Démosthène - Demosthenes On the crown: rhetorical perspectives

James J. Murphy

Next comes the vast army of oratorsso vast that a single age produced ten of them at Athens. Of these, Demosthenes was by far the greatest, almost a law of oratory in himself: such is his force, the concentration of his thought, his muscular firmness, his economy, his controlone feels that there is nothing lacking and nothing superfluous.

Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 10.1.76

THE RENOWN OF DEMOSTHENES

This praise of Demosthenes by the Roman rhetorician and educator Marcus Fabius Quintilianus about the year 95 in the first Christian century is typical of Demosthenes reputation in the more than two thousand years since he delivered his most famous oration, On the Crown, in 330 BCE.

Even his opponent on that occasion, Aeschines, who went into exile following his defeat in this famous case, later praised his speech to the students he was instructing on the island of Rhodes. The story is told that Aeschines had been declaiming his own crown speech to the students, who marveled that such a fine performance could still have failed to gain one-fifth of the votesthe minimum necessary under Athenian law to avoid a fine in such cases. But oh, Aeschines said, if only you had heard Demosthenes!

The Roman orator Cicero was so entranced by the speech that he translated it into Latin together with that of Aeschines. Unfortunately the translations

Later scholars so admired the oration On the Crown that they attempted to fill gaps in the text where Demosthenes refers to long-lost decrees and letters by inserting their own versions of these documents.

The speech was first printed in 1504 and has never been out of print since. In early modern times it was esteemed by such educators as Philip Melanchthon. In fact the English scholar Roger Ascham met regularly with Queen Elizabeth to read aloud the works of Demosthenes. Later Lord Brougham, a prominent English rhetorical critic, made the orator a prime example of successful oratory. In 1742 the philosopher and historian David Hume argued in Of Eloquence that Demosthenes, with his force and energy, set the standard for true taste. The Edinburgh professor Hugh Blair, whose Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783) was to have immense influence in the United States, placed Demosthenes above Cicero as an orator and ranked both of them as superior to any modern orator. Demosthenes was also heralded in the United States by such men as Chauncey Goodrich in his Yale lectures from 1822 onward.

During the early part of the twentieth century the stresses of World War I spurred still another type of interest in Demosthenes. Admired by the French for his staunch resistance to the invading Macedonians, Demosthenes was eulogized as a patriot by Premier Georges Clemenceau. On the other hand, some German writers criticized Demosthenes for pursuing the petty interests of lawyers against the great Macedonian King Philip.

As the bibliography shows, scores of writers have studied Demosthenes over the past two centuries. In recent years there has been a resurgence of scholarly interest in Demosthenes, marked by a spate of books about him. These include Demosthenes: Statesman and Orator, edited by Ian .mosthenes the Orator (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Cecil W. Wooten, Ciceros Philippics and Their Demosthenic Model: The Rhetoric of Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); Craig A. Gibson, Interpreting a Classic: Demosthenes and His Ancient Commentators (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); and Ian Worthington, Demosthenes of Athens and the Fall of Classical Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

Meanwhile the University of Texas Press has undertaken the translation of all of Demosthenes speeches in a series edited by Michael Gagarin.Demosthenes On the Crown (speech 18) is translated by Harvey Yunis in Demosthenes, Speeches 18 and 19 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005).

Clearly, interest remains strong for what Charles Rann Kennedy has called the greatest speech of the greatest orator in the world. And a speech that has been renowned for twenty-four centuries can surely tell us much about our own approach to the use of persuasion.

THE GOAL OF THIS VOLUME

It is our intention to make Demosthenes On the Crown come alive by recreating the circumstances of his speech, presenting a translation, and then offering detailed rhetorical evaluations, employing the four analytic approaches suggested by Demosthenes famous contemporary, Aristotle (384322 BCE), whose Rhetoric was the first comprehensive attempt to understand the elements of persuasive speech.

Aristotle states flatly that there are two parts of a speech; for it is necessary [first] to state the subject, and [then], to demonstrate it (Rhetoric 3.1). Consequently a large portion of his Rhetoric is concerned with methods of demonstration or proofthat is, ways in which a speaker can lead (persuade) an audience to agree with his position. Aristotle says that there are two kinds of proof, first what he calls nonartistic or preexisting proofs, which lie outside the control of the speaker; examples are laws, witness testimony, and contracts. But it is to the second type, artistic proofsthat is, proofs artistically created by the speakerthat he devotes his greatest attention.

Aristotle names three types of artistic proofs derived respectively from the speaker, the audience, and the speech.

There is persuasion through character ( ethos ) of the speaker whenever the speech is spoken in such a way as to make the speaker worthy of credence. (Rhetoric 1.2.4)

There is persuasion through the hearers when they are led to feel emotion ( pathos ) by the speech. (Rhetoric 1.2.5)

There is persuasion through the arguments ( logoi ) when we show the truth or apparent truth from whatever is persuasive in each case. (