The Attic Orators

Description

The `Attic Orators' have left us a hundred speeches for lawsuits, a body of work that reveals an important connection between evolving rhetoric and the jury trial. The essays in this volume explore that formative linkage, representing the main directions of recent work on the Orators: the emergence of technical manuals and ghost-written speeches for prospective litigants; the technique for adapting documentary evidence to common-sense notions about probable motives and typical characters; and profiling the jury as the ultimate arbiter of values. An Introduction by the editor explores the speechwriter's art in terms of the imagined community. Four essays appear in English here for the first time, and all Greek has been translated. The written plea of the logographer / Marius Lavency -- Lysias and his clients / Stephen Usher -- Who was Corax? / Thomas Cole -- Adultery by the book : Lysias 1 (on the murder of Eratosthenes) and comic diegesis / John R. Porter -- Demosthenes as advocate : the functions and methods of legal consultants in classical Athens / Hans Julius Wolff with an epilogue by Gerhard Thr -- Law and equity in the Attic trial / Harald Meyer Laurin -- Social relations on stage : witnesses in classical Athens / S.C. Humphreys -- The nature of proofs in antiphon / Michael Gagarin -- Artless proofs in Aristotle and the orators / Christopher Carey -- Torture and rhetoric in Athens / David Mirhady -- Ability and education : the power of persuasion / Josiah Ober -- Lady Chatterley's lover and the Attic orators : the social composition of the Athenian jury / Stephen Todd -- Arguments from precedent in the Attic orators / Lene Rubinstein -- Politics as literature : Demosthenes and the burden of the Athenian past / Harvey Yunis.