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THE GREEK ORATORS

THE
GREEK ORATORS

BY
J. F. DOBSON, M. A.
TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE,
PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY
OF BRISTOL

METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

First Published in 1919

PREFACE

The object of this book is to provide a reasonably short account of the works of the Orators and to give a general idea of the style of each. It seemed to me at the outset that this object could be best attained, not by applying methods of scientific analysis, but by giving numerous quotations from the speeches to emphasise the points which I wished to bring out. I have therefore avoided as far as possible the technicalities of criticism, and illustrated my remarks by translations of characteristic passages, hoping thus to make my work easily accessible not only to classical students, but also to others who, while generally interested in the Classics, have not the time or the capacity to study them in the original.

I have no idea of superseding the standard works on the subject, such as Jebb’s Attic Orators and Blass’ Attische Beredsamkeit, which deal with the subject more fully and from a somewhat different point of view. No student of the Orators can afford to neglect the works of these scholars, but though I have frequently consulted them, I have by no means considered myself bound by their opinions; in fact, my chief claim to consideration is that my own judgments are entirely independent of authority, and are based directly upon a first-hand study of the extant writings of the Orators.

The chief work, in addition to the two above mentioned, to which I am indebted is Croiset’s Histoire de la Littérature Grecque.

I have to thank Balliol College and the Clarendon Press for permission to print extracts from Jowett’s Plato.

J. F. DOBSON

Bristol, July 1919

CONTENTS

THE GREEK ORATORS

CHAPTER I
THE BEGINNINGS OF ORATORY

§ 1

Oratory is one of the earliest necessities of society; as soon as men were organised on terms of equality for corporate action, there must have been occasions when opinions might differ as to the best course to be pursued, and, if there were no inspired king whose unquestioned authority could impose his will, the majority must decide whether to flee or to fight, to kill or to keep alive. Thus different plans must be discussed, and, in cases where opinion was evenly balanced, that side would prevail which could state its views most convincingly; and so the need for deliberative oratory arose.

With the Greeks oratory was instinctive; in the earliest semi-historical records that we possess, eloquence is found to be a gift prized not less highly than valour in battle; the kings and princes are not only ‘renowned for their power,’ but are ‘leaders of the people by their counsels, ... wise and eloquent in their instructions’; strength and courage are the property of all, but the real leaders must be the counsellors, βουλήφοροι ἄνδρες. Nestor, who is almost past the age for fighting, is honoured among the first for his eloquence, and whereas Achilles shares with many other warriors the glories of the Iliad, Odysseus, fertile in counsel, is the chief subject of an entire poem. The speech of Phœnix in the ninth book of the Iliad shows us the ideals which were aimed at in the education of a prince. He tells how he trained the young Achilles to be a ‘speaker of words and a doer of deeds’;[1] and Achilles, as we know him, well justified this training. The leading characters in the Homeric poems are already fluent orators, able and ready to debate intelligently on any concrete subject, and, moreover, to seek guidance from general principles. Nestor makes frequent appeals to historical precedent; Phœnix introduces allegorical illustration;[2] many speakers refer to the sanctity of law and custom; though the particular case is foremost in the mind, generalisations of various kinds are by no means infrequent. The Homeric counsellor can urge his own arguments and rebut those of his opponent with a natural facility of speech and readiness of invective which even a polished wielder of personalities like Demosthenes might envy.

From the spontaneous outpourings of Achilles and his peers to the studied artifice of Lysias and Demosthenes is a long journey through unknown country, and it is obvious that no definite course of development can be traced; but a reference to Homer is of twofold importance. In the first place, it may indicate that Greek oratory was obviously of native growth, since the germs of it are to be found in the earliest annals; secondly, Homer was studied with such devout reverence not only by the Athenian orators themselves but by their immediate literary predecessors, the cosmopolitan Sophists and the rhetoricians of Sicily, that his influence may have been greater than would at first sight seem probable.

§ 2

The records of eloquence may be studied from various points of view, which may be roughly classified under the headings ‘literary’ and ‘practical,’ though it is not always easy to keep the elements distinct. A stylistic study of the writings of the Athenian orators must find a place in any systematic work on the development of Attic prose, but in a work like the present, which professes to deal with orators only, such a study cannot be carried out with any attempt at completeness; thus, while it may be possible to discuss the influence of Thucydides or Plato on Demosthenes, there will be no room to consider how far the historian himself may have been influenced directly by Antiphon, or the philosopher by Gorgias, though a cursory indication may be given that such influences were at work. When, however, we regard rhetoric not for its literary value but as a practical art, our task becomes more feasible; in literature there are many eddies and cross-currents, but in oratory, especially of the forensic type, there is more uniformity of flow. Antiphon and Demosthenes had, to a great extent, similar ground to traverse, similar obstacles to overcome or circumvent; and a study of their different methods of approaching like problems may give some reasonable and interesting results which will be a contribution to the history of the ‘Art of Persuasion.’ Even here we shall find difficulties, for one who is reckoned among the greatest orators, Isocrates, is known not to have been practical at all in the sense in which Demosthenes was; his so-called speeches were never meant to be delivered, and depended for their efficacy far more on their literary style than on their practical characteristics. There is, perhaps, only one great factor which is common to all orators alike; they all give us, both directly and indirectly, invaluable materials for the study of Athenian history, information with regard both to public and private life and national character. While the speeches before the assembly and in public causes increase our historical knowledge in the wider sense, the private speeches, often dealing with matters of the utmost triviality, provide a miscellaneous store of information on domestic matters only comparable to that more recently recovered from the papyri of Egypt.

§ 3

It would seem that constitutional liberty and a strong civic feeling are indispensable as a basis for the growth of oratory. Such a statement must be made with caution, as it leaves out of account a thousand influences which may have been operative; but we have no records of oratory at Athens before the establishment of the democracy, and after the limitation of Athenian influence due to the spread of Hellenism under Alexander, oratory very rapidly declined.

The imagination of Herodotus gives us, in the debates of the Persian court, some idea of what he conceived the oratory of an earlier age to be; but as he transferred the ideas of his own country to another, without any serious attempt at realism, such speeches are of little value to us. Thucydides again inserted speeches freely into his history, but these, he candidly admits, are not authentic records but imaginary reconstructions. Nevertheless, it is chiefly on Thucydides that we must draw for information about the eloquence of the early statesmen of the democracy.

Themistocles has left behind him some reputation as a speaker. Herodotus indicates how he harangued the Greeks before the battle of Salamis;[3] Thucydides commends him for ability in explaining his policy,[4] and the author of the pseudo-Lysian Epitaphios names him as ‘equally capable in speech, decision, and action.’[5] Beyond these meagre notices, and a reference to his eloquence in Cicero,[6] we have nothing earlier than Plutarch,[7] who tells us that from early youth he took an interest in the practice of speech-making, and that he studied under a Sophist, Mnesiphilus, who apparently taught him something of the science of statesmanship. Plutarch records his answer to Eurybiadas, who had taunted him in the council of allies with being a man without a city—since Athens was evacuated—and therefore not entitled to the right of speech:

‘We, villain, have left our houses and our walls, disdaining to be slaves for the sake of these lifeless things; but still we have a city—the greatest of Greek cities—in our fleet of 200 triremes, which now are ready to help you if you care to be saved by their aid; but if you go away and betray us a second time, the Greek world shall forthwith learn that the Athenians possess a free city and a country no worse than the one they have lost.’[8]

Another fragment is preserved by Plutarch, an address to Xerxes in quite a different vein, containing an elaborate metaphor which may have been thought suited to the Oriental mind:

‘The speech of man is like to a piece of cunning embroidery, for both when unrolled display their patterns, but when folded up conceal them.’[9]

Many others of his sayings are chronicled; they are more or less apocryphal, as his retort to the man of Seriphos, who hinted that Themistocles owed his greatness to the fact that his city was great. ‘You, Themistocles, would never have been famous if you had been a Seriphian’—‘Nor would you, if you had been an Athenian.’[10] His interpretation of the oracle, explaining ‘wooden walls’ as ships, shows the man ready at need like Odysseus; and the impression that we form of him from the very slight indications which we possess, is of a man always clear and plausible in his statements, never at a loss for an explanation, and perhaps rather a good debater than an orator.

Of Pericles, who represents the following generation, we have a clearer picture. We know more about his private life and the associates who influenced his opinions. His earliest instructors were the musicians Damon and Pythoclides, of whom the former remained his intimate friend through life,[11] and, if we believe Plutarch, was capable of giving him advice even on questions of statesmanship.[12] The friendship of Anaxagoras was doubtless a powerful influence, as Plato affirms in a well-known passage of the Phaedrus:[13]

‘All the arts require discussion and high speculation about the truths of nature; hence come loftiness of thought and completeness of execution. And this, as I conceive, was the quality which, in addition to his natural gifts, Pericles acquired from his intercourse with Anaxagoras.... He was thus imbued with the higher philosophy ... and applied what suited his purpose to the art of speaking.’

He is said also to have been acquainted with Zeno of Elea, an accomplished dialectician, and with the great Sophist Protagoras.

Plutarch represents him as amusing himself by discussing with Protagoras a question which is the theme of one of Antiphon’s tetralogies—a man in a gymnasium accidentally kills another with a javelin: who is to blame?[14] In Xenophon’s Memorabilia[15] we find him engaged in sophistical discussion with his young nephew Alcibiades, who, fresh from the rhetorical schools, was apparently his superior in hair-splitting argument.

Thucydides puts three speeches into the mouth of Pericles; though the language is that of the historian, some of the thoughts may be those of the statesman. We seem to recognise his high intelligence, developed by philosophical training, and the loftiness and effectiveness of which Plato speaks.[16]

The comic poet Eupolis gives us a picture from a different point of view:

A. ‘Whenever at Council he rose in his place

That powerful speaker—so hot was the pace—

Could give other runners three yards in the race.’

B. ‘His speed I admit; in addition to that

A mysterious spell on his lips ever sate:

He charmed; and alone of the orators he

Left something behind, like the sting of a bee.’[17]

We know from Thucydides the extent of his influence over the people. He was no demagogue in the vulgar sense; they knew him to be sincere and incorruptible. He was never deterred by the unpopularity of his policy; he would lead the people rather than submit to be led by them; he could abase their spirits when they were unduly elated, or raise them to confidence when unseasonably disheartened.[18] At the height of his career his eloquence was the more effective because it was rarely displayed; minor matters in the assembly were transacted by his subordinates; when Pericles himself arose to speak it was a signal that a matter of national importance was to be debated, and his appearance roused a confident expectation that the treatment would be worthy of the subject.[19] The epithet ‘Olympian,’ applied to him originally in sarcasm, was felt to be more truly applicable than its originator, perhaps, intended. His eloquence was a noble exposition of the fine intelligence and high character which first claimed a hearing.

