Abstract

That the Athenians were a litigious people is a commonplace. Yet the extant dicastic speeches from the fifth and fourth centuries are the product exclusively of elite hands and overwhelmingly deal with litigation involving elites. Indeed, a significant percentage of those speeches were paid for, as individuals wealthy enough retained the services of professional speechwriters, logographoi, to help negotiate the hazards of the courts. With a few noteworthy exceptions, then, the poor are underrepresented in the corpus of the Attic orators, although invariably they constituted a plurality of the city's citizenry. In this slim volume, Victor Bers, the author a quarter century ago of an important article on the impact of juror outbursts in the Athenian courts, returns to the dicastic arena, this time to examine the practice of self-presentation by amateur and professional speakers. Explicitly Bers argues "that the professional component of the genos dikanikon represents only a portion of the speechmaking that went on in the Athenian courts; that many men constrained to rely entirely or mainly on their own resources also spoke in court." Beyond the demonstration of a sociological phenomenon, Bers argues further "that their speech in court resembled routine speech in a number of ways, and that in these they differ from professional speech; [and] that professional speech was crafted to avoid certain features of amateur speech that seemed to cause a speaker's failure... in particular those that manifested excessive emotion when it was in his interest to appear unafraid and unperturbed." These avoidance strategies Bers labels evitanda.