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Show and Tell: Genre and Deixis in Lucian

By Inger Neeltje Irene Kuin

The vast majority of Lucian’s works were composed primarily with a live audience in mind. The author’s frequent and skilled employment of deixis, which I shall define as the use of ‘here and now’ and ‘this and that’ expressions, attests to this. It also shows how this intended live audience shaped the composition of Lucian’s epideictic speeches and his comic dialogues. In this paper I will compare Lucian’s usage of deictics between these two genres, which together supply almost the entire corpus.

Ille suppositus: The Genealogical Plots of Panegyric 12(9)

By W. Josiah Edwards Davis

Eusebian and Lactantian narratives of Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge have long provided historians and literary critics alike with a dominant script for this watershed event (Burkhardt 1853, Barnes 1981, Cameron 1983). Recent studies, however, have focused on neglected memories of Constantine’s victory in the Panegyrici Latini and other non-Christian texts (Humphries 2008, Van Dam 2012). I argue that Panegyric 12(9) deploys a range of genealogical fictions to legitimize and re-enact Constantine’s victory over Maxentius.

Meidias Tyrannos: Meidias’ Tyrannical Attributes in Dem. 21

By T. George Hendren

The venom with which Demosthenes lambasts Meidias suits both the circumstance of their private quarrel as well as the contemporary Athenian political climate. This paper will reevaluate Demonsthenes’ vitriol in his Against Meidias to show that the characterization of his opponent plays off Athenian fears specific to tyrannical individuals. With the political machinations of Philip II and Mausolos as background, I argue that Demosthenes spins his chief criticisms of Meidias into tyrannical attributes, an effective means of securing conviction in a fourth century Athenian courtroom.

The Two Kinds of Rhetoric in Plato's Gorgias

By Andrew Beer

This paper treats two passages in Plato’s Gorgias that appear to present two conflicting accounts of the art of rhetoric. In the first (463a6-465e1) Socrates describes rhetoric as a pseudo-art: a mere knack based on experience (ἐμπειρία) with no real knowledge of its subject-matter; it is a branch of “flattery” (κολακεία) of the same status as cookery and cosmetics. But in the second passage (500d6-504e4) Socrates describes an orator with real expertise in the rhetorical art (ὁ τεχνικὸς ῥήτωρ).

The Rhetoric of Visibility and Invisibility in Antiphon 5, On the Murder of Herodes

By Peter O'Connell

I intend to investigate a central element of Antiphon’s rhetorical strategy in On the Murder of Herodes: the vocabulary of visibility and invisibility. The speaker, who has been accused of murdering Herodes on a stormy night after a drinking party, uses phaneros and phainomai and aphanēs and aphanizō to refer to the alleged crime, the alleged evidence, and the arguments of himself and his opponents.