Hilary Lehmann (Knox College)
This paper examines the materiality of wills, contracts, and depositions in the speeches of the Attic orators. I argue that the orators draw attention to the physical nature of these documents as a way to exploit various strains of respect and suspicion associated with the written word; at the same time, since legal discourse both reflects and influences the world that produces it (Smith 2014; Biber, Luker, and Vaughan 2022), the material nature of the documents in legal oratory has shaped ancient and modern attitudes towards textuality and legal discourse.
I begin by giving an overview of the nature of the documents in their original performance contexts. Starting in the early fourth century, oral depositions and pleas were replaced with written documents (Thomas 1989: 38-55; Boegehold 1995: 79-81). Some scholars argue that during this period, concomitant with the rise of literacy in Athens, written documents came to be seen as more reliable than witness statements (Mirhady 2002). Yet orators frequently question the trustworthiness of documentary evidence and criticize one another for relying excessively on the written word (e.g. Isaeus 1.20-21, Demosthenes 18.209). Simultaneously authoritative and corruptible, and possibly regarded with a religious reverence for their semiotic valences, written documents brought a powerful and complex vibrancy to the oratorical performance (Bremer 2010; Purves 2015; L. Canevaro 2019).
The speakers enhance this vibrancy by drawing attention to the physicality of the documents, as the case studies discussed in this paper demonstrate. The speaker of Demosthenes 41 gives detailed, highly emotional descriptions of the movements through various hands of financial documents belonging to the wife of the deceased (§§9-10, 21-22). In Demosthenes 28, the orator rhetorically associates his father’s missing will with the vulnerable young bodies of himself and his sister (§15-16). The speaker of Hypereides 3 describes the contract placed on Athenogenes’ lap, imbuing the contract with the suspicious characteristics of his opponent and transforming it from the medium of the transaction into another object of exchange (§§3-4).
For modern scholars, the documents in the Attic orators have a paradoxical status. In their original contexts, these documents functioned as material evidence that transcended the performative temporality of the trial; the speeches themselves, on the other hand, were not delivered from written scripts, but were ephemeral and (created the illusion of being) extemporaneous. The texts were circulated as published documents only after the trial (Westwood 2020: 74-78). The documents themselves, in the first place more concrete than speeches delivered in the moment, were for the most part lost and subsequently filled in with varying degrees of accuracy by later scholars (M. Canevaro 2013). Thus modern scholars experience the materiality of the documents and the texts in reverse from their original contexts. This paper concludes by urging modern scholars to keep in mind the materiality of the texts we study today and to remember that all ancient texts are themselves objects that have been in some way shaped by generations of receiving audiences (cf. Mazza 2021).