Ancient Criticism: Continued
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Dionysios of Halikarnassos on Plato
(Demosthenes 5)
But Plato's language, in fact, wants, on the one hand, to be, even itself,
a mixture of both the styles, the elevated and the plain, . . . But by
its nature it is not equally felicitous as regards both styles. When, on
the one hand, he pursues the plain and simple and un-artificial style,
it is extraordinarily pleasant and appealing. For it is satisfyingly pure
and transparent, like the clearest of streams, and precise and elegant
beyond any other writing of those who have crafted the same style. It pursues
commonness of vocabulary and aims for clarity, disdaining all unnecessary
artifice. And the patina of antiquity quietly and stealthily comes over
it and produces a flower fresh and thriving and full of bloom. And just
as from the most fragrant meadows, a sweet breeze is borne from it. And
it seems to display neither shrill babbling nor clever theatricality.
But whenever it takes an immoderate rush toward unusual expressions
and prettified words--which it is accustomed to do often- -it falls far
short of itself. For in fact it appears rather unpleasant and less properly
Greek and somewhat bloated, and it dims what is clear and makes it like
darkness and it draws the thought out a great distance, when it ought to
round it off in a few words. And it flows forth into tasteless periphrases,
showing off an empty profusion of words; and disdaining normal words and
those used in their normal sense, it seeks invented and strange and archaistic
ones. And it founders most as regards figurative language, abounding in
epithets, untimely in metonymies, harsh and inexact in metaphors. And it
produces many extended allegories which have neither measure nor appropriateness.
And it luxuriates inappropriately and childishly in poetic figures which
bring the most extreme disgust and especially in the Gorgianic figures.
And there is a great deal of the charlatan about him in passages of this
sort, as Demetrios of Phaleron has said somewhere and quite a few others
before him. "For the tale is not my own."
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Opinions on Demosthenes
(Dionysios of Halikarnassos, Demosthenes 8)
Demosthenes, finding political speech in such a state (thus tending in
various directions) and succeeding such great men, thought it right to
be the emulator of no one man or style--he thought all of them were half-formed
and incomplete--but gathering from them all everything that was best and
most useful, he wove it all together and set about perfecting one diction
out of many: magniloquent and simple, extraordinary and ordinary, novel
and usual, elevated and straightforward, severe and festive, emotive and
relaxed, pleasant and bitter, showing character and inspiring passion,
differing not at all from Proteus, storied among the ancients. . . .
(ibid. 22)
When, on the one hand, I read one of Isokrates' speeches, . . . I become
morally serious in temper and I have a great tranquility of mind, like
those listening to flute-playing in spondaic rhythm or Doric and harmonious
melodies. But when I pick up one of Demosthenes' speeches, I become possessed
and I'm drawn this way and that, taking on one emotion in succession to
another--doubting, struggling, fearing, sneering, hating, pitying, approving,
angry, spiteful--taking on all the emotions, as many as naturally control
the human mind. And I seem to myself no different from those celebrating
the rites of the Great Mother and the korybantic rites and as many as are
similar to these. . . .
(ibid. 33)
. . . dividing style, on the one hand, into the three most general types,
the spare and the elevated and the one between these; demonstrating, on
the other hand, that he succeeds most of all (more than the rest) in the
three kinds. . . .
(ibid. 36)
Whence some, on the one hand, pursue the tranquil and weighty and austere
and archaizing and dignified composition, one which avoids everything clever;
others, on the other hand, pursue the smooth and clear-voiced and theatrical
composition, which displays much that is clever and soft, that by which
festive assemblies and the crowd collected together are charmed; others
still, assembling from either diction the most useful elements, aimed for
the mixed, middle way.
(ibid. 50)
[Distinctive features of Demosthenes' composition (sunthesis) are harmony,
good rhythm, and: . . . varying in every possible way and structuring with
great variety his kola and his periods. . . .]
(Dionysios of Halikarnassos, On Thucydides 53)
But of orators Demosthenes alone, just as of the others, as many as had
a reputation for composing something great and splendid in speeches, so
also of Thucydides became an emulator in many respects and added (some
excellent qualities) to his political speeches, taking them from him, qualities
which neither Antiphon nor Lysias nor Isokrates, who stood first among
orators of that time, possessed--I mean Thucydides' swift and concentrated
and forceful expressions and his harshness and compactness and that formidable
quality which rouses passions.
