University College London

Graduate Student, Greek and Latin

Thesis Title: Moving beyond text: aspects of performance in selected speeches of Aeschines and Demosthenes

About

My name is Andreas Serafim and I come from Cyprus. I read Classics at the University of Cyprus, where I awarded a BA in 2008. Then I pursued my postgraduate studies (MA 2010) at the University of Texas at Austin, under the supervision of Professor Michael Gagarin. While at UT Austin, I was Teaching Assistant for ancient Greek and Latin language and literature classes. I am currently doctoral student (and Teaching Assistant) at the University College London (UCL). My research project is supervised by Professor Chris Carey.

Research interests:
1) Ancient Greek oratory and rhetoric
2) Performance culture
3) Ancient Medicine (especially the Hippocratic Corpus)

Main research project
Moving beyond text: aspects of performance in selected speeches of Aeschines and Demosthenes

My study centres on the examination of performance in specific speeches of Greek oratory. All we have from the courts and assembly of ancient Athens is inert text. Can we get back beyond it to the moment of performance? I argue that despite the inevitable limitations and the fair amount of speculation involved in an enterprise of this sort, various features of the transmitted text reveal a great about the law-court performance, enabling us to reconstruct a basic image. Performance approach is significant, if not inevitable, for oratory: for the Greeks, oratory was not primarily something they wrote, but something they performed before the audience. To be able to reconstruct a basic image about the way orators (Aeschines and Demosthenes in particular) perform their speeches before the law-court audience invigorates and enriches our understanding of Greek oratory.

My research work purposes to incite the scholarly interest and stimulate further work on the analysis of oratorical texts as pieces of energetic oral persuasion. I discuss the strategies, means, and modes of the communication between the speaker and the audience that can be extracted from the text and shed light on the performance held at the original time.

Three elements of performance that can be extracted from the oratorical text are under examination in this research work. Firstly, I focus on the discussion of specific techniques used by the speaker in order to win over the audience, placing particular emphasis on the stratagems that he uses in order to insinuate himself into the favour of the audience and estrange his opponent from it. Secondly, I examine the portrayal of litigants’ character (ēthopoiia) and thirdly, I discuss the gestural and vocal ploys that a speaker uses in order to deliver his speech (hypocrisis).

Four speeches of the forensic oratory form the focus of my research work: Demosthenes’ On the Crown (speech 18) and On the False Embassy (speech 19) and Aeschines’ On the Embassy (speech 2) and Against Ctesiphon (speech 3). I have chosen to work on these speeches because they are related to each other; Aeschines 2 is the answer to Demosthenes 19 and Demosthenes 18 is the answer to Aeschines 3. Therefore, there is the unique opportunity to read comparatively these speeches, discussing how the two orators write for performance, and what strategies they use in order to influence the same audience during the same trial.

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