As I was working through Dickey’s book, I decided I needed to read some Greek prose. First, I pulled out Demosthenes’ Against Meidias in MacDowell’s edition, which has been sitting on my shelf for years waiting for me to get to it. For the sheer enjoyment of engaging with Greek prose, a speech like this can’t be beat, and MacDowell’s edition is full of information about Greek law and procedure, historical background, Greek idiom, textual issues, etc.–for me it was a very satisfying experience. This is the kind of commentary that really brings a text alive, at least for me. Then I turned to Plato’s Symposium in Dover’s equally satisfying edition; I’m on the last pages now. Dover certainly doesn’t give Plato a free pass–he wryly points out the absurdities (although in fairness, Plato has gone about as far as he can go to distance himself from everything that is said by the participants in the Symposium, including Socrates).
In reading these texts back to back, I was struck by something Dickey points out: Plato’s prose is really simpler–or rather, less complicated–than Demosthenes’. Demosthenes’ sentences are more elaborate, with more complex periods and syntactic structures. This is somewhat surprising, since Plato was writing to be read by an elite readership, while Demosthenes was writing to be heard by a large jury of ordinary citizens. They weren’t exactly contemporaries, although their lives may have overlapped by a decade or two.
Does anyone who has read these two authors have any thoughts on this? Maybe Plato took pains to communicate his ideas, which must have been difficult enough to follow in themselves, in less complicated prose?
Demosthenes writes fiercely rhetorical speeches with a view to their having the desired effect on the audience. Plato writes pseudo-drama, a simulacrum of real-life upper-class conversations on matters of concern to any thinking person. Much of the difference in the kind of Greek that they write is due to the requirements of the respective genres. I wouldn’t have said that overall there’s that much difference in “complexity”; if there is, it’s merely a side-effect.
Plato is out to engage the reader in following the development of a discussion that certain people in Athens, most of them well known, can be imagined as having actually had. He goes out of his way to create the illusion of its being real as he sucks the reader in. Accordingly the Greek is supremely naturalistic (more so than that of verse dramatists, Euripides or Aristophanes or Menander), while at the same time it’s distinctively Platonic (though it would seem less so if we had the dialogues of Aeschines Socraticus, Plato’s overshadowed contemporary).
I think there may have been appreciable overlap between readers of Plato and jury members. Juries in Demosthenes’ time were nominally made up of “ordinary citizens” but it’s been calculated that by the mid-4th century an unskilled laborer’ earnings were three times more a juror’s (a mere 3 obols: jury pay had not kept up with inflation), eliminating financial incentive. So jurors will have been “relatively well-to-do” (Carey) civic-minded or oratory-enjoying or dispute-enjoying citizens with an admixture of the truly indigent such as old men whose sons had been killed in war.
Demosthenes’ Greek makes a uniquely strong impression—he was renowned for his forcefulness. It may sometimes be syntactically complex (though not very, surely) but is usually straightforward in its progression and is always constructed so as to pack a punch. It’s not difficult to follow. There was a sentence in the De Corona we looked at that seemed syntactically problematic but will have been clear as day to its Athenian audience. (συνεπαινεσάντων δὲ πάντων καὶ οὐδενὸς εἰπόντος ἐναντίον οὐδέν, οὐκ εἶπον μὲν ταῦτα οὐκ ἔγραψα δέ, οὐδ᾽ ἔγραψα μέν οὐκ ἐπρέσβευσα δέ, οὐδ᾽ ἐπρέσβευσα μέν οὐκ ἔπεισα δὲ Θηβαίους, ἀλλ᾽ ἀπὸ τῆς ἀρχῆς ἄχρι τῆς τελευτῆς διεξῆλθον, καὶ ἔδωκ᾽ ἐμαυτὸν ὑμῖν ἁπλῶς εἰς τοὺς περιεστηκότας τῇ πόλει κινδύνους, http://discourse.textkit.com/t/griechische-grammatik-und-multiple-negatives/12918/12) We don’t know how much the written speeches were touched up prior to publication (was the speech against Meidias ever actually delivered?) but it’s clear they were skillfully composed with a view to their effectiveness in swaying the jury or the assembly in delivery.
I don’t have anything very profound to say, but I’d note that neither Demosthenes’ vocabulary nor his ideas are difficult; it’s only the syntax that is complex. As mwh said, I don’t think that would have been a problem for his native audience. Similarly, when we think about a difficult modern text in our native language, we usually think about something that either presents difficult ideas or has a difficult vocabulary. And I’d note that I didn’t find Plato’s Phaedrus at all easy; the vocabulary and the syntax are relatively easy, but the “philosophy” was so far from my experience that it was very difficult to follow.