But the recherche and unfamiliar and poetic quality of Thucydides' diction
he left aside, not considering it appropriate for real contests, nor did
he approve Thucydides' arrangement of figures straying far from the natural
sequence and his apparent solecism, but rather Demosthenes stayed with
customary vocabulary, adorning his style with changes and variety and by
expressing no thought simply, without adornment. But the convoluted sentences,
expressing a great deal in few words and completing the sense at a great
distance and conveying the arguments in an unexpected way, he emulated,
and he included them in his political and judicial speeches, less so in
the private ones, more abundantly in the public contests.
(Cicero, Orator 234)
. . . (Demosthenes') lightning-bolts would not fly with such force, if
they were not borne along by the torsion of rhythm.
(Cicero, Brutus 289-291)
"Let us imitate Demosthenes then." Good gods! What else, I ask, are we
doing, or what else do we want? But we don't achieve it. For of course,
those Atticists of ours do achieve what they want! They don't even realize
this, that it it was not only traditionally so recalled but necessarily
true, that when Demosthenes was about to speak, crowds from all of Greece
gathered to hear him. But when those Atticists are speaking, they are deserted
not only by the audience--which itself is a pitiful thing--but even by
their supporters. Therefore if it is characteristic of Atticists to speak
in a straitened and thin way, let them by all means be Attic. But let them
come (only) into the comitium, let them address (only) a standing judge;
the benches (full of spectators) demand a larger and fuller voice.
I want an orator to achieve this: when people hear that he is going
to speak, places are taken on the benches, the tribunal is filled, scribes
earn favor by giving or yielding a place; the circle of spectators is full
of all sorts of people, the (presiding) judge is alert; when he who will
speak rises, there are calls for silence from the spectators, then frequent
sounds of assent, many of wonderment; laughter, when he wishes; when he
wishes, tears; so that whoever should see this from a distance, even if
he should not know what is going on, would understand nonetheless that
it was pleasing the audience and that a Roscius was on the stage.
If anyone should achieve this, let it be known that he speaks in the
Attic manner, as we hear about Perikles, about Hyperides, about Aeschines,
indeed about Demosthenes himself most of all. If, however, they approve
a pointed, sensible, and also pure and solid and dry style of speaking
and do not make use of that weightier oratorical ornament and want this
to belong to Atticists, they praise it correctly. For there is, in so great
and so varied an art, a place even for this fine subtlety. Thus it will
transpire that not all who speak in the Attic way speak well but that all
who speak well speak Attic.
[Longinus], On the Sublime 16
Here, however, the topic of rhetorical figures also has its place. For
in fact these things, if they are arranged in the proper way, as I said,
would be no small part of grandeur. Nonetheless, since to go into everything
in detail at present would require much labor--or rather, would be an endless
task, we shall in fact recount a few of those things which help to achieve
grandiloquence, in order to prove the present point. Demosthenes introduces
a demonstration of (the correctness of) his political acts. What was the
natural way to employ it? "You were not wrong who took up the struggle
for the freedom of the Greeks, and you have precedents for this close to
home. For neither were the men at Marathon wrong, nor those at Salamis,
nor those at Plataia."
But when, as if inspired suddenly by a god and, as it were, becoming
possessed by Phoibos, he intoned the oath by the finest warriors of Greece
("It isn't possible that you were wrong--no, not by the men who bore the
brunt of danger at Marathon. . ."), manifestly, through the single figure
of Oath, which I here term apostrophe, he both deifies his forebears, by
presenting the idea that we must swear by those who thus died as by gods,
and he lends to those sitting in judgment the high-minded pride of those
who bore dangers on behalf of others in those places, and he transforms
the nature of his demonstration into an overwhelming sublimity and emotional
force which lends full credence to strange and mighty oaths, and at the
same time he instills a healing and curative reasoning into the souls of
his hearers so that, lifted up by the encomia, they may take pride no less
in the battle against Philip than in the victories at Marathon and Salamis.
By means of all these things Demosthenes, with his figurative expression,
snatched up his audience and ran away with them.
And yet they say that the seed of the oath was found in Eupolis:
No, by my battle at Marathon,
not one of them will take pleasure in paining my heart!
(Frag. 90 Kock; cf. Euripides, Medea 395-98)
But it is not grand to swear by just anyone in any way, but (this depends
on) where and how and in what circumstances and for what reason (one swears).
