Persuasion by Immersion: The Narratio of Lysias 1, On the Killing of Eratosthenes

1 Enargeia, immersion, and persuasion

The power of stories to change people’s beliefs has been recognized by many literary critics from antiquity to modern times. To be persuasive, a story must possess various qualities. One of the most effective properties of persuasive narrative is the capacity to make the reader or listener feel as if they are present at the scene, witnessing the events unfolding before their eyes. In ancient literary criticism, this stylistic quality is associated with notions such as ἔκφρασις, ἐναγώνιος and ἐνάργεια.^[2]

One of the ancient authors praised by the ancient critics for the enargeia of his style is Lysias. In his work on Lysias, Dionysius of Halicarnassus defines enargeia as “a certain power that brings the subject of the speech before the senses”, and he associates it with “the inclusions of attendant circumstances”. With regard to Lysias’ style he adds, more in particular, that an attentive reader readily visualizes the things shown, and even feels as if he or she is in the presence of the represented characters. As Webb rightly points out, “Dionysius choice of words points to something far more radical than ‘description’ and ‘characterization through speech’ (ēthopoiia) since the verb homilein implies not just conversation but presence in a shared space. Moreover, unlike some other sources on enargeia, he does not talk about it only, or even principally, in terms of the sense of sight but in terms of the senses (aistheseis) in general”.^[3]

Lysias’ enargeia is not just a recommendable stylistic quality: in a court of law, it undoubtedly also served an important persuasive goal. As O’Connell puts it, “the sense of presence that Dionysius describes as a stylistic feature, then, would have been a central aspect of Lysias’ persuasive strategy, since it would have contributed to an impression of first-hand, authoritative knowledge”.^[4] Creating the illusion of actually being physically present at the events as they unfold, that is, showing them, is a more effective way to persuade the jury of their truthfulness than merely telling them ‒ a rhetorical lesson that is also taught by Quintilian:

non enim satis efficit neque, ut debet, plene dominatur oratio, si usque ad aures valet atque ea sibi iudex, de quibus cognoscit, narrari credit, non exprimi et oculis mentis ostendi. (Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 8.3.62)

For oratory fails of its full effect, and does not assert itself as it should, if its appeal is merely to the hearing, and if the judge merely feels that the facts on which he has to give his decision are being narrated to him, and not displayed in their living truth to the eyes of the mind. (Transl. Butler)

Although enargeia is most typically described in terms of the visualizing power of a text, Dionysius’ characterization of Lysias’ style shows that enargeia in fact comprises all senses and that it is also associated with the feeling of being in the physical presence of the characters, to the extent that one feels able to interact with them. This brings us, finally, to another important aspect of enargeia, intimately connected to its ‘sense of presence’: the arousal of emotions, triggered by the feeling of being present at the scene as an eyewitness.^[5]

The ‘sense of presence’ experienced by a listener or reader is not only a central topic in ancient rhetoric and literary criticism. It is currently also in the focus of attention of literary studies and cognitive narratology, where the reader’s ‘quasi-presence’ is referred to by such terms as “immersion”,^[6] “transportation”,^[7] “aesthetic illusion”,^[8] and “absorption”.^[9]

The experience of immersion – which will be the focus of this paper – is defined by Marie-Laure Ryan, the pioneer of the study of literary immersion, as:

“(…) the experience through which a fictional world acquires the presence of an autonomous, language-independent reality populated by live human beings”.^[10]

“Immersion is a corporeal experience, (…) it takes the projection of a virtual body (…) to feel integrated in an art world”.^[11]

In her “Poetics of Immersion”, Ryan identifies four varieties of immersion: spatial immersion, a narrative’s ability to immerse readers in a sense of place; temporal immersion, the story’s creation of interest (suspense, curiosity, surprise) through the dynamics of the temporal unfolding of the told events; spatio-temporal immersion, the reader’s imaginative transportation (“recentering”) into the story world; emotional immersion, which relates to the emotional participation (such as empathy) in the fate of the characters.^[12] It is not difficult to notice the strong similarities between Ryan’s types of immersion and some of the effects that are usually associated with enargeia: both concepts are associated with a sense of place, imaginative transportation, and an emotional response.^[13]

Once introduced into literary studies by Ryan, the idea of immersion soon also attracted attention outside literary studies, for example in the study of the visual arts and cinema.^[14] The work on narrative immersion is particularly interesting because it includes empirical psychological studies which test the persuasive effects of narrative texts on actual readers. An example is the work of Green and Brock on the persuasive power of narrative texts. One of the central tenets of their Transportation-Imagery Model (2002) is that narrative persuasion is dependent on the degree of mental transportation (immersion) brought about by vivid visual imagery and emotional engagement: “in general, the more recipients are transported into a narrative world, the more likely they are to change their real-world beliefs to be more consistent with the story”.^[15]

In a study of 2000, Green and Brock found that the degree of transportation into the story world determines how likely readers are to change their beliefs on topics brought up in the story. For example, one of the stories used in their experiment was about a girl who was attacked in a shopping mall. Readers that were more strongly transported by the story were more inclined to believe that shopping malls are unsafe places, and that the world is unjust. An interesting observation made by Green and Brock is that the fact that the texts were explicitly labeled as fictional did not alter the outcome. Apparently, verisimilitude is much more important to reader persuasion than the fact that a story is fictional or not. Immersed readers judge the truthfulness of a story according to the principle “if it appears to be true, it must be true”; they are less critical of the story content and less attentive to signs of untruthfulness in the text.^[16]

An aspect that is closely associated with immersion is that of character identification. There is ample empirical evidence that identification with the main character in the story has a strong persuasive effect. In a study of De Graaf, Hoeken, Sanders, and Beentjes (2012), for example, it was found that the perspective of the story influenced the reader’s identification with the character and that readers are inclined to adopt the opinion of the character from whose perspective the story is told. Character identification and perspective is of course also of vital importance to the persuasive power of the narrative of Lysias 1, which will be discussed in more detail in section 4.

In this paper, I use the concept of immersion to come to a better understanding of the way in which texts create the feeling of presence in the story world. The concept of immersion shows several qualities that make it a valuable addition to the conceptual apparatus we use to analyze stylistic properties of a text. An important advantage of immersion is that it is firmly embedded within current cognitive linguistic and narratological theory. This means that immersive narrative techniques can be analyzed in terms of a wide array of concepts derived from both fields, such as tense and aspect, speech representation, cognitive frames/schemata (linguistics), and narrative speed, order, focalization, narratorial mediation, suspense, and story world (narratology). In the following sections, I first propose a coherent set of immersion-enhancing textual properties (section 2), which then serve as a framework for an analysis of two texts: the encounter of Hector and Andromache in Iliad 6 (section 3) and the narrative of Lysias 1, On the Killing of Eratosthenes (section 4).

