Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 17.33 (Spring-Summer/printemps-été, 2000) 58-72
In
addition, the utterance of the judge displaces the responsibility for its
execution onto others. This is what makes the silent nod of Zeus like the
letters sent out of the palace by Deioces: just as Zeus honors Achilles
by doing nothing (the Trojans will unwittingly do all the work), Deioces’
written judgement displaces the utterance and its execution elsewhere.
The letter will need to be read, presumably aloud, so the voice of the
sovereign is not the sovereign’s voice, and the judgement enacted, making
the sovereign’s hand only a remote controlled prosthesis.[9]
Deioces’ method of judgement, like Zeus’ nod, both preserves and signifies
his own silence.
The
silent sovereign inspires silence on the part of his subjects – Zeus’ reply
to Hera in the scene recounted above is “sit down and be silent, lest I
lay my hand on you” (Il. I.565-567). But the fact that sovereignty
speaks in judgement means that the subject stays silent in order to keep
the sovereign silent – either in order to silence his word of condemnation,
or to keep the judge from reading out the law and enacting its sanctions.
This is the mode under which Hesiod’s warning to kings, to keep their judgements
straight and true, is articulated: when Dike, Justice, is violated
there is a tumultuous noise, and she goes to sinful cities crying out loud
(Works and Days 220-224). Dike is usually silent,[10]
but when there is a violation she can make a lot of noise. Ethical action
is undertaken, in this mode of argumentation, in order to silence vengeful
justice. Just as the sovereign keeps silent in order to silence his subjects,
the subject keeps silent in order to silence the sovereign. [end of
page 60]
And
just as the sovereign has a way of breaking his silence to enforce his
authority that has no content other than power and that signifies his own
silence, the subject can break his silence to attack the sovereign in a
similar manner. The Athenian tragic stage saw its audience (theatron)
armed with a number of noise making procedures that could drive a production
off the stage[11]
– later writers list “heel-banging,” clucking, or hissing.[12]
Excessive weeping could have the same effect: in a moment of decisive importance
for the history of Greek tragedy, Phrynichus produced a play (The Capture
of Miletus) sometime after 494 BCE
in which the Persian sack of Athens’ sister city Miletus was dramatized.
The audience, Herodotus tells us, was so pained by the representation of
their own sorrows that they fined the playwright and banned the play (Histories
VI.21). Other sources inform us that the play was driven of the stage by
a weeping and angry audience.[13]The
silence of the theatron, in addition to being the silence of an
entranced audience, is the position from which audience threatens author
with retaliation, in the same manner as the author threatens the audience
with fear (more on this below).
When
an orator or a king succeeds in acquiring the power of a Lycurgus or a
Solon or a Darius, and thereby wins immortality among his people as a writer,
doesn’t he deem himself equal to the gods while still living, and do not
people of later times hold the same opinion of him when they contemplate
his writings [theomenoi autou ta suggrammata]? (258c)
Those
who read the law do more than imagine the divine status of its author.
They also recognize in the text a command, and recognize their responsibility
to live under its ban. But the law, like all writing, is present only in
the absence of its author, who cannot help others understand it (275C).
The written law in democratic [end of page 61] Athens reproduces
the autocratic diffusion of authority through the silence of the sovereign,
and the displacement of responsibility onto its subjects.
Socrates
does not use the verb “to read” in describing those who look upon the writings
of the lawmaker – instead he uses a verb for looking (theomenos),
from which words like theatre (theatron) and theory (theoria)
are derived. This is felicitous, since, from the point of view of his subjects,
the sovereign is a theoretical entity. If the sovereign must stay silent
in order to maintain his authority, he cannot tell his own story except
through the ambiguous intimations that the apparatus of justice provides.
This means that the subject must theorize the sovereign’s existence in
the gaps between his utterances, must attribute to silence the presence
of an authority who is not apparent, just as the astronomer theorizes in
order to save celestial phenomena, in order to introduce into what would
otherwise be ambiguous and arbitrary appearances an unapparent, silent
causality. Silence is the mode in which the onlooker theorizes the sovereign’s
existence. We will call this primary theorizing.
There
are, thus, two attitudes in subjective silence. First there is the silence
of a subject who fears what is theorized as sovereign, cause, judge, or
author. In this mode theory is always an ethical endeavor, since the theorist
always finds himself subjected to the object he theorizes, under the threat
of that object’s retaliatory speech. Second, the theorist’s silence contains
a threat that he may himself speak violently, obliterating and driving
from the stage the object he theorizes as sovereign. This is the insurrectionary
power of theory, to efface the object it contemplates – and in this mode
it is possible to say that the sovereign object theorizes the subject as
sovereign, the object keeps itself silent to keep the subject silent (to
forestall against arrogance and ostentation, says Herodotus, speaking of
Deioces’ spies – I.100.2).
