2. EKPHRASIS REVISITED: ANCIENT DEFINITION, USE AND FEATURES

Before proceeding to the examination of ekphrasis in Demosthenes 18 and 19, a brief discussion of that notion, its ancient and modern definitions, use and features, may be useful. In ancient rhetorical treatises, ekphrasis describes the power of narrative descriptions to activate the visual imagination of the audience. Two caveats are necessary.

The first concerns the use and application of that notion, which is mostly confined in contemporary scholarship to descriptions of works of art. This, however, is not the way ancient critics use it. Hence, it is useful to revisit that notion through the lens of ancient Greek rhetorical theory and recent classical scholarship.

Scholarship in the past has tended to emphasize the dominance of art as the single most significant subject matter of ekphrasis. Some researchers, for example Edouard Bertrand, Jacques Bompaire, Jaś Elsner and Shadi Bartsch, while acknowledging that ekphrasis in ancient theory has a wide area of subject matters, nevertheless centre their analysis exclusively on art. Thus, as Bompaire points out, ‘the most interesting meaning is the one which treats ekphrasis of the works of art, for example paintings and buildings, as ekphrasis par excellence’.Footnote ⁵ In short, as Ruth Webb rightly notes in her important work revisiting ekphrasis through the lens of ancient Greek rhetorical theory, the modern definitions of ekphrasis ‘place a central importance on a certain type of referent: the visual arts. But this was not its ancient sense’.Footnote ⁶ Theon (Prog. 118.6–7) defined it as follows:

For Nikolaos (Prog. 67), ekphrasis is ‘an expository speech (aphēgēmatikos logos), which vividly (enargōs) brings the subject before the eyes. Vividly is added because it is in this respect that ekphrasis differs most from diēgēsis (narrative). The latter sets out the events plainly, while the former tries to make the listeners into spectators.’Footnote ⁸ For the Greeks, ekphrasis refers to any descriptive passage or account, which is credited with the ability to present the matter described before one's eyes, creating the illusion that one ‘sees’ what is absent or abstract.Footnote ⁹ ‘It can be of any length, of any subject matter, composed in verse or prose, using any verbal techniques, as long as “it brings its subject before the eyes”.’Footnote ¹⁰

The second caveat is about the diversity of terminology that refers to the potential of narrative descriptions to create subjects for viewing: in addition to ekphrasis, we find enargeia, diatypōsis and hypotypōsis, diagraphē and phantasia.Footnote ¹¹ Each describes the process of affecting ‘the mind of the listener, evoking an image, thought of as an impression on the soul, and arousing emotion’.Footnote ¹² The lack of any crystal-clear definition of these terms and explanation of their difference in meaning, use and application amplifies the ambiguity of the ancient rhetorical terminology, which, as Webb points out, ‘is not surprising given the ad hoc and personal nature of ancient education’.Footnote ¹³ The term ekphrasis is used throughout this article because it is thoroughly discussed in rhetorical handbooks, which is the field more relevant to the phenomena that I am particularly exploring, in contrast to some of the other terms, which are rooted in fields such as philosophy,Footnote ¹⁴ or, like enargeia, are described in rhetorical sources as being referential features of ekphrasis.Footnote ¹⁵

3. THREE EXAMPLES OF EKPHRASIS

I now turn to the three examples of ekphrasis that I will explore in this article. The first example, in 18.169, is as follows:

The masterly stylistic construction of this passage, and the use of patterns that draw subtly on tragedy, enhance the vividness of the narrative description, with the aim of creating and then manipulating the memories of the audience to the best rhetorical effect. Demosthenes recreates the past ‘tragedy’ of the Athenians in the present, relying on their experience as theatregoers in instructing them to ‘see’ the described event, as if they were watching a performance before their eyes.Footnote ¹⁷