Though we have no verbal record of his speeches, a few of his phrases stuck in the memory of chroniclers. Aegina was to him ‘the eye-sore of the Piraeus’—it spoiled the view from the Athenian harbour.[20] The Samians, who submitted very reluctantly to the blessings of Athenian civilization, are like ‘babies that cry when you give them their pap, but take it all the same’;[21] and Boeotia, disintegrated by civil war, is like an oak split by oaken wedges.[22] His finest simile—not, perhaps, original, since Herodotus attributes a similar phrase to Gelon, when Greece refused his invaluable assistance—occurred, according to Aristotle, in a funeral speech:

‘The city has lost its Youth; it is as though the year had lost its Spring.’[23]

§ 4

The eloquence of these earlier statesmen, though significant of the tendency of the Attic genius, is an isolated phenomenon. It has no bearing on the development of Athenian oratory. We have now to consider two direct influences, that of the Sophists and that of the early rhetoricians of Sicily.

In the middle of the fifth century B.C.,—when in turn the unrestricted imagination of the Ionian philosophers had failed to explain the riddle of existence on physical grounds, the metaphysical Parmenides had denied the possibility of accurate knowledge, and Zeno, the dialectician of Elea, had reduced himself to dumbness by the conclusion that not only knowledge is impossible but even grammatical predication is unjustifiable, for you cannot say that one thing is another, or like things unlike,—Philosophy fell somewhat into disrepute. A spirit of scepticism spread over the Greek world, and the greatest thinkers, foiled In their attempts to discover the higher truths, turned their attention to the practical side of education. In various cities of Greater Greece there arose men of high intellectual attainment, conveniently classed together under the title of Sophists (educators), who, neglecting abstract questions, undertook to prepare men for the higher walks of civic life by instruction of various kinds. The greatest, of these, Protagoras of Abdera, expressed his contempt for philosophy in the well-known dictum, ‘Man is the measure of all things—of what is, that it is; and of what is not, that it is not.’ He therefore devoted himself to the study of literature, and, in particular, of Homer. He attained great popularity; in the course of long travels throughout the Greek world, he made several visits to Athens, where he knew Pericles. Plato, in the dialogue named after him, gives us some idea of the fascination which his personality exercised over the young men of Athens, and, indeed, ‘Sophistry’ as a whole had a tremendous popularity. All young men of good family and position, who aspired to political life, flocked to hear the lectures of the Sophists. Alcibiades, Critias, and others undoubtedly owed to this movement much of their political ability.

The morality of sophistry has been much discussed. The comic poets represent it as the chief instrument for the destruction of the ancient ideals of conduct. Plato, though he recognized its humanistic value and spoke with appreciation of several individual teachers, blamed their teaching as a whole. Certainly the claim of Protagoras, that he could make the worse cause appear the better, laid him particularly open to attack. Protagoras made some elementary studies in grammar, presumably as a basis for logic. His method of teaching was apparently by example. In the dialogue of Plato he gives a demonstration of how a given subject should be discussed: his discourse consists first of a ‘myth,’ then a continuous speech, finally a criticism on a poetical quotation. We may suppose that this is a reasonable imitation of his methods. His pupils committed to memory such speeches, or summaries of them, on various subjects, and were thus moderately well equipped for purposes of general debate.

Prodicus of Ceos, who seems to have been many years younger than Protagoras,[24] was more concerned with moral philosophy than with dialectical exercises. He paid the greatest attention in all his teaching to ὀρθοέπεια, the correct use of words, i.e. the distinction of meaning between words which in the popular language have come to be treated as synonymous.[25] This precision may have been carried to the point of pedantry, but as the correct use of terms is an important element in prose style, his studies deserve consideration.

Hippias of Elis is of less importance. He was ready to discourse on any subject under the sun, and could teach his pupils a similar glibness; abundance of words was made to conceal a lack of ideas.

§ 5

Cicero has preserved, from Aristotle, a statement that forensic rhetoric came to its birth at Syracuse, when, after the expulsion of the tyrants in 465 B.C., many families, whose property had been confiscated by them, tried to re-establish their claims.[26] Certainly Corax, the founder of rhetoric, was teaching about the year 466 B.C., and composed a τέχνη, or handbook of rhetorical principles.[27] He was followed by his pupil Tisias, who also wrote a treatise which Aristotle pronounced to be better than his master’s, and was in turn soon superseded by a better one.[28] Both Corax and Tisias attached great importance to εἰκός (probability) as a means of convincing a jury. A sample of the use of this argument from the work of Corax is the case of the man charged with assault, who denies the charge and says, ‘It is obvious to you that I am weak in body, while he is strong; it is therefore inherently improbable that I should have dared to attack him.’ The argument can of course be turned the other way by the prosecutor—‘the defendant is weak in body, and thought that on that account no one would suspect him of violence.’ We shall find that this argument from εἰκότα is very characteristic of the orator Antiphon; it occurs in his court speeches as well as in his tetralogies, which are model exercises. It seems, indeed, that he almost preferred this kind of argument to actual proof, even when evidence was available.[29] Tisias improved on the theme of Corax; supposing that a feeble but brave man has attacked a strong one who is a coward, he suggests that both should tell lies in court. The coward will not like to admit his cowardice, and will say that he was attacked by more than one man. The culprit will prove this to be a lie, and will then fall back on the argument of Corax, ‘I am weak and he is strong; I could not have assaulted or robbed him,’—and so on.[30]

An anecdote of these two rhetoricians further indicates the slipperiness of the ground on which they walked.[31] Tisias took lessons from Corax on condition that he should pay the fee only if he won his first case in court. After some lapse of time Corax grew impatient for his money, and finally brought an action—the first case, as it happened, on which Tisias was ever engaged. Corax asserted, ‘If I win the case, I get my money by the verdict; if I lose it, I claim payment by our contract.’ ‘No,’ said Tisias, ‘if I win, I don’t pay, and if I lose I don’t pay.’ The court dismissed the case with the remark, ‘A bad crow lays bad eggs’;[32] and this was obviously to the advantage of the younger man, who had nine points of the law on his side.

Though no writings of either are preserved, we can form an idea of their methods. They were wholly immoral or non-moral, and perversely sophistical. The plausible was preferred to the true, and the one object was to win the case. Their method of teaching was, according to Aristotle, ‘quick but unscientific,’[33] and consisted of making the pupil learn by heart a large number of ‘commonplace’ topics and standard arguments suitable to all kinds of legal processes. They do not appear to have paid any attention to style on the literary side.

§ 6

Gorgias of Leontini, a contemporary of Protagoras, started out, like the Sophist, from the position that nothing can be known, and the pursuit of philosophy is a ploughing of the sand. He is said to have been a pupil of Tisias, and occupies a place between the early rhetoricians and the Sophists usually so-called. Like the former, he studied and taught oratory, but whereas they were only concerned with the struggle for mastery in debate, he entertained, like Protagoras, a broad view of education, and, while continuing to regard rhetoric as the art of persuasion,[34] attached more attention to the artistic side than any other educator had done. He became the first conscious artist in prose style.

Like the other Sophists he travelled from town to town giving displays of his art, and gained riches which he spent freely.[35] In 427 B.C. he came to Athens as an ambassador from his native city,[36] and produced a remarkable impression on his hearers, not only the multitude before whom he spoke, but the highly educated class who could appreciate his technique. Thucydides owed something to him, and the poet Antiphon showed traces of his influence.[37] We hear of his sojourn at Larissa, where the Thessalians, in admiration, coined from his name the word which Philostratus uses to express his exuberant style.[38]

His first work is said to have been a sceptical treatise on Nature, or the Non-existent.[39] This was followed by a certain number of speeches, the most famous of which was the Olympiac, in which, like Isocrates at a later date, he urged on the Greeks the necessity of union. The Funeral Oration, to which we shall recur, is supposed to have been delivered at Athens, but this can hardly have been the case, as such speeches were regularly delivered by prominent Athenian statesmen, and there would be no occasion for calling in a foreigner. A Pythian speech and various Encomia are recorded; some on mythical characters, which may be regarded as mere exercises, some on real people, as the Eleans.[40] He seems not to have written speeches for the law-courts; his tendency, as in his personal habits, so in his speech, was towards display, and so he originated the style of oratory known as epideictic, which Isocrates in a subsequent age was destined to bring to perfection. Though an Ionian by birth, he instinctively recognized the great possibilities of the Attic dialect, and chose it as his medium of expression; it was not, however, the Attic of everyday life, but a language enriched by the exuberance of a poetical imagination. We possess of his actual work only one noteworthy extract from the Funeral Speech; but from this, joined to a few isolated criticisms and phrases preserved by commentators, as well as from the language ascribed by Plato to his imitator Agathon,[41] we can form some idea of his pompous exaggerations.

He was much addicted to the substitution of rare expressions—γλῶτται, as the Greek critics called them—for the ordinary forms of speech. His language abounded in archaic and poetical words, striking metaphors and unusual compounds. He frequently employed neuter adjectives and participles in preference to the corresponding abstract nouns; he liked to use a verbal noun accompanied by an auxiliary in places where a simple verb would be naturally employed. Finally, though he could not aspire to composition in elaborate periods like Isocrates or Demosthenes, he developed the use of antithesis, word answering to word and clause to clause, pointing his antithetical style not only by the frequent use of μὲν and δέ, but by the use of assonance at the ends of clauses, corresponding forms of verbs in similar positions, and by some attention to rhythm and equality of syllabic value in contrasted clauses.

His chief fault was excess; he was a pioneer in expression, and did very valuable work; but he lacked a sense of proportion. The result is that the page of his genuine work which we possess reads like a parody of style, as every characteristic is carried to extreme. But the teacher must indulge in exaggeration, or the pupil will not grasp his points, and the work of Gorgias has a considerable value. It was the first attempt to form a style, and his followers learned partly by imitation, partly by avoiding the faults which were too prominent. The very fact that the fragment preserved is possibly not in his best style makes it the easier to observe his influence on his successors—Antiphon, Thucydides, and many subsequent writers of artistic prose.

In addition to the speeches already mentioned we possess two encomia on Helen and Palamedes, which are attributed to him. Their authenticity is very doubtful, but Blass, who discussed the question very thoroughly in his Attic Orators without coming to a conviction, has since decided in favour of their genuineness.[42] This is entirely a matter of personal opinion; but, even if not genuine, they are probably able imitations of the Gorgian style and method.

The fragment from the Epitaphios can hardly be translated in a way that will give a proper idea of its affectations, but as some notion of its most striking faults may be formed from an English version, some extracts are added. In the Greek in some places there seems to be very little sense, and what there is has been entirely subordinated to the sound:

‘What quality was there absent in these men which ought in men to be present? And what was there present that should not be present? May I have the power to speak as I would, and the will to speak as I should, avoiding the jealousy of gods and escaping the envy of men. For these were divine in their valour, though human in their mortality; often preferring mild equity to stern justice, and often the uprightness of reasoning to the strictness of the laws, considering that the most divine and universal law is this—to speak, to omit, and to do the proper thing at the proper time. Two duties above all they practised, strength of mind and strength of body; the one in deliberation, the other in execution; tenders of those who by injustice were unfortunate, punishers of those who by injustice were fortunate.... And accordingly, though they have died, our yearning died not with them, but immortal over these bodies not immortal it lives when they live no more.’

Contrast and parallelism are rampant throughout this incredible piece of bombast, which in addition to the curious jingles produced by such words as γνώμην καὶ ῥώμην; δυστυχούντων, εὐτυχούντων, shows a poetical vocabulary in such phrases as ἔμφυτος Ἄρης, ‘the Mars that is born in them,’ ἐνόπλιος ἔρις, ‘embattled strife,’ and φιλόκαλος εἰρήνη, ‘peace that loves the arts.’ Antiphon and Thucydides suffered severely from the contagion of this style, and a conscious imitator, the author of the pseudo-Lysian Epitaphios, has reproduced its florid monotony.