There
is in this a conjunction of two temporal styles. In the ethical teaching
of the Works and Days Hesiod names what is not to be done (give
crooked judgements, accept bribes), giving the silent and vengeful sovereign
as his reason. Here, the time of the sin and the time of the punishment
are connected by a stable cause – justice, vengeance, or the gods. It is
typical of such texts that the theory (that there is justice) is given
the form of a knowledge which comes from experience – since this has happened
before, it will happen again. The conditional (“if you sin you will be
punished”) is unfolded onto a historical time in which the memory of the
teacher serves as a guarantee for the truth of what he teaches.[14]
In the narration of what is not to be done or said, past sins are recapitulated
in the present of a new sin’s denial. What we have here is an organic kind
of time, in which each moment fuses with its histories. This is evident
also in the belief, necessary to such ethical warnings, that the blameless
life will remain unsullied by punishment, that silence will not be burdened
with the aggression of censorship. [end of page 62] “There is a
belief,” says the chorus of old men in the Agamemnon, “that a man
has lived out his life in great happiness if he does not die childless,
but that from his good luck arises an insatiable destruction to ruin the
clan. I have my own ideas about these things, and they are different: disgraceful
deeds give birth to more, and the fate of just houses is to be blessed
by its children” (Ag. 750-762). Each generation repeats or re-performs
the fortune of the preceding generation. Sin begets sin, and goodness begets
goodness. Our ethical horizons fuse with those of our forefathers.
Ethical
teaching of this kind depends upon the certainty of a narrative cause at
work in history. But in projecting a time of this kind, the theoretical
subject denies what it requires; the empty and apparently arbitrary single
utterance of judgment, into whose silence it reads the presence of a narrative
cause. Sovereign authority, in other words, is articulated in the gaps
between its utterances, and the time in which it reveals itself is a punctuated
time of single events separated by silence. Out of the empty utterance
of the sovereign we extrapolate what is absent but what must be there –
a figure full of content, with a stable, just existence. The chorus of
Aeschylus’ Choephori articulates this temporal style, picking up
the position the chorus of the Agamemnon denies: “Justice came over
the children of Priam in time ¼ [she] comes, though she bides her
time” (Cho. 935-956). The utterance of the judge takes its time,
we must wait for it, and in the spaces where we wait we theorize the sovereign.
Sovereignty articulates itself within a pointillist time.
The
posture of theory vis-à-vis the sovereign in political life is identical
with the position of reading vis-à-vis the author in literary analysis.
The procedure of meaning-making is articulated in two moments: (1) the
reader’s identification of gaps and his impulse to fill them with interpretations
and supplements; and (2) the “fusion of horizons” of philosophical hermeneutics,
which posits an organic recapitulation of tradition (memory) in the moment
of literary reading. The first identifies authorial intent (or the author-function)
in the silences to which the words always point, while the second legislates
understanding within an orthodox tradition. Central to both the sovereign-subject
relation and the author-reader relation is the silence which preserves
and disseminates both the subject’s double tacit and the sovereign’s
authority. Reading, which depends on this primary theorizing, operates
on the basis of memories of past authorial articulations (tradition) and
the threat or promise of future ones. That the reader, like the political
subject, has an ethical attitude is indicated by the fact that while the
tradition is articulated as actual, the future is articulated only as possible,
threatened, or imminent: we must remember the past precisely in order to
avoid its revenge on us in the future. [end of page 63]
But
theorizing within this matrix is more than the initial inference that there
is a sovereign, that leads to the subject’s silence. It also designates
the kind of speech that is possible under the ban of the sovereign. If
it is of vital importance to both sovereign and subject that silence be
maintained, it is at the same time not possible that nothing be said. Without
speaking, there is nothing for the sovereign to rule, and nothing for the
subject to oppose. But what is said from day to day must not be the kind
of utterance that articulates the authority and the threat of these two
positions, since utterances of that kind are aggressive and destructive.
