Summer seminar in Belgrade: An international forum of research in Ancient Legal History

and Roman Law, University of Belgrade, 28-30 April 2018. Organizers: Gerhard Thur and
Sima Avramović.

Speaking Scripts: Hypocrisis in Attic Oratory

Dr Andreas Serafim, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Cyprus

The title of this paper, “Speaking Scripts”, is indicative of its content: the paper touches upon
matters in selected law-court speeches of Attic oratory that point to moments where one expects
the speaker to use vocal ploys (i.e. pitch, volume, intensity, articulation, stress, quality,
resonance and speed) and bodily ploys (gestures, movements and facial expressions) – what is
known in ancient theory as hypocrisis. To reconstruct hypocrisis is like playing Minesweeper.
In this game you are trying to find hidden “mines” or bombs, without detonating them, but the
clues you have about the number of nearby mines in each field are few and obscure. In much
the same way, a classicist, like the minesweeper in the game, strives to avoid mines, i.e. textual
mistakes, and to find the place in the text where gestures and vocal ploys are expected.

This, as everyone might understand, is a dangerous game: the mines in the text are many
and you cannot always avoid them. There are inevitable limitations in the task of using text to
reconstruct the moment of law-court hypocrisis, and any such reconstruction inevitably runs
the risk of leading to an elusive image about what really happened in the ancient law-court. As
I argue in my recently published book, Attic Oratory and Performance, however, there are
several textual indicators, which, coupled with information from other ancient sources, point
to the ways in which the speaker delivered his oration. In this paper, I focus on the examination
of four kinds of indicators: emotional language; prayers and invocations to the gods; deixis;
direct speech, narrative and questions.