2 Immersive texts and their characteristics

The potential of a text to engender an immersive experience can be linked to a number of its properties. In her 2001 book, which was substantially revised in 2015, Ryan discusses a number of textual characteristics that facilitate the experience of being immersed in the story world, such as internal and variable focalization, scene narration, dialogue and free indirect discourse, prospective first-person narration, a totally effaced narrator, mimesis “showing” (rather than diegesis “telling”), and reassignment of the reference of deictic elements to the perspective of a participant in the scene.^[17] It goes without saying that the text is not the only determining factor in whether or not a reader feels immersed in the story world ‒ other crucial factors will obviously be the reader’s current physical environment (Are there any external stimuli distracting the reader from being immersed in the story world?), the reader’s present mood, mental predisposition and other, more general, personal characteristics.

Drawing on Ryan’s ‘Poetics of Immersion’ and on other cognitively oriented studies of immersion, I propose the following set of textual dimensions contributing to a reader’s or listener’s immersion in the story world:^[18] (1) Space: the text provides indications of the spatial arrangement of the scene (e. g., through spatial adverbs, prepositional phrases and motion verbs) and evokes a ‘sense of place’;

(2) Sensorimotor details: the text provides concrete sensorimotor details (physical objects or bodies, their actions, and movements) and refers to objects or settings that activate experientially rich cognitive (culturally based) schemas/frames or personal memories, enabling an embodied mental simulation (‘mental image’) of the sights, sounds, touches, smells, emotions, and actions in the described scene;^[19]

(3) Time: the text shows an iconic temporal organization and a relatively slow pace (scenic narration); there are no deviations from chronological order (anachronies, such as flashbacks or flashforwards) or time compressions (summary narration);^[20]

(4) Perspective: the text contains a perspective-shift (‘recentering’), inviting the recipient to vicariously experience (‘view’) the situation from a spatio-temporal or cognitive-emotional viewpoint located in the scene. This may be typically realized by a shift to a scene-internal standpoint or, more specifically, to an embedded focalizer, but it may also be effected by a shift to direct speech, dialogue or free indirect speech;

(5) Emotional involvement: the text gives rise to an affective response, either (a) by steering the recipient’s emotional evaluation of the characters and their behavior (such as admiration, sympathy, pity or contempt), or (b) by arousing feelings of identification and empathy, “a vicarious, spontaneous sharing of affect, (…) provoked by witnessing another’s emotional state, by hearing about another’s condition, or even by reading”,^[21] or (c) by engendering plot-driven emotions, such as suspense, curiosity or surprise, which are generated by the interplay between the progression of narrated (represented) time and the dynamics of narrating time;^[22]

(6) Attention focus: the text directs the recipient’s attentional focus firmly to the represented scene; the focus does not shift towards ‘offstage’ elements such as the narrator, the text itself as a medium, and the extradiegetic discourse world.

Narrative immersion depends on a complex interplay of these textual dimensions. Even though immersive devices show a tendency to co-occur, narrative segments may also show a mix of immersive and distancing elements, and the immersive quality of the text will vary throughout a story, depending on the presence of immersion-enhancing or immersion-disrupting textual features. In other words, a narrative text typically shows a dynamic profile of ‘peaks and valleys’, going up and down the slopes between a more immersive, experiential, reenacting mode of narration and a more distanced, retrospective, reflective mode of narration.

One way of understanding the scale between a non-immersed and a fully immersed reading is by distinguishing 4 (fuzzy-bounded) levels of readerly absorption, as proposed by Ryan:

1. Concentration: “The type of attention devoted to difficult, non-immersive works”;

2. Imaginative involvement: “[t]he ‘split subject’ attitude of the reader who transports herself into the textual world but remains able to contemplate it with aesthetic or epistemological detachment”;

3. Entrancement: “[t]he nonreflexive reading pleasure of the reader so completely caught up in the textual world that she loses sight of anything external to it, including the aesthetic quality of the author’s performance or the truth value of the textual statements”;

4. Addiction: “[t]he loss of the capacity to distinguish textual worlds, especially those of fiction, from the actual world (I call this the Don Quixote syndrome)”.^[23]

We will never know which level of immersion an Athenian audience in court would have attained, and the degree of their immersion would also have depended on their individual disposition: some members of the audience would have been strongly (emotionally) involved in the narrative, other may have been uninterested or simply distracted by elements in their physical surroundings. For forensic oratory such as that of Lysias, it would of course have been important to strive to achieve Ryan’s level 3, “entrancement”, the level of immersion at which the truth value of the textual statements is no longer critically assessed.

3 Enargeia/immersion: An example from Homer

As a prelude to my more detailed analysis of the narratio of Lysias 1, I will discuss a relatively small passage from the Ilias, the famous encounter of Hector, Andromache, and Astyanax in book 6.^[24]

Ὣς εἰπὼν οὗ παιδὸς ὀρέξατο φαίδιμος Ἕκτωρ·

ἂψ δ’ ὃ πάϊς πρὸς κόλπον ἐϋζώνοιο τιθήνης

ἐκλίνθη ἰάχων πατρὸς φίλου ὄψιν ἀτυχθεὶς

ταρβήσας χαλκόν τε ἰδὲ λόφον ἱππιοχαίτην,

δεινὸν ἀπ’ ἀκροτάτης κόρυθος νεύοντα νοήσας. (Il. 6.466–470)

So, speaking glorious Hector reached out to take his son. But the child shrank back crying against the breast of the girdled nurse, terrified at the sight of his own father, frightened by the bronze and the crest of the horsehair, as he saw it nodding dreadfully from the top of the helmet. (Transl. Hammond 1987)

The Scholia give the following comment on this passage:

δυσαποσπάστως μὲν ἔχουσι τῶν τροφῶν. τοῦτον δὲ καὶ ἡ ὄψις φοβεῖ. ταῦτα δὲ τὰ ἔπη οὕτως ἐστὶν ἐναργείας μεστά, ὅτι οὐ μόνον ἀκούεται τὰ πράγματα, ἀλλὰ καὶ ὁρᾶται. λαβὼν δὲ τοῦτο ἐκ τοῦ βίου ὁ ποιητὴς ἄκρως περιεγένετο τῇ μιμήσει. (Schol. bT Il. 6.467 ex.).

[Children] are hard to tear away from their nurses. And [Hector’s] sight also frightens him. These lines are so full of enargeia that the events are not only heard but also seen. By taking this from life, the poet has shown himself to be highly superior in his representation.

The visual aspect of the scene is emphasized: the listener does not only hear it (and a reader does not only read the words) but he/she also sees it, i. e., makes a mental image of it. The scholion also mentions that the scene relates to everyday experience.^[25] In terms of modern cognitive theory, the scene activates cognitive schemata and scripts (general frames of knowledge) in the reader’s memory enabling the audience to construct an experientially rich mental ‘image’: because the audience have had the prior experience of how children behave when someone tries to take them away from their nurses, they are able to build a full-blown embodied sensorymotor simulation of the scene.^[26] Approaching the passage in terms of its immersive features, it is possible to expand on the observation in the Scholia and identify additional textual elements in the passage that contribute to a feeling of involvement and presence.

