Conclusions

Peter Wilson has explored the way in which the tragic is treated in oratory. Tragedy can certainly be a source of edifying examples, but also tragic coloring or imagery can often evoke an air of strong censure: that tends to focus on spectacularly dysfunctional families, but there is also a sense that ‘‘tragic’’ behavior in public life may suggest ‘‘putting on a performance,’’ and doing so transgressively - too much violent bluster and not enough substance, a failure to demarcate adequately what belongs in literature from what should be the case in reality. (See Wilson 1991, 182-86; 1996; 1997, 81-85; and 2000a, 148-51; cf. Ober and Strauss 1990, 257-58; Hall 1995, 54-55; the most explicit cases are Andocides 1.129, [Andocides] 4.20-23, Antiphon 1.17, Demosthenes 21.149). This chapter has investigated the mirroring phenomenon of the rhetorical in tragedy, and the types of suspicion aroused there are not wholly different, again pointing to too much of a misleading or disturbing performance. That disquiet may point in any of our three directions, illuminating the speaker, the audience, or the distance of it all from reality.

None of these themes is surprising in the intellectual world of fifth-century Athens. Thucydides too presents us with speakers who persuade so easily because the audience is so ready to be persuaded (Alcibiades at 6.16-18, and ironically Nicias too at 6.2023) and with speakers who have no chance because the affair is already prejudged (the Plataeans at 3.53-59); speakers who strike the right note for the occasion but whose words raise questions about their relation to the truth (Nicias urging the Athenians that all is not hopeless at 7.61-64, and in a different way even Pericles’ funeral speech at 2.35-46); debates with a dynamic that illuminates a political scene (the Mytilenean debate at 3.36-49, the debate at Syracuse at 6.32-41); speeches that raise questions about the speaker’s sincerity (Alcibiades at Sparta, 6.89-92); speeches that make claims which may be thought-provoking in ways deeper than the speakers or listeners know (Cleon’s claim that democracy cannot rule an empire at 3.37.1, or Alcibiades’ that his fame and Athens’ will be inextricably connected at 6.16); speeches that are most illuminating for arguing in unexpected ways (Euphemus at Camarina, 6.8287); speeches that explore broader themes of human nature, vindictiveness, and empire (Diodotus in book 3, Hermocrates in book 4, the Melian Dialogue in book 5). There as here, it is the variety of uses to which rhetoric can be put that is striking; all are thought-provoking, few are reassuring, and all require the speeches to be set against their context, the ‘‘situation’’ in which they sit.

Indeed, A. M. Dale famously talked of speeches as illuminating that ‘‘rhetoric of the situation’’ more than the character of the speaker (1954, xxv, xxvii; cf. Dale 1969, 139-55 and 272-80) - an overstatement, as several scholars (especially Conacher 1981; cf. Blundell 1989, 16-25; Halliwell 1997, 123 n. 10) have thoughtfully brought out, even if it was one which contributed in a timely way to the current of scholarly debate. Dale thought of the playwright as ‘‘a kind of logographos [speech-writer] who promises to do his best for each of his clients in turn as the situations change and succeed one another’’ (1954, xxviii; cf. for example Gould 1978, 57-58; Buxton 1982,153; Heath 1987b, 131-32; Mossman 1995, 94-137); yet we so often see characters not making the best of their cases - Euripides’ Electra and Clytemnes-tra, for instance - and it is precisely the ways that the rhetoric misfires which make it most interesting. And even where rhetorical moves do suit ‘‘the situation,’’ speakers were left choices and those choices were illuminating. Haemon need not have argued like that to his father, displacing matters of right and wrong on to questions of prudence before popular opinion (Sophocles, Antigone 682-723, ‘‘a masterpiece of obliquity and implication,’’ Bers 1994, 188); Medea did not need to have mentioned childbirth in a play where so much will center on a parent’s love for children (Euripides, Medea 250-51). And those choices can be as illuminating of the hearer’s mindset, or at least the speaker’s reading of it (Haemon), as of the speaker’s. Plato in Gorgias and Phaedrus and Aristotle in book 2 of the Rhetoric agreed that a knowledge of psychology was inextricably connected with the art of rhetoric, as speakers had to gauge their audience and judge the strategies which would suit their temper and extract the desired result. How accurately speakers do gauge their listeners, and particularly the distinctive mix of insight and misunderstanding that so often typifies the personal exchanges of tragedy, even or especially when speaker and listener are closely linked by friendship or by blood - all these have emerged as crucial themes. In fact we do best if we turn Dale’s formulation on its head: if rhetoric is conditioned by ‘‘the situation,’’ it is therefore most illuminating for what it tells us about the dynamics of that situation, and in particular how they are amiss.

Thucydides’ Cleon attacked his audience for taking too much delight in second-guessing speakers, swifter and keener to anticipate what would be said than what would result in the world of action (3.38.4-7). In the theater that second-guessing can take several forms, as the audience works out what else a speaker might have said if he or she had chosen to be more honest, or managed to be more effective, or gauged reality better. Familiarity with real-life rhetorical performances can sensitize an audience to what is particularly off-key as well as what is particularly accomplished - even or especially when the same passage is both. And that is so often what helps an audience to anticipate and understand the catastrophic consequences that will swiftly unfurl on stage.