CHAPTER II
ANTIPHON

§ 1

Antiphon is said to have been almost contemporary with Gorgias, but a little younger.[43] He was born about 480 B.C. He took no part in public life, perhaps disdaining to serve the democracy owing to his strong aristocratic prejudices. He wrote many speeches for others, but himself never spoke in the assembly and very rarely in the public courts. Most of his speeches were written for private individuals, but we have a record on one ‘about the tribute of Samothrace,’ apparently composed on behalf of that community when appealing against their assessment. Having lived in comparative obscurity all his life, he stepped suddenly into brilliant light in 411 B.C., the year of the revolution of the Four Hundred. According to Thucydides his was the brain which had planned all the details of this anti-democratic conspiracy. The historian pays a striking tribute to his ability as an organiser:

‘It was Pisander who proposed this motion and in general took the most active steps for the subversion of the democracy; but the one who contrived the whole plot and the details of its working and who had given his attention to it longest was Antiphon, a man who must be placed in the first rank for his character, his ingenuity, and his powers of expression. He never put himself forward in the assembly, nor appeared, from choice, at any trial in the courts, but lay under the people’s suspicion owing to a reputation for cleverness. He was, however, more capable than any other man of giving assistance to anybody who consulted him with regard to a case either in the courts or the assembly. Eventually, when the Four Hundred suffered reverse and were being harshly treated by the democracy, he was himself brought to trial, for participation in the revolution, and is known to have made the finest defence ever on record as having been delivered by a man on trial for his life.’[44]

During the short rule of the Four Hundred he seems to have been one of the leaders of the extreme party, as opposed to the followers of Theramenes, who advocated measures of conciliation. He went, with Phrynichus and eight other envoys, to negotiate peace with Sparta in the hope of thus securing the oligarchical government. Shortly after the failure of this embassy came the murder of Phrynichus and the fall of the Four Hundred, and the democracy was ready for revenge. Most of the ringleaders fled to Deceleia; Antiphon and Archeptolemus remained, were prosecuted for treason to the people, condemned and executed. Their property was confiscated, their houses razed to the ground, their descendants disfranchised for all time, and their bodies refused burial in the soil of Athens or any of her allies.

On the occasion of his trial the orator, who had spent the best years of his life in pleading by the lips of others in causes which did not interest him, justified his renown and far surpassed all expectation, delivering what was, in Thucydides’ opinion, the finest speech of its kind ever heard up to that time. Aristotle preserves an anecdote telling how the poet Agathon congratulated the condemned man on his brilliant effort, and Antiphon replied that ‘he would rather have satisfied one man of taste than any number of common people’—οἱ τυγχάνοντες, a fine aristocratic term for great Athenian people.[45]

§ 2

At the time when Antiphon composed his speeches, Attic prose had not settled down into any fixed forms. The first of the orators was therefore an explorer in language; he was not hampered by traditions, and this freedom was an advantage; but on the other hand, the insufficiency of models threw him back entirely on his own resources.

Of his predecessors in prose-writing, the early historians were of no account as stylists. Herodotus wrote in a foreign dialect and a discursive colloquial manner which was unsuited to the needs of oratory; Gorgias, indeed, used the Attic dialect, but had hindered the growth of prose by a too copious use of florid poetical expression. Antiphon, therefore, had little to guide him, and we should expect to find in his work the imperfections which are natural in the experimental stage of any art.

So few of his works remain that we cannot trace any development in his style; it is only possible to guess at certain influences which may have helped to form it.

He must have been familiar with the methods of the best speakers in the assembly and the law-courts of the Periclean age; without great experience of procedure in both he could not have hoped for any success as a speech-writer. He must have been versed in the theories of the great Sophists, such as Protagoras and, more particularly, Gorgias; and the model discourses which they and others composed for their pupils’ instruction were, no doubt, accessible to him. The general influence of Sophistry is, however, to be traced more in the nature of his arguments than in his style.[46]

§ 3

As regards vocabulary, we are struck at once by the fact that Antiphon uses many words which, apart from their occurrence in these speeches, would be classed as rare or poetical; words, that is, which a maturer prose-style was inclined to reject. This was partly the result of circumstances; as has been noted, there was no canon of style and vocabulary, and the influence of Gorgias had been rather to confuse than to distinguish the dictions of prose and poetry, while the great importance attached to poetry in the sophistical education of the time increased the difficulties for any experimental writer who was unwilling to resort to the colloquial language. In many cases, however, we may give Antiphon credit for intention in the deliberate use of poetical words: the ‘austere’ style ‘is wont to expand itself,’ says Dionysius, ‘by means of big spacious words’;[47] and a store of such words is to be found in the poets, notably Aeschylus.[48]

Antiphon is not singular among prose writers in introducing poetical words; Plato, the greatest master of Attic prose, is in some cases more poetical than the poets themselves, though his genius is sufficient to obviate any sense of harshness or incongruity. But to an orator such harshness might on occasion be a positive advantage for producing a particular effect; an unusual word must, at the worst, attract attention; at the best it lends dignity to an otherwise pedestrian sentence. Dionysius classed Antiphon and Aeschylus together as masters of the ‘austere’ style, and some of the orator’s words and phrases, quite apart from his treatment of his subjects, have a certain touch of Aeschylean majesty.

Besides poetical words—words which may, as we see, have been used intentionally, in preference to their ordinary equivalents in everyday speech—he employs, for the same reasons, a certain number of unusual words and forms not necessarily poetical. Every conscious stylist makes experiments: some of his innovations may become current coin; others may never pass into general circulation, but remain unused until, perhaps, after many generations an archæologist discovers and uses the hoard.[49] A few familiar words occur in unusual forms which are generally regarded as un-Attic; unless they are to be removed by emendation, we must suppose that they were used intentionally to give an archaic tone.[50]

Another noticeable characteristic of Antiphon’s language is the frequent employment of circumlocutions both for verbs and nouns; a neuter participle or adjective in combination with the definite article does duty as a substantive, while a verbal noun joined to an auxiliary takes the place of a verb. Thus, by an artifice which becomes very common in later writers, ‘the beautiful’ is used as a synonym for the abstract noun ‘beauty,’ and to ‘be judges of the truth’ is substituted for ‘judge the truth.’ These artificialities are often to be noticed in Thucydides, especially in the speeches, and are probably derived from Gorgias, who seems to have instituted the fashion.[51]

§ 4

Aristotle and subsequent critics distinguish, in prose, the running style (εἰρομένη λέξις) and the periodic (περιοδική). The characteristic of the former is that a sentence consists of a succession of clauses loosely strung together (εἴρω), like a row of beads; generally by τε, δέ and other copulae; the sentence begins and ends with no definite plan, and may be of any length. In the word period (circuit) the metaphor is rather that of a hoop; the sentence does not stretch out indefinitely in a straight line, but after a certain time bends back on itself so that the end is joined to the beginning. It must, according to Aristotle,[52] be of limited length, not longer than can be taken in at a glance or uttered in one breath, and have a definitely marked beginning and end.[53]

Aristotle finds the loose, running style tedious, because it has no artistic limit of length, and never gets to an end until it has finished what it has to say. To us it seems to have this slight advantage, that it can always stop when it has said what it means, and has no temptation to plunge itself into antithesis or lose its way at the cross-roads of chiasmus before it arrives at its destination; for though, in the periodic style, the end of the sense should ideally coincide with the end of the period, there are in practice many instances where the sense is fully expressed and the sentence might end before the ‘circuit’ is artistically complete.

The baldest examples of the ‘strung together’ style must be sought in the fragments of the early historians; but Herodotus is sufficiently near to them to provide us with an object-lesson.

Take, for instance, the following:

‘When Ardys had reigned forty-nine years, Sadyattes his son succeeded him, and he reigned twelve years, and Alyattes succeeded Sadyattes. And he made war on Cyaxares, the descendant of Deioces, and the Medes, and drove the Cimmerians out of Asia and took Smyrna, a colony of Colophon, and attacked Clazomenae. Here he had not the success he desired, but met with grave disaster. And during his reign he did other noteworthy deeds, as follows. He fought with the Milesians ...’ etc., etc.[54]

Yet even Herodotus, the most obvious exponent of the loose style, shows a tendency towards the greater compression of periodic writing; this tendency is at times strongly marked, e.g. in the speeches of the Persian nobles in debate.[55] Here there is a continual movement towards the balance of clauses; it is very far from the harmonious structure of Isocrates, and is perhaps unconscious, but the elements of the periodic style are there.

The particular faculty of this latter style is that it can be more emphatic and precise than the other. It must be concentrated (κατεστραμμένη)[56] if the sentence is to be of moderate length; it tries, as Dionysius says, ‘to pack the thoughts close together, and bring them out compactly.’[57]

These qualities, concentration of thought and preciseness of expression, are essential for a pleader in the courts, and so it was not unnatural that the development of the periodic style should coincide at Athens with the rise of forensic oratory. Antiphon, the first practical pleader on scientific lines, is also the earliest of extant writers known to have been a careful student of periodic expression.

It must not be supposed that all his work consisted of periods carefully balanced: on the one hand, perfection could not be attained at the first onset; many of the sentences are crude; in some cases there is a weakness of emphasis due to imperfect mastery of the form; on the other hand, there are cases where the style is freer and more analogous to the simple fluency of the εἰρομένη λέξις. The plain fact is that the method of Herodotus is the most appropriate for telling a straightforward narrative from one point of view only; while the periodic style comes spontaneously into being for purposes of criticism, or where we contrast what is with what might have been; or of debate, where we put up alternatives side by side with the object of choosing between them.

The first object of history, to the mind of Herodotus, is to tell a story; and Herodotus mostly keeps this end in view. Thucydides in some parts of his narrative does the same, but whereas he has a greater tendency to consider each event not by itself but in relation to other circumstances, such as the motives for the action, its effects and influences, he is often periodic even in narrative. He is still more so in speeches. The object of a deliberative speech is not usually to tell a plain story but to produce a highly-coloured one; it mentions facts chiefly with the object of criticizing them and drawing an inference or a moral.

If this is true of the speeches in Thucydides, it must be still more applicable to those of a forensic orator. In Antiphon we find short passages in the simple narrative style—for instance, in the statement of facts in the Herodes case; but a short section of this nature is followed by criticism and argument expressed in the more artificial period. This is inevitable; there is no time to spend on long narratives.

Closely connected with the desire for a periodic style is the tendency to frequent use of verbal antithesis, an artistic figure which provides a happy means of completing the period and the sense. It is useful because the second part of the antithesis supplies the reader or hearer with something which he is already expecting. It is the application in practice of a familiar psychological law of association by contrary ideas. Such contrast is emphasized in Greek by the common use of the particles μέν and δέ, and is of unnecessarily frequent occurrence in Athenian writers. All readers of Thucydides will remember that author’s craving for the contrast between ‘word and deed.’ In judicial rhetoric this kind of opposition must inevitably occur very often. From the nature of things each speaker will want to insist on his own honesty and the dishonesty of his opponents; the truth which he is telling as opposed to their lies, and to contrast the appearances, which seem so black against him, with the transparent whiteness of his character as revealed by a true account of the case. But Antiphon, like the speakers in Thucydides, carries this use of antithesis too far, for a sentence which contains too many contrasted ideas is difficult to follow, and so loses force.