The audience’s imagination is stimulated by the use of quite a number of sensory (visual and auditory) details such as ἐϋζώνοιο, ἰάχων, χαλκόν, ἱππιοχαίτην. The text also provides clues about spatial positions and movement, using adverbs and prepositional phrases (ἄψ, πρὸς κόλπον, ἀπ’ ἀκροτάτης κόρυθος), and verbs (ὀρέξατο, ἐκλίνθη, νεύοντα): Hector reaches out to take the child, the child shrinks back against the breast of the nurse, the crest is nodding from the top of the helmet. The sense of presence at the scene is also supported by the relatively low tempo of the narration: the time of the narration approximates the narrated time (scenic narration).

Crucial to the immersive quality of the scene, however, is the switch to embedded focalization. From πατρὸς φίλου ὄψιν ἀτυχθεὶς to νοήσας (468–470), we experience the event through Astyanax’ eyes and we are strongly encouraged to identify with him, both cognitively and emotionally. The narrator follows Astyanax’ gaze across Hector’s body. First, Hector’s appearance is mentioned as the cause of the child’s fright. Then, the bronze and the crest of horsehair is zoomed in upon. Finally, the specific detail of the waving crest is highlighted. Emotionally charged terms such as φίλου and δεινόν express the child’s contradictory emotions of love and fear.

4 Lysias 1, On the Killing of Eratosthenes

This paper focuses on the analysis of narrative in Lysias 1. That the enargeia (“descriptive detail”, “vividness”, “verisimilitude”, “sense of presence” – or however one wishes to call it) of the narrative is key to Lysias’ persuasive strategy, distracting the audience’s critical sense away from what might have actually happened in the fatal night of Eratosthenes’ death, has been argued convincingly in recent publications by O’Connell and Webb.^[27] O’Connell points out the importance of ground vividness (“the vivid presentation of information ancillary to the main point of an argument”),^[28] employed to draw away the juror’s attention from the issue of entrapment. Taking a different but congenial approach, Webb has shown the significant role of embedded focalization and spatial awareness, which “creates a sense of being physically present within the scene, alongside the participants”.^[29] My analysis has many points of contact with both papers, but it aims to complement them by taking a somewhat different angle, focusing on Lysias’ immersive techniques.

In the narrative of Lysias 1, many narrative devices are exploited that are commonly associated with immersive storytelling: the narrative gives a ‘sense of place’, a convincing sketch of the characters, provides sensorimotor (‘graphic’, ‘vivid’) detail in a selective but effective way, switches to scenic narration at significant points, presents the events from the viewpoint of the protagonist on the scene, engages the audience’s involvement with the protagonist and his vicissitudes, and creates suspense, surprise and curiosity.

An important narratological aspect in Lysias 1 is that we are dealing with an internal narrator: the narrator-speaker is also a character in the story.^[30] Further narratological dimensions that are relevant to the narrative style of Lysias 1 are (1) the degree of overtness (visibility) of the narrator, and (2) the distinction between narrating vs experiencing focalization.^[31] The first dimension relates to “a narrator who clearly manifests himself as narrator throughout the text”,^[32] for example by commenting on the narrated events or by thematizing his role as a narrator. The feature of narratorial overtness (1) is also relevant to immersion: a highly visible narrator who draws attention to himself instead of directing attention to the narrated events, decreases the audience’s feeling of being immersed in the story worlds.

The second dimension (narrating vs experiencing focalization) is especially relevant to internal narrators, since internal narrators have the choice either to tell the events – as much as possible – as they saw and (mis)understood them at the time they experienced them (experiencing focalization), or to recount the events from a retrospective viewpoint, drawing on the knowledge and feelings they possess at the moment of narration (narrating focalization). These two types of focalization differ in their immersive effect. In experiencing focalization, the story events are presented as they were perceived and understood by the narrator at the moment of experiencing them, which makes a technique par excellence to engender in the narratees a feeling of being present at the scene, witnessing the narrated events as they unfold before their eyes, while trying to make sense of what exactly is happening.

Even though many immersive techniques are used, the narrative starts off in a somewhat more distanced (in the sense of less immersive) mode of narration, before switching to a more immersive style in § 12. The term ‘distanced’ should in this context not be understood as ‘objective’, ‘non-emotional’, or ‘detached’. (This is clearly not the case.) The term ‘distanced’ is meant in this context as the contrary of ‘immersive’, that is, the focus of the narratees’ attention is still (partly) directed toward the narrator, his (hindsight) knowledge and emotions, and his circumstances at the time of speaking. In this distanced narrative mode, the narrator – and in his wake the narratee – views the story world from a retrospective (i. e., distanced) viewpoint rather than from an scene-internal, immersed viewpoint.

The stylistic transition I observe between the first part (§§ 6‒11) and the second part (§§ 12‒26) of the narrative is not meant as a replacement of various other, content-related, ways of dividing the narrative into sections, scenes or episodes, such as the division proposed by Todd (2004: 93), who distinguishes 5 parts: (1) §§ 6‒8 introduction, overview; (2) §§ 9‒10 description domestic setting; (3) §§ 11‒14 sequence 1, adultery downstairs, Euphiletus asleep upstairs; (4) §§ 15‒21 sequence 2, Euphiletus’ discovery of truth and his reaction; (5) §§ 22‒26 sequence 3, unsuccessful adultery, leading to killing of Eratosthenes.^[33]

The stylistic shift towards a more immersive mode of narration in § 12 does not occur at an arbitrary point in the narrative but is indeed related to its content: the shift to a more immersive mode occurs shortly after the incipit of the first narrative sequence, directly after the description of the background situation (Euphiletus has returned unexpectedly and after dinner the baby starts to cry) and the last intrusion of the narrator stating that he learnt the truth only later (the baby was in fact being annoyed by the maid; Eratosthenes was inside the house). From that point on, in the three sequences that constitute the core proper of the narrative, the immersive style is sustained until its ending in § 26.

