Volume 14, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Style and the Ancient City: Form and Functions of Language in Attic Oratory Issue Editors: Alessandro Vatri/Andreas Serafim

The modern concept of style is a complex one and is difficult to map fully onto a corresponding notion in ancient Greek thinking and vocabulary. This paper sets out to examine both the common understandings of this term in contemporary scholarship and the ancient sensitivities to what we may call stylistic phenomena – the multi-levelled features that may be conceptualized as characterizing the ‘how’ as opposed to the ‘what’. The paper moves on to show in what ways style and ancient stylistics are related to the city , that is to say, to the use of language in the culturally-defined communicative contexts for which texts were produced and circulated in classical Athens. In the final section, this paper briefly reviews recent approaches and perspectives in the stylistics of Greek oratory and lays out the framework of this special issue.

This paper approaches Lysianic ēthopoiia from the methodological perspective of ‘mind style’, a concept taken from modern stylistics. It is argued that Lysias gave his speakers individualized speaking styles that are indicative of their characters. The narrative of Lysias 1 is used as test case, and the analysis is based on a variety of linguistic features (sentence length, particle usage, pronoun usage) and cognitive concepts (mindblindness, schemas, cognitive metaphor). It is argued that, in a variety of subtle ways, Euphiletus is portrayed linguistically as a simple man, unaware of the motives and actions of others, and as a passive experiencer rather than an active participant in his own story.

This paper examines the language of ‘sharing in the polis ’ common in Greek legal and political discourse, with a particular emphasis on its use in Athenian oratory. It explores the conceptual metaphors related to various forms of engagement in the socio-political framework of the city-state, such as μετέχειν τῆς πόλεως and μετεῖναι τῆς πόλεως (“having a share in the polis ”), μετέχειν τῶν τῆς πόλεως (“having a share in the affairs of the polis ”), μετέχειν τῶν κοινῶν (“having a share in public affairs”), and more context-specific variants of this phrasing used by orators in attempts to influence the audiences gathered in the political institutions of democratic Athens. Finally, it argues that crucial distinctions should be made in the understanding of these different expressions and in interpreting their meaning in different rhetorical, legal, and socio-political contexts.

In his paper on Lysias, Dionysius of Halicarnassus characterizes the effect of Lysias’ enargeia as the power through which the listener “seems to see the things shown and to be almost in the company of the characters whom the orator introduces”. The capacity to give the audience a sense of being present at the narrated scene, vividly imagining the people, places, and actions, is one the most powerful instruments in Lysias’ persuasive toolbox. The ‘sense of presence’ created by Lysias’ narrative style will be approached as a form of what in cognitive literary studies has become known as immersion , a concept that is defined by in terms that are remarkably similar to Dionysius’ characterization of Lysias’ style, as “the experience through which a fictional world acquires the presence of an autonomous, language-independent reality populated by live human beings” (Ryan 2015, 9). Analyzing Lysias’ narrative techniques through the lens of their immersive power is interesting for several reasons. Psychological research has found evidence that highly immersed readers are more likely to be persuaded by the point of view implicit in a narrative than readers who are less immersed. Approaching Lysias’ style in terms of its immersive qualities also allows us analyze the text in terms of a wide and diverse range of linguistic and narratological devices: not only the strategic use of graphic (“vivid”) details, but also the use of verbal tense and aspect, vocatives, direct speech, the narrator’s visibility, and the narrative’s spatial and temporal organization, handling of perspective (focalization), and its capacity to raise suspense and to engage the audience’s attention and emotions.

This paper aims to examine whether imperatives are used in the same or a similar way in forensic, symbouleutic, and epideictic orations, what the semantic differences are between addressing the audience in the imperative and the so-called mandative subjunctive (which conveys requests, suggestions, and recommendations) or prohibitive subjunctive (which instructs the audience to avoid actions), and what impact these two moods are intended to have upon the judges and onlookers. It will be argued that subjunctives, when used in main clauses (those in subordinate clauses are not examined), take their level of forcefulness (i. e., how polite and discreet they are) from their immediate context, and that, in some instances, they may have a similar semantic force and persuasive potential to imperatives.

This paper investigates the distribution of different types of impersonal constructions in Attic oratory and focuses on the data taken from two political speeches, i. e., Aeschines’ Against Ctesiphon (speech 3) and Demosthenes’ On the Crown (speech 18). The topic of impersonal constructions in Ancient Greek has not yet received much attention from scholars, with the exception of some studies devoted to singular aspects, e. g., the semantics and morphosyntax of impersonal verbs and the comparison with other Indo-European languages. No attention has been paid to the analysis of textual distribution of impersonal constructions and to the effects that impersonal constructions produce in communicative terms. This paper aims at filling the gap, by analysing different types of clauses under the umbrella of impersonal constructions. Some of them are usually recognised as impersonal constructions, while others are not. Constructions are of three types: the first includes constructions with impersonal verbs, e. g., δεῖ, δοκεῖ, etc., which are to be compared with the corresponding personal constructions. The second group contains some non-personal uses of grammatical persons, namely the non-referential uses of the first person plural and the clauses with indefinite subject τις. Finally, the third type includes constructions with non-human subjects, which display no-agreement in number between the verb and its external argument. The purpose of the paper is twofold. On the one hand, it aims at contributing to the debate on ancient Greek impersonal constructions; on the other hand, it investigates the role played by impersonal linguistic strategies in building the contents of forensic speeches and conveying the messages that orators wanted to communicate to the audience.

The rhetorical question, often assumed to have been favoured by the sophist Gorgias, became a fundamental feature of ancient rhetoric in both Greek and Latin. By the time of Senecan tragedy, an accumulation of as many as seventeen serial rhetorical questions can be found expressing extremes of emotion, especially indignation or despair. Rhetorical questions in some archaic and classical Greek authors have received limited attention, for example, in the Iliad those delivered by Thersites in exciting indignation (2.225–233) and by the authorial voice to create pathos in asking Patroclus about the Trojans he has killed (16.692–693); the string of questions Aphrodite humorously asks in Sappho 1; the ritual queries in the Derveni Papyrus; the series of two to three questions found (often near the beginning of speeches) in the agōns of some tragedies. But the increasing variety and sophistication of the deployment of the rhetorical question in the Greek orators has been surprisingly neglected. This article analyses some of the different uses to which Lysias puts rhetorical questions especially in relation to characterisation in his orations and argues that they represent a considerable advance on the practice of any predecessor in any genre.

In many of the surviving Athenian law court speeches, litigants and sunēgoroi claim that, as amateurs, they come to trial at a disadvantage. Occasionally, they acknowledge a reputation for wishing to advance themselves by a display of rhetorical abilities. Whatever stance the speaker takes, these maneuvers add to the complex texture of Attic oratory. We find a remarkable variety of approaches, e. g., Antiphon giving a Lesbian-speaking client an ornate acknowledgment in lightly Ionicized Attic of his rhetorical inadequacy; Lysias posing as a forensic novice when he represents himself; Dinarchus mimicking a speaker at a loss for words; Lycurgus warning the jury that the defendant will (mis)represent himself as an amateur under attack by a malicious prosecutor. And the orator who has, however falsely, spoken to his audience of his own sense of formidable rhetorical challenge might thereby be better prepared to improvise his response to his opponents’ speeches. Alcidamas, champion of improvisation, would be sympathetic.