“Skill and Methods: Attic Orators”

Magdalen College Oxford, class session in Old Law Library, 20 November 2023, 14:00

Judson Herrman

Aristotle on types of oratory (Rhetoric 1.3): deliberative/symbouleutic, forensic/dicanic, epideictic/ceremonial

• determined by occasion/audience

• different times: future, past, present/ever

• content overlaps

Orators and speeches

Hellenistic canon of ten orators active 440s? to 320s

• Late 5th c. to early 4th c.: Antiphon, Andocides, Lysias

• Mid 4th c.: Isocrates, Isaeus

• Mid or late 4th c: Demosthenes, Aeschines, Hyperides, Lycurgus, and Dinarchus

• Translations/notes for all speeches: Oratory of Classical Greece (University of Texas); 16 volumes, 1998-2018. At Oxford, Solo gives access to all (except the last Demosthenes volume) as ebooks through De Gruyter. More than 3000 pages of speeches, letters, and pamphlets. J. Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (Princeton, 1989), 341-363 has helpful appendix that gives brief summary details for every item in the corpus.

Demosthenes best known over the ages

• From antiquity through to the modern era, Demosthenes was one of four canonical authors (Demosthenes; Homer; Cicero; Virgil) that formed a core canon in schools.

• Core sub-set of Demosthenes’ speeches about Philip (Philippics) and Demosthenes himself (On the Crown) have long afterlife until WW1.

Traditional approach to Demosthenes and Aeschines

• Sees Demosthenes as the last voice of Athenian independent democracy.

• Demosthenes and his political/legal opponent Aeschines in their courtroom battles provide (conflicting) narratives of mid-4th. c. political and military history (and we lack contemporary narrative histories; cf. Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon).

Changing approaches to Demosthenes and others in 20th c.

• Attention shifts away politics and war. Private courtroom orations offer wealth of information about more broad-ranging topics. Court cases on mundane topics give glimpses of home and family life, ideology and morality. K. J. Dover, Greek Popular Morality (1974) and Greek Homosexuality (1978).

• Others write private courtroom speeches too: Lysias, Isaeus, and Isocrates.

• Oratory as data for study Greek law as technical field, with complementary epigraphical sources.

• Similar interest in minute workings of 4th-c. Athenian democracy, which is much better attested than 5th c. Some scholars (Hansen, Rhodes) stress uniqueness of Athens. Others (Ober, Cartledge) compare Athenian and modern democracy, with more focus on ideologies and attitudes.

Other types of oratory – epideictic

• Athenian funeral orations. On Loraux and ideology see D. M. Pritchard, The Athenian Funeral Oration After Nicole Loraux (due to appear in next few months).

• Isocrates: abundant writings illustrate a different civic ideal and a pan-hellenistic outlook.