Dobson The Greek Orators

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63295-743-6
Verlag: Charles River Editors
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch

The Pergamum Collection publishes books history has long forgotten. We transcribe books by hand that are now hard to find and out of print.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dobson, J. F.

Leseproben

§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 : t??? µ?? pepe??aµa? p??a t??? p??s????t??, t??? d’ ??de?? e?µ? µ?a???? t??? s?µ?????t??, 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: ?.      ?? µ?? yáp µ’ ?de? ?a??pa?eî? t?? s?µat? µetà t??? a?t?a? t??? ?? p??s????s??, a. ??ta???î ??d?? µ’ ?????se? ? ?µpe???a, ?.       ?? d? µe deî s?????a? µetà t??? ????e?a? e?p??ta tà ?e??µe?a, ß. ?? t??t? µe ß??pte? ? t??? ???e?? ?d??aµ?a. 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 ???µ?? and ??µ?? 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 in flexional 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; 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 ???wµa?—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 pe??epese? o?? ??? ??e?e? —’ 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 d??? ??ße???se?—’ May justice steer my course ‘ ; ??w?te? ?at??????µe?a—’ 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—???at?? yàp ? µet????a t??? t????t?? ?st??— ‘ 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’ (s??µata d?a???a?) such as irony and rhetorical questions, so frequent in Demosthenes, are scarcely used by Antiphon. There is no instance either of the hypocritical reticence (pa???e??i?), 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. 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. 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. 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...