Among the very few papyri devoted to the work of the Attic orator Lysias, one of the most interesting is certainly P. Oxy. XXXI 2537. Dated palaeographically to the late 2nd-early 3rd century CE, it ...contains the summaries of 22 Lysianic speeches, 18 of which were formerly unknown or known just by the title and brief quotations in lexicographers. And yet, despite the undeniable richness of this collection, the papyrus has generally received little attention from modern scholarship, and no complete survey of its many aspects of significance has been yet produced. This work aims to fill this gap: along with a new transcription and critical edition based on autopsy of the papyrus, this book provides a translation and the first exhaustive commentary of the text. Through careful textual and juridical analysis, the author examines both the relationship between summaries and speeches, with a discussion of the significant legal features of each procedure, and the overall importance of this papyrus for the history of the corpus of Lysias. The book will thus be of interest for papyrologists, legal historians, students of Attic oratory, and researchers in the field of the history of the material culture of Graeco-Roman Egypt alike.
The theory of post-dialectics maintains that dialectical perspectives cannot account for the persuasive force of arguments which transgress dialectical norms. One particularly consequential form of ...post-dialectical argument, called "fascistic argument" by Paliewicz and McHendry, seeks to dominate its discursive space rather than to test claims and give reasons within the terms of that discourse. In this essay I affirm that pragma-dialectics can perceive and explain post-dialectical persuasive forces while retaining a fundamental commitment to dialectical norms. I support this claim with an analysis of the argumentative features of Lysias XII Against Eratosthenes, an instance of forensic oratory from fifth-century BCE Athens. The rhetorical analysis of Lysias XII identifies manifestations of each of Paliewicz and McHendry's five elements of fascistic argument and describes these manifestations of fascistic argument using the pragma-dialectical terminology of strategic maneuvering. The argument practices of Lysias XII diverge from the theory of fascistic argument by negating disinterested choice instead of choice per se, so they are identified with the distinct but related concept of democratic argument. I further affirm that explaining post-dialectical forces from a dialectical perspective can be enabled by enhancing the generative partnership of rhetoric and dialectics in argumentation studies.
Trends in Classics, a new series and journal to be edited by Franco Montanari and Antonios Rengakos, will publish innovative, interdisciplinary work which brings to the study of Greek and Latin texts ...the insights and methods of related disciplines such as narratology, intertextuality, reader-response criticism, and oral poetics. Both publications will seek to publish research across the full range of classical antiquity. The series Trends in Classics Studies welcomes monographs, edited volumes, conference proceedings and collections of papers; it will provide an important forum for the ongoing debate about where Classics fits in modern cultural and historical studies. The journal Trends in Classics will be published twice a year with approx. 160 pp. per issue. Each year one issue will be devoted to a specific subject with articles edited by a guest editor.
In his paper on Lysias, Dionysius of Halicarnassus characterizes the effect of Lysias’
as the power through which the listener “seems to see the things shown and to be almost in the company of the ...characters whom the orator introduces”. The capacity to give the audience a sense of being present at the narrated scene, vividly imagining the people, places, and actions, is one the most powerful instruments in Lysias’ persuasive toolbox. The ‘sense of presence’ created by Lysias’ narrative style will be approached as a form of what in cognitive literary studies has become known as
, a concept that is defined by in terms that are remarkably similar to Dionysius’ characterization of Lysias’ style, as “the experience through which a fictional world acquires the presence of an autonomous, language-independent reality populated by live human beings” (Ryan 2015, 9). Analyzing Lysias’ narrative techniques through the lens of their immersive power is interesting for several reasons. Psychological research has found evidence that highly immersed readers are more likely to be persuaded by the point of view implicit in a narrative than readers who are less immersed. Approaching Lysias’ style in terms of its immersive qualities also allows us analyze the text in terms of a wide and diverse range of linguistic and narratological devices: not only the strategic use of graphic (“vivid”) details, but also the use of verbal tense and aspect, vocatives, direct speech, the narrator’s visibility, and the narrative’s spatial and temporal organization, handling of perspective (focalization), and its capacity to raise suspense and to engage the audience’s attention and emotions.
In this article, I examine the exegetical issues of Lys. 2.59, recently analyzed by Bearzot and Todd. I argue that there is no problem in identifying in the Persians the subject of the phrase ...ἐνίκησαν µὲν ναυµαχοῦντες τοὺς Ἕλληνας οἱ πρότερον εἰς τὴν θάλατταν οὐκ ἐµβαίνοντες, and that the expression µετὰ τὴν νίκην τῶν βαρβάρων undoubtedly alludes, pace Bearzot, to the battle of Cnidus. Finally, I propose to reconsider the question concerning the chronology of Lysias’ funeral oration, generally dated to 392/1 BC.
Presentamos un estudio de los adverbios temporales εἶτα, ἔπειτα, ἔτι y προσέτι y de los adjetivos adverbializados (τό) πρῶτον y (τό) τελευταῖον en los discursos de Lisias. Nuestro propósito es ...mostrar cómo todos ellos desarrollan, a partir de su valor temporal inicial, usos discursivos que influyen en la organización del discurso.
Le sette iscrizioni, rinvenute a Pergamo e incise in origine su un lungo basamento costruito nella piazza del santuario della divinità poliade Atena Nikephoros, celebrano le vittorie conseguite da ...Attalo I all’inizio del suo regno, precisamente in un arco temporale di circa quindici anni, dal 241/240 a.C. al 224/223 a.C. I nemici sconfitti risultano essere i Galati, Antioco Ierace e gli strateghi di Seleuco III insieme a Lysias, membro della dinastia dei Filomelidi. La prima di queste vittorie, ottenuta presso le rive del fiume Caico contro i soli Galati intorno al 240 a.C., consentì ad Attalo I di assumere il titolo ufficiale di Σωτήρ e di essere riconosciuto come βασιλεύς. I successi del sovrano attalide furono tali da ricevere l’onore di altri due monumenti trionfali, eretti sempre nella piazza del santuario di Atena; in tal modo, il luogo sacro si apprestava a diventare una sorta di scrigno architettonico destinato a commemorare le vittorie dei sovrani di Pergamo, segno dell’ideologia e della propaganda dinastiche inaugurate da Attalo I e proseguite a pieno dal suo successore Eumene II.
This paper approaches Lysianic
from the methodological perspective of ‘mind style’, a concept taken from modern stylistics. It is argued that Lysias gave his speakers individualized speaking styles ...that are indicative of their characters. The narrative of Lysias 1 is used as test case, and the analysis is based on a variety of linguistic features (sentence length, particle usage, pronoun usage) and cognitive concepts (mindblindness, schemas, cognitive metaphor). It is argued that, in a variety of subtle ways, Euphiletus is portrayed linguistically as a simple man, unaware of the motives and actions of others, and as a passive experiencer rather than an active participant in his own story.
This book explores the history of rhetorical thought and examines the gradual association of different aspects of rhetorical theory with two outstanding fourth-century BCE writers: Lysias and ...Isocrates. It highlights the parallel development of the rhetorical tradition that became understood, on the one hand, as a domain of style and persuasive speech, associated with the figure of Lysias, and, on the other, as a kind of philosophical enterprise which makes significant demands on moral and political education in antiquity, epitomized in the work of Isocrates. There are two pivotal moments in which the two rhetoricians were pitted against each other as representatives of different modes of cultural discourse: Athens in the fourth century BCE, as memorably portrayed in Plato's Phaedrus, and Rome in the first century BCE when Dionysius of Halicarnassus proposes to create from the united Lysianic and Isocratean rhetoric the foundation for the ancient rhetorical tradition.
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