The third of Aristotle’s generic terms is derived from the Greek noun epideixis, whose nearest equivalents in English are ‘display’, ‘show’, ‘demonstration’.5 The label indicates that this kind of oratory differs from the other two in having no immediate practical outcome. Both the court and the Assembly must reach decisions, and winning and losing bring visible practical consequences. This gives epideictic oratory an ambiguous status. The terminology itself makes the activity sound frivolous in English, largely because our culture sets so little store by formal public speaking. In Greek too as in English ‘show’ very easily shades into ‘show off’. Lysias has the prosecutor of the younger Alcibiades upbraid the generals for using the defence of a criminal to demonstrate their influence (14.21). Diodotus accuses Cleon obliquely of taking money to make aggressive speeches and demonstrate his ability or influence (Thuc. 3.42). He is responding to an allegation of Cleon’s that his opponents are engaged in a rhetorical competition in cleverness. In these passages the objection is not to epideixis but to epideixis in the wrong context. But ‘display’ or ‘demonstration’ oratory could also be dismissed in Athens - irrespective of context - as trivial or selfserving in comparison with the other two categories. Isocrates observes (5.26):
Yet I’m not unaware of the immense difference between speeches delivered with a view to persuasion and those which are read, nor that everyone assumes that the former are concerned with serious matters which require urgent debate and the latter have been written for display (epideixis) and profit.
Though he is referring specifically to written speeches, the antithesis between display and seriousness is more general. Blanket dismissal of epideixis of this sort is especially common in Isocrates (cf. 4.17,12.271,15.147), who is concerned to stress the educational value of his training in contrast to the posturing of others.6 But despite his sometimes dismissive tone, Isocrates was perfectly happy to practice epideictic oratory. He took it seriously. So did other teachers of the art of speaking. Absence of urgency of context or immediacy of outcome does not mean absence of practical goals. In the case of the funeral oration, speeches classed as display had an important role to play in social definition. Other speeches in this category had an important place in rhetorical education, as a demonstration of methods of argumentation.7 Epideictic oratory was a serious pursuit.
The rise of epideictic oratory is a natural result of the new prominence of prose in Greek culture during the classical period. Oratory is already a prized skill in our earliest sources. Hence Agenor’s admiration for Odysseus’ speech to the Trojans during the Greek embassy to persuade them to surrender Helen and the treasure stolen by Paris described in the Iliad (3.221-224). In other archaic sources as well the pleasure provided by good speaking is comparable to that derived from song and music. The speech of Adrastus, the type of good speaking for Tyrtaeus (fr. 12.8 West),8 is described as meilichogeirus, soft-spoken or pleasing/soothing in speech. The adjective ligys, literally ‘shrill’, applied repeatedly in Homer to effective speakers (Iliad 1.248, 2.246, 19.82), is also applied to the Muse (Odyssey 24.62, Homeric Hymn 14.2, etc.), the lyre (Iliad 9.186, 18.569, Odyssey 8.67, 105, 254, etc.), a pleasing singing voice (Hesiod, fr.150.33). But despite the importance of oratory in the Homeric Assembly and also in (at least some) lawsuits (Odyssey 11. 545) and its continuing importance in all archaic states, regardless of political colouring, prose never had the status of verse. In a world without a book trade, ideas needed to be in verse in order to survive. Hence the fact that the Athenian politician Solon at the beginning of the sixth century puts so much of his political thought in poetic form; hence also the fact that his version of events at the end of the sixth century has imposed itself on posterity. The fifth century is a watershed for Greek literary forms, in that prose steadily emerges as a rival to poetry, through the work of the Ionian logographers, through the growth in technical writing, and through the study of rhetoric, which in turn led to an enhanced status both for rhetoricians and for oratory. Though the increased sense of speaking as teachable technique brought some anxieties like all technical and cultural change, in this case anxieties about the prominence of an art which (as both prose and verse sources demonstrate) has the potential to reward verbal skill without consideration of moral purpose, another result ofthe birth ofrhetoric was an informed audience with an interest in speeches for educational purposes as a preparation for intervention in public life and more generally an appreciation of skill in speaking. In the case of deliberative and judicial oratory, the impact of the age of the sophists may systematize but it does not create the art form. But oratory as display owes its existence to the new recognition of the full potential of prose.
Part of this process is the emergence of opportunities for oratory as performance. There had always been competitions in poetry and music at civic and panhellenic festivals, for instance in the dithyramb at Athens or in flute playing at the Pythian games. Perhaps most relevant in the present context (because it involves solo performances by the human voice) is the rhapsodic competition at the Panathenaea in Athens involving recitations of Homer. But by the last quarter of the fifth century there were opportunities for declamation at the panhellenic athletic festivals. We have small fragments of an Olympic speech (Olympikos) by Gorgias and he is also credited with a speech delivered at the Pythian festival at Delphi ( Pythios). We have a part of a speech from early in the fourth century allegedly delivered by Lysias at Olympia (33). The practice is alluded to by Isocrates (5.5,13,15.147). There was no formal organization and no prizes (Isoc. 4.3), but there was avast audience available drawn from the whole ofthe Greek world, and the persistence ofthe practice indicates that enough were ready to listen to make it worthwhile for leading intellectuals to devote time and effort to writing a speech and travelling to the festivals. So Isocrates can write (Letter 1.6):
In addition this too is clear to everyone, that the festivals suit those in need of display (eideixis) - for each can broadcast his own powers there to the largest audience - but those who want to achieve something practical should speak to the person who is to carry out the acts disclosed in the speech.