I begin with a subtle theatrical loan, the use of the participle ἀγγέλλων. In context, this participle tacitly invites the audience to identify the person who brought the sorry news to the Athenians with the tragic ἄγγελος. My point here is not that this single word per se carries tragic evocations; rather, it is that this word in this particular context serves to bring tragedy to the mind of the audience. To appreciate the effect, it is worth considering the options available to Demosthenes for describing the announcement of the alarming news. He could, for example, have attributed the announcement of the news to a plurality of messengers, as Diodorus Siculus does in his account of the same historical event (16.84):

Diodorus uses the passive with a simple genitive of time and has the news brought not by a single messenger but by many. Later in his account, Diodorus uses the accusative τὸν μηνύσαντα (not τὸν ἀγγέλλοντα) to designate the messenger who was called by the generals to describe once again what happened in Elatea. The key point to note from the comparison between Demosthenes and Diodorus is that the use of the participle ἀγγέλλων at the beginning of §169 in Demosthenes is not random, but rather seems to draw on conventions used in tragedy, where the verb ἀγγέλλω and its cognates are used to describe the duty of bringing news.Footnote ¹⁹

The tragic resonance of this narrative description is heightened by some other stylistic details. The language pattern used here for the announcement of the alarming news – the verb ἥκω followed by a participle that denotes the action of bringing news (ἀγγέλλων) – is also used at the beginning of messengers' speeches in tragic plays. A noteworthy example is at Eur. Andr. 1070, where ἥκω is used with a participle that, interestingly, is similar to the verbal collocation in Dem. 18.169 (οἵας ὁ τλήμων ἀγγελῶν ἥκω τύχας σοί τ᾽, ὦ γεραιέ, καὶ φίλοισι δεσπότου ‘what a tale of disaster I have come to tell you, old man, and my master's friends as well’).Footnote ²⁰ Whether Demosthenes has specific plays in mind is impossible to say; it can be argued, however, that the use of a language pattern that is deployed in tragic messengers' speeches, combined with other aspects of the context that have implications for tragedy, may be an implicit means of enhancing the tragic potential of this description.

It should be noted, at this stage, that there are some considerable limitations to the analogy between messengers' speeches in tragic plays and the condensed message of the Demosthenic bringer of news in §169. The messenger in tragic plays, on the one hand, is given a (lengthy) speech of his own, which is full of details about the physical setting, the characters involved and the actions executed by them,Footnote ²¹ and reports ‘at least one passage of direct dialogue from someone on the scene’.Footnote ²² Demosthenes' messenger, on the other hand, neither has a speech of his own nor gives details about what happened in Elatea. None the less, the context still legitimizes the suggested link between the Elatea narrative description and tragedy. It is not argued, of course, that Demosthenes produces a tragic scenario that mirrors precisely what playwrights do. What is argued is that the patterns and devices he employs subtly construct his narrative in such a way as to evoke tragedy in the mind of the audience. Thus, in alluding to tragic messenger speeches, for example, he encourages the audience to envisage a similar scene to those that they had seen enacted onstage, and which, as de Jong aptly argues, were familiar to and particularly appreciated by the Athenians.Footnote ²³ The appeal to the recurrent tragic pattern serves to enhance the vividness of the description by drawing on the familiar experience of the audience.

Mental vision is not the only effect of the exploitation of implications of the tragic messenger pattern in 18.169; this can also be a means of imposing on the audience a particular reading of a momentous event (in this case the announcement of the capture of Elatea) and consequently a means of aggrandizing its pivotal effect. Messenger speeches often either chart or precipitate a radical change of direction in the plot.Footnote ²⁴ In Demosthenes' speech, therefore, these implications of the role of the messenger in tragic narrative are arguably exploited in order to grasp the attention of the audience by inviting them to realize that what is described in §169 is as important as the plot-changing announcements of news-bringers in tragedy. This adds additional impact to Demosthenes' attempt to trigger loaded reminiscences in the audience's mind of that moment in the past that did indeed alter dramatically the situation in Athens.

