Reviewed by: Genos Dikanikon: Amateur and Professional Speech in the Courtrooms of Classical Athens Edmund M. Burke Victor Bers . Genos Dikanikon: Amateur and Professional Speech in the Courtrooms of Classical Athens. Hellenic Studies 33. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2009. Dist. by Harvard University Press. ix + 159 pp. Paper, $15.95. That the Athenians were a litigious people is a commonplace. Yet the extant dicastic speeches from the fifth and fourth centuries are the product exclusively of elite hands and overwhelmingly deal with litigation involving elites. Indeed, a significant percentage of those speeches were paid for, as individuals wealthy enough retained the services of professional speechwriters, logographoi, to help negotiate the hazards of the courts. With a few noteworthy exceptions, then, the poor are underrepresented in the corpus of the Attic orators, although invariably they constituted a plurality of the city's citizenry. In this slim volume, Victor Bers, the author a quarter century ago of an important article on the impact of juror outbursts in the Athenian courts ("Dikastic Thorubos," in P. A. Cartledge and F. D. Harvey, eds. Crux: Essays Presented to G. E. M. de Ste. Croix on his 75th Birthday [Exeter 1985] 1-15), returns to the dicastic arena, this time to examine the practice of self-presentation by amateur and professional speakers. Explicitly Bers argues "that the professional component of the genos dikanikon represents only a portion of the speechmaking that went on in the Athenian courts; (and) that many men constrained to rely entirely or mainly on their own resources also spoke in court." Beyond the demonstration of a sociological phenomenon, Bers argues further "that their (viz., amateurs') speech in court resembled routine speech in a number of ways, and that in these they differ from professional speech; [and] that professional speech was crafted to avoid certain features of amateur speech that seemed to cause a speaker's failure . . . in particular those that manifested excessive emotion when it was in his interest to appear unafraid and unperturbed." These avoidance strategies Bers labels evitanda (5). The issue of what Bers characterizes as "the concrete reality and drama of the Attic courts" (3), including the use of powerful affective speech and gesture, has received much scholarly attention since the mid-1980s. A feature of Bers' work, then, is polemical, as he stakes out his positions in several scholarly debates. His appeal to ancient evidence is carefully selective, not exhaustive, and occasionally there is a buttressing of an argument by appeal to a comparative social model or practice (see, e.g., 70-71, 85). There are seven chapters whose titles and arrangement suggest at one level close analysis of what would have been the concrete reality for an Athenian litigant speaking before a court. So "The Challenge of Court Speech" (chap. 1), [End Page 699] "Amateur Litigants, Amateur Speakers" (chap. 2), "Terrors of the Courtroom" (chap. 4), "Performance as Evidence" (chap. 5), "Appeals to Pity and Displays of Anger" (chap. 6), "Tactics, Amateur and Professional" (chap. 7). Chapter 3, "Natural and Artificial Speech from Homer to Hyperides: A Brief Sketch," follows a different, if parallel course. Here Bers concludes that ". . . other things being equal, an overemotional style was likely to fail in Athenian courts" (35), and with that enters the recent debates about the relationship between the courts and the tragic stage (for Bers, subsequent to Antiphon, there was virtually none [37-43]), and the significance and meaning of appeals to pity and expressions of anger (taken up in chap. 6). Beyond the seven chapters, there is an appendix ("The Formality Hypothesis," for which see below), a list of works cited, an index locorum, an index of Greek words, and a subject index. The case Bers makes for large numbers of poor amateur litigants in the courts fashioning their own presentations is speculative but compelling, as he extrapolates from the work of Mogens Hansen and P. J. Rhodes, fleshing out the various types of circumstance that could land an individual in court (from public scrutinies to family feuds), along with the practical limitations for men of limited means in securing professional help (e.g., logographoi cost money). There is succinctness and clarity here on a...
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