Dike,
her commandments broken, thunders. Zeus nods, and Olympus shakes. Deioces
writes: and writing, we know from Plato, “wanders everywhere, getting into
the hands not only of those with understanding, but also of those who have
no business with it. It doesn’t know how to address the right people, and
not address the wrong” (Phaedrus, 275e). The unjust kings who offend
Dike
in the Works and Days utter “crooked judgments” (221) – utterances
that do not conform to the proper cannons of appropriateness, to what Plato
calls criteria of straightness (orthothes:
Laws
655ff, 668b,
700b-e). The ways the subject theorist uses to announce his authority are
similar. Heel-banging, clucking, hissing; the audience of tragedy utters
what Plato calls “unlearned shouts” (700c).
A
form of contractual speech is invented in the context of a general desire
to avoid the recurrence of these forms of utterance, without removing the
memory of their past occurrence or the threat of their future return -
without, in other words, destroying either of the two temporal indices
we outlined above. This is the speech that is allowed in the light of the
theorized sovereign and the necessity of silence: we might call it “theoretical
discourse” because it rests on the assumptions of primary theorizing. Theoretical
discourse is not obnoxious to either sovereign/object or subject, since
it exists in a neutral territory which both permit. But it maintains the
play of forces and the contest of authority that is performed in the mutual
silence of sovereign and subject.
In
fact, theoretical discourse is speech, or, rather, all speech is theoretical
discourse. Everything outside of theoretical discourse is mute – and is
configured by theoretical discourse as such. This, of course, is not an
accurate depiction of reality, and its inaccuracy will be its undoing,
as we will see below. But it is from here that the entire edifice of language,
and of linguistic self-awareness for the species, is built – from a contract
between sovereign/object and subject. And it is for this reason that so
many of us can so blithely say that “the concept of speech requires and
contains the concept of silence” – the dialectic seems Hegelian, but it
conceals what it ultimately must never name, the silence of tyrannies,
the assault of barbarity.
Tragedy
is one such form of theoretical discourse. The tragic emotion (let us call
it pity-and-fear) is situated precisely at the intersection of two separate
axes [end of page 64] which, while they are distinct, are each a
function of the other. The pity – fear axis can be mapped from an axis
self – other: the closer to home a sign or event is, the more fear it inspires,
and the closer to the other it is, the more it inspires pity.[15]
We have described the theatron’s violent response to Phrynichus’
Capture
of Miletus. It appears that what was wrong with the play was that it
frightened the Athenian audience by making the fall of Miletus into a prophecy
of a similar fate for Athens:[16]
after this no historical event that directly implicated Athens was ever
again presented on the tragic stage.[17]
In other words, by representing an event that struck too close to home,
Phrynichus inspired too much fear. Later tragedians would avoid his fate
by representing events that happened to others, either to barbarians or
to mythic characters, thus mixing pity with fear, other with self. If fear
is inspired as it were by threatening the audience,[18]
and if this may cause the audience to break its silence and retaliate,
then Athenian tragedy is a form of theoretical discourse: it is written
from a position that theorizes the possibility of the theatron’s retaliation
and silences it by representing pitiable events (which do not offend or
accuse), while still allowing itself the possibility of breaking its own
silence with fearful representations. Tragedy, the conjunction of pity
and fear, is a strategic entente between author and audience.
Written
law is also theoretical discourse. Like the utterance of the sovereign,
it displaces responsibility while leaving authority with the framer. But
the written law is different from the utterance of the sovereign in a number
of ways: where the sovereign expresses only preference and permission,
the written law establishes procedures and sanctions; and where the sovereign
utterance is unilateral, expressing only the authority of its composer,
the written law has a double sphragis, which indicates the authority
of the mover and of the demos. The formula that begins Athenian
state inscriptions (discussed above) includes not only the name of the
original mover of the law. It also names the people who accepted it, of
whom the theomenos must be assumed to be a member. There is, in
the Socratic analysis, a peculiar effacement of the role of consent in
the promulgation of such a law: just as Deioces, chosen by an assembly
to reign as monarch over the Medes, soon becomes simply autocratic, effacing
the contract that elected him, so the law maintains its force, not on the
basis of the assent of the people but through the divine authority of the
lawmaker. Written law, like tragedy, comes from a contest between two opposed
positions (democratic assembly and single orator). In this sense, it is
entirely predictable that it should be Greek democracy, and not tyranny,
that encourages the development of theoretical discourse, since democracy
constantly looks for a contract between the single authority and the (subject)
many. Democracy’s cultural success is not founded on the politicization
of speech. It is founded on silence, in as much as silence holds in reserve
the possibility of judgment or insurrection. [end of page 65]
It
is important that the jury of kritai is constitutional and instituted
by law. Since the establishment of this procedure comes from the mutual
consent of legislator and demos, the critic is theoretical discourse’s
advocate, invented by theory to preserve what it had built, even after
its failure. But the critic comes after theoretical discourse has been
embarrassed by its own catastrophe, and therefore [end of page 66] he
both enacts the ethical position of theory and judges it: the law, which
institutes the jury, stands at its mercy (a jury must vote according to
the laws,[24]
but is licensed to decide if and when they apply).[25]
Similarly the tragic jury, which exists because of tragic discourse, is
required to evaluate it and to express preference for one play over another.