A fair example may be taken from the third speech of the second tetralogy:

‘I, who have done nothing wrong, but have suffered grievously and cruelly already, and now suffer still more cruelly not from the words but the acts of my adversary, throw myself upon your mercy, Gentlemen—you who are avengers of impiety but discriminators of piety—and implore you, in view of plain facts, not to be over-persuaded by a malicious precision of speech, and so consider the true explanation of the deed to be false; for his statement has been made with more plausibility than truth; mine will be made without guile, though at the same time without force.’

This outburst is part of a sentence in which the prosecutor expresses his indignation that the opponent whom he has accused of murder has had the audacity to defend himself at some length.

One more example—from the speech on the charge of poisoning—is almost ridiculous.

‘Those whose duty it was to play the part of avengers of the dead and my helpers, have played the part of murderers of the dead, and established themselves as my adversaries.’

§ 5

All speakers must consider the sound of their sentences as well as their grammatical structure, and among all careful writers we find that attention is paid to the balance of clauses. Some orators go further than this; they emphasize contrasts or parallels by the repetition of similar sounds and even show a preference for certain rhythms, it being a maxim of late rhetoricians that prose, though not strictly metrical in the same way as verse, should possess a characteristic rhythm of its own.

Some authors go so far as to change the natural order of words for the purpose of escaping hiatus of open vowels, which are necessarily awkward to pronounce in rapid speech. This is familiar from the pages of Demosthenes, and what the later writers did systematically, Antiphon, and even Thucydides, seem to have done at times instinctively.

As regards the balance of clauses, a good example may be found in the opening of the Herodes speech:

τοῦ μὲν πεπείραμαι πέρα τοῦ προσήκοντος,

του δ’ ἐνδεής εἰμι μᾶλλον τοῦ συμφέροντος,

where the correspondence of the two clauses in equal numbers of syllables is noticeable. The next sentence shows the same sort of correspondence, though not quite so precise; but here the structure is more elaborate, since we have two clauses, each of two parts, contrasted both in whole and part:

A. οὗ μὲν γάρ μ’ ἔδει κακοπαθεῖν τῷ σώματι μετὰ τῆς αἰτίας τῆς οὐ προσηκούσης,

α. ἐνταυθοῖ οὐδέν μ’ ὠφέλησεν ἡ ἐμπειρία,

B. οὗ δέ με δεῖ σωθῆναι μετὰ τῆς ἀληθείας εἰπόντα τὰ γενόμενα,

β. ἐν τούτῳ με βλάπτει ἡ τοῦ λέγειν ἀδυναμία.

Though there is no rhythmical correspondence here, and the syllabic lengths only correspond roughly, the ‘antistrophic’ structure is obvious.

Gorgias, if we may condemn him on the evidence of a single short fragment, seems to have affected rhyme—at any rate his collocation of γνώμην and ῥώμην cannot have been accidental—and the similar sound of the endings of the two clauses in the first passage quoted above proves that Antiphon at any rate took no pains to avoid such natural assonance. In an inflexional language, where there is always a strong probability that a rhyme will occur wherever we have to use an adjective agreeing with a noun, or two verbs in the same tense and person, some ingenuity has to be employed at times to avoid a rhyme, and Antiphon here, at any rate, did not choose to avoid it. The use of rhyme in verse seems to have been offensive to the Greek ear;[58] perhaps for that very reason it may have been at times desirable in prose, its harshness producing the same kind of effect which Antiphon elsewhere attains by the use of uncommon words.

Hiatus is of fairly common occurrence in Antiphon, and I cannot point to any certain instance of an attempt to avoid it by a change from the natural order of words.

Antiphon draws little from common speech; perhaps his dignity prevented him from enforcing a point by the use of those γνῶμαι—proverbial maxims—which Aristotle recommends; and he seldom has recourse to colloquialisms. We are inclined, however, to put in this class such a phrase as περιέπεσεν οἷς οὐκ ἤθελεν—‘he got what he didn’t want’—used of an unfortunate who has been accidentally killed through his own negligence.

Metaphors are rare, but telling when they do occur, as δίκη κυβερνήσειε—‘May justice steer my course’; ζῶντες κατορωρύγμεθα—‘I am buried in a living tomb,’ used by a man who lost his only son; or, again, the appeal of the prisoner to the jury not to condemn him to death—ἀνίατος γὰρ ἡ μετάνοια τῶν τοιούτων ἐστίν—‘Repentance for such a deed can never cure it.’

Some exaggeration of language is permitted to an orator. The defendant in the first tetralogy thus appeals for pity—‘An old man, an exile and an outcast, I shall beg my bread in a foreign land.’

The so-called ‘figures of thought’ (σχήματα διανοίας) such as irony and rhetorical questions, so frequent in Demosthenes, are scarcely used by Antiphon. There is no instance either of the hypocritical reticence (παράλειψις), also common in later orators, which by a pretence of passing over certain matters in silence hints at more than it could prove.

Greek oratory was much bound by conventions from which even the greatest speakers could not altogether escape. To some extent this may be attributed to the evil influence of the teachers of rhetoric, but by far the greater part of the blame must rest upon the Athenian audiences.

The dicasts, with a curious inconsistency, seem to have demanded a finished style of speaking, and yet to have been suspicious of any speaker who displayed too much cleverness. It was, in fact, the possession of this quality which made Antiphon himself unpopular.[59] A pleader, therefore, who felt himself in danger of incurring such suspicion, must apologize to his audience in advance, stating that any strength which his case might seem to possess was due to its own inherent justice, not to his own powers of presenting it. He must compliment the jury on their well-known impartiality, and express a deep respect for the sanctity of the laws. The early rhetoricians made collections of such ‘topics’ or ‘commonplaces,’ and instructed their pupils how to use them. The process became merely mechanical; any speaker could obtain from the rhetorical handbooks specimens of sentences dealing with all such requirements, but only a man of rare genius could, by originality of treatment, make them sound at all convincing. Aristotle at a later date made a practically exhaustive collection of such topics.[60]

Antiphon, in his Tetralogies, showed by example how some of these commonplaces might be employed. In his real speeches he uses them freely, and with so little care that he repeats his own actual words even within the limits of the few extant speeches.[61]

In the introduction of these devices, however, he shows some skill. The speech on the murder of Herodes is quite subtle in places. Compliments are paid to the jury, but the flattery is not too open. It is sometimes achieved rather by suggestion than by statement. ‘Not that I wished to avoid a trial by your democracy,’ says the defendant; and again, ‘Of course I could trust you quite without considering the oath you have taken’; or once more, in parenthesis, ‘On the supposition that I had no objection to quitting this land for ever, I might have left the country.’ Here, and in other cases, there is little more than a hint which an intelligent juror may grasp.

The most prominent of all the topics used by Antiphon is the appeal to the divine law by which guile meets with punishment; the murdered man, if unavenged by human justice, will find divine champions who will not only bring the homicide to book, but will punish the guilty city which has become polluted by harbouring him. So much stress is laid upon this conception of divine justice that some writers have believed that Antiphon held firm religious views which he thus expressed. This opinion may reasonably be held, but it must not be pressed. We know from external sources that Antiphon was not in sympathy with the existing government, yet the speakers of his orations express or imply admiration for the democracy; the speech-writer, in fact, wrote what he thought would be acceptable to the judges rather than what he himself believed. Arguing, in Antiphon’s own way, from probabilities, we may say it is more likely that a highly educated contemporary of Anaxagoras and Pericles should in private life profess a moderate scepticism than an unquestioning belief in the sort of curse that destroyed the house of Atreus, even though Antiphon may be Aeschylean in style.

The argument of the defendant in the Herodes, ‘Those who have sailed with me have made excellent voyages, and sacrifices at which I have assisted have been most favourably performed, and this is a strong argument for my innocence,’ does not appeal to us, who do not believe in the accidental blood-guiltiness of the community which unknowingly harbours a guilty individual. It may or may not have had some weight with Antiphon himself, but it certainly would have some influence on the common people of Athens, who believed that the whole city was polluted by the sacrilege of the mutilation of the Hermae. The fact that it must impress the jury was a good reason for inserting it, whether Antiphon had any religious feeling or not.[62]

§ 6

It remains to consider Antiphon’s manner in the treatment of his subjects.

His personal dignity is as remarkable in his manner as in the formalities of style. As we turn back to him from Demosthenes or Aeschines, who lowered the tone of forensic pleading to suit contemporary taste, we are surprised to find that he hardly ever condescends to ridicule, never to scurrilous invective. His judicial adversaries are not necessarily persons of discreditable parentage, immoral character, and infamous occupation. They may perhaps be liars, for one’s own statement of the case must be assumed to contain the whole truth, and consequently the other side must depend on falsehood; but even here the orator is prepared to admit, with almost un-Attic generosity, that his adversaries have been misled and are not acting up to their true character. Take the opening of Tetralogy II. 3:

‘The behaviour of my adversary shows, better than any theory could, that necessity constrains men to speak and act contrary to their better nature.

Up to the present he has never spoken shamelessly or acted desperately; but now his misfortunes have constrained him to use language which, knowing him, I should never have expected him to utter.’

Antiphon’s method of constructing his speeches is simple: a conventional preface, of the kind which every rhetorician kept in stock,[63] is followed by an introduction describing and criticizing the circumstances under which the action has been brought.[64] The facts, or a selection of facts of the case, are then narrated,[65] and are followed by arguments and proofs.[66] The evidence of witnesses may be interspersed through the narrative, taken point by point; or, if the narrative is short and simple, all the testimony may be reserved for the end. A peroration,[67] reviewing the situation and containing a final appeal to the court, normally ends the speech.

The speeches in the Tetralogies, which are only blank forms composed for practice or as specimens for study, contain only preface, argument, and peroration; there being no actual facts to deal with, there is no introduction or narrative.

It is a peculiar weakness of the extant speeches that they rely so much more on arguments from general probability (εἰκότα) than on real pleading on the basis of evidence.[68]

Thus the defendant in the Herodes mentions quite casually that he never left the ship on the night when the murder was committed on shore, but he produces no evidence for the alibi and treats it as of quite secondary importance.[69] He insists more on the point that the slave who gave evidence against him was probably induced to bear false witness by the prosecutors. Another piece of evidence against him is the assertion that he wrote a letter to Lycinus, stating that he had committed the murder. ‘Why,’ he asks, ‘should I have written a letter, when my messenger would know all the facts?’

It may be, in this instance, that the defendant’s case was a very weak one, and that he was obliged to rely on generalities: but the First Tetralogy affords an interesting parallel. There the defendant, in his second speech, the last speech of the trial, affirms, what he has apparently forgotten to mention before, that he never left his house on the night of the murder.

The most serious artistic defect in the extant speeches is the lack of that realism which the Greeks called ἦθος, characterization. The language of the defendants in the Herodes and the Choreutes is very similar, though the former is a young Lesbian and the latter a middle-aged Athenian. Moreover, the young Lesbian apologizes for his inexperience and lack of capacity for speaking, and does so in polished periods elaborated with all the devices of rhetorical art—antithesis of words and ideas, careful balance of the length of clauses, and judicious employment of assonance.

