This study identifies specific features in the legal procedure and social perception of homicide in Athens in the time of the orators and examines how these features affected and were represented and utilised in forensic rhetoric. The socially transgressive nature of the crime in Athens resulted in homicide receiving a distinctive treatment in Athenian law, where it was 'set apart' from other crimes in a number of ways, including the courts in which it was tried, the procedures involved, and the fact that uniquely these laws were attributed to Drakon as mytho-historical lawgiver. Plastow explores how four distinctive features of homicide procedure and law at Athens played out in rhetoric: ideology, pollution, relevance, and the connected issues of motive and intent. Through exploration of these rhetorical themes, the volume also provides insight into the popular perceptions of homicide amongst the Athenians, since the orators' speeches make extensive use of persuasive techniques that tap into the deeply held beliefs and ideologies of the jury members. A secondary aim is to explore the effects of the physical context of delivery on the rhetoric of homicide: the courtroom spaces themselves, whether homicide courts or popular courts, with the variable ideologies that their locations and physical attributes provoked, as well as the aspects of ritual that would have been performed physically during a homicide trial. Homicide in the Attic Orators offers insight into this complex subject, and is of interest to anyone with an interest in Athenian law, rhetoric, and society.

This study identifies specific features in the legal procedure and social perception of homicide in Athens in the time of the orators and examines how these features affected and were represented and utilised in forensic rhetoric. The socially transgressive nature of the crime in Athens resulted in homicide receiving a distinctive treatment in Athenian law, where it was ‘set apart’ from other crimes in a number of ways, including the courts in which it was tried, the procedures involved, and the fact that uniquely these laws were attributed to Drakon as mytho-historical lawgiver. Plastow explores how four distinctive features of homicide procedure and law at Athens played out in rhetoric: ideology, pollution, relevance, and the connected issues of motive and intent. Through exploration of these rhetorical themes, the volume also provides insight into the popular perceptions of homicide amongst the Athenians, since the orators’ speeches make extensive use of persuasive techniques that tap into the deeply held beliefs and ideologies of the jury members. A secondary aim is to explore the effects of the physical context of delivery on the rhetoric of homicide: the courtroom spaces themselves, whether homicide courts or popular courts, with the variable ideologies that their locations and physical attributes provoked, as well as the aspects of ritual that would have been performed physically during a homicide trial. Homicide in the Attic Orators offers insight into this complex subject, and is of interest to anyone with an interest in Athenian law, rhetoric, and society.

This multiauthored volume, as well as bringing into clearer focus the notion of drama and oratory as important media of public inquiry and critique, aims to generate significant attention to the unified intentions of the dramatist and the orator to establish favourable conditions of internal stability in democratic Athens. We hope that readers both enjoy and find valuable their engagement with these ideas and beliefs regarding the indissoluble bond between oratorical expertise and dramatic artistry. This exciting collection of studies by worldwide acclaimed classicists and acute younger Hellenists is envisaged as part of the general effort, almost unanimously acknowledged as valid and productive, to explore the impact of formalized speech in particular and craftsmanship rhetoric in general upon Attic drama as a moral and educational force in the Athenian city-state. Both poet and orator seek to deepen the central tensions of their work and to enlarge the main themes of their texts to even broader terms by investing in the art of rhetoric, whilst at the same time, through a skillful handling of events, evaluating the past and establishing standards or ideology.

This timely volume brings together leading scholars and rising researchers in the field to examine the role played by the law in thinking and practice in the legal system of classical Athens. The aim is not to find a single perspective or method for the study of Athenian law but to explore the subject from a variety of different angles. The focus of the collection on ‘use and abuse’ raises fundamental questions about the status of law in the Athenian constitution as well as the use of law(s) in the courts, the nature of law itself, and the elusiveness of a definition of ‘abuse’. An introduction sketches the major developments in the field over the last century.