In criticism, the objectivity of theoretical discourse is relativized and
submitted to another, external authority.
It
is true that the practice of placing a token of his decision into an urn,
to be removed and tabulated by the archon or official who fills the function
of dikazein, keeps a number of the characteristics of authority
that marked the silence and speech of the sovereign. As was the case with
the sovereign, the responsibility for enacting and reading out the decision
of the krites is displaced. The voting urn reproduces the characteristics
of writing: like the written text, which is transported in space to the
reader, the critic’s vote goes into the urn from one hand and comes out
into others, and the archon in effect reads the contents of the urn. But
the mode of being of the critic is vastly different from that of the sovereign.
The difference consists precisely in the nature of each position’s silence.
Let us recapitulate how the sovereign is: he is known only through ambiguous
utterances that contain very little content other than his own power, and
that signify his silence. The sovereign is in the same way that, for Heidegger,
presencing (eon) is, as “luminous self-concealing,”[26]
where the lighting that designates his luminosity would be lightning his
terrible utterances. In this sense, we could speak of the sovereign in
a state of epoche, where this would be understood as his holding
himself apart, or revealing himself in his concealment. Silence for the
sovereign is the medium through which his non-appearance is made evident.
We
might speak of the krites as being in a state of epoche as
well. But for the critic, epoche would mean, not carefully concealing
oneselfin order to extend authority,
but rather the critical suspension of judgment (epoche) practiced
by Academic Skepticism.[27]
The response of subjects and sovereigns to events, sights, or expressions
is visceral, automatic, and cacophonous, but the krites keeps his
peace until he has heard everything. Krinein was set against the
ability of the theatron to judge plays automatically and through
heckling (these methods are outlined above). If playwright and audience
faced each other as sovereign (author) and subject (theatron), the
jury instituted itself as a mediator and an arbitrator. Plato is most explicit
on the relationship between the noisy theatre and the silent, lawful krites:
A
judge who is truly a judge must not get his decision from the audience,
letting himself be intimidated by the clamor (thorubos) of the multitude
and by his own incompetence, nor yet, out of cowardice and servility, should
he weakly pronounce a judgement which belies his own convictions on the
[end
of page 67] same lips with which he invoked the gods when he took up
his function. (659a-b)
The
educated judge holds his silence and listens through to the end of a performance
(700c). In the Eumenides, Aeschylus tells the story of the founding
of the jury of the Areopagus as the result of an unsolvable face-off between
sovereign and subject: Apollo and the Furies are locked in a context over
the right of Orestes to murder his mother, Clytemnestra. The issue turns
on the prevalence of vengeance or of the guilt of matricide, but the critical
problem is whether or not the Argive history of retribution is to continue.
Athena, who has been asked to mediate, exclaims that “this affair is too
difficult for any mortal to judge [dikazein]” (Eum. 470-1)
and institutes a jury of Athenian men to choose (krinein: 677, 682,
734; 744) which side has the right. Athena institutes the sworn jury to
choose between sovereign and subject (which one is which is, at this point
in the trilogy, thoroughly confused) in a world marked by mutually offensive
utterances[28]
and endless blood and retribution. The jurymen enter the stage in silence,
cast their votes in silence, and leave, perhaps also in silence. Aeschylus’
use of mute extras here is pointed: kritai, unlike sovereign or
subject, never break their silence.[29]
Academic
epoche
leads to silence. Sextus Empiricus outlines aphasia (not speaking)
as both a goal and a method among skeptics;[30]
this is the case for the juryman as well, as long as we understand that
his silence and epoche are finite, rather than indefinite, with
respect to duration. The juryman will not speak, will not decide, until
time, as far as the process is concerned, has ended. This is the difference
between sovereignty and criticism: where the one has silence as the medium
of his epoche, the other has silence as the substance of his, the
very thing in which his epoche consists.