There is a further indication of the use of patterns that evoke tragedy. A stylistic device frequently associated with the speeches of messengers in tragic plays is what de Jong calls the ‘pregnant silence before the storm’.Footnote ²⁵ The use of this device is evident at the beginning of §169: the Athenians in the law court are invited to ‘see’ their Assemblymen taking their dinner peacefully, and then to re-experience the sudden reversal when, immediately after the announcement of the capture of Elatea, the calm disappeared, the presiding councillors stood up shocked and incredulous, and the whole city became noisy. The abrupt shift from the moment of silence and tranquillity to the onset of turbulence approximates to the use of a ‘pregnant silence’ before the catastrophe in tragic messenger speeches.

The dramatic change in the situation in Athens is embedded in and reinforced by the stylistic construction of §169 in a way that enhances the vividness of the narrative. Instead of treating the capture of Elatea merely as a fact, Demosthenes gives a vivid description of the panic in Athens and the confusion of the Athenians as to how to react to the shocking news. This description begins with an indication of time (ἑσπέρα μὲν γὰρ ἦν), which does not, from a purely factual perspective, add anything to the gist of the clause; if one were to cut out this first part, the rest of the sentence (ἧκε δ᾽ ἀγγέλλων τις ὡς τοὺς πρυτάνεις ὡς Ἐλάτεια κατείληπται) would still make perfect sense. Wankel suggests that this way of commencing the description is ‘almost poetic’. Although his examples are taken from later authors (for example, Ov. Fast. 2.792, 5.429),Footnote ²⁶ this intuition is sound. The use of a non-personal subject as an indication of time as here (cf. §172: ἐκεῖνος ὁ καιρὸς καὶ ἡ ἡμέρα ᾽κείνη ... ἐκάλει ‘that day and that crisis called’) is a linguistic pattern rare in Greek prose works,Footnote ²⁷ but common in verse genres, such as tragedy and epic.Footnote ²⁸

It can also be argued that the seemingly superfluous details given at the outset of Demosthenes' description appeal to the visual memory and imagination of the audience. Much of the pictorial potential of the first clause of §169 would have been lost if Demosthenes had used a simple genitive of time – for example, ἧκεν ἑσπέρας ἀγγέλλων τις (as in Hyp. fr. 33) – or a combination of a passive statement with a genitive of time, as used in Diod. Sic. 16.84 (καταληφθείσης γὰρ τῆς Ἐλατείας ἧκόν τινες νυκτός).Footnote ²⁹ The construction of the first clause is more masterful: [a] Ἑσπέρα μὲν γὰρ ἦν, [b] ἧκε δ᾽ ἀγγέλλων τις ὡς τοὺς πρυτάνεις ὡς Ἐλάτεια κατείληπται. The sentence can be divided into two cola (marked here as a and b): the first presents an image of the ‘usual’ beginning of the night, when the Assemblymen and the Athenians got their supper, the city was tranquil, and there was no sign of the oncoming uproar. The second colon presents the violent breach of tranquillity and immobility: a messenger arrives to interrupt the stillness with the alarming news that causes the ensuing turbulence. The striking change in the narrative pace is an effective way of reinforcing the pictorial effect of the juxtaposition of these two antithetical cola. ‘The abrupt switch from the balanced opening clause (– ⏑ – – ⏑ –) to the jarring pace that follows (– ⏑ – – – ⏑), reinforced by the sense-pause and μέν/δέ, reflects the way in which the tranquil evening is shattered by the messenger's sudden arrival.’Footnote ³⁰

According to Hermogenes (Id. 320), the first period of §169 is an example of rapidity (γοργότης), since a trochaic metre is used, ‘the rhythm that literally runs in passages (τρέχει γὰρ ὡς ὄντως ἐν τούτοις ὁ ῥυθμός)’.Footnote ³¹ It is difficult to believe that Demosthenes did not reinforce this quick-fire narrative pace with the use of comparable techniques in his vocal delivery. For example, the acceleration of his pace of delivering the first clause of §169 or the action verbs in the next period would have each served to represent the urgency of the decisions that should have been made for the safety of Athens. The lack of action verbs in the rest of the Elatea scene by contrast indicates the retardation of pace, which is also highly likely to have been represented in the speaker's delivery. This antithesis, from the commotion of the first day to the uneasy silence of the second, perhaps reflected in Demosthenes' delivery, adds to the vividness of the description and energizes the audio-visual imagination of the audience.

