The Greek orators employed the full range of appeals to the emotions in order to elicit sympathy or affection for their clients or odium for their opponents, to remind the public of acts that deserved their gratitude or, contrariwise, to moderate their undue resentment or envy, to induce shame at vicious behavior - their own, it may be (especially in political contexts) or that of others - or a spirit of emulation in respect to the achievements and virtues of good people, and to produce a rational fear concerning enemies and, correspondingly, a justifiable confidence - which Aristotle defines as the emotion opposite to fear - when there is good reason to believe that one’s enemies are weaker than oneself. Such forms of argument were not limited to the court room or the Assembly; they are fully in evidence in the set orations or agones that are a regular part of both Greek tragedy and comedy, are essential to the direct speeches that form the larger part of epic narrative, and are an indispensable part of ancient historiography. But the two emotions most relevant to forensic discourse, at least, were the pair pity and anger: pity, the emotion a pleader sought to arouse in behalf of the accused (or, it may be, his victim), and anger, the legitimate outrage experienced at behavior that violated the norms of the community and its sense of justice.
Consider the following extract from a speech by Lysias, in which the plaintiff admonishes the jurors (15.9):
And if any one of you, gentlemen of the jury, thinks that the penalty is great and the law too harsh, you must recall that you have not come here as lawmakers on these matters, but rather to vote according to the established laws, nor to pity those who do wrong, but rather to be angry with them and to come to the aid of the entire city.
Elsewhere, Lysias has a defendant declare (1.28): ‘I believe you know that those who do not act justly do not acknowledge that their enemies are telling the truth, but rather, by lying and scheming in this way, they instil in the wrongdoers anger against those who do act justly’ (cf. 21.21, 32.19). Anger is the appropriate response to true malefactors. Another speaker in Lysias (6.17) declares: ‘It is right, Athenians, to be more angry at citizens who do wrong than at foreigners’. Demosthenes denounces a law, the result of which will be that jurors will appear to ‘take their oath, impose penalties, pronounce their verdicts, grow angry, and do all that they do in vain’ (24.90). Demosthenes comments specifically on the usefulness of civic anger against the unjust, since people are then likely to be more careful about unlawful behavior (24.143). Thucydides asserts categorically (1.77.4) that ‘it seems that men are more angry when they are wronged than when they suffer violence’ (cf. 5.46.5). Indeed, the term orgo may be used in a way that is virtually equivalent to a negative verdict or condemnation, as when Demosthenes says that the laws authorize the jury to utilize anger that is proportionate to the offense (24.118; cf. 24.218, 25.6).16 As Danielle Allen observes: ‘The Athenians had no doubts about why they punished: it was simply because someone was angry at a wrong and wanted to have that anger dealt with’.17 The premise of anger was a judgment concerning the moral behavior of another, and was for this reason susceptible to the techniques of persuasion developed by the Athenian pleaders and codified by Aristotle and other writers of technical treatises on rhetoric.
Like anger, pity was not something separate and apart from judgments concerning justice and desert, but rather presupposed the innocence (as anger did the guilt) of the accused. For this reason, appeals to pity on the part of defendants were never accompanied by expressions of remorse or requests for pardon or forgiveness; rather, such pleas were intended to remind the jury of the consequences of condemning an innocent person - a person who, therefore, did not deserve the punishment that a guilty verdict would entail. This is why the Greeks - and Romans - did not typically attempt to arouse pity by dwelling on their unfortunate childhood, for example; they were not explaining how they acquired criminal tendencies - quite the contrary, they were affirming their innocence, for only in this way could they induce the emotion of pity in their audience. When it comes to arguing the facts of the case, the Greek orators exploited logical arguments or enthymemes with a precision and versatility worthy of Aristotle himself. For pity to be invoked, the facts - or a plausible interpretation of them - had already to have demonstrated the innocence of the speaker. This is why appeals to pity come regularly in the peroration of speeches, after the narrative has made the case for a positive verdict. Thus, the arousal of emotion, and of pity in particular, worked differently in the Athenian courts from the way it functions in the modern judicial process, where it is assumed to constitute an appeal to the heart rather than the mind (and hence is deemed illegitimate in the verdict phase of trials). In antiquity, it was taken for granted that one should be pitiless toward those who deliberately committed an unjust act.
In forensic speeches, then, efforts to induce pity or anger in the jurors were predicated on a cognitive and moral interpretation of these emotions. It is just for this reason that they could be influenced by arguments. It is true that the emotions, once aroused, in turn may lead a person to judge matters in a more positive or unfavorable way than would have been the case on a purely dispassionate appreciation of the evidence; that is just the function of emotional rhetoric. There exists, accordingly, the danger that a judge who is in the grip of an emotion may deviate from the right ruling. But the emotions themselves are a function of cognitive appraisals; they are anything but raw, irrational feelings. They do not produce their effects by magic, as Gorgias seems to have supposed, but by argument. And Aristotle’s understanding of the emotions is confirmed by the way in which they were exploited in practice by the orators who were his contemporaries.
World History
