At some point during the 350s or 340s bc, an Athenian called Ariston brought a private prosecution for assault against a fellow-citizen of his called Konon. Athenian legal practice demanded that plaintiffs in such cases speak on their own behalf, and Ariston turned for assistance to a logographer, i. e. a professional speech-writer, in this case the orator Demosthenes. Ariston’s speech survives in the corpus of Demonsthenes’ works, as speech 54, but there is no explicit statement within the text itself to link the work with Demosthenes: it consists only of Ariston’s first person exposition of his case.
Ariston claims that he had been assaulted during an evening stroll through Athens by Konon, along with his son Ktesias and the (unnamed) son of Andromenes, who kicked him, verbally abused him, and stole his cloak; his injuries were so severe that he almost died. This assault was connected with the ill-feeling which developed between Ariston and Konon’s sons when they had all been in the army together some years earlier, and, on the evening in question, had been preceded by an encounter between Ariston and a drunken Ktesias. Ariston also produced witness testimony and depositions: about what had happened in the army, from the men who carried Ariston to the baths and then to a friend’s house, from the doctor who attended him and from those who visited him when injured, as well as about Konon’s conduct at the earlier arbitration stage. However, the evidence itself was not preserved.
Ariston seems to have a good case: he can demonstrate that his assailants had a grudge against him, and that he was badly hurt. But there are some indications that what happened may not be as simple as the story which he tells. The most telling point is that Ariston may not have had any witnesses to the attack itself. He claims towards the end of the speech (32) that his witnesses testified “that they saw me beaten by Konon and stripped of my cloak and the victim of hubris in respect of the other things I suffered”; but the force of this paraphrase is undermined by the tense usage on other occasions in the speech where Ariston refers to this evidence, which suggests that these witnesses arrived only after the fight was over. If Ariston did have a witness to the attack itself, it is certainly curious that he does not make more emphatic use of his testimony. Furthermore, there was sworn testimony, produced by the other side, that Konon had not participated in the attack (31) but had come across his son Ktesias and Ariston fighting; and Ariston works hard to demolish the credibility of this evidence on the grounds that it comes from Konon’s drinking pals.
Another argument which Ariston claims Konon was going to use is that both Ktesias and Ariston are members of drinking clubs, and that what happened was simply the result of a drunken encounter (13-23). Ariston turns this into a further argument against Konon, inasmuch as his lack of concern about this kind of assault is a demonstration of his brutal nature and distance from the norms of behavior which Ariston and his audience of jurors share. But it is easy enough, if one steps away from Ariston’s perspective, to see the case which Konon might have constructed. He was not personally part of the assault; his sons and Ariston had a history of mutual ill feeling; they came across one another while both drunk, and there was a scuffle; no one was seriously hurt; boys will be boys.
To consider Konon’s case is not necessarily to conclude that Konon was innocent: and the fact that Ariston does not have a witness to his assault, but speaks as though he does, is not in itself evidence that he was not attacked by Konon in the way that he alleges. But the exercise does reveal that Ariston’s case is not perhaps as strong as an initial reading suggests. The apparent strength, indeed, depends as much on the way Demosthenes constructs the speech as on the facts of the case, and above all on the characterization he applies to both Ariston and Konon throughout the speech. Ariston is made to seem like a respectable young man, reluctant to engage in legal action until provoked beyond bearing and the victim of unprovoked hostility from Konon and his family: “without ever offering a shred of solid evidence to his own good character Ariston emerges as an excellent young man” (Carey and Reid 1985: 74). Konon, by contrast, is brutal and untrustworthy, contemptuous of normal decent behavior, a member of a sworn association whose members are willing to perjure themselves - accusations (at 38-40 in particular) for which Ariston produces no evidence beyond his own statement. If his audience accepts this relentless and consistent polarization it will be much more likely that they will believe an interpretation of events in which Ariston is the victim and Konon the aggressor. Aristotle, who was writing and teaching on rhetoric at around the same time that Demosthenes and the other Athenian orators were producing forensic speeches for their clients, divided the material of rhetoric into three parts: ethos, which concerns characterization; pathos, which deals with the arousal of the listener’s emotions; and logos, which covers evidence and rational arguments (Arist. Rhet. 1356a1-4). Ethos and pathos offer the skillful orator, or speech-writer, enormous scope to generate material which is favorable to his client and which creates an atmosphere in which his audience is likely to be favorable to the arguments drawn from the facts of the case. An excellent way to counter the insidious effects of character and emotion would be to read the opposite side’s case. Quintilian, a Roman theorist of oratory writing in the first century ad, counsels precisely this when explaining how to make the best use of studying speeches: “The most useful steps are to get to know the cases which the speeches you have taken up deal with and, whenever possible, to read the speeches given on both sides. . . even if they seem not to be well matched, it is nevertheless good to get hold of them so as to understand the nature of the case” (Quint. 10.1.22-23).
Quintilian’s suggestion is phrased in such a way to indicate that even for him it was often not possible: the consequence in part of patterns of recording speeches in writing, an issue to which I return below. Our position is even worse because of the additional losses in subsequent transmission; indeed, only two matched pairs of speeches survive, both involving clashes between Demosthenes and Aeschines. In reading deliberative oratory, too, we do not have the opportunity of putting opposing cases side by side; indeed, some locations of speaking, such as the public meeting at Rome, did not always involve the presentation of opposing points of view. Nevertheless, the subject matter of much deliberative oratory is more liable to external check. We have no other evidence about Konon’s behavior than what Ariston tells us; but we can sometimes speculate in a more informed manner about what ancient politicians tell us.
World History