This contrast between the two phases of that dramatic night is further repeated in, and thus strengthened by, the juxtaposition of the participles ἐξαναστάντες and δειπνοῦντες that follow. The first presents the ‘unusual’ image of the night, while the second presents the image of its ‘usual’ beginning. The tenses of these two participles, as well as their order, merit examination. The present participle δειπνοῦντες indicates a continuous action,Footnote ³² which is unexpectedly and forcefully interrupted by the action of the aorist participle ἐξαναστάντες, which comes first even though, in the temporal sequence of actions, it should come second. This order is a means of emphasizing the violent interruption of one action by another, which is also indicated by the use of the adverb μεταξύ.Footnote ³³

As well as the use of antitheses, several other stylistic features of §169 are designed to maximize the pictorial capacity of this narrative description. A distinct feature is the plethora of action verbs (numbered as 1–4 in the passage cited earlier) that denote quick-fire action, motion and commotion (ἐξεῖργον, ἐνεπίμπρασαν, μετεπέμποντο, ἐκάλουν) and which invite the Athenians in the law court to relive the stressful actions and intense emotions of their fellows during the turmoil. It should be noted, at this point, that all these action verbs are in the imperfect. In narrative, the so-called ‘“imperfect of description” often has a dramatic or panoramic force: it enables the reader to follow the course of events as they occurred as if he was a spectator of the scene depicted’.Footnote ³⁴

The vivid way in which Demosthenes describes the violent reversal of the situation in Athens and the emphasis he places on the presentation of the confused response of the Athenians allows him to recreate the moment within its emotional context. Demosthenes aims to remove the critical resistance of the Athenians to his own reconstruction of the past, by inviting them to ‘see’ before their eyes their intense emotions, their fear, panic and uncertainty at this time of turmoil. This example of ekphrasis is ‘a rhetorical weapon to leave the listener not just “as if a viewer at events”, but with the destabilizing emotions of that event’.Footnote ³⁵

The incitement of an emotional reaction in the audience also forms a part of Demosthenes' strategy to elicit their goodwill for himself, as it is he who is presented in what follows (especially in §173) as being the only one who stood up and spoke when the city was in danger. It is worth expanding the discussion to consider the way Demosthenes sets up his own intervention in the Athenian assembly in response to the crisis. To begin with, the tumultuous actions of the frightened and panic-stricken Athenians in §169 are sharply contrasted with their presentation in §§170–2 as being assembled in silence, unwilling to move and speak for the deliverance of Athens. This vivid antithesis is then supplemented by a further pair of equally vivid contrasting images in §§170–2 and §173. The attention paid to the silence and complete lack of motion in §§170–2 is contrasted with the decisive intervention by Demosthenes in §173: ἐφάνην τοίνυν οὗτος ἐν ἐκείνῃ τῇ ἡμέρᾳ ἐγὼ καὶ παρελθὼν εἶπον εἰς ὑμᾶς ‘well, I was the man who came forth on that day and addressed you’.Footnote ³⁶ Demosthenes expertly places before the audience two antithetical images: on the one hand, the Athenian leaders stood motionless in their seats, while, on the other hand, Demosthenes emerged abruptly out of the mass (ἐφάνην), ascended the βῆμα (παρελθών) and came forward to speak for the deliverance of Athens.