ἐγὼ γάρ, ὦ Ἀθηναῖοι, ἐπειδὴ ἔδοξέ μοι γῆμαι καὶ γυναῖκα ἠγαγόμην εἰς τὴν οἰκίαν, τὸν μὲν ἄλλον χρόνον οὕτω διεκείμην ὥστε μήτε λυπεῖν μήτε λίαν ἐπ᾽ ἐκείνῃ εἶναι ὅ τι ἂν ἐθέλῃ ποιεῖν, ἐφύλαττόν τε ὡς οἷόν τε ἦν, καὶ προσεῖχον τὸν νοῦν ὥσπερ εἰκὸς ἦν. ἐπειδὴ δέ μοι παιδίον γίγνεται, ἐπίστευον ἤδη καὶ πάντα τὰ ἐμαυτοῦ ἐκείνῃ παρέδωκα, ἡγούμενος ταύτην οἰκειότητα μεγίστην εἶναι. ἐν μὲν οὖν τῷ πρώτῳ χρόνῳ, ὦ Ἀθηναῖοι, πασῶν ἦν βελτίστη. καὶ γὰρ οἰκονόμος δεινὴ καὶ φειδωλὸς {ἀγαθὴ} καὶ ἀκριβῶς πάντα διοικοῦσα. (§§ 6‒7)

When I, Athenians, decided to marry, and brought a wife into my house, for some time I was disposed neither to vex her nor to leave her too free to do just as she pleased; I kept a watch on her as far as possible, with such observation of her as was reasonable. But when a child was born to me, thence-forward I began to trust her, and placed all my affairs in her hands, presuming that we were now in perfect intimacy. It is true that in the early days, Athenians, she was the most excellent of wives; she was a clever, frugal housekeeper, and kept everything in the nicest order.^[34]

There are several linguistic and narratological features that make the first part of the narrative less immersive than the second part: the spatial setting of the story is not elaborated until § 8, the temporal framework is indicated in rather vague and general terms, things are narrated in a relatively high tempo (summary narration), the narrative does not provide many descriptive details, and it features a highly visible narrator.^[35] In what follows, I go into these textual aspects in more detail.

The first part of the narrative serves to lay the groundwork for the story: it introduces the main protagonists (Euphiletus himself, his wife, and her lover), sketches Euphiletus’ initial attitude towards his wife, and it describes the spatial setting of the story, Euphiletus’ house in the city. Time progresses at a relatively high pace (summary narration): first (τὸν μὲν ἄλλον χρόνον [§ 6]), Euphiletus kept watch on his wife; then his child is born, whereafter he trusted his wife completely, as she initially (ἐν μὲν οὖν τῷ πρώτῳ χρόνῳ) was the best of wives. After an unspecific period of time, his mother dies leading to the start of his wife’s affair. After a while (again, Euphiletus is not very specific: προϊόντος δὲ τοῦ χρόνου [§ 11]), he unexpectedly returns from his work, at which point the narrative gears into another, more immersive, mode.

The relatively distanced perspective of the narrative also shows in the use of tense and aspect in the first part of the narrative. The first thing to note is that the present tense is used several times. In some cases, these present tense verbs refer to discourse time, the time at which Euphiletus is speaking to the jury in court. Such references to the present time have of course an immersion-disturbing effect: they jolt the audience out of the story world into the present, as they draw attention to the speaker-narrator and his immediate circumstances. The first case in point is γεγένηται (in § 7), a present perfect:

ἐπειδὴ δέ μοι ἡ μήτηρ ἐτελεύτησε, ἣ πάντων τῶν κακῶν ἀποθανοῦσα αἰτία μοι γεγένηται. (§ 7)

But as soon as I lost my mother, whose death has become the cause of all my troubles.

In Greek, as we know, the present perfect is not a narrative time: it does not refer to events or states in the story. Present perfects, instead, refer either to states in the present of the speaker (resultative-stative perfect) or, if they do not refer to the subject’s physical or mental state, they stress that a past event is relevant at the time of speech (current relevant perfect).^[36] The present perfect γεγένηται is of the latter type; this means that Euphiletus is not merely mentioning a past event, he is actually referring to a present state: “my mother’s death HAS BECOME/IS the cause of all my troubles”. This sentence is not meant to contribute to the construction of the story world – the narrator interrupts his narration of the story to comment on it from a retrospective viewpoint; it expresses what the event means for him hic et nunc while he is speaking to the jury. Now whereas this shift of the audience’s attention to the speaker’s present situation should be seen as detrimental to the immersion in the story world, it does however have a significant role in priming the audience for a more immersive experience, as it captures the audience’s attention by stressing the story’s dramatic outcome.^[37] An important effect of Euphiletus’ statement in § 7 is the creation of ‘HOW suspense’. The audience know that his mother’s funeral is the cause of all his troubles, and they were already informed of the fact that Eratosthenes has seduced his wife (§ 4). But how did this all come about?

The other present verbs are, likewise, intrusions of the narrator in the chain of events, intrusions that are crucial for the audience to understand the setting and the further course of events:

πρῶτον μὲν οὖν, ὦ ἄνδρες, (δεῖ γὰρ καὶ ταῦθ᾽ ὑμῖν διηγήσασθαι) οἰκίδιον ἔστι μοι διπλοῦν, ἴσα ἔχον τὰ ἄνω τοῖς κάτω κατὰ τὴν γυναικωνῖτιν καὶ κατὰ τὴν ἀνδρωνῖτιν. (§ 9)

Now in the first place I must tell you, sirs (for I am obliged to give you these particulars), my dwelling is on two floors, the upper being equal in space to the lower, with the women’s quarters above and the men’s below.

Euphiletus interrupts the story line to provide relevant background information, using a present tense ἔστι: he is still the owner of the house at the time of the trial. The present δεῖ is part of a meta-narrative comment drawing attention to the narrator in his role of organizer of the narrative: Euphiletus points out to the audience the relevance of his digression on the house to understand the rest of the story.

These present tenses are not the only tense-aspect forms that are linked to a more distanced mode of narration. Many verbs refer to habitual events, which by definition require a relatively distant perspective: the narrator makes a generalization regarding a longer time span, describing long-term, habitual patterns. Examples are: ὅ τι ἂν ἐθέλῃ ποιεῖν (general-iterative subjunctive), ἡ μήτηρ αὐτὸ ἐθήλαζεν (habitual imperfect), ὁπότε λοῦσθαι δέοι (iterative optative), ἐγὼ μὲν ἄνω διῃτώμην, αἱ δὲ γυναῖκες κάτω (habitual imperfect). The repeated occurrence of the described actions is hammered home in (10): καὶ οὕτως ἤδη συνειθισμένον ἦν, ὥστε πολλάκις ἡ γυνὴ ἀπῄει κάτω καθευδήσουσα ὡς τὸ παιδίον, ἵνα τὸν τιτθὸν αὐτῷ διδῷ καὶ μὴ βοᾷ. καὶ ταῦτα πολὺν χρόνον οὕτως ἐγίγνετο. It was his wife’s habit (συνειθισμένον ἦν) often (πολλάκις) to go (ἀπῄει: habitual imperfect) to the child, a pattern that went on for a long time (πολὺν χρόνον). The description of habitual-iterative actions shows that the narrator presents the events from a temporally distant standpoint: he presents a summary overview of the events in a certain (unspecified) period of time; he does not yet ‘zoom in’ to describe one specific scene, as he will do later.

