Euripides

Euripides often has characters refer to their speaking ability, for instance, Hippolytus, who, in the play of the same name, claims he can better speak to a few men of his own age than a crowd, and then disparages public speaking ability by saying words to the effect that ‘any fool can show off to a crowd’ (98 5-989).22 Plato has often said that it is better to speak before a few wise people rather than the ignorant masses.

The victim is now the main ‘hero’ through the way he or she faces disaster. Standard heroes are unmasked, and although they are rhetorically clever, they are shown to be morally base. Medea, in the play of the same name, counters her husband Jason’s claim that he is leaving her for her own benefit (591-602):

Medea:  I know your real reason for this.

You were ashamed of growing old with a barbarian for a wife.

Jason:  Can’t you understand? I didn’t prefer the princess to you.

As I said before. I only wanted to make you secure and happy.

Then have royal children as brothers to those we had, and in this way preserve our house for all time.

Medea:  I don’t want a ‘happy’ life that makes me miserable,

No wealth that shreds my heart.

Jason:  Be sensible. Your attitude is all wrong.

You reject what is good for you, claiming it makes you miserable.

When you’re lucky, you say that you’re unlucky.

They play with terms for happiness.23 Medea uses eudaimon bios and olbos, two terms for happiness that connote wealth and prosperity, exactly what Jason claims he promises her. She rejects those terms in favor of a happiness that satisfies the soul, one meaning of eudaimonia. Jason immediately counters by using the term eutuchia, good luck or good opportunity, something that he has always pursued. Euripides masterfully chooses the right words to illustrate the type of person who uses them. Jason is the sophist who uses rhetorical arguments, following nomos, or social convention. Medea follows phusis, or nature, particularly her own as she pursues a Homeric course in achieving her vengeance. She accuses Jason of speaking for his own gain (to sumpheron) rather than considering her feelings and the consequences of his actions.

Ironically, Medea shows the same rhetorical skills she criticizes: she later seduces Jason into thinking that she has been persuaded by his arguments simply to further her ends (killing the princess, the new object of Jason’s desire, and their children, all of whom Jason claimed were tools to better both their lives). Medea is a master of persuasion and symbouleutic skills as she illustrates before the women of Corinth, Creon, and Jason. Medea’s speech to persuade Creon to let her stay for one day illustrates the very thing he fears, namely that she is a very clever woman (271-356). She appeals to what she perceives as his one weak point: his sense of fairness and mercy (340-356):

Medea:  Just give me one day so I can figure out where to go,

And provide for my children, since their father has made no provision for them.

You’re a parent too; please have some pity on them.

I don’t care about myself and exile,

My concern is all for my children and how they will suffer. Creon: I’m not a tyrant, and I’ve paid for that in the past.

I know I’m making a terrible mistake now, but I’ll give you what you ask.

I warn you though, if tomorrow’s sun still sees you and your children within this land’s borders, you will die. I mean it. So stay if you must, just this one day. That’s not long enough for you to commit the crimes which I fear you have in mind.

Medea enlists Creon’s sympathy as a fellow parent. The irony of Creon’s last two lines here is not lost on the audience, who by this time have some indication of the woman with whom they are dealing. The appeal to sympathy was also a device used in courts to impress the jury: parading children who would be adversely affected by a negative verdict (see Aristoph. Wasps 561-574).24 Medea has done the same thing rhetorically.

In the Trojan Women, we find many examples of the pathetic enlisting choral and audience sympathy. Similes and metaphors contribute. Particularly popular, even in the following century (though it goes back to Solon), is the image of a ship in a storm.25 Hecuba tells Andromache (686-696):

I have never been on board a ship,

But I know about it from pictures, and what people tell me.

If a storm is manageable, the sailors are eager to save themselves;

This one steers, that one mans the sails, and this one bales;

But if a rough stormy sea overwhelms them,

They accept their fate and hand themselves over to the racing waves.

My troubles rise up like these waves, but no voice, no speech rises from my lips.

This wave of misfortune from the gods has silenced me.