In context, the emphatic first-person verb ἐφάνην that indicates the suddenness of Demosthenes' advent serves to reinforce the dramatic dimension of the description and enhance its vividness. The image of Demosthenes appearing to resolve masterfully a seemingly intractable problem concerning the safety of Athens approximates to a coup de théâtre, as Yunis rightly argues,Footnote ³⁷ and has affinities with the dramatic device of the deus ex machina. These affinities are reinforced by the fact that the verb φαίνομαι and its cognates are used to describe the epiphanies of heroes and gods in tragic and comic plays.Footnote ³⁸ Although the convention of the deus ex machina is at most a hint here, this could still be seen as a risky strategy in that it could imply that Demosthenes saw himself as akin to a superhuman agent, isolated from and superior to the audience. In context, however, this risk is largely minimized by the careful phrasing that underscores Demosthenes' role as citizen and politician who cares for and defends the interests of the Athenian dēmos. In §172, he points out:

The emphatic predicative οὗτος (§173: ἐφάνην τοίνυν οὗτος … ἐγὼ) refers to the political qualities that anyone who wanted to stand up against Philip should have: he should not only be a rich and patriotic citizen, but also a well-informed political genius able to follow the reasoning behind Philip's strategy.Footnote ³⁹ Any Athenian has the potential to perform this role but none of their leaders was actually prepared to do it – only Demosthenes himself. In attributing praiseworthy civic qualities to himself, however, he is careful not to alienate the audience with overt and arrogant self-praise, and studiously avoids anything which might look like an accusation of inaction against the common people, many of whom might have been in the law court. Instead, he carefully targets the Athenian leaders – thus underscoring his own dynamic role as a patriotic political leader, capable of defending Athens. The implications of the device of the deus ex machina, in context, serve to reinforce the vividness of the narrative description – thus stimulating the audience's mental vision of Demosthenes as a leader determined to defend his polis in a time of danger.

This goal is also served by the antithesis between stillness-speechlessness and action, which turns the account of a past event into an ‘I–You’ contrast between Demosthenes and Aeschines. The latter is presented (tacitly in §§170–2 and explicitly in §180) as being useless and incapable of defending the polis in a crisis, while also, as one of the most passionate supporters of the Peace of Philocrates, being responsible for whetting Philip's imperialistic appetite. In §173, the contrast with Demosthenes, whose ‘advent alters the drastic situation in a stroke’,Footnote ⁴⁰ is sharp, but it becomes even sharper in §180: σοῦ πλείονος ἄξιος ὢν ἐφάνην τῇ πατρίδι ‘I was seen to be worth more to this country than you [Aeschines]’. This zero-sum contrast between Demosthenes and Aeschines is designed to invite the audience to side with the leader who defended the polis in the time of danger.

My second example of ekphrasis is in §262, where Demosthenes describes the onstage acting of his adversary:

Emphasis is placed on the (alleged) hostility of the theatrical audience towards Aeschines. The hostility was so great that, according to Demosthenes, Aeschines was hissed by the audience and pelted with agrarian produce, which he collects like a fruit-seller.Footnote ⁴² The simile ὥσπερ ὀπωρώνης aims to deconstruct the persona of Aeschines; the fruit-seller/stealer has affinities not with Aeschines' trade as tragic actor but with primitive comic mime (see Ath. 14.621d–e).Footnote ⁴³ It is also included by Pollux in his list of ‘lives by which one would be disgraced’ (6.128: βίοι ἐφ' οἷς ἄν τις ὀνειδισθείη).Footnote ⁴⁴