In the first part of the narrative (§§ 6‒11), there are also two historical presents: ἐπειδὴ δέ μοι παιδίον γίγνεται, ἐπίστευον ἤδη (§ 6), and ἡ ἐμὴ γυνὴ ὑπὸ τούτου τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ὀφθεῖσα, χρόνῳ διαφθείρεται (§ 8). Contrary to what one would perhaps expect, there is no straightforward one-to-one relation between the occurrence of the historical present and an immersive narrative style. The historical present is often characterized as ‘vivid’, ‘pseudo-present’, or as creating an ‘eyewitness effect’; that is, as a way of creating the illusion that a past action is occurring in the present, before one’s eyes.^[38] When this effect of historical present is present, one could indeed argue that it also contributes to the immersive quality of the narrative.

However, while this ‘pseudo-present’ function of the historical present is evident in some passages (also at a later point in Lysias 1, as we shall see), it certainly does not seem to be valid for many others. In the two cases at issue, there is no ‘vivid’ narration, and the events are not described as if occurring before one’s very eyes. In § 6, the audience is not expected to feel as if they are present at the moment of birth of Euphiletus’ child, nor are we supposed to visualize, by the use of διαφθείρεται in § 8, how Euphiletus’ wife is corrupted.^[39] In fact, the adverbial χρόνῳ makes it clear that his wife’s corruption is a process that took some time. The events are not told with any graphic detail and the pace of the narrative is relatively high (summary narration).

Now if these historical presents are not ‘vivid’ or ‘pseudo-present’, what then is their function? To understand how the historical present functions in narrative, it is important to distinguish between summary narrative and scenic narrative.^[40] In summary narrative, as in our case, historical presents show a discourse-structural function. Contrary to their occurrence in scenic narrative, they do not occur as part of a longer series but in isolation. In summary narrative, historical presents are used to draw the narratee’s attention to the significance of the event for the larger development of the story line, highlighting crucial turning points narrative events. In the case of γίγνεται, the birth of the child is important for at least two reasons: it causes an important change in Euphiletus’ attitude towards his wife, which would have fatal consequences, and the child itself remains highly important for the unfolding of the plot.

Like γίγνεται, the historical present διαφθείρεται has a discourse-structural function: it is used to highlight an important event in the story line. This time, however, it is not so much a turning point in a sequence of events, but an announcement of what will be narrated in the subsequent chapters (that is, an ‘abstract’ in the Labovian sense).^[41] That the following narrative should be interpreted as an elaboration of this summarizing statement is explicitly marked by the particle γάρ in the following sentence (ἐπιτηρῶν γὰρ τὴν θεράπαιναν …). The historical presents γίγνεται and διαφθείρεται do not refer to ‘vivid’ actions, nor are they meant to create a ‘pseudo-eyewitness effect’. In other words, they should not be seen as part of an immersive narrative strategy. Instead, they occur in summary narrative in which the narrator is visible as a mediating instance in the narration, which are associated with a more distanced narrative mode. As I argue later, there are also historical presents, later in the narrative of Lysias 1, that do enhance the immersive quality of the narrative.

The narrating focalization of the narrator in the first part of the narrative also comes to the fore at several points in the narrative in which he contrast his former ignorance and naivety with his present awareness of what really happened (a), or provides information that could not have been known to him at the moment the events expired, adding that he learned about what actually was going on in his house only afterwards (b and c):

1. καὶ ταῦτα πολὺν χρόνον οὕτως ἐγίγνετο, καὶ ἐγὼ οὐδέποτε ὑπώπτευσα, ἀλλ᾽ οὕτως ἠλιθίως διεκείμην, ὥστε ᾤμην τὴν ἐμαυτοῦ γυναῖκα πασῶν σωφρονεστάτην εἶναι τῶν ἐν τῇ πόλει. (§ 10)

2. μετὰ δὲ τὸ δεῖπνον τὸ παιδίον ἐβόα καὶ ἐδυσκόλαινεν ὑπὸ τῆς θεραπαίνης ἐπίτηδες λυπούμενον, ἵνα ταῦτα ποιῇ· ὁ γὰρ ἄνθρωπος ἔνδον ἦν. ὕστερον γὰρ ἅπαντα ἐπυθόμην (§ 11)

3. προσέρχεταί μοί τις πρεσβῦτις ἄνθρωπος, ὑπὸ γυναικὸς ὑποπεμφθεῖσα ἣν ἐκεῖνος ἐμοίχευεν, ὡς ἐγὼ ὕστερον ἤκουον (§ 15)

In narratological terms, (b) and (c) are prolepses, that is, two instances of foreshadowing future events.

The first part of the narrative does not only show features that point to a more distance narrative mode. The narrative is clearly not a dry, detached report of the events preceding the killing of Eratosthenes: there are several narrative devices serving to engage the audience in the story, involving them emotionally with the characters, by describing the spatial setting and by creating suspense as to how things will develop. That the first part already lays the groundwork for the audience’s immersion in the story is crucial for its persuasive function: the audience’s attention and emotional involvement should be aroused from the start, preparing the way for a gradual build-up of the immersive intensity of the narrative.

The first immersive device occurs right at the start in § 6, where there is an immediate switch to embedded focalization: ἐπειδὴ ἔδοξέ μοι γῆμαι. Instead of neutrally stating “after I married”, the cognition verb ἔδοξέ μοι subtly but effectively introduces Euphiletus’ mental point of view in the narrative: from now on, we are inside Euphiletus’ head and are encouraged to view things as they are felt and perceived by Euphiletus rather than from anyone else’s perspective. The rest of § 6 firmly establishes Euphiletus’ perspective as the primary emotional and cognitive center of the story’s universe, describing in detail his thoughts, attitudes, and feelings – note the many verbs referring to Euphiletus’ mental states: διεκείμην, ἐφύλαττον, προσεῖχον, ἐπίστευον, ἡγούμενος. The subtle use of μοι in ἐπειδὴ δέ μοι παιδίον γίγνεται may also serve to emphasize his (emotional) involvement in the event. Euphiletus’ pervasive subjective style of narration is aimed at gaining the audience’s empathy (in the sense of identification: seeing, thinking and feeling as he does, and identification with his fate) as well as their sympathy, staging himself as an ordinary citizen, naive but kind, who – although certainly not morally impeccable – would not be remotely capable of devising a scheme to kill an innocent man, as he is accused of by his opponents.^[42] Empathy and sympathy for the protagonist are important factors in the audience’s feeling of being immersed in the story world.

An element that also contributes to the immersive effect of the narrative is Euphiletus’ description of the layout of the house. Even though this description does not provide us with much explicit details as to how we should visualize Euphiletus’ dwelling (Demetrius, On Style 190 comments on its “plain style”), it still contributes to the overall immersive effect of the narrative as it sketches the setting of the adultery and the murder.