A perusal of Antiphon’s introduction to the speech de Caede Herodis will help, better than any detailed criticism, to an understanding of his methods of composition. We must note the disproportionate length of this introduction, to which the pleader evidently attaches more importance than to the disproof of the charge itself.[70] A study of it leads us to believe that the guilt or innocence of the party would have little to do with the verdict if he had once succeeded in impressing the jury favourably. He apologizes in artistic periods for his incapacity in public speaking, and enlarges on the commonplace that truth has often been stifled through lacking the power of expression.

He makes no appeal for impartiality, since he can trust the jury—another brazen commonplace (§§ 1-7).

The procedure of his adversaries is as shameless as it is unjust (§§ 8-9); it is even sacrilegious (§§ 10-12), so that they merit indignation, while the defendant, who respects the laws of God and man as he loves his country, deserves every indulgence (§§ 13-15). The prosecutors’ brutality can be explained by their distrust in the justice of their case and the uprightness of the jury (§§ 16-17). Finally, they have had ample time to work up their case, while the victim of their intrigues is called upon at a moment’s notice to answer the most serious charges (§§ 18-19).

‘1. I could wish, Gentlemen, that I possessed a capacity for speaking and an experience of the world on a scale corresponding to the misfortune and sufferings that have befallen me; as it is, my experience in the latter is as much beyond my deserts as my deficiency in the former falls short of my requirements.

‘2. When I had to suffer in my own person under an undeserved charge, I had no experience to help me on; now, when my salvation lies in a plain statement of the facts as they occurred, I am thwarted by my incapacity in speaking.

‘3. In many instances men with no capacity in speaking have been disbelieved because they only told the truth, and have owed their ruin to the fact that they could not demonstrate the truth; many, on the other hand, who possess the capacity for speaking, have been believed on account of their lies, and owed their salvation to the fact that they lied well. So one who has not the necessary experience of procedure in the courts must inevitably be at the mercy of the speeches of the prosecution; he cannot rest secure upon a true statement of the facts of the case.

‘4. Now, most parties in such causes as this make a request for a fair hearing—implying a mistrust of themselves and a conviction that you are not impartial. I shall make no such request, for it is only reasonable that honest men should grant a hearing to the defendant, even though he has not asked for it, just as the prosecutor has been granted a hearing without asking.

‘5. But my prayer is, firstly, that if my tongue leads me into error, you will be merciful, and consider that my error is due to inexperience rather than guilt; and secondly, that if I should in any point express myself well, you will attribute such expression not to any cleverness of mine but to the inherent power of truth; for justice demands that a man guilty in his actions should not win salvation by his speech, and, equally, that one righteous in his actions should not for his speech be brought to ruin; for an error in speech is the tongue’s fault—an error in action is a fault of the heart.

‘6. A man who realizes that his personal safety is endangered is bound to err sometimes; he has to think not only of the defence he is making, but of its possible results; for the issue of all matters yet undecided depends on chance rather than on forethought.

‘7. Such considerations cannot fail to cause anxiety to one whose life is in danger; indeed, I observe that people who have a thorough experience of the courts fail to do justice to their powers when in danger themselves, but are far more successful in cases which involve no personal danger. Thus, Gentlemen, my request is both lawful and righteous; it is as just for you to grant as for me to prefer it; and I now proceed to answer in detail the charges which have been brought against me.

‘8. First, I would draw attention to the illegality of the methods by which I have been forced into this trial, not that I wish to avoid judgment by this democratic court—for even if you had taken no oath, and were bound by no law, I should be ready to leave in your hands the decision about my life, confident as I am that I have done no wrong in this matter, and that your verdict will be a just one—but in order that my enemies’ violent and illegal action against me in this case may help you to realize their conduct towards me on other occasions.

‘9. My first point is this: Contrary to all precedent at Athens, though I am on trial for murder, I was indicted for “criminal violence.” Now my enemies themselves have testified that I neither belong to the class of “violent criminals,” nor am subject to the law which covers such cases. It applies to such offences as stealing and highway robbery, and they have shown that no such charge can attach to me.

‘Thus their conduct in the matter of my summary arrest has made it in the highest degree legal and just for you to acquit me.

‘10. They say, indeed, that the taking of life is in itself an aggravated form of “criminal violence.” I admit that it is a most serious kind, and so is sacrilege or treason; but you have laws which deal with each of these charges specifically.

‘And, to begin with, they have brought me to trial in the Agora, the very place which a defendant in a charge of murder is ordinarily warned to avoid; secondly, they have proposed a penalty of their own choosing, whereas the law ordains that the man who has taken another’s life shall lose his own in return.

‘This they have done, not for my benefit, but for their own convenience, and herein they have failed in that respect for the dead which the law prescribes.

‘11. Again, as I imagine you all know, all the courts concerned with murder trials sit in the open air, with this particular object, that the jurors may not have to enter the same building with those who have blood on their hands, and that the prosecutor in a trial for murder may not find himself under the same roof with him who committed the act.

‘But you, Sir, have acted contrary to all precedent in transgressing this law; and not only this: It was incumbent on you to take the most solemn and binding oath, to invoke destruction upon yourself and your family and your house if you failed in its conditions, namely, that you would not bring any charges against me except such as referred to the murder and my complicity in it.

‘Had this obligation been observed, however great crimes I had committed I could not be found guilty except in view of the one fact of blood-guiltiness, and on the other hand, however many good deeds I had to my credit, these good deeds could not save me.

‘12. All this regular procedure you have violated; you have invented laws for your own use; you who prosecute me have taken no oath; your witnesses who bear witness against me have taken none, though they ought first to take the same oath as yourself; they should lay their hands upon the sacrifice while they are bearing witness against me.

‘Further, you ask the court to dispense with the oath; to give credence to your witnesses and bring in a verdict of Guilty, though you yourself have made them disinclined to credit you by transgressing the established laws, and by imagining that your own illegal conduct should in their consideration have precedence over law itself.

‘13. You say, however, that if I had been set at liberty I should not have remained here, but should have gone away and disappeared—as if you had compelled me against my will to enter the country. I answer that, on your supposition that I should not have minded saying farewell to Athens, it was open to me either not to appear in obedience to the summons, and so incur judgment by default, or to go away after replying to the opening speech of the prosecution; for this privilege is open to all. But you, by legislating in your own interest, are trying to withhold in my case alone this privilege which belongs to all of Greek race.

‘14. Yet I think we must all agree that the laws which govern such procedure are the best laws in the world, and most in accordance with divine sanction. They have a double claim to respect; they are the most ancient laws in this land, and they are unchangeable as the offences with which they deal; and this is the strongest indication that a law is well framed; for time and experience teach mankind to recognize what is not well done.

‘So you do not require to learn from the speeches of the prosecution whether the laws were well framed or not, as he implies; but you do require to learn by the aid of the laws whether the speeches of the prosecution are urging a righteous and lawful action, or the reverse—as I assert.

‘15. The laws, then, which relate to the charge of murder, are excellently framed, inasmuch as no one has ever ventured to disturb them; you alone have ventured to legislate anew, and for the worse. You would set aside justice as you have transgressed law in your attempt to bring me to ruin. But your illegal procedure is in itself the strongest evidence in my favour; for you knew well enough that nobody who had taken that solemn oath would have borne witness against me.

‘16. Again, you did not rely on the facts sufficiently to allow the question of facts to be settled indisputably by a single trial; you reserved for yourself the right to dispute the judgment, and reopen the case, implying a distrust in the verdict of the present court. The result is that even if I am acquitted I am no better off, since it is open to you to say that I was acquitted on the charge of criminal violence but not on the charge of murder; whereas, if you secure my condemnation you will demand my death on the ground that I have been found guilty of murder.

‘What can surpass the cruelty of such a device by which you, if you can once convince the jury, have attained your object; while I, if I escape your clutches once, find the same danger awaiting me again?

‘17. Again, my imprisonment was a monstrous illegality. I consented to produce three sureties as required by law, but they contrived that I should not be allowed to do so. There is no other instance on record of the imprisonment of a non-Athenian who consented to produce sureties.

‘Yet the officers who have custody of criminals are subject to this same law, so that this is another privilege common to all men which was withheld from me alone.

‘18. Of course, it suited my accusers, firstly, that I should be as unprepared as possible, through being unable to attend to my own business in person, secondly, that I should suffer personal ill-usage, and in consequence of this personal ill-usage find my own friends more ready to bear false witness in support of my accusers than true witness in my support. And so they inflicted a life-long disgrace on me and my family.

‘19. Thus I have been brought to trial handicapped in many ways in relation to your laws and to justice; but even with these disadvantages I shall try to demonstrate my innocence.

‘But it is a hard task to refute at a moment’s notice a number of deliberate falsehoods long-prepared; for it is impossible to be forearmed against unexpected attacks.’

After this long preamble, the speaker at last discusses the accusation (§§ 19 sqq.), and to some extent deals satisfactorily with the evidence—entirely circumstantial—which has been brought against him. It has already been noticed that, though he casually leaves it to be inferred that he could prove an alibi, he lays no stress on the assertion, and is far more concerned with showing that it is ‘improbable’ that he should be a murderer. The final and, apparently, the most important argument is drawn from the absence of divine signs which might have pointed to the speaker’s guilt. He makes no attempt, like the defendant in the First Tetralogy, to suggest other explanations of the crime; many crimes, he says, have before now baffled investigation, and he is only concerned with denying the charge against himself.

§ 7

In the Life of Antiphon, falsely ascribed to Plutarch,[71] we read that sixty speeches were extant under the orator’s name, but of these twenty-five were considered spurious by the critic Caecilius of Calacte. We have now fifteen, viz. the three Tetralogies, or sets of four speeches; the speeches on the Murder of Herodes, the Death of the Choreutes, and the Charge of Poisoning. All of these deal with homicide, the department in which Antiphon, presumably, showed especial skill. Blass has collected besides the titles of twenty-three other speeches on miscellaneous subjects.[72]

The Tetralogies, each consisting of four short speeches on the same imaginary case—two for the prosecution, and two for the defence—have this peculiar interest, that they stand on the border-line between theory and practice. They differ from the exercises composed by other early rhetoricians and from the declamations of the Roman Empire in that they are not concerned with historical or mythological personages in possible or imaginary positions, but treat cases which, although fictitious, are of the kind which might arise in everyday life at Athens. Thus these skeleton-speeches give a clear idea of the lines on which either side might plead its case in an actual trial. The professional advocate must be ready to plead on either side in any cause, and here we find Antiphon composing speeches in turn suitable for both sides. As has been noted, there is very little detail given. No narrative of facts occurs; the actual circumstances presupposed can only be gathered from the arguments employed; and the result is that the outlines of the speeches both in accusation and defence are very clearly marked.

The argument of the First Tetralogy is as follows:—A certain citizen has been murdered on his way home from a dinner party. His slave, who was mortally wounded at the same time, deposed that one of the murderers was a certain enemy of his master, against whom the latter was on the point of bringing a serious law-suit. The case comes before the Areopagus.

