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| In
427 BC the Sicilian sophist Gorgias, from the city of Leontinoi
(see Pausanias
6.17.1 for his statue at Olympia), visited Athens and revolutionzed
the art of rhetoric. Gorgias employed so-called "Sicilian style"
oratorical devices - rhythmic passages and balanced clauses - which
had an enduring impact on prose styling for centuries. Of course,
not all Attic (i.e., Athenian) orators or historians fell under the
sway of this movement; some indeed possessed natural, brilliant talents
that developed separately from, but still contributed to the growing
taste for rhetoric. |
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| We
will read three examples of Attic oratory over the course of the semester:
On
the Murder of Eratosthenes (c. 400 BC) by the Syracusan Lysias
son of Cephalus, a model of pure and masterful prose; the Third
Philippic (341 BC) by the Athenian Demosthenes,
considered the greatest master of Attic oratory since the 1st c. BC;
and Events
at Pylos and Sphacteria (425 BC), which is a modern designation
for five passages from book 4 of the History of the Peloponnesian
War by Thucydides,
Greece's most talented historian and an early expert at prose styling. |
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| Our
subject matter addresses respectively a murder trial, political persuasion
and popular appeal. Lysias' On the Murder of Eratosthenes asks
whether one could admit to the murder of a spouse's lover and still
be acquitted in democratic Athens. Demosthenes attacks Philip II of
Macedonia (father of Alexander the Great) in his Third Philippic
(or, harangue against Philip) and attempts to persuade his fellow
Athenian citizens, grossly outnumbered, to continue to fight the foul
Macedonians. Thucydides pits the restrained general Nikias against
the hot-headed Kleon, the untested son of a sausage-seller, in book
4 of his History of the Peloponnesian War as Kleon attempts
to convince the Athenian assembly to give him an army to wage war
with Sparta. |
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| For
some of you, this course represents your first experience devoting
a semester to reading texts continuously, and so you will focus on
sharpening your reading skills. Grammar review will continue to play
a signficant role as you enhance your skills, but increasingly you
will review Greek grammar on your own. We will, of course, discuss
grammatical points as they arise, but we will concentrate on reading
continuously. In addition, you will select a passage from one of our
three works and develop a commentary
that addresses the text linguistically, rhetorically and historically.
Those of you who have taken "author" courses (e.g., Homer,
Herodotus) before will also focus on developing your reading skills,
and as well you will work on a research
paper which will emerge from discussions
of scholarship. |
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Students
in CG311 Greek Oratory will demonstrate the ability
- to
read continuous prose, employing skills developed in previous
semesters of Greek
-
to effect the transition from grammar-based learning to reading
comprehension
- to
contextualize speeches by Lysias and Demosthenes, and speeches
recorded by Thucydides, in their larger cultural settings, by
familiarizing themselves with
-
biographical details about each author
-
a basic grasp of the corpus of works of the author
-
the literary world of the author
- the
origins and development of rhetoric in 5th and 4th c. Athens
-
political/social aspects of the setting of each text
- to
use digital technology (web-based resources such as the textual,
lexical and morphological tools in Perseus, and cultural databases
on Athens and Greece)
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