The Attic Orators

The 'Attic Orators' have left us a hundred speeches for lawsuits, a body of work that reveals an important connection between evolving rhetoric and the jury trial. The essays in this volume explore that formative linkage, representing the main directions of recent work on the Orators: the emergence of technical manuals and ghost-written speeches for prospective litigants; the technique for adapting documentary evidence to common-sense notions about probable motives and typical characters; and profiling the jury as the ultimate arbiter of values. An Introduction by the editor explores the speechwriter's art in terms of the imagined community. Four essays appear in English here for the first time, and all Greek has been translated.

Edwin Carawan is Professor of Classics, Missouri State University.