α. The accuser argues that the deceased cannot have been murdered by robbers, since he was not plundered; nor in a drunken brawl, which was impossible considering the time and place. Therefore the crime was premeditated, and the motive was revenge or fear. The accused had both these motives, and moreover the slave identified him.

β. The defendant argues that the murder may have been done by robbers who were scared away before they had robbed the corpse, or by some criminal who feared the dead man’s testimony, or by some other enemy, who felt secure because he knew suspicion would fall on the accused. The slave may have been mistaken or perhaps suborned. If probability is to decide the case, it is more probable that the defendant would have employed some one else to do the murder than that the slave would be certain of having recognized the criminal. The danger of losing a law-suit could not have seemed so serious as the present danger of losing his life.

γ. The accuser in his second speech ingeniously meets the arguments of β point by point; and

δ. The defendant criticizes and disposes of the arguments of γ, and incidentally mentions that he could prove an alibi—though he does not seem to lay any stress on this.

With the exception of the evidence of the slave, now dead, the whole case rests on a discussion of probabilities.

The Second Tetralogy deals with the death of a boy accidentally killed by a javelin with which another youth was practising in the gymnasium. The question to decide was, who was to blame—the accuser maintained that it was a case of homicide, the defendant suggested unintentional suicide![73]

The Third Tetralogy supposes that an old man has been brutally beaten by a young man, and died of his injuries a few days later. The defendant attempts to put the blame first on the dead man, since he struck the first blow, secondly on the surgeon; and, finding this not plausible enough, goes into exile: the second speech for the defence is spoken by a friend of the accused.

The extant speeches composed for real cases may be taken in the order of their importance.

On the Murder of Herodes.—Herodes, an Athenian citizen who had settled at Mitylene, made a voyage to Aenus in Thrace to receive the ransom of some Thracian captives. He sailed with the accused, a Mitylenean whose father lived at Aenus. They were driven by a storm to shelter at Methymna, and there exchanged from their open boat into a decked vessel. They fell to drinking to pass the time, and Herodes, going ashore one night, was never heard of again. His companion continued the voyage, and on returning to Mitylene was charged with murder. It was asserted that a slave had confessed to having assisted in the murder, and that a letter had been discovered from the defendant to one Lycinus, supposed to be the instigator of the crime.

By the laws of the Athenian League such a trial must take place at Athens; ordinarily a case of murder would come before the Areopagus, but actually the accused was indicted as a ‘malefactor,’[74] was arrested and brought before an ordinary court. He contends that this is a grievance, for if the prosecution fails he may still be brought before the Areopagus. Further, he was kept in prison, all bail being refused. This was, apparently, illegal.

The trial took place probably about 417 or 416 B.C. The introduction to the speech has been quoted.[75] The narrative gives first the facts up to the defendant’s arrival at Athens (§§ 19-24), and shows that probability is against the prosecution (§§ 25-28); next, the return of one of the ships to Mitylene, and the confession of the slave under torture (§§ 29-30). The slave’s evidence is proved to be worthless (§§ 31-41). The alleged letter to Lycinus is discussed, and the defendant proves that he himself had no motive for the murder, and cannot be expected to know who is the real culprit (§§ 42-73). Odium has been unjustly stirred against him by the assertion of his father’s disloyalty (§§ 74-80). The absence of signs of divine anger is a further proof of his innocence (§§ 81-84). Finally, he appeals for another chance at least, since, if acquitted now, he may be tried again by the Areopagus (§§ 85-95).

The speech On the Choreutes refers to the death of a boy Diodotus, who was being trained to sing in a choir at the Thargelia, and was accidentally poisoned by a drug given him to improve his voice. The choregus or choir-master was accused of poisoning before the Areopagus.

The extant speech is the second for the defence; the date is probably about 412 B.C. The speaker comments on the disingenuous action of his adversaries, who refused to have slaves examined, and introduced much irrelevant matter. He contrasts the openness of his own conduct. The epilogue is lost.

The speech Against a Stepmother on a Charge of Poisoning is sometimes regarded as a mere exercise, but, in striking contrast to the Tetralogies, this speech contains full and detailed narrative. Its authenticity has been further questioned, but we have so little material for judging of the style of Antiphon that it is impossible to pronounce definitely against the supposition that this speech was composed by him. It may be that it was an early work; it is certainly less powerful than the other two genuine speeches.

The Argument.—A young man accuses his stepmother of having poisoned his father by the help of another woman, a slave. The father was dining with Philoneos, a former lover of this woman, and she was persuaded to administer a love-philtre to the two. Both men died, the woman was put to death, and the prosecutor now urges that his stepmother, who instigated the crime, should be punished for her guilt.

Of the speeches known to us only by name or by short fragments, it is probable that some at any rate were the work of Antiphon the Sophist, with whom the orator is often confused. A work on rhetoric and a collection of proëmia and epilogues were also current under the orator’s name.

CHAPTER III
THRASYMACHUS—ANDOCIDES

§ 1

A new period begins with Thrasymachus of Chalcedon, who adopted Athens as his home. He is placed by Aristotle between Tisias, one of the founders of rhetoric, and Theodorus of Byzantium,[76] who was a contemporary of Lysias. According to the chronology of Plato’s Phaedrus, he was already at the height of his powers when Isocrates was only a youth of promise.[77] The dramatic date of the dialogue being 410 B.C., we may suppose him to have been born between 460 and 450 B.C., though there is no clear indication.

He seems to have followed the lines of his predecessors. He composed a τέχνη or handbook of rhetoric, and composed or compiled a collection of passages to serve as models for his pupils, called by Suidas ἀφορμαὶ ῥητορικαί (oratorical resources). This probably included the exordia and epilogues mentioned by Athenaeus.[78] Aristotle mentions a work called Ἔλεοι (appeals to pity),[79] and a book with the mysterious title ὑπερβάλλοντες completed his educational output.[80] He composed also some epideictic speeches, which, as Suidas calls them παίγνια, were probably of the mythological type, of which we possess examples in the Helen and Palamedes of Gorgias. Dionysius says that he left no deliberative or forensic speeches, and this statement agrees with the known fact that he was an alien, and therefore could not appear in the courts or the assembly.[81] On the other hand, Suidas mentions public speeches, and Dionysius has himself preserved a fragment of what appears to be a deliberative speech.[82] The probability is that this was composed only as a model for his pupils, and it is, in fact, of a vagueness which would be appropriate to almost any circumstances.

He excelled in the ‘pathetic’ style: ‘For the “sorrows of a poor old man,”’ says Socrates, ‘or any other pathetic case, no one is better than the Chalcedonian giant; he can put a whole company of people into a passion and out of one again by his mighty magic, and is first-rate at inventing or disposing of any sort of calumny on any grounds or none.’[83] These gifts seem to have been the natural expression of his impetuous and passionate character represented in the Republic.[84]

The loss of his works is much to be regretted, since he was the inventor of a style—the tempered style, as it was called by Dionysius—which, standing between the austerity of Antiphon and Thucydides, and the elaborate simplicity perfected by Lysias, combined the best qualities of both. He was thus a forerunner of Isocrates. In the fragment which is preserved, we find no trace of rare or poetical words or audacious compounds such as Gorgias used; none of the complicated sentences of Thucydides, and no forced antithesis; the diction is flowing, and the expression clear. He seems to have been the first writer to make a careful study of metrical effect, and is mentioned for his frequent use of the paeon by Aristotle, who apparently classed him with those writers to whom diction is more important than ideas.[85]

The fragment already mentioned purports to be the exordium of a political speech:

‘I could have wished, men of Athens, that my lot had been cast amid those ancient times and conditions when the younger men were content to be silent, since circumstances did not force them to speak in public, and their elders were able administrators of the state....’

This is a conventional opening; a similar phrase of regret (ἐβουλόμην) begins the speech of Antiphon on the murder of Herodes,[86] and Aeschines has elaborated the same theme of the superiority of political life in the time of Solon in a way which leads us to suspect that he had the prooemium of Thrasymachus in mind.[87]

Of the works of Theodorus of Byzantium not a sentence remains. A contemporary of Lysias, he taught rhetoric and composed certain works on the subject.[88] He concerned himself with the proper divisions of a speech, adding a section of ‘further narrative’ (ἐπιδιήγηις) to the usual narrative, and ‘further proof’ (ἐπιπίστωσις) to proof.[89] It is for this over-subtlety that Plato ridicules the ‘cunning artificer of speeches’ from Byzantium.[90]

§ 2

Andocides was born about 440 B.C., a member of a family which had been distinguished for three generations.

His great-grandfather, as he tells us, fought against the Pisistratidae; his grandfather Andocides was one of the envoys for the peace with Sparta in 445, and was twice subsequently a strategus; his father, Leogoras, is mentioned by Aristophanes as rearing pheasants.[91] The orator himself was a member of a ἑταιρεία or club—probably a social rather than a political club, as the only meeting mentioned was purely for convivial purposes.

In 415, on the eve of the sailing of the Sicilian expedition, Athens was startled and horrified by a remarkable act of sacrilege. The images of Hermes which stood everywhere in the town were, all but one, mutilated and defaced in a single night. The superstitious citizens, with a deep feeling that the whole community must suffer for the guilty action of some of its members, considered this an evil omen for the fortunes of the Syracusan expedition, and, less reasonably, took it as an indication of impending revolution and an attempt to subvert the democracy. Their anxiety was increased by rumours that a profane parody of the Eleusinian mysteries was being celebrated in certain private houses. Such acts of impiety were likely to bring upon Athens the wrath of the gods who had hitherto protected her.

It will be remembered how Alcibiades, one of the leaders of the expedition, was accused of complicity in the plot, and how this accusation brought about his recall from Sicily and his estrangement from his native city, which led to the utter failure of the great enterprise of conquest, and ultimately, through the total loss of her best armies and fleets, to the downfall of Athens herself.

Andocides was accused of complicity both in the profanation of the mysteries and the mutilation of the Hermae. Of the former charge he apparently succeeded in clearing himself, but he confesses to a knowledge of the affair of the Hermae.

A certain Teucrus denounced eighteen persons as guilty of the mutilation of the busts. Of these some were put to death, the rest went into exile. The list included some members of the club to which Andocides belonged. Another informer, Dioclides, came forward with a tale that about three hundred persons were implicated, and he named forty-two of them, including Andocides and twelve of his near relations. Athens was in a panic, and eager for instant vengeance. The informers’ victims were at once imprisoned, and their situation was grave indeed. Andocides describes how, to save his father and other innocent persons, he at last resolved to tell what he knew. He gave his information under a promise of immunity from punishment, but in accordance with the terms of a subsequent decree he suffered ‘atimia,’ comprising exclusion from the market-place and the temples; and being thus debarred from a public career he decided to go abroad.

In the de Reditu, delivered in 410 B.C., five years after the outrage, Andocides implies that he was himself concerned in the deed, and asks pardon for his ‘youthful folly’ (§ 7). The language of Thucydides[92] and others also implies that he accused himself along with others. The language of the de Reditu is not, however, explicit, and does not necessarily disagree with the statement made twelve years later in the de Mysteriis.

Andocides there affirms that he knew of the plot and opposed its execution, but it was carried out without his knowledge. In proof of this he points out that the Hermes opposite his own house was the only one not mutilated.