Hecuba and Helen debate before Menelaus the question of whether she is guilty or not and whether Menelaus should kill her for her crimes (914-1032). Helen first blames Hecuba for not executing Paris when an oracle predicted the disastrous consequences he would bring. Then she blames Menelaus for leaving when she needed him and then claims she merely obeyed almighty Aphrodite who awarded her to Paris in a beauty contest. Finally, she says she deserves a crown for saving Greece from barbarians; besides this, she often tried to escape. Her speech follows the four-part division as outlined by M. de Brauw (Chapter 13): proem, narrative, proof and epilogue. Helen appeals to Menelaus in her proem, her narrative outlines her case, and for proof she cites her trying to escape. Her epilogue is asking to be rewarded with a crown. She enlists some of the same arguments that Gorgias gave her in his encomium, and Gorgias agrees with her that she is blameless: the gods are responsible, along with necessity and luck.26

Helen’s speech is more ‘rhetorical’, whereas Hecuba’s is more ‘philosophical’, because she enlists the truth, dismisses mythological excuses, and uses logic. First Hecuba asks why would goddesses compete in a beauty contest? Does Hera want a new husband? Is Zeus not enough? She says Helen’s Aphrodite is instead aphrosyne (‘folly’, namely her own passion). Why did her brothers and servants not protect her if she wanted protection? No. Menelaus’ house was too poor for her, and a Trojan prince offered her more. And if Helen tried to escape, who saw her? Hecuba says she pleaded with her to return to her husband Menelaus, but she preferred to stay and lord it over the Trojans. Her epilogue consists of the request that Menelaus ‘crown’ Greece with Helen’s death for the destruction she caused. Hecuba wins according to logic, but in this case once again it is power that prevails, viz., Helen’s sexual power over Menelaus. Everyone knows by the end that, in spite of Menelaus’ protestations to the contrary, he will spare Helen’s life.

Elsewhere in the Trojan Women we find an example of epideictic oratory in Hecuba's speech over the dead Astyanax that is the opposite of Pericles' funeral oration (Thuc. 2.35-46). Rather than praising the Greeks’ heroism it condemns their cowardice in executing a young child (1158-1191, abridged):

0  you Greeks who have more strength in spear than in brain,

Why did you fear a child so much that you committed this barbaric murder?

Did you think he would raise again our fallen Troy?

Did you consider yourselves so weak?

When Hector was winning, with all his allies at his side,

We still died in droves. Now that Troy is taken, and Phrygia no more,

Do you fear this little child?

1  hate the fear that comes when reason flies away (1158-1166) ...

What will some poet inscribe on your tomb?

‘This is the innocent child whom the Greeks feared and murdered!’

An inscription to bring shame on Greece (1188-1191).

Her speech emphasizes the pathetic. It begins with praise for the child and his hypothetical future, now cut short by ‘broken bones grinning between bloody gashes’ (1176-1177). She recalls his promises to tend to her grave, but now she must tend his. He will be buried on his brave father’s shield. She asks the women to honor him with ornaments, and adds a maxim, a device often used to conclude messenger speeches in Euripides, which was something used in later oratory (1203-1206):

A man is a fool who, when things go well,

Thinks that his happiness will endure;

Fate is like a madman, lurching here and there.

No one’s happiness ever lasts.

After the ornaments are placed on the body, Hecuba addresses the shield, and delivers with the chorus a final lamentation. She bandages his wounds (which she describes as a useless effort), entrusts him to his father’s care among the dead, and ends by saying (1246-1250):

Go, bury the corpse in his sorry grave.

It now has the offerings that are due the dead.

I think to be buried with pomp and luxury

Means little to the dead;

It is just vain show for the living.

Hecuba’s last comment implies that rhetoric has replaced religion: the gods have proven themselves unreliable, but words now have replaced worship and function as salves for the living.

The audience is left loathing the Greeks, representatives ofcivilization that act more barbarically than any barbarian. It is in fact the barbarians in Euripides who consistently indict the Greeks. Andromache’s speeches in his Andromache expose both Hermione and Menelaus, Hermione’s father, for the self-serving brutal cowards they are. Her-mione wants to kill both Andromache and her child by Neoptolemus her husband (Andromache is his concubine from Troy) because she herself is childless. She and her father would have succeeded in this ignoble end without the intervention ofPeleus, an old man, father to Neoptolemus, who comes in the nick of time. As we have noted, Medea, another barbarian, shows that Jason’s rhetoric is in service to his ends rather than her feelings.

Hecuba in Euripides’ Hecuba defends herself before Agamemnon against Poly-mestor, a Greek ally, and successfully establishes that he murdered her son for his gold. Earlier in the play Odysseus admits he owes Hecuba a debt because she once saved his life, but it is not enough for him to spare her daughter Polyxena who is to be sacrificed on Achilles’ tomb. He says (299-331, abridged):

Hecuba, listen to what I have to say.

Don’t be angry with me, when I’m giving you good advice.

Yes. You saved me. I admit it.

And I’m ready and willing to save you.

But I’m not going to change what I said to the army:

Since Achilles asked for this honor

And we owe our victory here in Troy to him,

We must sacrifice your daughter.

This man was our bravest warrior.

Here’s where many cities go wrong: they do not give a better prize to their bravest and best men than the prizes given to their inferiors. . .

