BMCR 2009.02.23, Edwin Carawan, Oxford Readings in the Attic Orators

Edwin Carawan (ed.), Oxford Readings in the Attic Orators. Oxford
Readings in  Classical Studies.  Oxford/New York:  Oxford University
Press, 2007.  Pp. xxiv, 450.  ISBN 9780199279937.  $45.00 (pb).

Reviewed by Jeremy Trevett, York University, Toronto
Word count:  1848 words
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Table of Contents
(http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip075/2006039353.html)

In this contribution to the series Oxford Readings in Classical Studies
Edwin Carawan usefully collects fourteen previously published pieces on
the Attic orators. The pieces, which are listed at the end of this
review, range in date from 1964 to 2000. Four are (newly) translated,
two from German, one from French and one from Danish.

It should be said at the outset that the book's title is somewhat
misleading, insofar as it suggests a rather wider-ranging selection
than Carawan has chosen to offer. As he writes in the preface: 'For
this volume I have set a rather narrow focus but one that should prove
useful to scholars and students in a range of disciplines: the
intersection of rhetoric and law.' What this means in practice is that
judicial oratory predominates, and the deliberative and epideictic
genres are largely passed over. This gives the collection a tight
focus, but at the cost of a certain thematic narrowness. Readers
interested in Demosthenes' speeches to the Athenian assembly, or the
epideictic works of Isocrates, will find little of direct relevance
here.

The material is divided into three sections. The first, entitled 'The
lost art and the first written speeches', includes an extract from
Lavency's book on speech-writing, and articles discussing the
relationship between a speech-writer and his client (Usher), arguing
that Corax was not a real person but the nickname of the early Sicilian
rhetorician Tisias (Cole), and suggesting that Lysias 1 is a work of
fiction rather than a real speech (Porter).

The second and longest section is entitled 'The tools of argument:
procedure and proof'. It contains Wolff's essay on 'Demosthenes as
advocate', an extract from Meyer-Laurin's book on equity in Athenian
law, and articles on the use of witnesses in court (Humphreys), on
Antiphon's handling of proofs (Gagarin), on what Aristotle calls
'artless' proofs (Carey), and on the evidence of slaves extracted under
torture (Mirhady).

The third section, 'Casting the jury', offers a chapter from Ober's
Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens, and articles on the social
composition of juries (Todd), on the use of arguments about the
precedent that the decision of the jury will set (Rubinstein), and on
Demosthenes' representation of recent history in his speech On the
Crown in tragic terms (Yunis).

The individual pieces are all of high quality, and in many cases have
proved very influential in shaping our understanding both of law-court
oratory and more broadly of the administration of justice in classical
Athens. Their organization into three thematically arranged sections
works well, with the second section proving particularly cohesive. The
only piece whose inclusion might be thought questionable on grounds of
relevance is that of Cole: his is an important study of early rhetoric,
but it has little to do with the Attic Orators.

On matters that have been hotly debated Carawan expresses a wish to
avoid 'antilogies', preferring to give one side only (p. xiii). Thus on
the question of whether speeches were composed by the writer and his
client in collaboration he includes Usher's article arguing that they
did not, but not the chapter of K. J. Dover's Lysias and the Corpus
Lysiacum of which it is a critique. One understands that there is only
so much space available, and that choices have to be made, but it seems
oddly imbalanced to have Mirhady write an epilogue to his by no means
uncontroversial article 'Torture and rhetoric in Athens', in which he
summarizes and seeks to rebut criticisms that have been made of the
article, rather than (say) reprint the brief critique 'Reply to D. C.
Mirhady' by Gerhard Thuer that accompanied the article's original
publication (JHS 116, 1996, 132-4).

Carawan seeks to explain his selection of material as follows: 'The
aims of the series have shaped the content to some degree: I have not
included any essay that can already be found in a recent collection of
wide distribution; I preferred to revisit articles that have been
influential but may not be easily available (not to overlook those that
appeared in major journals).' (p. v). Since the aims of the series are
not set out in this volume, it is impossible to tell to what degree
they have shaped its content.[[1]] But the principle of selection
offered by Carawan does not seem entirely coherent. If it is
appropriate to exclude any essay that can be found 'in a recent
collection of wide distribution', one wonders what justification there
is for including articles published in such major journals as JHS or
CPh, since these are likely to be at least as readily accessible as the
former.[[2]] To my mind it would have been preferable if the editor had
chosen either to restrict his selection to material that is currently
not easily available, or to include the most important work on the
judicial aspects of Attic oratory, regardless of its availability
elsewhere.

There is a further aspect of the issue of availability about which
Carawan is conspicuously silent: the rapid and continuing growth in the
online storage of scholarly books and journals. Most potential users of
this volume are likely to have access via a university library to such
online archives of scholarly journals as JSTOR and Project MUSE, as
well as to electronic copies of books. Of the fourteen pieces in this
volume no fewer than five (Usher, Gagarin, Mirhady, Ober and Todd) are
available in electronic format through my university library. Some
readers may reasonably regard this as a disincentive to buying the book
for themselves, or to requiring their students to buy it as a
course-reader. Volumes of this kind are likely to have a future only
insofar as their editors provide sufficient 'added value' via
introductions, glosses and translations of unfamiliar terms,
consolidated bibliographies and indices, and the like.

Carawan has certainly tried hard to make the material fully accessible
to a wide range of readers. All Greek has been either translated or
transliterated, and there is a lengthy and very helpful glossary of
Greek and Latin terms. The one piece for which more should have been
done to help the reader is Cole's, where the Greek is transliterated
but not always translated or explained, either in the article itself or
in the glossary. In addition there is a quantity of untranslated Latin
(generally confined to the notes) as well as a sprinkling of German
words and phrases (Mittelquelle, Eikostechnik, redende Namen, etc.) in
the body of the article. Cole's argument is in any case complex and
technical in character, and I fear that the lay reader will find this
piece hard going.