‘So I told the Council that I knew the culprits, and I declared the facts—namely that Euphiletus suggested the plot while we were drinking, and I spoke against it, and for the moment prevented it. Some time later I was riding a colt I had in Cynosarges, and had a fall, and broke my collar-bone and cut my head, and was carried home on a stretcher. Euphiletus, hearing of my condition, told the others that I had been persuaded to join them, and had agreed to take a hand in the work and mutilate the Hermes beside the shrine of Phorbas. In this statement he deceived them, and this is the reason why the Hermes which you all see in front of our house, the one erected by the Aegeid tribe, was the only Hermes in Athens not to be mutilated, because it was supposed that I would do it, as Euphiletus said. The conspirators, when they heard of it, were highly indignant, considering that I knew of the affair, but had taken no part in it. On the next day Meletus and Euphiletus came to me and said:

‘“We have done it, Andocides, and it’s all over. If you care to keep quiet and hold your tongue, you will find that we are as good friends to you as ever; if not, our enmity will count much more than any friendship you could form by betraying us.”

‘I answered that, from what had occurred, I considered Euphiletus a scoundrel; but that they had much more to fear from the fact of their guilt than from my knowledge of it.’[93]

This story is at least a plausible one. The only suspicious detail is the orator’s own candid admission that all of those whom he accused—with the exception of four—had already been named by Teucrus and punished, some by death, the rest by exile, so that his ‘confession’ could do them no further harm. The four others whom he included were not yet in prison, though they were known to be associates of those who had already paid the penalty. They had time to escape into exile (§ 68). We may suspect that they received from the informer due notice of his intentions. Thus, at the expense of driving four men, who were probably guilty, into exile, Andocides undoubtedly saved the lives of himself, his father, his brother-in-law, and the rest of the forty-two prisoners. The informer Dioclides now recanted, and said that he had been compelled by Alcibiades and Amiantus to lay false information. He was brought to trial and put to death (§ 66). Andocides, suffering from partial disfranchisement, was for many years away from Athens. He engaged in commerce in many countries, and made money, sometimes by discreditable means. He had dealings with Sicily, Italy, the Peloponnese, Thessaly, Ionia, the Hellespont, and finally, Cyprus, where Evagoras, King of Salamis, bestowed a valuable property on him.[94]

In 411 B.C. he made an attempt to recover his rights. He procured oars for the Athenian fleet at Samos, and returned to Athens to plead his cause. Unfortunately the Four Hundred had then just usurped the government, and they rejected his plea on the ground that he had helped their enemies. Later, in 410 or 408 B.C., he made another attempt, and delivered the speech de Reditu, but was again unsuccessful. It was only after the amnesty of Thrasybulus (403 B.C.) that he resumed his full citizenship, and henceforward took an active part in public life, figuring now as an ardent democrat, speaking in the assembly and performing liturgies. In 399 B.C. old enmities burst into flame, and he was accused of impiety on two counts—as having taken part in the Eleusinian mysteries at a time when he was legally disqualified from doing so, and as having deposited a suppliant’s branch on the altar at Eleusis during the time of the mysteries—which was a profanation. The penalty for either offence was death, and the de Mysteriis is his successful answer to these charges.

In 391 B.C., as one of the envoys delegated to bring about a peace with Sparta, he delivered the de Pace. The peace was not concluded. This is the last mention of this interesting adventurer, though the pseudo-Plutarch affirms that he went into exile again. If that is true, we know that he had comfortable places to retire to, in Cyprus and elsewhere.

§ 3

Ancient critics dealt severely with Andocides. Though Alexandrine criticism included him in the list of the ten standard orators, Dionysius barely mentions him;[95] Quintilian disparages his work,[96] and Herodes Atticus modestly hopes that he himself is at least superior to Andocides;[97] Hermogenes sums up his defects as an orator as follows:

‘He aims at being a statesman, but does not quite succeed. He lacks proper articulation and distinctness in his “figures,” he lacks order in connecting his sentences and rounding them off, losing distinctness by the use of parentheses, so that he strikes some as ineffectual and needlessly obscure. He has very little finish or arrangement and little vigour. He has a small, but very small, portion of cleverness in systematic argument, but practically none of any other kind.’[98]

It is with some hesitation that I give this tentative translation of a difficult passage. It seems to mean that Andocides, though he uses ‘figures,’ such as antithesis, rhetorical question and irony, does not attain ‘precision’ or make them distinct enough. His sentences are sometimes deformed because a parenthesis overpowers the main clause. His diction is unpolished and unconvincing. The only credit which he deserves is for his μέθοδος—his system of stating his case; wherein Hermogenes was perhaps thinking of the way in which the orator arranges his material, giving only part of the narrative at a time, and criticizing it as he goes along, rather than keeping narrative and arguments quite separate. Later and more practised orators have been commended for this method. By general cleverness, Hermogenes probably means skill in the use of the usual sophistries of the rhetorician.

The Pseudo-Plutarch is less severe on the orator:

‘He is simple and inartificial in his narratives, straightforward and free from “figure.”’[99]

It must at once be granted that many of the criticisms aimed at Andocides hit their mark; but it is open to doubt whether they can penetrate deep enough to deal a vital blow at his reputation. The ancient critics were academic and tended to lose sight of practical details. They were, as a rule, more concerned with the impressions that a speech produced on the reader than with its effect on the hearers; they laid great emphasis on the artistic side, and in examining a speech looked carefully to see how closely the orator had followed the artificial rules of the rhetorician. But this kind of estimate may lead to injustice, for not only must the critic refer to an artificial standard established by convention, a standard which might not have been recognized by the orator’s contemporaries, but, even granting that certain rules of rhetoric should generally be followed, we may maintain that particular circumstances justify a speaker in departing from them. Rhetoric is a practical art, whose object, as Plato tells us, is persuasion; and though most people who practise it will do best to move on the accustomed lines, there may be some who can succeed without following the beaten track.

Andocides is not to be compared to his predecessor Antiphon in the points which are the latter’s chief characteristics—dignity of manner, balance of clauses and verbal antithesis; but, on the other hand, he has command of a fairly lucid style, and a gift for telling a straightforward narrative of events, two matters in which the older orator was not conspicuously successful. Again, Andocides starts with one signal advantage. If we read the tetralogies of Antiphon, excellent as they may be in showing the writer’s grasp of the technique of his trade, and turn from them to one of the real speeches, the Herodes, for instance, we feel at once how great a gain it is to have the human interest before us. A speech in which real persons are concerned must always have this advantage over a declamatory exercise. But we still feel that the personal element is not so prominent as it might be, simply because the orator is not giving voice to his own thoughts on an occasion where his own interests are deeply concerned, but stringing together sentences which an obscure young man from Mitylene may clumsily stumble through without, perhaps, in the least comprehending their cleverness. But Andocides is a real live man speaking in his own person and in his own defence on a most serious charge. He is in grave danger, and must exert himself to the utmost; he must rise to the great occasion, or expect to pay the penalty—perhaps with his life. This is an occasion, if there ever can be one, when style may be completely put in the background, where matter is of more importance than method, where the means are of no account unless the end can be attained; for epigram cannot temper the hemlock-cup, and the laws of Athens are stronger than the rules of oratory.

It was natural to Antiphon to pay attention to details of style, and his style is of a rather archaic tone. Andocides, on the other hand, was not a trained orator, except in so far as every Athenian was trained in youth in the elements of speaking. He was not either a professional pleader or a frequent speaker in public—indeed, from the fact that he lived long in exile he cannot have had many opportunities of appearing either in the law-courts or the assembly. Possessing a convenient fluency of speech and a thorough command of the language of daily life, he finds in it a satisfactory means of expression. In most cases he seems to have by nature what Lysias obtained by art—a clear and direct way of expressing his thoughts, a simplicity of language in which nothing strained or unfamiliar strikes the ear. On the other hand, there are inconsistencies in his style; there are times when, apparently without premeditation, he does use words or phrases slightly foreign to the speech of common life. We have a feeling that this was done without affectation; that in the course of his fluent and rapid utterance he used just those words which naturally occurred to him as appropriate.[100] In this he differs from Lysias, who took the common speech and perfected it into a literary form, attaining by study a refined simplicity and purity which only careful practice could produce.

On the whole, Andocides is most effective when he is most simple; when he uses common words and makes no attempt at the rhetorical artifices which do not come natural to him. The following narrative will emphasize my point:

‘When we had all been taken to prison, and it was night and the prison gates were shut, and one man’s mother had come, and another’s sister, and another’s wife and children, and sounds of lamentation were heard as they wept and bewailed our miserable state, Charmides spoke to me—he was a cousin of mine, of the same age as myself, and he had been brought up in our home from childhood.

‘“Andocides,” he said, “you see what serious trouble we are in; and though I did not want to say anything, or to annoy you at all before, I am now forced to do so on account of the misfortune we are come to.

‘“Your other friends and associates, apart from us who are your relations, have some of them already been executed for the charges on which we are being done to death, while others have admitted their guilt by fleeing from the country.

‘“If you have heard anything about this affair, tell the truth, and by doing so save both yourself, and your father, who must be very dear to you, and your brother-in-law, who is married to your only sister, and finally, all the rest of your family and friends, not to mention me—for in all my life I have never caused you annoyance, but am devoted to you and ready to do anything I can to help you.”’[101]

His exposure of Dioclides is simple and effective; he repeats the informer’s statement, and with a very few words of comment makes it appear ridiculous:

‘Encouraged by his country’s misfortunes Dioclides laid information before the Council. He asserted that he knew the persons who had mutilated the Hermae, and that there were about three hundred of them. He proceeded to relate how he had come across the matter.

‘He said that he had a slave working at Laureion, and had to go there to get the man’s wages. He rose very early, having mistaken the time, and started on his way. The full moon was shining, and as he passed the gateway of Dionysus, he saw a number of men coming down from the Odeum into the Orchestra. He was afraid of them, and so went into the shadow and sat down between the pillar and the pedestal on which the bronze statue of the General stands.

‘He estimated the number of the men he saw at about three hundred, and they were standing round in groups of five or ten, or, in some cases, twenty. He could recognize most of them, as he saw the moonlight shining on their faces.

‘Now he made this monstrous statement in the first place in order that it might be in his power to say that any citizen he liked was or was not a member of that company.

‘After seeing all this, he said, he went on to Laureion, and on the next day heard of the mutilation of the Hermae. So he knew at once that it was the work of the men whom he had seen.’[102]

The opening of the speech shows a reasonable use of the sort of commonplaces which custom demanded as a preface to argument—the malignity and ingenuity of the speaker’s enemies and the perplexity caused by the number of their accusations which makes it difficult to know where to begin.

‘Nearly all of you know, Gentlemen, with what persistency my enemies have contrived to harm me in every possible way, by fair means or foul, from the time when I first came to Athens, and there is no need for me to dwell upon the subject; but I shall ask you only for just treatment, a favour which is as easy for you to grant as it is important for me to gain.

‘First, I would have you bear in mind that I have now appeared before you without having been in any way forced to await my trial; I have neither surrendered to bail, nor have I suffered the constraint of imprisonment. I appear because I have put my trust above all in the justice of my cause, and secondly, in your character; feeling as I do that you will give a just decision, and not allow me through a perversion of justice to be ruined by my enemies, but that you will much rather save me by allowing justice to take its course in accordance with the laws of the city, and the oaths which you have sworn as a preliminary to the verdict which you are about to record.

