Extemporary Speech in Antiquity; A Dissertation (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1914 Excerpt: ...and that the spoken speech was worked over, polished, perhaps, and condensed, and then reduced to writing in its present form.112 The question arises, could an Athenian audience, even granting all the natural quickness that has been attributed to it, and all the critical taste it had acquired from listening to the finest productions,113 have appreciated Demosthenes' speeches, for example, after hearing them once? Perhaps so, if all the Greeks were as good judges as the old market-woman who mortified Theophrastus by calling him 5evos for no other reason than that his Attic Greek was too Attic.114 It might be argued from this very conciseness that the present form of the speeches is not the one in which they were.originally delivered, and that explanatory words and phrases, necessary to the hearer but not to the reader, have been omitted from the published speech. Granting, however, so far as the diction of the speeches is concerned, that the orators might have been able to extemporize so successfully, and granting that "in general intelligence the Athenian populace far surpassed the lower orders of any community that has ever existed," 115 let us see what the actual practice of the orators was in regard to extemporary speech. Before taking up the Attic orators, however, it will be necessary to say a few words about Gorgias with whom the history of Greek oratory begins. According to Blass 116 the art of the sophists was first brought to Athens not by Gorgias but by Protagoras. One might naturally expect to find that the speeches of the sophists, who claimed universal knowledge, were wholly extemporary, but such was not the practice of Protagoras himself nor of his pupils. He prepared certain general topics called "commonplaces" which he ma...