrower notion of relevance” than the popular courts. The latter of course constituted a much larger component of the Athenian system.

[ back ] 15. In the same vein, J. Schmid 1894/95:6 remarks that the words μιαρία and ἀλιτήριος are pertinent to speeches on bloodshed.

[ back ] 16. Andocides 1.122 contains what is, to my knowledge, the earliest attestation in oratory of the syntagma discussed at the end of this section. That passage could join the adjective βδελυρός in Opelt’s list (1993:229).

[ back ] 17. Crudity appears to have reached its all-time height in professional speech at [Demosthenes] 59.108 – if the words “making her living from three holes” are genuine; see my translation (Bers 2003 ad loc. with n136).

[ back ] 18. J. Schmid sees Antiphon’s sparing use of invective as a sign of the high moral rectitude in public and private life admired in that era by the orator and the jurors of the Areopagus (1894/95:7). Schmid’s naïveté (and class bias?) are remarkable.

[ back ] 19. Hitler’s public speech style, and even his hysterical-sounding delivery, were far from natural and unpremeditated; see www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,1360379,00.html.

[ back ] 20. Not that the lesson was at all simple: “Although there are certain areas which require sensitive treatment, what can be said depends as much on the calculations and strategy of the speaker as on any fixed response from the audience” (Carey 1999:391).

[ back ] 21. Euripides Medea 56–58, where the word in the genitive denotes something undesirable, but not contemptible, shows the construction from the point of view of the victim

[ back ] 22. I would of course be more pleased to be able to report that they were attributed to the professional rhetorician rather than to Socrates.

[ back ] 23. Demosthenes 20, 36, and 38, and Isaeus 7 and 8 end with exactly the same words.

[ back ] 24. I am sure Yunis 2001 ad 18.139 is right to say that “the offer is purely rhetorical.” Cf. Dinarchus 1.114.

[ back ] 25. I do not doubt that this is how the customers of logographoi prepared, even though the evidence is in the form of jokes and anecdotes, e.g. Aristophanes Knights 347–350 and Plutarch On Garrulity 504c.

[ back ] 26. Here he must have all three branches of rhetoric (forensic, political, and epideictic) in mind, though at 1403b34 he remarks specifically about “political contests.”

[ back ] 27. I suppose this is not a misprint for ‘intoned’, but a word the translator has chosen to make it clear that Aristotle is suggesting the rising and falling pitch accents of Greek words, just the opposite of one occasional connotation of ‘intone’, to deliver in a monotone.

[ back ] 28. Perhaps too mild a translation of mokthêria: see Chapter 1, note 7.

[ back ] 29. Hypokritikê, the specific Greek term for stage acting.

[ back ] 30. Hamlet’s directorial instruction to the actor at III.ii.1–20 is weirdly Janus-like. A fifth-century logographos might have advised a client,“[D]o not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently, for in the torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.” At the same time, the alternative to the traditional declamatory style can be said to anticipate the nineteenth-century revolution in acting. For a compact discussion of this famous passage, see Kermode 2000:113 and Kermode 2004:106–107.

[ back ] 31. Ancient sources include Plutarch Demosthenes 6–7, 11; [Plutarch] Lives of the Ten Orators 844E–F, Quintilian Institutio Oratoria 10.30. Bien 1967 proposes that the story of the pebbles is a mangled version of his use of a stone as an obturator, a prosthesis to relieve a cleft palate, but as Lionel Pearson observed (conversation), in a period when taunting a man for physical deformity was not infra dig, Aeschines and his allies would not have hesitated to jeer at an opponent with a cleft palate.

[ back ] 32. Pearson 1976:6. In that monograph and a number of articles Pearson advanced the theory that Demosthenes developed a vocal technique that made it possible to deliver very long phrases, very artfully adapted to his rhetorical aims; Dover 1997:178–179 is skeptical.

[ back ] 33. Even the references to a weak voice (Isocrates Panathenaicus 10, Epistula 8.7; Alcidamas Against the Sophists 15) say nothing about the space and the number of auditors.

