On Orators And The Loss of Speech

 Last week I found, completely out of the blue, a horde of my Loeb Classical Library Books (someone, it seems, had an interest in the period of Alexander the Great).  One of the books I found was Minor Attic Orators II:  Lycurgus, Demades, Dinarches, Hyperides.

I had never heard of any of the writers/speakers, yet with the exception of Demades, are considered among the 10 great Orators of Attic Greece.  Sadly, very little of what they wrote has even survived:  the volume has some complete speeches, but just as often there were lacunae in the texts or mere sentences (in some cases only preserved in the speeches or writings of other writers).

Having read this - and having now completed reading the works of Isocrates  and working my way through the works of Demosthenes as I can afford them, I am finding yet another way in which our society is slowly slipping away:  we can no longer speak.

Reading the speeches of these long dead writers, I find myself engaged.  They write well.  They are mostly the speeches of court cases and politics, so they are perhaps a bit inflated in language and tone.  But the language is overflowing and grand; it uplifts and involves the intellect and the emotion.

"He (Leocrates) will perhaps in his impetuosity raise the argument, suggested to him by certain of his advocates, that he is not liable on a charge of treason, since he was not responsible for the dockyards, gates or camps, nor in fact for any of the city's concerns.  My own view is that those in charge of these positions could have betrayed a part of your defenses only, whereas it was the whole city that Leocrates surrendered.  Again, it is the living only whom men of this kind harm, but Leocrates has wronged the dead as well, depriving them of their ancestral rites.  Had the city been betrayed by them it would have been inhabited though enslaved, but left as this man left it, it would have been deserted." - Lycurgus, "Against Leocrates"

"Yet the actions fought near Pylae and Lamia has proven to be as glorious to them as the conflict in Boetia, not solely through the circumstances of victory in the field, over Antipater and his allies, but on the grounds of the situation also.  The fact that this has been the battle's site will mean that all of the Greeks, repairing twice a year to the council of the Amphictyones, will witness their achievements; by the very act of gathering in that spot they will recall the valour of these men.  Never before did men strive for a nobler cause, either against stronger adversaries or fewer friends, convinced that valour gave strength and courage superiority as no mere numbers could.  Liberty they gave as an offering for all to share, but the honour of their deeds they have bestowed upon their country as a wreath for her alone." - Hyperides, "Funeral Speech"

We do not get speeches like that any more.  We get 140 character blurbs or vague generalities or speeches written purely to "make points" for whichever side is speaking.  Keep in mind to that these speeches were written by these individuals (if not always delivered by them).  Now, many of our leaders employ others to write their speeches for them.  They have become merely performers in a sort of grand theater.

One could make a cogent argument, I suppose, that we no longer need this sort of skill because we no longer have situations that require it.  Perhaps that is true.  But what seems objectionable to me is that we have also abandoned the learning and writing and thinking that made such speeches possible.  More and more, we have abandoned the high art of composition and rhetoric and presentation for the lower call of "realism" and "telling truth to power" (whatever you consider that power to be).  It somehow construed that these methods are more effective, when in fact they more often than not are less so, crude tools used to hack and chop where a scalpel would be much more effective.

We are truly the poorer for it.