Classical oratory is an invaluable resource for the study of ancient Greek life and culture. The speeches offer evidence on Greek moral views, social and economic conditions, political and social ideology, and other aspects of Athenian culture that have been largely ignored: women and family life, slavery, and religion, to name just a few. This volume contains the works of the two earliest surviving orators, Antiphon and Andocides. Antiphon (ca. 480-411) was a leading Athenian intellectual and creator of the profession of logography ("speech writing"), whose special interest was law and justice. His six surviving works all concern homicide cases. Andocides (ca. 440-390) was involved in two religious scandals—the mutilation of the Herms (busts of Hermes) and the revelation of the Eleusinian Mysteries—on the eve of the fateful Athenian expedition to Sicily in 415. His speeches are a defense against charges relating to those events.

In democratic Athens, mass citizen audiences - whether in the lawcourts, or in the political Assembly and Council, or when gathered for formal civic occasions - frequently heard politicians and litigants discussing the city's past, and manipulating it for persuasive ends. The Rhetoric of the Past in Demosthenes and Aeschines explores how these dynamics worked in practice, taking two prominent mid-fourth-century politicians (and bitter adversaries) as focal points. While most recent scholarly treatments of how the Athenians recalled their past concentrate on collective processes, this work looks instead at the rhetorical strategies devised by individual orators, examining what it meant for Demosthenes or Aeschines to present particular 'historical' examples, arguments, and illustrations in particular contexts. It argues that discussing the Athenian past - and therefore discussing a core aspect of Athenian identity itself - offered Demosthenes and Aeschines, among others, an effective and versatile means both of building and highlighting their own credibility, authority, and commitment to the democracy and its values, and of competing with their rivals, whose own versions and handling of the past they could challenge and undermine as a symbolic attack on those rivals' wider competence. Recourse to versions of the past also offered orators a way of reflecting on a troubled contemporary geopolitical landscape in which Athens first confronted the enterprising Philip II of Macedon and then coped with Macedonian hegemony. The work covers the full range of Demosthenes' and Aeschines' surviving public speeches, and the extended opening chapter includes synoptic surveys of key individual topics which feed into the main discussion.

In this volume Canevaro studies the 'state' documents preserved in the public speeches of the Demosthenic corpus. Offering a comprehensive account of the documents in the corpora of the orators and in the manuscript tradition, Canevaro summarizes previous scholarship and delineates a new methodology for analyzing the documents.

'People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed - a knife - a purse - and a dark lane...' In this provocative and blackly funny essay, Thomas de Quincey considers murder in a purely aesthetic light and explains how practically every philosopher over the past two hundred years has been murdered - 'insomuch, that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him'. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859). Thomas de Quincey's Confessions and an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings is available in Penguin Classics.

Antiphon was a fifth-century Athenian intellectual (ca. 480-411 BCE) who created the profession of speechwriting while serving as an influential and highly sought-out adviser to litigants in the Athenian courts. Three of his speeches are preserved, together with three sets of Tetralogies (four hypothetical paired speeches), whose authenticity is sometimes doubted. Fragments also survive of intellectual treatises on subjects including justice, law, and nature (physis), which are often attributed to a separate Antiphon the Sophist. Were these two Antiphons really one and the same individual, endowed with a wide-ranging mind ready to tackle most of the diverse intellectual interests of his day? Through an analysis of all these writings, this book convincingly argues that they were composed by a single individual, Antiphon the Athenian. Michael Gagarin sets close readings of individual works within a wider discussion of the fifth-century Athenian intellectual climate and the philosophical ferment known as the sophistic movement. This enables him to demonstrate the overall coherence of Antiphon's interests and writings and to show how he was a pivotal figure between the sophists and the Attic orators of the fourth century. In addition, Gagarin's argument allows us to reassess the work of the sophists as a whole, so that they can now be seen as primarily interested in logos (speech, argument) and as precursors of fourth-century rhetoric, rather than in their usual role as foils for Plato.