Chapter 2: Amateur Litigants, Amateur Speakers The idiôtês on His Own It often said that a litigant in an Athenian court was required to speak for himself, [1] though the evidence for an actual law making such a stipulation is very… Read more
Chapter 3: Natural and Artificial Speech from Homer to Hyperides; A Brief Sketch From Homer to the Mid-Fifth Century The continuity of Greek rhetorical tradition has become controversial, with much of the controversy centering around those Plato identifies as teachers of rhetoric in the Phaedrus. Read more
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… Read more
Chapter 5: Performance as Evidence Far from being a small town where everybody kept everybody else under continual surveillance, Attica was a large territory with a large population, and it would be exceptional for a juror to know the people involved in a trial, unless perhaps they… Read more
Chapter 6: Appeals to Pity and Displays of Anger Appealing to Pity Several very well-known descriptions of court speakers and actual passages of court speech have lead many scholars to conclude that litigants wallowed in emotion as they made appeals to the jury’s pity (in older… Read more
Chapter 7: Tactics, Amateur and Professional In remarking on the style of classical Greek authors, moderns usually leave denigration to the ancients. [1] Criticisms such as MacDowell’s remarks on Andocides’ stylistic lapses (1962:20–22) are exceptional. [2] And… Read more
Works Cited Commentaries and Translations with Commentary Aeschines Carey, Christopher. 2000. Aeschines . The Orators of Classical Greece 3. Austin. Fisher, Nick. 2001. Aeschines : Against Timarchos. Oxford. Alcidamas … Read more
Preface: Doing Anthropology with the Greeks [In this on-line version, the page-numbers of the printed version are indicated within braces (“{” and “}”). For example, “{69|70}” indicates where p. 69 of the printed version ends and p. 70 begins. These indications will be useful to readers who… Read more
Chapter 1. The Art of Founding Autochthony: Thebes, Athens, and Old-Stock French [*] Yes, there is an art in founding what some call their roots and others autochthony. I have chosen this approach, valid both for the present and the past, for… Read more