Of the translations, those from German (Wolff and Meyer-Laurin) are,
insofar as I can judge, competently done.[[3]] The latter reads a
little awkwardly in places, but the meaning is never unclear. I do,
however, have reservations about George Kennedy's translation of
Lavency, which is no better than serviceable. In general it inclines
more to the literal than to the fluent: to take an example more or less
at random, 'They [sc. speech-writers] were naturally attentive to
exploit in the best way possible all the sources of information at
their disposal' (p. 7) is a word-for-word rendering of the French ('Ils
e/taient naturellement attentifs a\ exploiter au mieux toutes les
sources d'information dont ils pouvaient disposer.'), but is clumsy
English. There are also a fair number of errors. In the very first
paragraph verbs in the present tense ('leurs compositions sont
considere/es comme parfaitement re/ussies quand les discours qu'ils
produisent ne ressemblent pas ...') are arbitrarily rendered in the
perfect tense ('their compositions have been considered perfectly
successful when the speeches they produced did not at all resemble
...') (p. 3). On p. 4 'discours', the standard French word for a
speech, is misleadingly translated as 'discourse'. And on p. 7
'L'essentiel e/tait pour ce dernier de se re/presenter, pour la saper,
la position que la partie adverse allait adopter.' emerges as 'It was
essential for the writer to picture himself, to know the position his
adversary was going to adopt.' Here the French verb 'saper', to
undermine, seems to have been confused with the Italian 'sapere', to
know. These are not isolated errors, and I regret to have to conclude
that anyone who can read French would be better served consulting the
original.

The main text is mostly free of typographical errors, though the
bibliography contains a few. More seriously, for a work that aims for
maximum accessibility, many journal titles are abbreviated, and for
elucidation the reader is directed towards either the third edition of
the Oxford Classical Dictionary or L'Anne/e Philologique, the former of
which (at any rate) offers no help for such abbreviations as AU (= Der
Altsprachliche Unterricht) or AN (= Ancient Narrative). It would have
been preferable, and little extra work, to have given journal titles in
full.

To conclude, this volume provides a well-chosen and thematically
coherent, albeit narrow, cross-section of scholarly work on the
judicial speeches of the Attic orators, and generally succeeds in its
aim of making that work accessible to readers who are not specialists
in the field and/or do not read Greek.

Contents:

1. M. Lavency, 'The Written Plea of the Logographer' tr. from Aspects
de la logographie judiciaire attique (Louvain  1964) 124-151, tr. G.
Kennedy.
2. S. Usher, 'Lysias and his Clients' = GRBS 17 (1976) 31-40
3. T. Cole, 'Who Was Corax?' = Illinois Classical Studies [abbreviate?]
16 (1991) 65-84
4. J. R. Porter, 'Adultery by the Book: Lysias 1 (On the Murder of
Eratosthenes) and Comic Diegesis' =  EMC 40 (1997) 421-453
5. H. J. Wolff, 'Demosthenes as Advocate: The Functions and Methods of
Legal Consultants in Classical Athens', tr. from Demosthenes als
Advokat: Fuktionen und Methoden des Prozesspraktikers im klassischen
Athen (Berlin 1968), tr. J. Miner in collaboration with G.  Thuer, with
epilogue by Gerhard Thuer
6. H. Meyer-Laurin, 'Law and Equity in the Attic Trial', tr. from
Gesetz und Billigkeit im attischen Prozess, Graezistische Abhandlungen
1 (Weimar 1965) 1-31, tr. D. Mirhady
7. S. C. Humphreys 'Social Relations on Stage: Witnesses in Classical
Athens' =  History and Anthropology 1 (1985) 313-369, with postscript
by author.
8. M. Gagarin, 'The Nature of Proofs in Antiphon' = CPh 85 (1990)
22-32, with bibliographical update by author.
9. C. Carey, '"Artless Proofs" in Aristotle and the Orators' = BICS 39
(1994) 95-106
10. D. Mirhady, 'Torture and Rhetoric in Athens' = JHS 116 (1996)
119-131, with epilogue by author.
11. J. Ober, 'Ability and Education: The Power of Persuasion', from
Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens; Rhetoric, Ideology and the Power
of the People (Princeton, 1989) 156-191
12. S. Todd, '"Lady Chatterley's Lover" and the Attic Orators: The
Social Composition of the Athenian Jury' = JHS 110 (1990) 146-173, with
retrospective by author.
13. L. Rubinstein, 'Arguments from Precedent in the Attic Orators' tr.
from 'Praecedensargumenter I de attiske retstaler' in C. G. Tortzen and
T. H. Nielsen (eds.), Gammel Dansk (Copenhagen, 1995) 80-84
14. H. Yunis, 'Politics as Literature: Demosthenes and the Burden of
the Athenian Past' = Arion 8 (2000) 97-118
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Notes:


1.   The  home page
(http://www.oup.co.uk/oxfordtextbooks/classics/ORCS)  of the series
offers only a list of the volumes in it.

2.   It is not clear what counts as 'a recent collection [sc. of
articles on the Attic orators] of wide distribution'. My best guess is
that C. is thinking of such collections as P. Cartledge, P. Millett and
S. Todd (eds.), Nomos: Essays in Athenian Law, Politics, and Society
(Cambridge, 1990), which is not concerned with the Attic Orators as
such.

3.   Rubinstein's piece was originally published in Danish but began
life as an English-language paper (see introductory note, p. 359) and
has been translated into English by its author.