Now in the first place I must tell you, sirs (for I am obliged to give you these particulars), my dwelling is on two floors, the upper being equal in space to the lower, with the women’s quarters above and the men’s below. When the child was born to us, its mother suckled it; and in order that, each time that it had to be washed, she might avoid the risk of descending by the stairs, I used to live above, and the women below. (§ 9)

It should be noted that the ability to visualize a description of an object or a space (such as a room, a building, or a landscape) need not depend on an abundance of graphic detail. Equally ‒ if not more ‒ important is the descriptions potential to tap into the audience’s general cultural knowledge of the world (or cognitive schemas, frames, scripts, or scripts, as they are called in cognitive science). Descriptions activate cultural knowledge stored in the audience’s memory which is used to ‘flesh out’ the strategically selected cues given in the description into a rich mental representation (‘mental image’) of the described entity.^[43] In this case, we may assume that the relative succinct description of the layout of the house is still able to evoke a vivid embodied sensorimotor simulation in the minds of the Athenian audience, not only encompassing visual information retrieved from their memories but also activating motoric information based on their personal experiences. Since this type of dwelling was undoubtedly highly familiar, the audience would have been able to create a vivid mental picture of it and imagine how it is to move around in such a house and how it feels to climb up and down the staircase between the two floors. The additional detail of his wife descending the staircase to suckle her child, which can certainly be said to be ‘taken from life’, also adds to the audience’s imagination of the scene. The description of the house not only provides information about the spatial setting of the narrative, but also serves to portray Euphiletus as a naive but caring husband and to explain how his wife ended up sleeping on the ground floor, which would eventually turn against him as it facilitated her affair with Eratosthenes.

It is worthwhile dwelling briefly on the occurrence of the vocative. The vocative is used 8 times in the narrative, in § 6 (ὦ Ἀθηναῖοι), § 7 (ὦ Ἀθηναῖοι), § 9 (ὦ ἄνδρες), § 11 (ὦ ἄνδρες), § 15, ὦ ἄνδρες), § 17 (ὦ ἄνδρες), § 23 (ὦ ἄνδρες), and § 25 (ὦ ἄνδρες). In principle, a vocative addressing the audience can be seen as a textual feature disturbing immersion into the story world: a vocative uttered by the narrator, after all, refers to an addressee external to the story world, that is, in the discourse world, or, more precisely, in the communicative situation in the court of law. And indeed, the vocatives addressing the members of the jury more frequently occur in the less immersive first part of the narrative (4 vocatives in 6 sections); in the second, more immersive, part (§§ 12‒26), their relative frequency decreases (4 vocatives in 15 sections). Yet, even though vocatives can be seen as detrimental to immersion, their immersion-disturbing effect is probably not very strong. Linguistically they are relatively ‘light’: they are parenthetical (probably prosodically postpositive) constituents consisting of a single noun, which only briefly interrupts the clause. The content of the actual clause, meanwhile, still refers to a situation in the story world.

The vocatives’ function is to appeal to the jury members to pay attention to the following discourse segment. As Scheppers has demonstrated, vocatives in Lysias 1 are used (a) at the beginning of all major parts of the speech (such as at the beginning of the narrative in § 6), (b) important boundaries in the internal structure of these parts (such as episode boundaries), (c) in segments which constitute a climax in a narrative development.^[44] On balance, I would suggest that the use of the vocative does not appear to be distinctly immersion-disturbing nor immersion-enhancing: on the one hand, it briefly reminds the audience of the communicative (extradiegetic) situation; on the other hand, it serves to incite the audience to pay attention to (and thus be more immersed in) the upcoming part of the story, which partly neutralizes its potential anti-immersive effect.

An overview of the narrative techniques in the first part of the narrative (§§ 6‒11) can be found in the following table:

As we have seen, the first part of the narrative (§§ 6‒11) shows a mix of distancing and immersive elements. This intermediate position between a distanced and an immersive style can be seen in the light of the function of this part of the narrative: it is a transitional stage between the exordium, (in which the audience’s attention is focused on the discourse world, i. e., their present physical and social context, the court of law and the speaker addressing them) and the core of the narrative (in which the audience’s attention is fully absorbed by the actors and events of the story world). The first, preliminary, part of the narrative does not plunge the audience immediately and completely into the story world, but it engages the audience in a more gradual way, step by step, into the narrated events.

The shift to a more immersive mode of narration in § 12 depends on several linguistic and narratological ‘switches’ that are set differently. The general spatial layout of the scene has already been charted in § 9, on which the subsequent narrative can build further. Subsequent indications of the spatial setting can therefore remain limited and often only implicit. That the first scene is set in the bedroom upstairs, for example, only becomes clear when Euphiletus’ wife locks the door behind her, and Euphiletus subsequently falls asleep. The setting of the second scene (§ 15‒17), in which the old woman approaches him, is not specified, but the fact that someone is able to approach him implies that it occurs at some location in the city. This is confirmed only at a later stage by ἐλθὼν δὲ οἴκαδε in § 18, which is the start of the subsequent scene concerning the interrogation of the maid (§§ 18‒21). After he returns home, Euphiletus brings the maid to a friend’s house (ἀγαγὼν δ᾽ αὐτὴν ὡς τῶν ἐπιτηδείων τινά).

The spatial arrangement of the highly immersive final episode (§§ 22‒26) is more complex and described in more detail. In §§ 22‒23, Euphiletus tells that he encountered Sostratus just after sunset coming from the country (ἰόντι ἐξ ἀγροῦ ἀπήντησα) and invited him to come to dinner with him. After their arrival at Euphiletus’ house (ἐλθόντες οἴκαδε ὡς ἐμέ) they go upstairs (ἀναβάντες εἰς τὸ ὑπερῷον) and have dinner. Eratosthenes enters the house in § 24 (Ἐρατοσθένης … εἰσέρχεται), and Euphiletus leaves the house to round up his friends (ἀφικνοῦμαι ὡς τὸν καὶ τόν). They visit the nearest shop (ἐκ τοῦ ἐγγύτατα καπηλείου) to buy torches, and re‒enter the house (εἰσερχόμεθα), first through the main door (ἀνεῳγμένης τῆς θύρας), then through the bedroom door (ὤσαντες δὲ τὴν θύραν τοῦ δωματίου), where they see Eratosthenes first lying next to Euphiletus wife (κατακείμενον παρὰ τῇ γυναικί), then standing naked on the bed (ἐν τῇ κλίνῃ γυμνὸν ἑστηκότα).