[ back ] 34. E.g. Demosthenes 53.3. It can be found even if the speech is a fiction and the author horribly prolix, as at Isocrates Antidosis 15.54: ἅπαντας ἂν οὖν διὰ τέλους εἰπεῖν οὐκ ἂν δυναίμην· ὁ γὰρ χρόνος ὁ δεδομένος ἡμῖν ὀλίγος ἐστίν.

[ back ] 35. καὶ διαρρήδην μαρτυρήσας γνησίους τοὺς παῖδας εἶναι οἴεται ἐξαρκέσειν ὑμῖν παρεκβάσεις, ἐὰν δὲ τοῦτο μὲν μηδ᾽ ἐγχειρήσῃ ἐπιδεικνύναι ἢ καὶ κατὰ μικρόν τι ἐπιμνησθῇ, ἡμῖν δὲ λοιδορήσηται μεγάλῃ τῇ φωνῇ καὶ λέγῃ ὡς εἰσὶν οἵδε μὲν πλούσιοι, αὐτὸς δὲ πένης, διὰ ταῦτα δόξειν τοὺς παῖδας εἶναι γνησίους.

[ back ] 36. I can find only one mention of a literal inability to speak in the capacious volume of Wille 2001 that treats the orators; it refers to fish, whose defect in this respect Aristotle explains as the absence of the requisite anatomy (823 with n75). Praeteritio and the like, which Wille does canvass, of course fall into a different category altogether.

[ back ] 37. In what follows I draw heavily on Faraone’s excellent 1989 article.

[ back ] 38. I do not see why Faraone 1989:152 supposes that this discomfiture afflicted “[sc. only] those unaccustomed to public speaking.” Given sufficient stress, the sangfroid that comes with experience will not always stay cool enough.

[ back ] 39. Faraone 1989:156 (magic a tactic of the rich as well as the poor), 157 (“cognitive and verbal faculties which are essential to success in the law courts”), 158 (importance of the tongue).

[ back ] 40. Carey points out that his service as Clerk might have also fostered Aeschines’ vocal abilities (9–10). For more details on Demosthenes’ intricate dancing around on the matter of Aeschines’ stage experience, see Easterling 1999:156–162.

[ back ] 41. The cicadas sing for only a month or two (see p. 16).

[ back ] 42. Quaestiones Convivales (“Table Talk’) 623a–b: καὶ τοὺς ῥήτορας ἐν τοῖς ἐπιλόγοις καὶ τοὺς ὑποκριτὰς ἐν τοῖς ὀδυρμοῖς ἀτρέμα τῷ μελῳδεῖν προσάγοντας ὁρῶμεν καὶ παρεντείνοντας τὴν φωνήν.

[ back ] 43. Among the pertinent texts: [Aristotle] Physiognomy 806b. For discussion of these notions in the second century AD see Gleason 1990. For another collection of texts describing undesirable speech traits, not however clearly connected to public speaking, see Halliwell 1990:70–71. For an analogous preference in another culture for “low pitch, low volume, and a laconic slowness” see Irvine 1984.

[ back ] 44. In the course of a trial, this might happen because a litigant has failed to anticipate his opponent’s arguments or feels he must respond to jurors’ heckling (Bers 1985:5 with n15).

[ back ] 45. For a compact history of these controversies see McCabe 1981:1–41.

[ back ] 46. Since we cannot be sure whether the audience was meant to recall and laugh at Hegelochus’ failure to elide the word or his false accentuation or both (see Daitz 1983), I will not adduce Aristophanes Frogs 303–304 to show sensitivity to the means by which a potential hiatus was averted.

[ back ] 47. McCabe 1981 remains the authoritative statement on this and closely related features, e.g. the treatment of naturally short syllables at the close of sentences; for a summary of his conclusions see the fifth chapter.

[ back ] 48. He might have been happier with only single short syllables, or even speaking exclusively in molossi, but the former would make expression of thought inordinately difficult, and the latter would be ludicrous in the extreme.

[ back ] 49. Perhaps Demosthenes found it easier to coach clients in their delivery if the composition accommodated his own weakness.