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Hardy Hansen
Contents
- Sketches of Various Authors: Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria
- Thucydides on Antiphon
- Gorgias' Distinctive Style
- Opinions on Thucydides
- Dionysios of Halikarnassos on Lysias
- Comments on the Style and Career of Isokrates
- Dionysios of Halikarnassos on Plato
- Opinions on Demosthenes
- Cicero on Asianic Style
- Demetrios on Periodic Style
Sketches of Various Authors: Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria
(10.1.73) Many have written history outstandingly, but no one doubts that two are to be placed far ahead of the rest; their diverse excellence has achieved almost equal praise. Thucydides is compact and brief and always urging himself on; Herodotos is sweet and clear and expansive. The first is better with excited emotions, the second with calm ones; the first with speeches, the second with conversations; the first at being forceful, the second at giving pleasure.(76) There follows a large group of orators, in view of the fact that a single era brought forth ten at the same time in Athens. Of these Demosthenes was by far the first and was almost a law of speaking: there is such force in him, everything is so compact, so tautened with sinews, as it were, so absent is anything pointless--such a measured way of speaking that you could not find what is lacking in him or what is redundant.
(77) Aeschines is fuller and more diffuse and more like a grandiloquent orator since he is less constrained. Nonetheless, he has more flesh, less muscle. Hyperides is especially pleasant and pointed, but fit rather for lesser, not to say more paltry, cases.
(78) Lysias, preceding these in age, is simple and elegant and someone than whom, if it should be enough for an orator to instruct (his audience), you would not seek anything more perfect: there is nothing otiose, nothing recherche; he is closer, however, to a pure spring than a great river.
(79) Isokrates, polished and refined in a different type of speaking and more suited to the palaestra than to a (real) fight, pursued all the charms of speaking, and not wrongly: for he had prepared himself for lecture-halls, not courtrooms: he was adept at invention, mindful of the good, and in his composition so painstaking that his diligence is faulted.
. . . . .
(81) Of philosophers, from whom Marcus Tullius admits that he took the greatest part of his eloquence, who could doubt that Plato is outstanding, whether for his subtlety of argument or his divine, one might say, and Homeric gift of discourse? For he often rises above prose diction and that which the Greeks call pedestrian ("on foot, walking") so that he seems to me to be driven not by the talent of a human being but by some Delphic oracle.
(82) Why should I recall that unaffected pleasantness of Xenophon--which, however, no artifice could achieve--so that the Graces themselves seem to have shaped his speech, and the testimony of old comedy about Pericles can be transferred most justly to him: that the goddess of persuasion, as it were, sat upon his lips.
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Thucydides on Antiphon
(8.68.1-20) . . . The one, however, who organized the entire affair so that it came to this point and who took the most care over it was Antiphon, a man second to none of the Athenians of his time in virtue and best at taking thought (about affairs) and at speaking what he thought, not (however) coming forward to the people (to speak) nor willingly to any other contest, but viewed suspiciously by the mass because of a reputation for cleverness; able nonetheless most greatly as one individual to help those contending both in court and in the assembly, whoever consulted him on any point. And he himself, when later the faction of the four hundred was overthrown by the people and was badly treated, when he was accused on these very points, that he helped to establish (the tyranny), defended himself on a capital charge manifestly most ably of people up to my time.
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Gorgias' Distinctive Style
(Aristotle, Rhetoric 1404a24-29)
And since poets, although saying simple things, seemed to attain their reputation because of their style, for this reason poetic prose-style first came into being, for example that of Gorgias, and now, still, the majority of uneducated people think that people of this sort speak most beautifully. But this is not so; rather, the style of speech and of poetry is different.
(Diodorus Siculus 12.53.2-5)
And the ambassador-in-chief of the delegation was Gorgias the rhetor, who greatly excelled those of his own time in cleverness of speech. This one both first discovered artistic principles of rhetoric and so much excelled the rest in his teaching as to take one hundred minas as salary from his students. Then, arriving at Athens and brought before the people, he spoke to the Athenians about the alliance (with Leontinoi) and astounded the Athenians with the novelty of his style, since they were naive and fond of hearing speeches. For he first employed figures of speech both unusual and excelling in artfulness--antitheses and isokola and homoioteleuta and some other things of this sort, which then, on the one hand, were thought worthy of acceptance on account of the novelty of their contrivance, but now seem over-elaborate and appear laughable when they are used often and tiresomely. Finally, upon persuading the Athenians to enter into alliance with the people of Leontinoi, Gorgias, marveled at in Athens for his rhetorical art, made his way back to Leontinoi.