The derision is underscored by the ironic statement that Aeschines gets more from what the audience threw at him than from prizes for the performances that he acted at the danger of his life.Footnote ⁴⁵ There is ‘a pun on the two meanings of ἀγών and ἀγωνίζομαι, fight and play’.Footnote ⁴⁶ The final period of §262 develops even further the subtle irony expressed in the pun. The hostile audience response registered by throwing fruit becomes a total war between Aeschines and the audience and causes wounds (τραύματα) for the hapless actor. Goodwin is right to note that figs, grapes and olives cannot have put Aeschines and his fellow actors in any real danger.Footnote ⁴⁷ This exaggeration, combined with the meticulous choice of words that draw subtly on the imagery of wars – τῶν ἀγώνων … ἠγωνίζεσθε, ἄσπονδος καὶ ἀκήρυκτος πόλεμος, τραύματα – is designed to belittle and ridicule not only the acting career but also the impressive military performance of Aeschines (at least according to what he himself claims in 2.167–9). Demosthenes relocates Aeschines' martial bravery from the battlefield to the theatrical stage and degrades his campaigns against the enemies to a fight against spectators armed with fruit.

The implied analogy between the reaction of two audiences, the theatrical and the law-court audience, aims to encourage the latter to relive and experience Aeschines' onstage failure in the same way that the former (allegedly) did, sharing its hostile mood and expressing the same contempt for Aeschines, and thus nullifying the impact of his considerable personal presence and delivery. The caricatured description of Aeschines is designed to provoke laughter: ‘once the playful is exceeded, laughter is invariably regarded in Greek texts as having a human object or target, and it is the intended or likely effect of “pain”, “shame” or “harm” on this target’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Demosthenes' description brings before the eyes of the judges and onlookers the image of Aeschines as a ridiculous stage buffoon and invites them to laugh at him and display the same contempt as the earlier audience allegedly had.Footnote ⁴⁹ To incite and manipulate this non-verbal reaction of the audience is to attempt to create a sense of community: laughter often unites two of the three parties involved in a trial (i.e. the prosecutor, the defendant and the audience) against the third party.Footnote ⁵⁰ Hence, Demosthenes aims not only to estrange his opponent from the goodwill of the viewers/hearers, but also to insinuate himself into their favour.Footnote ⁵¹

My third example of ekphrasis comes from Demosthenes 19. In §337–8, Demosthenes claims that Aeschines played the role of Thyestes and the figures from the Trojan War in a failed performance that made the audience hiss him and almost stone him:

This passage can be divided into two sections (marked here as A and B) with one common addressee, the law-court audience, which the speaker aims to estrange from his opponent. The first section presents Aeschines' law-court speech as a theatrical performance with no reality behind it. A notable feature of the first section is the use of the phrase ὡς καθυποκρινούμενον ὑμᾶς: the participle is unattested elsewhere and it is plausibly suggested that it was coined by Demosthenes.Footnote ⁵³ Although the formation (the κατά-compound) and syntax (ὡς followed by participle) are common,Footnote ⁵⁴ this compound form, unlike other (plain or compound) forms of the verb ὑποκρίνομαι, is transitive, meaning ‘he will overcome you by acting’. Language here underlines the extravagant emphasis that Demosthenes places on the impact upon the audience of Aeschines' political acting.

The second section consists of a vivid description of a (recurrent) theatrical performance by Aeschines. Particular attention is paid to the reaction of the theatrical audience. The verbs ἐξεβάλλετε ‘drive away’ and ἐξεσυρίττετε ‘hiss’ present regular aspects of the response of the audience within a theatrical context, and therefore invite the law-court audience to ‘see’ the viewers in the theatre reacting in an aggressive way against Aeschines, their normal response to poor acting.Footnote ⁵⁵ As in the case of 18.262, the description here, I argue, is not just about a past incident, but it is rather an attempt to create a manipulated version of the past in the present: Demosthenes tries to make the contemptuous response of the theatrical audience a model for the law-court audience. The invited alignment of the law court with the theatrical audience aims to stir θόρυβος as an expression of the audience's disapproval for Aeschines.Footnote ⁵⁶ Demosthenes' attempt to stir the reaction of the members of the audience serves his permanent purpose to create a certain disposition in them towards his opponent, by instructing them to ‘see’ him in a negative way when he takes the rostrum.