The Making of Identities in Athenian Oratory (PDF) is an insightful look at this understudied aspect of Athenian oratory. It will interest anyone working on the speeches themselves, identity in ancient Greece, or oratory and rhetoric more broadly.
Focusing on extant speeches from the Athenian Assembly, law, and Council in the fifth–fourth centuries BCE, these essays explore how speakers constructed or deconstructed identities for themselves and their opponents as part of a rhetorical strategy designed to persuade or manipulate the audience.
According to the needs of the occasion, speakers could identify the Athenian people either as unified demos or as a collection of sub-groups, and they could exploit either differences or similarities between Athenians and other Greeks and between Greeks and ‘barbarians’. Names and naming strategies were essential tools in the (de)construction of individuals’ identities. In contrast, the Athenians’ civic identity could be constructed in terms of honour(s), ethnicity, socio-economic status, or religion. Within the forensic setting, the physical location and procedural conventions of an Athenian trial could shape the identities of its participants in a unique if transient way.
978-0367228200, 978-1000764086, 978-0429277023
NOTE: This product only includes the eBook in PDF. No access codes are included with the sale.
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