But in Eupolis, on the one hand, there is nothing but an oath, and one
directed at the Athenians when they were still fortunate and not in need
of comforting, nor did the poet deify the men in his oath, in order that
he might engender a proper reckoning of their virtue in his hearers, but
from those who bore the danger he veered off to the inanimate: the battle.
In Demosthenes, on the other hand, the oath is accomplished before a defeated
audience, so as for Chaironeia no longer to seem a failure for the Athenians,
and one and the same thing, as I said, is at once a demonstration that
they were not wrong, an example, a proof, an encomium, and a moral exhortation.
And since (someone would probably have) replied to the orator, "You
speak of a defeat in your political career, then you swear by victories?"--for
this reason he measures everything in order and securely sets out facts
and names, showing that even amid Bacchic revels one must be sober. He
says, "the men who bore the brunt of danger at Marathon and the ones who
fought sea-battles at Salamis and off Artemision and those who took their
stand at Plataia." Nowhere did he say "those who were victorious", but
everywhere he hid away the proper name of the outcome, since it was successful
and opposite to the events at Chaironeia. For this reason he also immediately
anticipates his hearer and carries him away: "all of whom the city buried
publicly, Aischines, not the successful ones alone."
Timokles (a 4th-c. B.C.E. poet of Middle Comedy), fragment 12, lines 4-7
Briareos [Demosthenes],
the one who eats catapults and spears,
a man who hates words and has never yet
uttered a single antithesis, but glares like Ares.
Demosthenes and Cicero Compared: Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 10.1.106
I judge most of their virtues similar: good judgment, (skill in) arrangement,
sound technique in dividing (the parts of the speech}, preparing the way,
and proving the case--everything, in sum, which belongs to invention. In
their style of speaking there is a certain difference: Demosthenes is denser,
Cicero more copious; D. bounds (his sentences) more tightly, C. more broadly;
D. always fights with a sharp point, C. often also with weight; from D.
nothing can be subtracted, to C. nothing can be added; of craft there is
more in D., in C. more of nature.
([Longinus], On the Sublime 12.4-5)
In no other respect than this, it seems to me, dearest Terentianus (if,
that is, it is permitted us too, as Greeks, to have an opinion), that Cicero
differs from Demosthenes in grandiloquent passages. For Demosthenes mostly
(is involved) in a rugged sublimity, Cicero in effusiveness. Our writer,
because he burns and ravages everything, as it were, with force, and also
with swiftness, strength, and formidable utterance, one could compare to
a bolt of thunder or lightning. But Cicero, I think, like a wide-spreading
fire ranges everywhere and rolls along, always with a strong and insistent
burning, renewed now here, now there, and nurtured in relays within him.
But this you Romans could better judge. The occasion for the Demosthenic
and tensioned elevation is in forceful passages and displays of strong
passion and where one must altogether astound the hearer; that for effusiveness,
when one must flood him with words. For it is appropriate for commonplaces
and perorations, for the most part, and digressions and all descriptive
and epideictic passages, and historical and scientific writings, and not
a few other classes (of writing).
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Cicero on Asianic Style
(Brutus 325)
But if we are asking why Hortensius flourished in speaking more as a young
man than as an older man, we shall find two reasons most true. First, that
the Asiatic type of oratory was more suited to youth than to old age. There
are, moreover, two types of Asiatic style: one clear and full of pointed
thoughts, thoughts not so much weighty and severe as balanced and graceful.
. . .
The other type, however, is not so much filled with thoughts as swift
and agitated with words, the sort of style which is (spread) throughout
Asia (Minor), characterized not only by a flowing river of speech but also
by an ornate and sophisticated sort of vocabulary . . . In these (writers)
there was an admirable flow of speaking, but an elaborate concinnity of
sentences was absent.
(Orator 212-213)
Further, the period ends in rather many ways, of which Asia has especially
followed one which is called the dichoreus, when the two final feet are
chorei [i.e., trochees], that is consisting of single longs and shorts.
(For one must explain, since the same feet are named with different words
by different people.) In itself, the dichoreus is not wrong in clausulae,
but in the rhythm of oratory nothing is so wrong as when it is always the
same.
(Orator 230)
In others, moreover, and among the Asiatic school, who are most enslaved
to rhythm, you can find certain empty words introduced as if to fill out
rhythms. There are even those who, because of that fault which flowed especially
from Hegesias, by breaking off and cutting short their cadences fall into
a certain undignified style of speaking which most resembles little verses.
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