Prose as Performance: Seeing and Hearing in the Forensic Speeches of Antiphon, Andokides and Lysias

The texts of Athenian forensic speeches are all that survive of dynamic performances that sought to persuade jurors through voice, words, gestures and appearance in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. This dissertation recreates aspects of those performances by examining the vocabulary of seeing and hearing in Antiphon, Andokides and Lysias. It shows how litigants' words work together with their physical appearance, how litigants plant images in their jurors' minds, and how litigants bring their speeches to life by referring to people in the lawcourt.;Through a detailed discussion of procedure, archaeology and demography, the first two chapters of the dissertation demonstrate that forensic performances should not be conflated with performances in the assembly or the theater. The third chapter argues that the theater, the lawcourts and the assembly do not fit into a pattern which equates looking with judging. A survey of examples from Lysias indicates that litigants manipulated the jurors' sight rather than subjected themselves to it.;The second half of the dissertation looks closely at the intersection of text and performance. The fourth chapter establishes the importance of the terms phaneros, "visible," and phainomai, "to become visible," for eyewitness testimony. Close readings of Antiphon 5 and Lysias 7 show how speakers use these terms to suggest that the jurors are seeing what they are really only hearing. The fifth chapter discusses the technical term enargeia, "vividness," which Dionysios of Halikarnassos applies to Lysias' prose. Through examinations of Lysias 32 and F 278 and 279 Carey, it shows how speakers use internal audiences, quoted speech and the deictic pronoun houtos to bridge the past time of their narratives and the here-and-now of the lawcourt.;The final chapter of the dissertation discusses the language of sight in Lysias 6 and Andokides 1. It shows that the speaker of Lysias 6 takes advantage of the requirement that his jurors be initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries to recreate with his words the visual highpoint of their initiations. My conclusions rely on a detailed analysis of seeing words in the two speeches and in other accounts of initiation into the Mysteries.