What if there’s another war and we have to raise an army?

What will people say then? ‘Shall we fight?

Or should we try to save ourselves,

Since we see the dead receive no honors?’ . . .

I know that you have suffered much, but listen to what I have to say.

We also deserve your pity:

Our side has old suffering women,

Besides old men, and brides who have lost their husbands, brave men whose bodies the dust of Mount Ida covers.

Learn to bear your suffering. If we do not honor our brave, we will be called foolish and inconsiderate.

You barbarians,

If you don’t treat a friend and ally as he should be treated, and don’t honor your dead,

It’s no wonder that you lost and Greece won this war!

You get what you deserve for the way you act.

Odysseus argues like a sophist with the arguments he musters. He first says all he owes her is quid pro quo, her life for his, but her daughter must die because heroes deserve to be honored. The latter is true, but that is not the question that should be addressed. Odysseus’ conclusion here makes it sound as if it is.

Hecuba leaps on this weakness in his argument as she says that Greeks oppose human sacrifice (with the implication that this is the shared belief of all civilized human beings, and the Greeks claim to be civilized in contrast to barbarians): ‘You have a law that forbids murder and it applies to both slaves and the free’ ( Hecuba 291-292). Odysseus’ speech (that argues for this sacrifice) is adorned with rhetorical flourishes, using Aristotle’s categories of persuasion in the Rhetoric: argument, praise for Achilles, and also an emotional appeal - ‘we deserve your pity’. His structure is typical of rhetoric. He begins by trying to win over the audience (Hecuba and the chorus) by getting her to trust his exposition by arguing Achilles’ merits and a need for sacrifice, and by giving proof from induction that otherwise others will not make sacrifices if heroes do not have such honor. He ends by stirring the emotions, trying to gain sympathy as he says the Greeks deserve pity, and then criticizing his opponent. Odysseus accuses Hecuba of being a barbarian (discrediting her character), and yet, by sacrificing a human being, he is breaking a law of humanity. Although his arguments are specious, and Hecuba, the barbarian, is acting in a more civilized way, force is on Odysseus’ side, and as usual prevails. Murder once more is justified, in this case under the guise of sacrifice, the same way that Agamemnon justified killing Iphigenia. Much of Euripidean tragedy illustrates the claim that the Athenians made in their dialogue with the Melians when they were forcing them to pay tribute (Thuc. 5.89): ‘Justice is seen by reasoning men to arise from equal power to compel, and the strong do what they can, and the weak submit to it’.27

Hecuba also gives obeisance to peitho, realizing that it is a vital art for persuading the powerful, as she does in the end persuade Agamemnon (Hecuba 814-820):

Why do we stupidly struggle to learn all the arts when the only skill we should pay to master is persuasion, that art of persuading others to help us achieve what we want.

Without that art, no one succeeds.

Peitho also won the day in Aeschylus’ Eumenides (885, 970). Athena, however, in good Athenian fashion flaunts her lightning bolts in case persuasion fails (Eumenides 827-828).

Symbouleutic rhetoric is naturally well illustrated in the scene before the Assembly in Euripides’ Orestes as the messenger recounts how Orestes is condemned for murdering his mother, whom he had claimed he executed in accordance with Apollo’s command in order to avenge his father’s murder (866-956). One speaker said Orestes set a bad precedent for children. This claim showed that Orestes is a threat to society. Another made an appeal for mercy and condemned execution, but suggested exile instead. Then another suggested the maximum punishment: death by stoning. The messenger commented that if a man with a sweet tongue who lacks common sense sways people, great harm can result for the city (907-908); he voiced the widespread suspicion of rhetoric. One advocate for Orestes recommended awarding him a crown for avenging his father, and went on to argue from probability (eikota): if Orestes had not killed his mother in response to Apollo’s command to avenge his father, what man would leave home to fight in a war, if he feared a wife like Clytemnestra waiting for his return with malice in her adulterous heart? Orestes chimed in with a similar argument about not being slaves to women, appealing to a widespread view of women as inferior to men, and therefore subject to the superior (Arist. Politics 1254b 10-15). The man of sweet tongue prevailed, namely rhetoric over right, from Orestes’ and the messenger’s perspective. Electra was also condemned and they were sentenced to committing suicide that same day.

Again and again we see speeches in fifth-century Greek tragedy that either reflect the rhetoric of the contemporary sophists or influence the professional orators to come. These speeches often justify either murders committed (for example, Orestes in the Eumenides) or lead to circumstances that result in murder (Medea). Force seems to prevail over justice and Thucydides is filled with examples such as those articulated in the Melian debate (5.89). Greek tragedy, particularly Euripides, illustrates the consequences for the victims of rhetoric.