It
may be objected that to compare a juryman, who must, by definition, arrive
at a decision, with the academic skeptic, whose philosophical practice
consists in cultivating the ability to be radically undecided on all questions,
is, at the very least, oxymoronic. But in fact, it is only from a position
to which all alternatives seem equally (in)valid that a true choice can
be made. The act of krinein only resolves open conflict between
subject and sovereign if it is radically a choice, only if it is nothing
more than a capricious and arbitrary selection of one of two equal alternatives.
Neither subject nor sovereign ever truly choose, as long as they are cognizant
of each other: their silences are overdetermined and overdetermining, as
are their utterances, and it is precisely the lack of freedom vis-?-vis
the other that theoretical discourse expresses, and that causes it to fail.
The efficacy of the critic, on the other hand, depends on a real choice:
that is the substance of his role. [end of page 68]
We
might say that, faced with the conflict of subject and sovereign, theoretical
discourse invents absolute freedom to arbitrate. We might also say that
modern literary criticism, which has worked so hard to disconnect linguistic
texture from realia, has this as a necessary preliminary: literary
criticism is not possible unless it has hardwired the willing suspension
of (dis)belief (epoche) into its epistemology. Radically unpredictable
subjectivity is required for criticism to be criticism. Of course it is
also true that the epoche is accomplished for criticism by the catastrophe
of theory, and the collapse of theoretically-instituted objectivity.
The
fact that the critic’s silent epoche lasts for a finite period of
time, while the skeptic’s epoche is supposed to be indefinite, is
inconsequential. The simple reason for this is that both last only as long
as the subject does – the critic’s epoche ends at the end of the
trial, when he is no longer a critic, just as the philosopher’s epoche
ends at the end of his life.
However,
from another perspective, the epoche of the critic is just as indefinite
as that of the philosopher. Unlike the written utterance of the sovereign,
the decision of the krites is absolutely anonymous. His vote bears
no mark that would identify it as his, and the decision the individual
juryman reaches is only part of a larger mass decision that is tabulated
simply by counting. Not only does the krites not pronounce his own
decision, but his decision is not his – it is impossible (in theory) to
tell which juryman decided for the defendant and which for the plaintiff,
or who evaluated what plays in what order. The critic’s decision is limited
to a single utterance that is immediately effaced, and from which all personal
responsibility and authority are removed. What does this mean? Let us consider
again the “luminous self-concealing” of the sovereign: from his light(n)ing
the subject deduces the sovereign’s being (eon), and deduces it,
furthermore, as stable and eternal. The knowledge that there are some
spies, and the memory that there have been utterances of the sovereign,
leads to the belief that spies are everywhere and that the sovereign
will
speak again. The critic, on the other hand, expresses himself with a single
ballot, and he is not alone. The final decision is a statistical effect,
in which the individual votes of the critics are quanta. The position of
each individual critic cannot and will not be grasped as sure, stable,
or determinate; rather it can only be understood as a distribution, a probability.
The critic is quantum, and as quantum he is indefinite. The epoche
that he exercises, although it comes to an end in his casting of a vote,
remains an indefinite silence even after the decision is reached. Just
as we do not know what he is thinking as he listens in silence, we do not
know, after the trial is over, what he was thinking, either. The
critic preserves an unidentifiable inscrutability and a singular anonymity.
It
is not true that the epoch that gives rise to theoretical discourse is
succeeded chronologically by the epoch of the critic. Both coexist, mutually
supportive, but [end of page 69] without being moments of each other.
As critics, we have a way of leaving no trace. We are superseded by the
mass of which we are members, by the students who read and continue our
decisions. But as theorizers we have the opportunity to leave a trace.
It is a failing trace, it is true, but it will (it must) call for criticism
and for choice. If as theorizers we seem to be collaborators, we still
call for what neither subjectivity nor sovereign objectivity can tolerate:
arbitrium,
unpredictability, caprice.
End
notes
2.
“Informational, ‘mediatic,’ communicated energy is expended today only
for the purpose of tearing a bit of sense, a bit of life from the cold
and indifferent antibody, from the silent mass whose attraction grows ever
greater ... the masses know they are powerless, and they don’t want power.…
[T]he masses are very snobbish; they act like Brummel and sovereignly delegate
the faculty of choice to someone else, in a sort of game of irresponsibility,
ironic challenge, sovereign lack of will, or secret ruse” ( J. Baudrillard,
Fatal
Strategies, trans. Philip Beitchman & W.G.J. Niesluchowski [New
York: Semiotext(e), 1990]: 96-8). Powerlessness is the highest expression
of power – “I can’t help you, you must do what I say....” 3.