‘It is reasonable, Gentlemen, that, in the case of men who voluntarily face the danger of a trial, you should take the same view of them as they do of themselves. Those who refuse to await their trial practically stand self-condemned, so that you may reasonably pass on them the sentence which they have passed on themselves; but as for those who wait to stand their trial in the confidence that they have done no wrong, you have a right to hold the same opinion about them which they have held about themselves, and not decide, without a hearing, that they are in the wrong....

‘I am considering, therefore, from which point I ought to begin my defence. Shall I begin with the last-mentioned plea, that my indictment was illegal? or with the fact that the decree of Isotimides is not valid? or shall I appeal to the laws and the oaths which you have taken? or, lastly, shall I start by relating the facts from the beginning?

‘My greatest difficulty is that the various counts of the indictment do not stir you all equally to resentment, but each of you has some point which he would like me to answer first. It is impossible to deal with them all at once, and so it seems to me the best course to relate the whole story from the beginning, omitting nothing; for if you thoroughly realize what actually occurred, you will easily recognize the lies which my accusers have told to my discredit.’[103]

The peroration is simple and vigorous in its directness:

‘Do not deprive yourselves of your hopes of my help, nor deprive me of my hopes of helping you. I now request those who have already given proof of the highest nobility of feeling towards the democracy to mount the platform and advise you in accordance with what they know of my character. Come forward, Anytus and Cephalus, and you members of my tribe who have been chosen to plead for me—Thrasyllus and the rest.’[104]

Reference has already been made to the vitality of his speech. Compared with his life-like vigour, the ‘austerity’ of Antiphon becomes dull and pompous. The most striking feature of his work is the ease with which, in reporting conversations or explaining motives, he breaks into direct quotation, recalling his own words or putting words into the mouths of others to express what they said or thought. We recognize in this something of a Homeric quality; it is comparable to the Epic use of ὧδε δέ τις εἴπεσκε and καὶ ποτέ τις εἴπῃσι.

The following extract shows how the main thread of the sentence may be lost in a tangle of such parenthetical quotations:

‘From the first, though many people informed me that my enemies were saying that I should never await my trial—“For what could induce Andocides to await his trial, when he may leave the city and still be well off? If he sails to Cyprus, where he comes from, there is waiting for him a large and flourishing farm of which he has the freehold; will he prefer to put his neck into a halter? With what end in view? Cannot he see which way the wind blows here?” I, Gentlemen, disagree entirely with this view. I would not live and enjoy the utmost prosperity somewhere else at the price of losing my fatherland; and even if the wind did blow here as my enemies say it does, I would rather be a citizen of Athens than of any other city; prosperous, for the present, as such other cities may seem to me to be. Holding such views as these I have committed to you the decision about my life.’[105]

It has been noted that Andocides is not addicted to the use of verbal antithesis such as Thucydides and Antiphon have made too familiar. We do not find him playing upon the contrasts between ‘word and deed,’ ‘being and seeming’ with such recurrent monotony.

There is, however, one kind of antithesis to which he is somewhat partial—an antithesis of thought rather than language. He is fond of explaining a difficulty of choice by putting it in the form of a dilemma.

As far as his own personal conduct was concerned, he must often have had to face dilemmas. From the part which he had played in the sacrilege, and the awkward positions in which consequently he found himself placed, it must often have been equally difficult and dangerous for him to lie and to speak the truth. So it is not unnatural that we should often find sentences like the following:

‘How would each of you have acted, Gentlemen, if you had had to choose either to die nobly, or to owe your life to a disgraceful action?

‘Some may say that what I did was base, but many would have chosen as I did.’[106]

This appeal to the individual feelings, especially the request by which it is prefaced, that they will judge ‘by human standards’ (ἀνθρωπίνως), is effective in its boldness. The speaker must have felt sure of his audience before he ventured to appeal to the lower nature which every one would like to repudiate.

In marked contrast to the dignity of Antiphon, Andocides from time to time lapses into scurrility, dragging into his speech discreditable anecdotes relating to his opponents which are quite irrelevant to his proper subject and merely serve to raise a laugh at the moment. Thus the long recital about the domestic affairs of Callias (§§ 123-130) has no bearing at all on the trial. A man whose father has been three times unhappily married may still be a trustworthy witness. The introduction of the irrelevant story is then quite unjustifiable, but, since such examples of bad taste were freely tolerated at Athens, it was worth while to make a score by such foul hitting, especially if one could deliver the blows as neatly as in the following passage:

‘At the mother’s request, the relations took the child to the altar at the time of the Apaturia. They brought a victim, and requested Callias to perform the sacrifice. He asked who was the father of the child. “Callias, the son of Hipponicus.”—“But I’m Callias.”—“Yes, and it’s your child.”’[107]

There is more to be said in justification of the attack on Epichares. To prove, or to assert violently, that his accuser was an enemy of the democracy and a person of vile character formed a presumption in favour of the defendant. Demosthenes himself made a custom of such practices, and was not less unscrupulous or less irrelevant than Andocides:

‘But Epichares, who is the worst of them all, and wants to keep up his reputation, and so acts vindictively against himself—for he was a member of the Council in the time of the Thirty; and what is the provision in the law which is inscribed on the pillar in front of the Council room? “Whosoever shall hold office in the city when the democracy has been overthrown, may be slain without penalty, and his slayer shall be free from blood-guiltiness, and shall possess the property of the slain.” Surely then, Epichares, any one who slays you now will have clean hands, according to Solon’s law? Let me have the law on the pillar read aloud?’[108]

But Andocides in such cases certainly violates the laws of good taste, and in the matter of this personal abuse, though less fertile in vocabulary, is a worthy forerunner of the great orators. His scurrility is hardly excused by the ingenuity of its epigrammatic form:

‘You jackal, you common informer! ... are you allowed to live and prowl about the city? Little do you deserve it; under the democracy you lived by the informer’s trade; under the oligarchy, for fear of being forced to give up the money you had made by informing, you were a menial of the Thirty....’[109]

and again:

‘One result of your decision to observe the present laws is that he has been restored from exile to citizenship, and from legal disability to the free exercise of the informer’s trade.’[110]

The use of parenthesis is sometimes carried by Andocides to extremes. An instance has been quoted in which the grammatical construction breaks down because the writer introduces an imaginary conversation into the middle of it.[111] The style is sometimes so loose and discursive that not only is the construction difficult to follow, but the argument is obscure. The writer suffers from an inability to keep to the point, or rather, he tries to explain several things at once, and so makes nothing clear. An extreme instance is to be found in §§ 57 sqq. of the de Mysteriis. His thoughts run too fast for his tongue, and he has not the technical skill to guide them on their proper courses. Such sentences afford a practical comment on the introduction to the same speech, in which he states that he does not know where to begin.[112]

On the other hand, passages may be found in which a series of short sentences, loosely combined, and disturbed by anacoluthon, are really effective, since they simulate the broken utterance of passion. Of such is the following:

‘Then the herald inquired who had deposited the suppliant’s branch, and no one answered. Now we were standing close by, and Callias could see me. When nobody answered, he retired into the temple. Eucles, stepping forward—oblige me by calling him up—Now then, Eucles, first of all give evidence whether I am speaking the truth.’[113]

§ 4

I have dealt hitherto chiefly with the speech de Mysteriis, the best of Andocides’ work. The other speeches now demand a short mention. The de Reditu differs remarkably from the later speech, de Mysteriis, but it is chiefly a difference of tone. The verbal style is much the same, though there is rather more tendency to antithetical structure. The language is simple, the sentences are less hampered with parentheses. But here Andocides is humble; he appears as a young man without friends speaking before a critical and hostile assembly; he is moderate in his language, apologetic in tone, careful not to give offence by any sarcastic or ill-considered utterance. In the de Mysteriis he is speaking with the consciousness not of a better cause but of increased powers and an assured position in the State. He is confident, almost arrogant at times; he is bitter and violent in his attacks on his enemies.

The de Pace bears a general resemblance in style to the other speeches, except for certain grammatical peculiarities. Dionysius declared it to be spurious, but modern critics mostly regard it as genuine.

The chief grounds for suspicion are the inaccuracies of the historical narrative (§§ 3-9) and the curious fact that a very similar passage occurs in Aeschines (de F. L., §§ 172-176), where even certain peculiarities of phraseology[114] are reproduced. As to history, the orators were often inaccurate about the past history of their own country. Careless statements occur even in the de Mysteriis. Demosthenes is an untrustworthy authority even for events almost contemporary. As to the other matter, there is good reason for the belief that Aeschines plagiarized Andocides in the fact that a reference to Andocides, the grandfather of the orator, which occurs in both speeches, is in place in a speech of Andocides, while there is no particular reason why Aeschines, if he were composing the passage, should have mentioned him. In some minor points, as Jebb has shown, Andocides is more accurate than Aeschines. The suggestion that the de Pace is a spurious speech, composed by a later rhetor who plagiarized from Aeschines, is therefore hardly tenable. There remains a third possibility, that both Aeschines and Andocides borrowed from the same semi-historical compilation, perhaps a lost rhetorical exercise.

The de Pace and the de Reditu are not enlivened by excursions into anecdote or the consequent direct quotations of speech which characterize the de Mysteriis. The historical argument already mentioned is dull in itself, but the tedium of the de Pace is somewhat relieved by a not infrequent use of rhetorical question.

‘What is there left for us to discuss? The subject of Corinth and the invitation of Argos. First, I should like to be informed about Corinth: if the Boeotians do not join us in the war but make peace with Sparta, what will Corinth be worth to us? Remember the day, men of Athens, when we made our alliance with the Boeotians; what was our feeling in that transaction? Was it not that we and Boeotia in combination were strong enough to stand against all the world? But now our question is, if the Boeotians make peace, how shall we be able, without Boeotian help, to fight against Sparta? We can do it, say some people, if we protect Corinth, and have an alliance with Argos.

‘But when the Spartans attack Argos, are we going to help Argos or not? We must definitely choose one course or the other.’[115]

An appeal for peace does not give such opportunities for oratory as a call to arms; nevertheless, a greater orator might have made more of the subject.

The speech Against Alcibiades is undoubtedly spurious and belongs to a much later date.

It is based upon a complete misconception of the nature of the law about ostracism. The speaker is represented as discussing the question whether he himself or Nicias or Alcibiades should be ostracized—a quite impossible position. The speech is little more than a collection of some of the stock anecdotes about Alcibiades, such as occur in Plutarch.

The names of four lost speeches are preserved:—πρὸς ἑταίρους, συμβουλευτικός, περὶ τῆς ἐνδείξεως and ἀπολογία πρὸς Φαίακα. Fragments—a few lines in each case—remain of two unnamed speeches. One of these refers to Hyperbolus as still in Athens, and so must be placed not later than 417 B.C., the year when Hyperbolus was ostracized. It deserves quotation as being typical of the snobbishness of the young aristocrat, not yet disciplined by misfortune.

‘I am ashamed to mention the name of Hyperbolus; his father is a branded slave, who up to the present day works in the public mint; he himself is a foreigner, a barbarian, and a lampmaker.’[116]

CHAPTER IV
LYSIAS