Within Athens the most important opportunity for declamation was at the state funeral for the war dead, to which we shall return shortly. As well as these authorized events, there was from the late fifth century a ready audience for privately organized performances, like the one by Gorgias that is represented as preceding the dialogue that bears his name (Pl. Gorgias 447a). And some of these epideixeis will have been performances of the model speeches produced by the sophists to demonstrate rhetorical technique.9 At Thucydides 3.38.7, Cleon alludes to such occasions sneeringly when he compares the Assembly to ‘observers of the sophists’ (sophistO>n theatai). Wealthy Athenians were prepared to host such events (as we know from Plato’s Protagoras)1'0 And audiences were willing to pay. Certainly the sophist Prodicus could charge up to fifty drachmas a time for his lectures (at least according to Pl. Cratylus 384b). The opportunity for epideixis was expanded with the rise of the book trade. By the late fifth century there was a market for books in Athens, both verse and prose, including oratory.11 The book trade expanded still further in the fourth century. This opened up the prospect of extending the audience for a speech which had been delivered (by subsequent publication with or without revision) and also of creating speeches entirely for a reading audience, either written texts masquerading as real speeches or texts which use the tropes of real speeches but make no secret of the fact that they were always and only meant to be read.12
Epideictic oratory does not seek to win a political or courtroom debate and there is no formal decision that marks out success or failure. It does, however, like the other forms of oratory, seek to persuade. It may be entertaining - an anecdote has Prodicus assert that if his audience was flagging at one of his less costly lectures he would throw in a gem from his fifty drachma session to keep them attentive (Arist. Rhet. 1415b) - but its goal is not solely to entertain. It is intended to demonstrate ability. In a society that values public speaking it enhances the status of the speaker. This is thus a highly competitive activity.13 The element of competition is stressed in the funeral speech ascribed to Lysias (2.1-2):
If I thought it possible, you who are present at this burial, to make clear in speech the courage of the men who lie here, I would criticize those who gave instructions to speak in their honour at a few days’ notice. But since for all mankind all time would not be enough to prepare a speech equal to their deeds, I think that the city gave the order at short notice out of concern for those who speak here, in the belief that in this way they would be most likely to be forgiven by their listeners. However, though my speech is about these men, my contest is not with their deeds but with those who have spoken in their honour previously.
Despite (or arguably because of) the explicit disclaimer, the pressure on the speaker (no less real for being exaggerated for effect) is evident. As the text notes,14 the audience are measuring the speech against the honorands (as we all do with all laudatory speeches) to see if it adequately expresses the collective view of their merits. Alongside this synchronic evaluation there is a diachronic judgement, the more challenging because for the audience the comparators are not consulted on paper but seen through the aggrandizing eye of individual and collective memory.15 The speaker is compared with all who have ever spoken at such an event, a comparison tacitly acknowledged by the generic allusion within the funeral oration (see below, pp. 243-245).
The competitive element is as marked an element of other areas for oratorical epideixis. Some speeches viewed as ‘display/demonstration pieces’ (epideixeis) by their contemporaries were written essentially as advertising (this is what Isocrates means by ergolabia - profit - in 5.26, quoted above). Aeschines gives the clearest insight into the process (1.173-174): 16
For I’m told he declares to them, drumming up business at your expense, that without your noticing he will shift the ground of debate and your attention; that he will bring confidence to the defendant the moment he appears in court and reduce the accuser to panic and fear for himself; that he will summon such loud and hostile heckling from the jurors by dragging in my political speeches and criticizing the peace which was brought about through me and Philocrates that I will not even turn up in court to defend myself, when I submit to audit for my service as envoy; I’ll be content if I receive a moderate punishment and am not condemned to death!
The verb I translate as ‘drumming up business’ is ergolabeisthai, literally ‘acquire work’. Demosthenes is giving a display of the skills he can teach in order to attract or keep pupils. The allegation is false; but it is still revealing. Aeschines is describing a judicial speech. But fictive speeches could serve the same purpose, as Isocrates stresses in the case of the encomium to Busiris written by the early fourth century rhetorician Polycrates, which Isocrates sees as a display of what his teaching can offer to his pupils (11.47). And the trade was competitive; a successful teacher like Isocrates could attract pupils from all over Greece (Isoc. 15.146). This element of competition is most clearly demonstrated by Isocrates, who having criticized the Busiris of Polycrates explicitly offers his own encomium as an example of how it should be done (11.9). He does exactly the same in his praise of Helen. Here the competitive element is still more to the fore, since the predecessor he singles out for criticism is the fifth century rhetorical master Gorgias (according to tradition one of his teachers,17 hence perhaps the more gentle manner of criticism). In almost identical terms to those used in 11.9, he offers his own praise of Helen as a corrective to that of Gorgias. In the same spirit we find Alcidamas (another pupil of Gorgias, according to the entry on him in the medieval Suda lexicon) writing a speech for delivery by Odysseus in the prosecution of Palamedes at Troy; it can hardly be coincidence that Gorgias had written a defence speech for Palamedes.
Thus though the outcomes of epideictic oratory have none of the urgency of the other two categories, the stakes for the speaker are still high, in terms of public standing and (sometimes) profit.
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