The Rhetoric of Unity and Division in Ancient Literature

Andreas N. Michalopoulos, Andreas Serafim, Flaminia Beneventano della Corte, Alessandro Vatri, Andreas N. Michalopoulos, Andreas Serafim, Flaminia Beneventano della Corte, Alessandro Vatri

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110609868
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume, comprising 24 essays, aims to contribute to a developing appreciation of the capacity of rhetoric to reinforce affiliation or disaffiliation to groups. To this end, the essays span a variety of ancient literary genres (i.e. oratory, historical and technical prose, drama and poetry) and themes (i.e. audience-speaker, laughter, emotions, language, gender, identity, and religion).

Part I: Authors, Speakers and Audience

The Rhetoric of (Dis)Unity in the Attic Orators

Michael J. Edwards

When I read the call for papers for the conference for which this Chapter was originally prepared, I did not think that I had much to say about the suggested category of “paratextual and non-textual ways of signifying” unity and disunity, through the visual arts, architecture and epigraphy, though I suppose that the images on the Parthenon frieze, once a symbol of Athens’ power and unity, have in recent times become the source of some disunity between Greece and the United Kingdom; and the integrity or otherwise of that architectural masterpiece is also symbolic of times of unity and disunity. Likewise, Simonides’ epigram for the fallen at Marathon, or even more famously the one for the Spartans at Thermopylae, might be seen as emblems of Greek unity, or perhaps rather of disunity — ironically, “Medes” encompasses “Persians” (a forced unity after the Persians defeated the Medes in the sixth century), whereas the terms “Spartans” and “Athenians” hint at other stories of Greek disunity:

τοιγαροῦν ἐπὶ τοῖς ἠρίοις μαρτύρια ἔστιν ἰδεῖν τῆς ἀρετῆς αὐτῶν ἀναγεγραμμένα ἀληθῆ πρὸς ἅπαντας τοὺς Ἕλληνας, ἐκείνοις μέν·

ὦ ξεῖν’ ἄγγειλον Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε

κείμεθα τοῖς κείνων πειθόμενοι νομίμοις,

τοῖς δ’ ὑμετέροις προγόνοις·

Ἑλλήνων προμαχοῦντες Ἀθηναῖοι Μαραθῶνι

χρυσοφόρων Μήδων ἐστόρεσαν δύναμιν.

For this reason, you can see written above their graves true testimonies of their courage for all the Greeks. For the Spartans:

O stranger, announce to the Spartans that here

We lie, obedient to their laws.

And for our ancestors:

Fighting for the Greeks, the Athenians at Marathon

Laid low the might of the gold-clad Medes. (Lycurgus 1, Against Leocrates 109 = Simonides, Epigrams XXIIb, XXI; trans. Edwards)

Nor did I feel qualified to speak in one of the other areas in the call, “to identify an “anthropological common core” of a “cultural rhetoric” of unity and disunity”, though these epigrams on the war dead naturally make me, as an Englishman, think of the Cenotaph in London, with its rather briefer epigram “The Glorious Dead”. But what I thought I could do would be to speak — and now write — on seven topics listed in the call for papers: language, emotions, performance, memory, humour,¹ gender-based approaches and religion, whilst paying attention to “narrative, argumentation, ēthopoiia and other techniques that reinforce affiliation/disaffiliation to groups”; and I will illustrate these themes with examples drawn from the corpus of the Attic orators.

My first topic, then, is language, and here I will concentrate on accent. Unity and disunity caused by regional accents are doubtless a universal phenomenon, perhaps most evident in the UK at football matches. In games between Chelsea and Liverpool, Liverpool supporters will in unison taunt Chelsea fans with the accusation that they are cockneys (i.e. from London) who make their living as homosexual prostitutes (“rent-boys”), and Chelsea supporters will then retaliate in unison by taunting Liverpool supporters over their Scouse (i.e. Liverpudlian) accent with the chant “why don’t you speak *** English”. It must have been a frightening prospect for the young Mytilenean, usually thought to have been named Euxitheus and accused in about 420 B.C. of murdering the Athenian Herodes, to defend himself before an ordinary court in Athens in the wake of the disunity caused by the Mytilenean revolt; and the situation can only have been exacerbated by the fact that people from Lesbos spoke in the Aeolic dialect. Not that you would get this from the speech that survives as Antiphon 5, which opens with the topos of inexperience, arranged chiastically in an exemplary antithetical and balanced antithesis:

ἐβουλόμην μὲν, ὦ ἄνδρες, τὴν δύναμιν τοῦ λέγειν καὶ τὴν ἐμπειρίαν τῶν πραγμάτων ἐξ ἴσου μοι καθεστάναι τῇ τε συμφορᾷ καὶ τοῖς κακοῖς τοῖς γεγενημένοις· νῦν δὲ τοῦ μὲν πεπείραμαι πέρᾳ τοῦ προσήκοντος, τοῦ δὲ ἐνδεής εἰμι μᾶλλον τοῦ συμφέροντος.