The second part of the narrative (§§ 12‒26) effectively feeds the audience with significant and evocative descriptive details at strategic moments in the narrative. These narrative details are used to create what Barthes (1968) calls l’effet de réel (“the reality effect”): they lack an apparent function but serve to enhance the realism of the text, suggesting that the text is indeed a faithful representation of reality. An example of such an evocative narrative detail is Euphiletus’ wife drawing the bolt outside the bedroom (τὴν κλεῖν ἐφέλκεται) shutting Euphiletus in § 13. Another example is Euphiletus’ observation in § 14 that it seemed to him that his wife had used make-up (ἔδοξε δέ μοι, ὦ ἄνδρες, τὸ πρόσωπον ἐψιμυθιῶσθαι), evoking the image of a face with “traces on the skin left following inadequate efforts at removal and visible by the light of day”.^[45] The wife’s make-up is mentioned again in § 17, his final moment of insight, at which he also remembers the specific detail of both doors (ἡ μέταυλος θύρα καὶ ἡ αὔλειος) having made a noise that night. Equally effective is the narrative detail of the baby’s night-light that had gone out and had to be re-lit at the neigbours’ (ἔφασκε τὸν λύχνον ἀποσβεσθῆναι τὸν παρὰ τῷ παιδίῳ, εἶτα ἐκ τῶν γειτόνων ἐνάψασθαι). Here, the woman herself (as presented by Euphiletus) strategically exploits a narrative detail to enhance the verisimilitude of her story, explaining to her husband why the doors had made such a noise in the night.

The switch to a more immersive mode of narration in § 12 is not only dependent on a higher number of spatial and descriptive details, but also involves a slowing down of the narrative speed (scenic narration), a more intensive use of a scene-internal perspectives (such as embedded focalization), and a stronger emotional involvement of the audience with the troubles experienced by the protagonist and speaker Euphiletus. The effective interplay of these immersive features can be observed in the following scene, which in fact constitutes the transition to the more immersive part of the narrative:

καὶ ἐγὼ τὴν γυναῖκα ἀπιέναι ἐκέλευον καὶ δοῦναι τῷ παιδίῳ τὸν τιτθόν, ἵνα παύσηται κλᾶον. ἡ δὲ τὸ μὲν πρῶτον οὐκ ἤθελεν, ὡς ἂν ἀσμένη με ἑωρακυῖα ἥκοντα διὰ χρόνου· ἐπειδὴ δὲ ἐγὼ ὠργιζόμην καὶ ἐκέλευον αὐτὴν ἀπιέναι, “ἵνα σύ γε” ἔφη “πειρᾷς ἐνταῦθα τὴν παιδίσκην· καὶ πρότερον δὲ μεθύων εἷλκες αὐτήν”. κἀγὼ μὲν ἐγέλων, ἐκείνη δὲ ἀναστᾶσα καὶ ἀπιοῦσα προστίθησι τὴν θύραν, προσποιουμένη παίζειν, καὶ τὴν κλεῖν ἐφέλκεται. κἀγὼ τούτων οὐδὲν ἐνθυμούμενος οὐδ᾽ ὑπονοῶν ἐκάθευδον ἄσμενος, ἥκων ἐξ ἀγροῦ. (§§ 12‒13)

So I bade my wife go and give the child her breast, to stop its howling. At first she refused, as though delighted to see me home again after so long; but when I began to be angry and bade her go, – “Yes, so that you,” she said, “may have a try here at the little maid. Once before, too, when you were drunk, you pulled her about”. At that I laughed, while she got up, went out of the room, and closed the door, feigning to make fun, and she took the key away with her. I, without giving a thought to the matter, or having any suspicion, went to sleep in all content after my return from the country.

The narration slows down and zooms in on a little domestic scene. The few sentences abound with indications of emotional states. The baby is crying and Euphiletus asks his wife to feed it. First, the wife’s feelings are addressed: she refuses (οὐκ ἤθελεν), pretending to be glad (ὡς ἂν ἀσμένη) to see him. Euphiletus becomes angry (ὠργιζόμην) and laughs (ἐγέλων) at his wife’s reply. She pretends to make a joke (προσποιουμένη παίζειν), and he falls asleep happy (ἐκάθευδον ἄσμενος). The strong emotional focus of the narrative involves the audience with the feelings of the two actors in the scene. The pervasive use of the imperfect tense to describe the various mental states present them as unbounded and ongoing, suggesting Euphiletus’ scene-internal viewpoint (that is, his experiencing focalization).

There are also two other concrete linguistic devices that create a sense of immediacy: the shift to direct speech (the first in the narrative), and the use of two adjacent historical presents (προστίθησι τὴν θύραν; τὴν κλεῖν ἐφέλκεται). These two historical presents have a different function from the historical present occurring earlier in the narrative. Since προστίθησι and ἐφέλκεται are part of a scenic narration (cf. also the use of direct speech), they do serve to convey a sense of presence at the scene, presenting the actions as if they are actually taking place before one’s very eyes. The reference to Euphiletus’ prior attempt to seduce the maid is, strictly speaking, not very relevant to the main point of the story. Still, it is a highly effective detail: it paints Euphiletus as an ordinary (for the contemporary audience relatable) Athenian male, with ordinary weaknesses, and it also aims at producing Barthes’s l’effet de réel.

Even though this scene offers us several immersion-enhancing narrative techniques, it sometimes also shows signs of a retrospective stance towards the events. The use of ὡς “as if” as a modifier of the participle ἀσμένη and the negated participles οὐδὲν ἐνθυμούμενος οὐδ᾽ ὑπονοῶν mark brief intrusions of the retrospective narrator (i. e., narrating focalization) into the otherwise predominantly experiencing focalization of the second part of the narrative: the audience is subtly reminded of the fact that what seemed to be true at the time, turned out to be false at a later stage.

The section of the narrative that is perhaps strongest in creating a feeling of emotional immersion is § 17, which narrates the moment in which Euphiletus realizes the truth.

ταῦτα εἰποῦσα, ὦ ἄνδρες, ἐκείνη μὲν ἀπηλλάγη, ἐγὼ δ᾽ εὐθέως ἐταραττόμην, καὶ πάντα μου εἰς τὴν γνώμην εἰσῄει, καὶ μεστὸς ἦ ὑποψίας, ἐνθυμούμενος μὲν ὡς ἀπεκλῄσθην ἐν τῷ δωματίῳ, ἀναμιμνῃσκόμενος δὲ ὅτι ἐν ἐκείνῃ τῇ νυκτὶ ἐψόφει ἡ μέταυλος θύρα καὶ ἡ αὔλειος, ὃ οὐδέποτε ἐγένετο, ἔδοξέ τέ μοι ἡ γυνὴ ἐψιμυθιῶσθαι. ταῦτά μου πάντα εἰς τὴν γνώμην εἰσῄει, καὶ μεστὸς ἦ ὑποψίας.

With these words, sirs, she took herself off; I was at once perturbed; all that had happened came into my mind, and I was filled with suspicion, – reflecting first how I was shut up in my chamber, and then remembering how on that night the inner and outer doors made a noise, which had never occurred before, and how it struck me that my wife had put on powder. All these things came into my mind, and I was filled with suspicion.