(Dionysios of Halikarnassos, Lysias 3)
And Gorgias the Leontinian makes this clear, since he makes his artistic expression in many places quite vulgar and pompous, and expresses some things 'not far from dithyrambs' [Plato, Phaidros 238d]--both he and, of his fellow-troupers, those associated with Likymnios and Polos. And poetic and figurative style took hold of the rhetors at Athens, as Timaios, on the one hand, says [frag. 95, FHG 1.216], because Gorgias started it when, as an ambassador to Athens, he astounded his audience with his declamation, but as the truth holds, because this sort of speech was always the subject of some wonderment even earlier. Thucydides, at any rate, the most marvelous of authors, both in the funeral oration and in the declamations, by using poetic artifice at many points transformed his style toward pompousness and, at the same time, a rather recherche choice of words.
(Dionysios of Halikarnassos, Demosthenes 5)
(Plato's style) luxuriates inappropriately and childishly in poetic figures which bring the most extreme disgust and especially in the Gorgianic figures.
(Cicero, De Oratore 3.129)
. . . And he first of all dared, in a gathering of people, to ask on which subject each one wanted to hear (a speech); so great an honor was given him by Greece that to him alone of all at Delphi a statue not gilded but golden was erected.
(Plato, Symposion 198c1-5)
For in fact (Agathon's) speech reminded me of Gorgias, so that I had exactly that feeling Homer describes [Odyssey 11.633-35]: I was afraid that at the end of his speech Agathon would send a "Gorgias' head", fearsome of speech, against my speech and turn me to stone myself with muteness.Gorgias' Audience: Thucydides 3.38.5-7
Kleon berates the Athenian ekklesia during the debate on Mytilene, a few months before Gorgias' arrival at Athens in 427.And when there is novelty of speech (you are) best at being deceived, but when there is tried and proven speech (you are best at) not wishing to follow along, since you are slaves of what on each occasion is unheard-of, and sneerers at what is familiar, and each of you wants personally to have the ability to speak, or if not, you contend with each other so as to seem not to lag behind in following in your mind the ones speaking thus and to applaud early when someone is saying something acutely, and you are eager to apprehend early what is being said and slow to recognize early the results which will come from it, and you are searching after something other, to put it thus, than the world in which we live while taking no sufficient thought about your present circumstances. Simply, you are overcome by the pleasure of hearing and resemble people sitting and watching sophists rather than deliberating about the city.
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Dionysios of Halikarnassos on Lysias
(Lysias 2) He is entirely pure in his style and the best canon of Attic speech, not the archaic speech which Plato and Thucydides employ, but the speech prevalent at that time. . . . (3) . . . and he makes his subject matter seem dignified and out of the ordinary and great while using the commonest words and not resorting to poetic artifice. . . .(4) I declare that the third excellence about the man is his clarity, not only that in his words but also in the matters which he treats. For there is also a certain clarity of subject matter not known to many. I make this judgment because in the diction of Thucydides and Demosthenes, who were most adept at expressing matters, many things are hard for us to divine and unclear and in need of interpreters. But Lysias' diction is all lucid and clear even to one who seems to stand at a great remove from political speeches. . . .
(5) . . . Further, he is brief, as sufficing for a private citizen wanting to make matters clear, but as for a rhetor seeking to display an abundance of power, not sufficient. . . . (6) After these virtues I find in Lysias an excellence altogether marvelous, in which Theophrastos, on the one hand, says that Thrasymachos led the way, I, on the other hand, Lysias: . . . diction which condenses and expresses in closely rounded form his thoughts, very appropriate and indeed necessary for courtroom speeches and for every true contest. . . .
(7) And Lysias' style also has vividness to a great extent. . . . (8) And I assign to him then also the most seemly excellence, called by many character-drawing. . . . And further, he puts his words together quite unassumingly and simply, since he sees that character comes not in the period and in rhythms but in the loose style. . . . (9) And I think that Lysias' style has propriety no less than any of the ancient orators, the best and most complete excellence of them all, since I observe that his style is fully fitted both to the speaker and to the audience and to the matter at hand (for in these and in relation to these is propriety). . . .
(10) . . . There is no one who does not agree, learning from both first-hand experience and hearsay, that he is of all orators the most persuasive. . . . And I shall demonstrate one more excellence yet of the orator, judging it most beautiful, most powerful, and itself alone able to establish the character of Lysias more than the rest, in which no one of later orators excelled him, though many imitated it. . . . And what is this excellence? The charm blossoming equally over all his words, a thing greater than all speech and more wondrous. . . .