I wish I had the ability to speak and the experience in practical matters equal to my recent troubles and misfortunes, but my experience of the latter goes beyond what is proper, while my deficiency in the former leaves me at a disadvantage. (Antiphon 5, On the Murder of Herodes 1; trans. Gagarin)²

The subsequent topoi which appear in sections 14 and 87–89 reappear in Antiphon 6.2–4, and one would hardly know from the written record that the young Mytilenean speaker of speech 5 was any different in origin from the mature Athenian speaker of speech 6. This is a factor that should be taken into account in discussions of how similar or otherwise our texts are to what was actually said in court. But the point here is that if the surviving text bears any resemblance at all to what Antiphon composed for his client, and not simply what he (or somebody else) revised for publication, he was clearly doing his level best, against the odds, to make Euxitheus appear no different from other, Athenian defendants, notwithstanding the fact that his first argument consists in demonstrating how Euxitheus was being tried in the wrong court by the wrong procedure, “something no one in this land has ever experienced before” (ὃ οὐδεὶς πώποτ’ ἔπαθε τῶν ἐν τῇ γῇ ταύτῃ, 9) — in other words, without explicitly saying as much, that his client’s nationality was being used by the opponents to unite the judges against him.

It is pure coincidence that the speaker of my second example was also called Euxitheus. I note that this was a fairly common name in Athens and Greece in general, though it is not listed by Fraser and Matthews in the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names for Lesbos, presumably because the identity of the speaker of Antiphon 5 is not secure; and I also note that the name of the speaker of Demosthenes 57 is preserved not in the text, but in a later hypothesis by Libanius. Regardless of that, the Demosthenic Euxitheus is appealing against the decision of his deme to strike him off its register of members. One of the grounds for this decision, he alleges, is that his father, who had been captured in war and sold as a slave, had acquired a foreign accent:

διαβεβλήκασι γάρ μου τὸν πατέρα, ὡς ἐξένιζεν· καὶ ὅτι μὲν ἁλοὺς ὑπὸ τῶν πολεμίων ὑπὸ τὸν Δεκελεικὸν πόλεμον καὶ πραθεὶς εἰς Λευκάδα, Κλεάνδρῳ περιτυχὼν τῷ ὑποκριτῇ πρὸς τοὺς οἰκείους ἐσώθη δεῦρο πολλοστῷ χρόνῳ, παραλελοίπασιν, ὥσπερ δὲ δέον ἡμᾶς δι’ ἐκεί-νας τὰς ἀτυχίας ἀπολέσθαι, τὸ ξενίζειν αὐτοῦ κατηγορήκασιν.

You see, they slander my father, when they say he spoke like a foreigner. They leave out the fact that he was captured by the enemy during the Decelean War and sold into slavery, then taken to Leucas, where he fell in with Cleandrus the actor, and after a long interval returned safely to his family; so they accused him of speaking with an accent, as though we should be ruined on account of his bad luck. (Demosthenes 57, Against Eubulides 18; trans. Bers)

In her Ph.D. thesis on this speech, Kerry Phelan writes, “Presumably, Thoucritos’ accent was affected by the western dialect spoken in Leucas”, which was that of its mother-city Corinth, and also that “it would be hard to believe that a non-Athenian accent alone would serve as evidence against those who were not citizens. Both the Old Oligarch and Plato attest to the fact that there was a vast mixture of accents and dialects in the city ([Xen.] Ath. Pol. 2.8; Pl. Lysis, 223a, Prt. 341c)”. Here is the Old Oligarch passage:

ἔπειτα φωνὴν πᾶσαν ἀκούοντες ἐξελέξαντο τοῦτο μὲν ἐκ τῆς, τοῦτο δὲ ἐκ τῆς· καὶ οἱ μὲν Ἕλληνες ἰδίᾳ μᾶλλον καὶ φωνῇ καὶ διαίτῃ καὶ σχήματι χρῶνται, Ἀθηναῖοι δὲ κεκραμένῃ ἐξ ἁπάντων τῶν Ἑλλήνων καὶ βαρβάρων.

Further, hearing every kind of dialect, they have taken something from each; the Greeks rather tend to use their own dialect, way of life, and type of dress, ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Unity and Division in Ancient Literature: Current Perspectives and Further Research
• Part I: Authors, Speakers and Audience
• Part II: Emotions
• Part III: Drama and Poetry
• Part IV: Historical and Technical Prose
• Part V: Gender and the Construction of Identity
• Part VI: Religious Discourse
• General Index
• Index Locorum