The narrative shifts to a form of ‘psycho-narration’: Euphiletus describes his mental process suddenly realizing what has been really going on: he becomes alarmed (ἐταραττόμην), everything coming back to his mind, and he is filled with suspicion (πάντα μου εἰς τὴν γνώμην εἰσῄει, καὶ μεστὸς ἦ ὑποψίας, ἐνθυμούμενος ἀναμιμνῃσκόμενος). The shift to embedded focalization (ἐνθυμούμενος μὲν ὡς …, ἀναμιμνῃσκόμενος δὲ ὅτι …) invites the audience to recall, together with Euphiletus, what had happened earlier, and to identify with Euphiletus in his moment of enlightenment. Again, the imperfects describe the processes from an internal viewpoint, and they also suggest that the feelings and thoughts overwhelming Euphiletus flood his mind in one simultaneous wave of emotions. The repetition of the sentence ταῦτά μου πάντα εἰς τὴν γνώμην εἰσῄει, καὶ μεστὸς ἦ ὑποψίας, leading to a form of concluding ring composition, suggests the intense emotional shock he was experiencing.^[46]

The climax of the narrative is (not coincidentally, of course) also the most immersive part of the story, in §§ 24‒26:

παραλαβὼν δ’ ὡς οἷόν τε ἦν πλείστους ἐκ τῶν παρόντων ἐβάδιζον. καὶ δᾷδας λαβόντες ἐκ τοῦ ἐγγύτατα καπηλείου εἰσερχόμεθα, ἀνεῳγμένης τῆς θύρας καὶ ὑπὸ τῆς ἀνθρώπου παρεσκευασμένης. ὤσαντες δὲ τὴν θύραν τοῦ δωματίου οἱ μὲν πρῶτοι εἰσιόντες ἔτι εἴδομεν αὐτὸν κατακείμενον παρὰ τῇ γυναικί, οἱ δ’ ὕστερον ἐν τῇ κλίνῃ γυμνὸν ἑστηκότα. ἐγὼ δ’, ὦ ἄνδρες, πατάξας καταβάλλω αὐτόν, καὶ τὼ χεῖρε περιαγαγὼν εἰς τοὔπισθεν καὶ δήσας ἠρώτων διὰ τί ὑβρίζει εἰς τὴν οἰκίαν τὴν ἐμὴν εἰσιών. κἀκεῖνος ἀδικεῖν μὲν ὡμολόγει, ἠντεβόλει δὲ καὶ ἱκέτευε μὴ ἀποκτεῖναι ἀλλ’ ἀργύριον πράξασθαι. ἐγὼ δ’ εἶπον ὅτι “οὐκ ἐγώ σε ἀποκτενῶ, ἀλλ’ ὁ τῆς πόλεως νόμος, ὃν σὺ παραβαίνων περὶ ἐλάττονος τῶν ἡδονῶν ἐποιήσω, καὶ μᾶλλον εἵλου τοιοῦτον ἁμάρτημα ἐξαμαρτάνειν εἰς τὴν γυναῖκα τὴν ἐμὴν καὶ εἰς τοὺς παῖδας τοὺς ἐμοὺς ἢ τοῖς νόμοις πείθεσθαι καὶ κόσμιος εἶναι”.

I took with me as many as I could among those who were there, and so came along. Then we got torches from the nearest shop, and went in; the door was open, as the girl had it in readiness. We pushed open the door of the bedroom, and the first of us to enter were in time to see him lying down by my wife; those who followed saw him standing naked on the bed. I gave him a blow, sirs, which knocked him down, and pulling round his two hands behind his back, and tying them, I asked him why he had the insolence to enter my house. He admitted his guilt; then he besought and implored me not to kill him, but to exact a sum of money. To this I replied, “It is not I who am going to kill you, but our city’s law, which you have transgressed and regarded as of less account than your pleasures, choosing rather to commit this foul offence against my wife and my children than to obey the laws like a decent person”.

In the final scene, we find all the features that associate with an immersive narrative mode: an elaborate spatial layout, a high density of action and motion, a scenic progression of time, strategically inserted descriptive details, a shift to a scene-internal perspective, emotional involvement, and suspense.

Linguistically, the spatial dimension is indicated by prepositions in compound verbs and in adverbial phrases, which give information about the location or movement in space (underscored). Time is progressing at a relatively slow pace. We are informed of every single stage of the action: they take torches from the nearest shop, enter through the first door, then they force the second door, the first to enter saw Eratosthenes lying next to Euphiletus’ wife, those following see him standing on the bed, Euphiletus knocks him down, ties his hands, and finally there is a verbal interaction. The detail of buying torches is artfully inserted in the account of the final events. Whether Euphiletus had a torch is completely irrelevant to the legal case he wishes to make: this detail only serves to enable the audience to picture the situation mentally. Mentioning the torches is yet another apparently redundant detail inserted in the narrative to create l’effet de réel.

Another feature contributing to the immersive quality of the scene is the use of the historical present at crucial points in the action (boldface), creating a sense of urgency and of presence at the scene. The first historical present (εἰσερχόμεθα) marks the entry on the crime scene,^[47] the second (καταβάλλω) highlights the moment in which Eratosthenes is overpowered and made immobile. One may wonder why the moment of knocking down is marked with a historical present rather than, for example, the moment they catch Eratosthenes in the act on the bed, which is referred to with the aorist εἴδομεν. A possible answer is that it is more crucial to Euphiletus’ defense that Eratosthenes was knocked down and made immobile immediately: this point is emphatically made in order to counter the claim of the accusers that Eratosthenes had in fact escaped to the hearth or to the door of the house.^[48] Another typical immersive feature of this passage conveying a sense of presence at the scene is, of course, the dramatic switch to direct speech. Euphiletus solemnly voices the final death sentence stressing that he is only acting in accordance with the laws of the city.

The narrative’s handling of perspective also contributes to the immersive quality of the final scene. The events are presented in strict chronological order, as they are experienced by Euphiletus: we follow him and his friends as they enter into the house and to the bedroom, and, at the crucial moment of entering the bedroom, the narrative explicitly switches to their point of view (εἴδομεν); it is through their eyes that we catch the surprised Eratosthenes in the act: “the restricted focalization ensures that the audience adopt the perspective of Euphiletus and his friends”.^[49] By presenting the events consciously from his perspective, Euphiletus effectively encourages the audience to identify with him and his party. The immersive quality of the passage is intimately linked with its persuasive purpose – enhancing the verisimilitude of the narrative. ‘Entranced’ by the story, the jurors’ critical sense and awareness of any omissions or possible inconsistencies would undoubtedly have been reduced substantially.^[50] By its choice of perspective and by its wealth of detail, the narrative presents itself as a truthful representation of what actually happened.^[51]

By way of conclusion, I give an overview of the immersive devices discussed above: