The Greek orators

Another good example of his sarcastic humour appears in the defence of Euxenippus against the charge of Macedonian sympathy:

This same sarcasm is in many places a powerful weapon of offence, as in the next extract from the indictment of Demosthenes:

The following fragment contains the most striking example of irony to be found anywhere in his works; the situation explains itself:

We have seen already how he could turn his wit against the whole class of orators, to which he belonged himself; it is pleasant to find him, in a speech which he wrote for a fee, thus describing Athenogenes: ‘A common fellow, a professional writer of speeches.’[457] It was the business of the logographos to sink his own personality in that of his client, and Hyperides, who was an artist by instinct, did so more successfully than any other speech-writer, except, perhaps, Demosthenes. In the present instance he must have felt a peculiar satisfaction in his work.

In private speeches he introduces many matters extraneous to the case; thus in the Athenogenes, though the question is only about a shady business transaction, he rouses odium by references to his adversary’s political offences. No doubt many weak cases succeeded by such devices, which call forth the just indignation of Lycurgus.[458] In public cases he has a higher ideal. When Lycurgus was an advocate on the other side, Hyperides referred to him with all the respect due to his character. Even the speech against Demosthenes is entirely free from personal abuse, if we except a little mild banter about Demosthenes’ austere habits of sobriety.[459] The indictment of Demosthenes’ public actions is vigorous enough, but it is restrained within the limits of good taste, and this is not for the sake of ancient friendship, which Hyperides repudiates:

Dionysius approves the diversity of Hyperides’ manner in dealing with his narratives:—‘He tells his story on a variety of ways, sometimes in the natural order, sometimes working back from the end to the beginning.’[461] We have no means of judging; the Euxenippus, the only complete forensic speech, contains practically no narrative; the story of the Athenogenes is, apparently, told straight through without a break, and then followed by evidence and criticism and legal arguments. Then follows the attempt to blacken the character of Athenogenes by extraneous arguments.

We may conclude this section by a few sentences from the treatise On the Sublime, expressing an estimate of the general character of his oratory:

And the passage concludes with a sincere tribute to the titanic force of Demosthenes.

Hyperides had seventy-seven speeches ascribed to him, of which fifty-two were thought by the Greek biographer to be genuine.[463] Blass has collected the titles of no less than sixty-five, in addition to the five which are extant in the papyri; so that only seven are unknown by name. Some quotations have been given from the indictment of Demosthenes;[464] the subject-matter has been explained,[465] and the treatment, so far as we can judge from the fragments, criticized.[466] The date is 324 B.C. The Defence of Lycophron is a speech in an εἰσαγγελία in which Lycurgus was one of the prosecutors. Lycophron, an Athenian noble, was a commander of cavalry in Lemnos, and was accused of seducing a Lemnian woman of good family, the wife of an Athenian who died before the case came on. The date is uncertain; perhaps circa 338 B.C. The case of Euxenippus arises out of the fact that Philip, after Chaeronea, restored the territory of Oropus to Athens. It was divided into five lots, and one lot assigned to every two tribes. A question arose whether the portion given to the Hippothoöntid and Acamantid tribes was not sacred to Amphiaraüs, and Euxenippus and two others were deputed to sleep in the shrine of the hero and obtain from their dreams a divination on the subject. They reported a dream which could be interpreted in favour of their tribes. In the present instance they are prosecuted for having given a false report of their dreams. The defendant and another advocate had already preceded Hyperides, so that the present speech is mainly devoted to bickering with the prosecutors, of whom Lycurgus was one. Date about 330 B.C.

The speech Against Philippides[467] is very much mutilated. It is a γραφὴ παρανόμων against Philippides, otherwise unknown, who had proposed a vote of thanks to a board of πρόεδροι or presidents of the ecclesia for their action in passing a certain decree, which seems to have been a vote of honour to Philip. It was passed under compulsion, and Philippides attempted subsequently to exonerate them from all possible blame by a decree which is here declared illegal.

The Epitaphios or Funeral Speech is a composition in a well-known conventional form. The topics for such a speech were already laid down by long custom. The skill of the orator is seen in his original way of handling the traditional commonplaces. First of all there is the strong personal note. He had been associated in politics with Leosthenes, and with him was jointly responsible for the Lamian war in which the latter met his death.[468] His personal feeling for the general is very prominent in the speech; Leosthenes is in fact the principal theme; he is put, as M. Croiset remarks, almost on a level with Athens:—‘Leosthenes seeing all Greece humbled and cowering, brought to ruin by the traitors whom Philip and Alexander had bought; seeing that our city wanted a man, and all Greece wanted a city, to take the leadership, freely gave himself for his country and gave our city for the Greeks to win their freedom.’[469] It is not, he says, that he wishes to slight the other patriots, but in praising Leosthenes he is praising all. He draws a fancy picture of the heroes of antiquity welcoming Leosthenes in Hades. It is a sign of the times that the individual should so be exalted; we have travelled far indeed from the cold impersonality of Pericles, to whom the nameless heroes who sacrifice their lives are but part of a pageant passing before the eyes of the deathless city. The consolation to the living is remarkable for containing references to a future life, which is quite without precedent:—‘It is hard to comfort those who are in such grief; for neither speeches nor laws can send sorrow to sleep’ ... (there follow remarks about eternal praise, which are not particularly characteristic; but he concludes in a higher strain):—‘Furthermore, if the dead are as though they had never been, our friends are released from sickness and pain and the other misadventures which afflict mankind; but if the dead have consciousness, and are under the care of God, as we believe, we may be sure that they, who upheld the honour of the gods when it was threatened, are now the objects of God’s loving kindness.’[470] Truly Socrates had not lived in vain.

The speech Against Athenogenes[471] is an admirable example of the orator’s lighter style. Its chief merit is the way in which the narrative of the events is delivered by the speaker.

Hyperides’ client, a young Athenian, wished to obtain possession of a young slave, who was employed in a perfumery-shop. Athenogenes, the owner of the shop—‘a vulgar speech-maker, and worst of all an Egyptian’—saw his opportunity for a good stroke of business, and at first refused to sell the slave. A quarrel ensued. At this point Antigona, once the most accomplished courtesan of her day, but now retired, came and offered her services to the young man. She contrived to pick up for herself a gratuity of 300 drachmas, just as a proof of his good opinion. Later, she told the young man that she had persuaded Athenogenes to release the boy, not separately, but together with his father and brother, for forty minas. The young man borrowed the money; a touching scene of reconciliation followed, Antigona exhorting the two adversaries to behave as friends in future. ‘I said that I would do so, and Athenogenes answered that I ought to be grateful to Antigona for her services; “and now,” he said, “you shall see what a kindness I will do you for her sake.”’ He offered, instead of setting the slaves free, to sell them formally to the plaintiff, who could then set them free when he liked, and so win their gratitude. As to any debts they have contracted, you can take them over; they are trifling, and the stock remaining in the shop will easily cover them.’ Assent having been given, Athenogenes produced a contract in these terms, which he had brought with him, and it was signed and sealed on the spot. Within three months the unhappy purchaser found himself liable for business debts and deposits amounting to five talents. Athenogenes made the preposterous excuse that he had not known anything about this enormous debt. His dupe was in an awkward position, as he had formally taken over the business and its liabilities. He tries to prove that the contract should be held not valid. His legal claim is very slight; the appeal is really to equity. The second part of the speech deals with Athenogenes in his political relations. The epilogue exhorts the judges to take this opportunity of punishing such a scoundrel on general grounds, even if he cannot actually be brought under any particular law.

DINARCHUS

Dinarchus, the last of the ten orators of the Alexandrian Canon, was a Corinthian by birth. He lived as a metoecus at Athens, but never obtained the citizenship, and was therefore unable to appear in the courts or the assembly. He was born about 360 B.C.; on coming to Athens he is said to have studied under Theophrastus, and he began to write speeches, as a professional logographos, about 336 B.C. He did not come into prominence till about the time of the affair of Harpalus, and his most flourishing period was after the death of Alexander, under the oligarchic constitution set up by Cassander. During these fifteen years, 322-307 B.C., he composed a large number of speeches. In 307 B.C. the democratic restoration threatened danger to all who had flourished under the oligarchy, and he retired to Chalcis in Euboea, where he lived for fifteen years.[472] He returned to Athens in 292 B.C. and stayed for a time with one Proxenos, who, taking advantage of his age and infirmity, robbed him of a large sum of money. He brought his host to justice, and, according to Dionysius and other biographers, himself spoke in court for the first time. We know nothing of the result of the case, and have no information of the rest of the life of Dinarchus or his death.[473]

Dinarchus wrote, according to Demetrius Magnes,[474] over a hundred and sixty speeches. Many of these were rejected by Dionysius, who, however, admits the authenticity of a sufficiently large number—sixty out of eighty-seven which he knew.[475] Three only have come down to us, and the authenticity of the longest of these—Against Demosthenes—was questioned by Demetrius. We shall, however, treat it as genuine, since in style and subject-matter it is very similar to the others. The three speeches, Against Demosthenes, Aristogiton, and Philocles, all relate to the affair of Harpalus. The corruption connected with this affair was so deep-rooted that it was necessary above all to find men of upright character to conduct the prosecutions, and these would not be well-known orators, since most of the prominent politicians were implicated as defendants in the case. It is hardly remarkable, therefore, that professional speech-writers should be employed or that one writer should compose speeches to be delivered in three of the many prosecutions.

Dinarchus, the last of the truly Attic orators, is of very little importance in himself, but must find a place in any history of this kind as representing the beginning of the decline of oratory. ‘He flourished most of all,’ says Dionysius, ‘after the death of Alexander, when Demosthenes and the other orators had been condemned to perpetual banishment or put to death, and there was nobody left who was worth mentioning after them.’ This contains a fairly just estimate of the merits of the man, who, according to the same critic, ‘neither invented a style of his own, like Lysias and Isocrates and Isaeus, nor perfected the inventions of others, as, in our judgment, Demosthenes, Aeschines, and Hyperides did.’[476] His merits and defects are very obvious. He knows all the technique of prose composition; he can avoid hiatus cleverly, and writes a style which is easily intelligible, even when his sentences are inordinately long. He has some skill in the use of new words and metaphors—μετοιωνίσασθαι τὴν τύχην, ‘auspicate your fortunes anew’—ἐκκαθάρατε, ‘purge him away from the State’—δευσοποιὸς πονηρία, ‘ingrained wickedness.’ He has some vigour and liveliness: abrupt statements like the following are terse and graphic enough—‘You chose prosecutors in due course; he came before the court; you acquitted him’;[477] he makes good use of rhetorical questions addressed to the defendant:—‘Did you propose any motion about it? Did you give any counsel? Did you contribute any money? Did you ever in any small matter prove serviceable to those who were working for the common safety? Not in the slightest degree’ ... etc.[478] His sarcasm, which is rare, because he is generally too directly violent to be sarcastic, is at times pointed:—‘Read again the decree which Demosthenes proposed against Demosthenes.’[479] He knows the oratorical tricks: he can flatter the jury by references to their intelligence, by praise of the Areopagus, by encomia on the virtues of their ancestors. He can appeal to ancient and modern precedent for the impartiality of judges and their severity against evil-doers.

He is at his best in the long refutation of the defence which he anticipates from Demosthenes[480]—this is, on the whole, orderly and effective—and in short passages like the following from the speech Against Philocles:

He was, then, thoroughly competent; but he was careless. He passes from section to section with no logical and little formal connection; invective takes the place of argument, and even his abuse is incoherent. Everything is overdone; other writers have produced striking effects by slight changes in the order of words; Dinarchus disarranges his order without improving the emphasis.[482] Again, the repetition of a single word may give emphasis, as thus:—‘A hireling, men of Athens, a hireling he is and has been’; but this device is used ad nauseam.[483] His sentences, great concatenations of participles and relatives, trail along like wounded snakes.[484]

Invective had its place in Athenian oratory, but when on every page we find such expressions as beast, foul creature, foul beast, scum, cheat, accursed, thief, traitor, perjurer, receiver of bribes, hireling, unclean, we feel that the orator is spitting rather than talking.[485] There is a similar lack of decency in his imputation of corrupt motives to all the public actions of Demosthenes, good or bad, and to his exaggeration of the latter’s offences. He becomes positively ridiculous when he describes Aristogiton’s first imprisonment—the first of many. Aristogiton, the worst man in Athens, or rather, in all the world ... has spent more time in prison than out ... the first time he went there he behaved so disgustingly that the other prisoners, the dregs of all the world, refused to have their meals with him, or associate with him on terms of equality.[486] This abuse of a man who is on trial for a merely political offence, is grossly over-coloured, and is probably as false as his description of Demosthenes’ callousness:—‘He went about exulting in the city’s misfortunes; he was carried in a litter down the road to Piraeus, mocking at the miseries of the poor.’ Finally, his plagiarisms from Demosthenes, Aeschines, and other orators are too numerous to record; he borrows whole passages without skill or appropriateness.[487] He borrows even from himself.[488] The ancient nicknames for him, ἀγροῖκος Δημοσθενής, κριθινός Δημοσθενής—‘the boorish Demosthenes,’ ‘the small-beer Demosthenes,’ are as apt as such characterisation can be.[489]

To sum up: the very marked decline of which Dinarchus is typical, is due not to lack of technical ability, but to lack of originality on the intellectual side, and still more to moral causes:—lack of literary conscience, shown in the plagiarisms; lack of proper care, shown in the incoherence of the whole speeches; and lack of all sense of proportion and restraint, shown by the numerous exaggerations of various kinds which have been described above.