Both tyranny and “oriental” despotism; the one is often an allegory of
the other. (Both are used to describe Zeus’ regime. See, e.g. Prometheus
Bound). 4.
Cyrus’ ministers were known as his “eyes” and “ears;” ibidem, VIII.ii.11;
Midas was alleged to have had extremely large ears, and rationalizing interpretations
of this legend attributed this to the fact that he had spies who listened
for him (cf. Photius, Biblioth. 130B.40). The result of Persian
use of spies is that “people fear to say unkind things about the sovereign,
as though he were himself present” (Xenophon, Cyropedia VIII.ii.12). 5. See
M. Gagarin, Drakon and Early Athenian Homicide Law (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1981): 47; Headlam, JHS 13 (1982): 48-69; Wolff “Judicial
[end
of page 70] Legislation among the Greeks,” Traditio 4 (1946):
75-6, Harrison the Law of Athens (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968):II.38
n.1. 6.E.g.
Od.
VIII.390-1; Aesch. Agamemnon
366-70. 7.
Aesch. Agamemnon 144-5; Il. I.41, 504, IX.100-1. 8.
E. Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, tr. E. Palmer
(Coral Gables: U of Miami P, 1973): 333. 9.
Writing regularly removes the inscriber from the material dissemination
of his utterance and places the responsibility on others. In the only reference
to writing in Homer, Proteus sends Bellerophon away bearing “baleful signs”
which instruct their receiver to put Bellerophon to death. Proteus, who
was not willing to do the killing himself (Il. 167), uses the medium
of writing to displace his authority onto another. 10.
So Solon, fr. 3 (Campbell): 15-6; TrGF adespota 486, 493. 11.
Dem. 19.337; Aristotle, Poetics 1456a.18-19; Harpocration s.v. ekklozein). 12.
Pollux, Onomasticon 4.122. 13.TrGF
1.3
T 10.f. 14.The
memory of the teacher is, in Hesiod, given mythical figuration as the Muses. 15.Aristotle,
Rhetoric
1382b. 16.By
presenting the Capture of Miletus, Phrynichus shouted “fire” in
a crowded theatre; but the fire to which he referred was the Persian fire
that burned Miletus and was headed to wards Athens” (D.Rosenbloom,
“Phrynichus’ Capture of Miletus,” Philologus 137 [1993]:
175). 17.
The Persai of Aeschylus represents the tragedy of others (Persians,
barbarians), and not of Athens or her ethnically related cities. 18.The
fearful, since it implicates the one who fears, has the style of an accusation
or threat. 19.
The fifth-century democracy in Athens culminates, after the Peloponnesian
war, with the reign of the thirty tyrants. 20.Aeschylus,
Agamemnon
1426-1430: [The Chorus to Clytemnestra:] “Overweening in ambition, you
bark arrogant words: ... still will you pay requital, blow for blow....” [end
of page 71] 21.See
note 5, above. There is some variation in the vocabulary: Diocles is described
as diakrinon, for example, where the sense is what I have attributed
to dikazein, and the Homicide law of Drakon uses dignonai
for krinein. 22.
Aristophanes
Eccl.
1154-62; Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens
2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968): 97. 23.
Plato
Laws
659a; Aeschines in Ctes. 233, of choral competitions: Plut. Kimon
8.7; Lysias IV.3; Dem. Meid 17-18; Andocides in Alcib. 20. 24.R.
Bonner and G. Smith, The Administration of Justice from Homer to Aristotle
(New York: AMS Press, 1970): 2.153. 25.
Aristotle, Rhetoric I.xv.3 1375a: “If the written law is contrary
to our case, then we must use the general law and equity as more just;
that part of the oath that says ‘the best part of my judgement’ means that
the juryman must not hold fast to the written law.” 26. “Aletheia
(Heraclitus, Fragment B 10),” Early Greek Thinking, trans. D.F.
Krell &F. Capuzzi (San Francisco: HarperCollins,1984): 108. 27.“‘Epoche’
is that mental stasis because of which we do not deny or affirm anything”
(Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism): I.10. 28.Offensive
utterances (Furies 328-33; Apollo: esp. 644-51). 29.
Juries who heckle, like the one that judges Socrates in Plato’s Apology,
are by definition not true juries. Their thorubos at 30c is a sign
of Athens’ inability to give Socrates justice. 30.Outlines
of Pyrrhonism
I.192-3.